Midnight rolls across Earth like a silent reset—time's curtain sweeping from city to cell block, from slum to supermax. In the stillness between seconds, a thousand detention centers pause in mechanical rhythm: the flicker of fluorescent lights, the thrum of recycled air, the endless shuffle of tired guards checking bolts for the hundredth time.

  Then the lattice appears.

  It begins as a single thread of violet energy, tracing the grout lines of Cragmoor Penitentiary’s solitary wing. Inmate J. Reyes, thirty-eight days into a life sentence, watches the light split across the ceiling above him, humming low and cold like something thinking in a language of pressure. Before he can rise, the glow forks—splitting into fractals, forming a perfect web. His cell becomes geometry. And then—nothing.

  He’s gone.

  Elsewhere, in the rain-slick towers of Southpoint Correctional, guards freeze as the eastern wing pulses with color not found on Earth. One inmate vanishes mid-shout, their jumpsuit left standing for half a heartbeat before collapsing into itself. Shackles clatter to the floor. Metal detectors seize with static.

  In the buried dormitories of East Gantry Detainment Zone, a surveillance operator slaps a console as camera feeds go white, then black. The log reads:

  [REMOTE OBSERVATION DENIED — CLASS 0]

  From orbit, satellites register synchronized flashes across the globe. No heat. No sound. Just sudden, simultaneous erasure. A hundred pinpricks of light. A thousand. Ten thousand. Then silence.

  But not everywhere.

  At Holcomb Secure Rehabilitation Facility, the lattice appears—threads along every corridor, humming with purpose—but leaves most inmates untouched. Cameras show prisoners blinking, shielding their eyes… and remaining. No one disappears. Just light. Then darkness.

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  It’s the same in dozens of others: the lattice arrives, performs its scan… and departs.

  Only a fraction vanish.

  Across the world, headlines scream MASS ESCAPE, COSMIC EVENT, UNEXPLAINED SYSTEM FAILURE. Conspiracy theorists upload glitch-heavy footage to fragmented networks. Government statements contradict one another by the hour.

  Total known disappearances: 7,142.

  Not global rapture. Just a few. And no one knows why.

  A sociologist on a podcast suggests the missing shared genetic anomalies. A physicist points to quantum entanglement. A prison chaplain insists they were the chosen. No one is right. No one is wrong. Because no one understands what they’re dealing with.

  Except the lattice.

  And even it, perhaps, is still learning.

  For the ones taken—convicts, suspects, lifers, rebels—there is no warning. One breath they are on Earth. The next, surrounded by seamless white. Their names are stripped. Their bodies catalogued. Their minds tagged and suspended for processing.

  But for a select handful—a rare few among the rare—the System reacts differently.

  APTITUDE MATCH DETECTED

  CANDIDATE FLAGGED FOR INTEGRATED FRAMEWORK

  ISOLATED CONTAINMENT DEPLOYMENT COMMENCING

  They don’t just wake in new cells.

  They wake to HUDs, notifications, and a quiet voice that says:

  "You are compatible. Begin adaptation."

  And among them, one man—unremarkable by most standards—opens his eyes in silence.

  His designation: R?149?222?4.

  His story hasn’t started yet.

  But the System is watching.