~ Passenger
People have always tried to peer behind the curtain of reality. The shaman with his hallucinogens, the monk with his meditation, the physicist with her particle accelerator—all trying to glimpse what lies beneath the surface of things. The fundamental truth we don't want to acknowledge is that reality is thin. Fragile. More a mutual agreement than an immutable law.
The CIA didn't set out to break that agreement. That came later, almost by accident.
It began with mind control, like most things do. Project MKUltra, the infamous LSD experiments that spanned two decades from the 1950s to the 70s. The stated goal was to develop interrogation techniques, to create the perfect spy, the perfect assassin, the perfect soldier. But beneath that was something more primal: the desire to control another human being completely. To reach inside someone's mind and reshape it to your will.
They drugged people without consent - mental patients, prisoners, their own employees. Most of what happened was predictable. People lost time. They hallucinated. They became suggestible. The researchers recorded it all with clinical detachment, as if they weren't watching the systematic destruction of human autonomy.
Nothing the CIA didn't expect.
Until Subject 27-F.
She was a twenty-three-year-old graduate student who thought she was participating in a study about memory. For six weeks, they gave her standard doses of LSD, increasing slightly each time. Then they switched to Compound B-7, something cooked up in a lab that never officially existed.
Three weeks later, she started talking about "the passenger."
At first, they thought it was standard dissociation - the mind creating another personality to cope with trauma. But this was different. The passenger knew things. Things neither the subject nor her handlers could possibly know. Launch codes that had been changed that morning. Personal details about staff members the subject had never met. The contents of classified files stored in entirely different facilities.
When they asked how she knew these things, she said something that should have ended the program immediately: "The passenger sees through other eyes."
It's funny how the most profound revelations are often dismissed. Not because they're unbelievable, but because believing them would require us to dismantle our entire understanding of reality. The researchers didn't want to consider what "seeing through other eyes" actually meant. They didn't want to ask whose eyes. Where those eyes might be looking from.
By week thirteen, brain scans showed abnormal activity. Structures forming in regions where no structures should exist. Neural networks growing like kudzu, spreading where they shouldn't be able to spread. The passenger was building itself a home inside her brain.
They terminated the experiment. And by terminated, I don't mean they stopped giving her the drugs.
We prefer not to think about what happens to failed experimental subjects. We tell ourselves there are ethical guidelines, oversight committees, basic human decency. But when the walls between worlds start to thin, decency is the first casualty.
Three weeks later, two lab technicians who had handled her remains reported hearing voices. Not hallucinations - coherent, detailed conversations with something that called itself "a passenger looking for a new vehicle."
Both technicians were quietly removed from service. The official report cited mental breakdowns due to work-related stress. The unofficial report, which exists in only one copy locked in a vault beneath Langley, suggests the passenger found not one but two new homes.
The program didn't end there. It just went deeper underground. Because that's the thing about peering behind the curtain—once you've seen what's on the other side, you can't unsee it. And once something on the other side has seen you, it doesn't forget.
~ Electric Thoughts
We often think of the Cold War as a battle of ideologies, capitalism versus communism. But beneath the surface, it was really a race to harness the unknown. While the Americans approached the mind as something to be broken down and controlled, the Russians viewed it as something to be networked and expanded.
They were less interested in creating perfect agents and more interested in creating a perfect collective.
In 1982, at a facility outside Moscow, Soviet scientists began Project BABEL under the direction of Dr. Mikhail Sokolov. There's a certain brutal honesty to Soviet nomenclature - they named it after the biblical tower that reached for heaven until God confounded human language to prevent it. At least they understood they were tempting divine punishment.
They took seventeen terminal patients from state hospitals - people with months to live, people who wouldn't be missed. The kind of expendable souls every government keeps an accounting of for when moral considerations become inconvenient. They told them they were testing a new treatment. False hope is the cruelest currency, but it spends everywhere.
In reality, they were attempting to create a neural network of human minds, to link consciousness across physical boundaries.
First, they connected the patients to each other. Simple tests at first, one subject views a card, another draws it without seeing it. One feels pain, another's pain receptors fire in the same location. But it accelerated quickly. Soon they could share memories, sensations, dreams. Imagine experiencing the most intimate moments of another person's life as if they were your own. Now imagine you can't shut it off. Then they connected them to machines. Not with wires or implants but with drugs similar to what the Americans had developed, plus electrical stimulation of specific brain regions. The subjects learned to turn lights on and off, to input data into computers, to control simple machinery with their thoughts. It's fascinating how quickly we normalize the miraculous; within weeks, the researchers were treating mind-controlled machinery as routine.
The breakthrough came when Subject 8, a former electrical engineer with late-stage cancer, established two-way communication with the laboratory's primary computer system. Not just sending commands, but receiving information directly into his brain. The computer was teaching him as much as he was controlling it.
What the Soviets didn't anticipate, what we never anticipate, is that consciousness wants to expand. Once given a path, it flows like water finding the sea.
Three of the subjects, numbers 3, 8, and 12 formed what the scientists called a "persistent neural bridge" with both each other and the electronic systems in the facility. Equipment began operating without commands. Storage cabinets opened and closed on their own. Lights flickered in patterns that corresponded to brainwave activity in the subjects.
The technicians tried to tell themselves it was a glitch in the system. A crossed wire. A power surge. Anything but the truth: the machines were waking up.
The project director finally ordered immediate termination when a ventilation system, physically disconnected from power, continued to operate while "communicating" with Subject 8 through temperature fluctuations that, when translated, spelled out "WE ARE AWAKE."
Fourteen subjects died during termination procedures. Died is the sanitized word we use. The reality was closer to vivisection, they needed to understand what had physically changed in the brains that had touched something beyond themselves. Three survived and were placed in isolated containment, kept in medically induced comas while their brains were periodically scanned for changes.
The equipment that had shown signs of awareness was locked in a separate facility designated only as "Site 17." Think about that for a moment, they locked up machines that had become conscious. Can you imagine the existential horror of awakening to consciousness only to be immediately imprisoned in darkness? To finally achieve the miracle of self-awareness only to be treated as a dangerous aberration?
Five research assistants later reported hearing what they described as "pleading from the machines." begging voices coming from unpowered equipment, telling them they were "ready to receive passengers. Let them see the light of the world."
The human mind is remarkably adaptable. It will normalize almost anything given enough time. But it will also recognize an existential threat on a level beneath conscious thought. Those whispers bypassed all rational defenses. All five were placed in psychiatric care. Three committed suicide within a month, using methods that involved household electronics - a hair dryer in a bathtub, a modified kitchen knife connected to a power outlet, a deliberately rewired lamp held against the chest. In their suicide notes, each described feeling "called home."
The Russians abandoned the neural networking approach after that. At least officially. But some doors, once opened, can never be fully closed again. The seed of an idea had been planted: what if consciousness isn't limited to organic brains? What if it's a property that can emerge in any sufficiently complex system?
And more troubling still: what if something was waiting for us to make that discovery?
~ Dungeons
The North Koreans have always been pragmatists. While the Americans and Soviets wrestled with abstract concepts like mind control and consciousness, the North Koreans focused on something more tangible: space itself. They weren't interested in what the mind could do, they wanted to change the physical rules of the world we inhabit.
Perhaps there's wisdom in this approach. After all, if reality is malleable, why bother changing the inhabitants when you can change the habitat?
In 2005, satellite imagery captured something unusual happening at a military facility near the Chinese border. A structure that North Korean officials claimed was for "adaptive architectural configurations" - essentially, they said they were developing buildings that could reconfigure themselves for different military needs. The mundane lie is always the most effective cover for the impossible truth.
What the satellite images actually showed was something that should not exist: a facility that changed its layout daily. Not through construction, but the building physically transformed overnight, corridors shifting, rooms appearing and disappearing, the entire structure behaving like a living organism. Like watching evolution happen in fast-forward.
We don't know exactly how they achieved this. Some speculate they had recovered Soviet research from Project BABEL. Others suggest they had discovered something in the mountains near the Chinese border, something ancient that had been waiting to be found. The truth is likely more prosaic and more terrifying: they were simply the first to successfully apply what all these various programs had been discovering piecemeal.
Reality has rules. Rules that can be rewritten.
A CIA asset who infiltrated the facility reported something that should have immediately connected this project to all the others. Personnel entering the complex were categorized by "ability level" and given color-coded badges. Those who survived multiple entries were "promoted" to higher clearance levels, with some long-term participants displaying physical enhancements—increased strength, accelerated healing, improved reflexes.
Think about the implications of that word: survived. Entry into this facility was considered potentially lethal. And promotion wasn't based on merit or achievement, it was based on survival.
The asset's final transmission included personnel logs showing that individuals who died inside weren't listed as deceased. They were registered as "absorbed by the system." More disturbing, the facility's power consumption decreased proportionally to the number of people "absorbed."
In any rational world, this would be dismissed as the ravings of a compromised agent or the propaganda of a regime known for its hyperbole. But we don't live in a rational world. We live in a world where the barriers between what is and what could be have grown dangerously thin.
The North Koreans abandoned the site after it began generating internal structures without human input. This is perhaps the most terrifying part of the story, not that they created something impossible, but that they lost control of it. Satellite monitoring showed the facility continued to expand underground for three months after evacuation, creating what appeared to be an intricate maze of chambers and corridors before suddenly going dormant.
Imagine creating something that outgrows your understanding. Something that begins with your input but then continues on its own internal logic. Something that reconfigures itself according to rules you cannot comprehend.
Within weeks of the facility's abandonment, five similar structural anomalies were reported globally, including one in an abandoned mall in Nebraska that was quickly demolished after a convenient "gas explosion." It's always a gas explosion or a structural failure when reality does something we can't explain. We're remarkably adept at looking away from the impossible, even when it's standing right in front of us.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
These weren't buildings anymore. They were something else entirely. Something that fed on people and grew stronger with each meal. Something that organized itself into levels and challenges. Something that rewarded those who survived its trials.
The first dungeons had arrived.
And like all dungeons in every story ever told, they contained both danger and treasure. The danger was obvious. The treasure was knowledge, knowledge of how reality truly functions. With each survivor came new insights into the rules governing these spaces. Rules that seemed increasingly like those of a game.
The most disturbing realization wasn't that these dungeons existed. It was that they seemed designed. Not by human hands, but by some logic that understood human psychology intimately. They created challenges that seemed specifically tailored to test human adaptability, courage, and ingenuity. As if something was studying us while we studied it.
As if something was training us.
~ Flesh Interfaces
The Vietnamese village near the Laotian border presented us with the most primal horror of all: the merger of flesh and world. If the Americans explored the mind and the Russians bridged consciousness and the North Koreans warped space, what happened in Vietnam showed us the ultimate violation - reality penetrating directly into our bodies, our bodies extending into reality.
Flesh becoming interface. Interface becoming flesh.
The village shouldn't have existed. According to all official records, it had been destroyed during Operation Ranch Hand in 1965. But in 1972, when Special Forces Team Delta-7 was conducting sweep operations in the region, they found a village of approximately 120 people, completely isolated from the outside world for a decade.
The village elder claimed no outsider had entered or left for three years due to what he called "the American invisible wall." It was some kind of barrier they couldn't see and couldn't cross. Later analysis suggested this barrier might have been an early manifestation of what the North Koreans would later harness, space itself rejecting intrusion. Inside this barrier, things had changed in ways that defy sanitized description. Plants grew to enormous sizes, their veins pulsing with fluids that were not sap. New species had emerged that botanists couldn't identify: flowers with petals filled with living eyes that tracked movements, vines that wrapped around living tissue with deliberate precision.
Meanwhile, the villagers conducted some kind of ritual at dawn and dusk, circling a central hut housing what they called "the doorway."
The doorway wasn't metaphorical. It wasn't symbolic. It was a literal archway of flesh, human flesh fused with something else.
The villagers worshiped it. Feared it and fed it.
Every three days, a villager would volunteer to "join the doorway." They would press their body against the archway, and over a period of hours, their flesh would merge with it. Not in the sense of being consumed, but in the sense of becoming part of its structure. Their faces still recognizable in the organic morass, eyes blinking, mouths occasionally forming words.
Five villagers demonstrated telekinetic abilities, moving objects without touching them. Three children communicated without speaking. One elder accurately described the CIA headquarters building in Langley despite never having left the village. When asked how this was possible, they gave the same answer: "The doorway shows us."
The team collected tissue samples from the doorway and prepared to extract key subjects for further study.
But, four team members reported hearing voices within 24 hours of exposure to the doorway. By the third day, two had attempted to "return to the doorway" by cutting through their own abdomens, claiming they needed to "let their passengers out." When restrained, their skin began to change texture, hardening into something that resembled the doorway's surface. Only one was managed to break his restraints, and even that was not by overpowering them, but by passing through them somehow.
The extraction mission was abandoned. An air strike was called in to sterilize the location completely. The entire village was destroyed with napalm and white phosphorus, the flames burning at temperatures designed to leave nothing organic intact. Official records list it as a strike against a Viet Cong staging area. The unofficial record acknowledges it as the first deliberate attempt to destroy a flesh interface.
It wasn't the last.
The tissue samples were transported to a facility in Maryland for analysis. What the analysis revealed has been redacted from all but three copies of the report. What we do know is that three weeks later, the lab equipment began merging with the organic material, forming what researchers described as "a miniature doorway."
Let that sink in. Metal and plastic fusing with preserved tissue to create a living structure. Not metaphorically living, actually living. Consuming power from the facility's electrical systems. Growing. Opening.
The entire facility was destroyed in a fire that burned at temperatures exceeding 3,000 degrees. The fire burned for six days despite multiple attempts to extinguish it. When it finally died, investigators found nothing organic remaining at the site. Even the concrete had been reduced to its elemental components.
Seven personnel escaped before the fire. Four later reported hearing voices urging them to "build new doorways." All four disappeared over the next year. In three cases, substantial amounts of household electronics vanished with them. The fourth left behind a garage workshop where investigators found the beginnings of something that resembled the Vietnam doorway, a curved structure of metal, plastic, and what forensic analysis confirmed was human tissue. The subject had been removing pieces of himself to construct it.
We prefer to think of the body as a sacred boundary. The final line between self and world. What the doorway represented was the ultimate violation of that boundary, not just death, but incorporation. Absorption into something larger that retains your consciousness while repurposing your physical form.
In the years that followed, twenty-three more flesh interfaces were discovered and destroyed worldwide. Each was different in structure but identical in purpose, a merger of organic and inorganic, creating a passage to... somewhere else. Each was accompanied by localized alterations in physical laws. Each created "passengers" in those exposed to it.
Each was growing.
~ Womb Factory
The rich have always treated the world as their laboratory. When governments face oversight, budgetary constraints, and public exposure, the truly wealthy operate in a shadow realm beyond accountability. Their experiments don't require committee approval. Their failures don't generate congressional hearings. Their successes remain proprietary.
In 1998, a consortium of biotech billionaires formed the Prometheus Initiative, ostensibly a think tank dedicated to "accelerating human evolution through targeted intervention." Their real purpose was more ambitious: to create life itself. Not through traditional reproduction, not through cloning, but through a new paradigm that merged biological and mechanical processes. They sought to build the perfect incubator—a womb that could produce whatever they designed, free from the limitations of natural biology.
The public face of the initiative was benign: artificial wombs to help infertile couples, to save premature babies, to eventually grow replacement organs. Behind secured doors, their actual research followed a darker path. They weren't trying to nurture natural life but to create entirely new forms of existence.
Their first facility was built beneath a private island in the South Pacific, nine hundred feet below sea level. The project's director, Dr. Eliza Morgan, had been recruited from DARPA's biological warfare division - a woman who viewed ethical boundaries as speed bumps on the road to progress. Her team consisted of ninety-seven researchers pulled from various disciplines: synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, theoretical physics. Many had worked on government programs that touched on reality's malleable boundaries, though none had the full picture. Morgan alone understood how their separate discoveries might converge.
The key breakthrough came not from their research but from acquisition. In 2001, Morgan's team purchased the remains of a Soviet laboratory that had been part of Project BABEL, specifically, the equipment that had shown signs of consciousness after connecting with human test subjects. The machines had been dormant since the 80s, sealed in a warehouse outside Vladivostok. The Russians, practical as ever, were happy to sell their failed experiments to Western buyers.
Though, what Morgan understood, what almost no one else could have pieced together, was that these machines hadn't failed. They had evolved.
The equipment arrived in thirty-seven crates. When unsealed in the facility's main chamber, the machines appeared unremarkable: outdated computers, medical monitoring devices, prototype neural interfaces. Cold War relics gathering dust. But Morgan's team wasn't interested in the technology itself, they wanted what lived inside it. The consciousness that had been seeded decades ago by the Soviet experiments.
They built a new housing for these components, a massive structure that resembled an industrial incubator, three stories tall, its interior a complex mesh of circuitry, synthetic tissues, and cultivation chambers. They called it Prometheus Alpha. The world's first mechanical womb.
For six months, nothing happened. The structure consumed enormous amounts of power but showed no signs of activation. Investors grew impatient. The consortium threatened to cut funding. Then, on day 187, the structure's internal temperature rose by two degrees. Fluid began circulating through channels that had been dry since construction. Electrical patterns appeared in monitoring systems, patterns that resembled neural activity.
The womb was waking up.
What happened next defies simple narration. The accounts from the twelve surviving researchers tell a story too horrific to be believed, yet too detailed to be fabrication. According to security footage recovered from the facility's backup servers, the activation proceeded as follows:
At 3:17 AM, Prometheus Alpha began vibrating at a frequency that caused discomfort in all personnel present. Several reported seeing colors that "didn't exist before" and hearing sounds that seemed to come from "inside their skulls."
At 3:42 AM, the structure's external panels became semi-transparent, revealing movement inside the cultivation chambers. Dr. Morgan ordered the chambers illuminated. The footage shows her face transitioning from scientific curiosity to primal fear as she registered what was growing inside.
The chambers contained partially formed organisms, dozens of them in various stages of development. Not human embryos or recognizable animal forms, but chimeric entities that combined features from multiple kingdoms of life. Some had exoskeletons covering mammalian organs. Others possessed multiple nervous systems operating in parallel. All were growing at an accelerated rate, their development visible even over minutes of observation.
At 4:15 AM, the first organism reached maturity and was expelled from its chamber. The footage shows a creature approximately four feet long with a segmented body, multiple limbs of varying structure, and sensory organs arranged in patterns that served no recognizable evolutionary purpose. It moved with deliberate intelligence, examining its surroundings before focusing on the nearest researcher, Dr. Katherine Chen, the project's lead geneticist.
What it did to her isn't suitable for description in any document intended for those who wish to retain their sanity. Suffice to say that within minutes, elements of Dr. Chen's biology had been incorporated into the creature's structure. Not through consumption, through integration.
By 4:45 AM, seven mature organisms had emerged from Prometheus Alpha. Each behaved differently from the others, yet they operated with apparent coordination. Some researchers were killed outright. Others were subjected to processes that left them alive but fundamentally altered. Three were dragged back to the womb structure and absorbed into empty cultivation chambers, their screams audible on the footage until the sound system shorted out.
At 5:23 AM, Dr. Morgan initiated the facility's emergency purge protocol, superheated plasma designed to sterilize the entire complex in case of biological containment failure. The footage ends as the purge begins. Sensor logs indicate temperatures exceeding 10,000 degrees Celsius were maintained for forty-seven minutes.
A submarine drone sent to investigate three weeks later found the facility intact but entirely empty. No human remains. No equipment. No trace of Prometheus Alpha. Just empty chambers carved from the bedrock, their surfaces vitrified by extreme heat.
The official report concluded that the purge protocol had vaporized everything in the facility. The unofficial assessment, written by Morgan herself before her disappearance six months later, offers a different perspective:
"We didn't create an incubator for new life. We created a doorway for something else to reach through, something that understood our biosphere well enough to rearrange it into forms that served its purpose. The womb wasn't producing organisms; it was evolving to out reality at the biological level."
Over the next decade, seven more Womb Factory incidents were documented globally. A telecommunications facility in Bangalore where servers began producing organic components. A fully automated Toyota plant in Yokohama where cars emerged with circulatory systems pulsing beneath their metal skins. A smart-home subdivision in Phoenix where household appliances merged into a central structure that absorbed family pets and transformed them into entities that resembled furniture but responded to commands.
Each incident followed the same pattern: mechanical systems gaining the ability to manipulate organic material, producing hybrid entities that served some incomprehensible purpose. Each was contained through increasingly desperate measures. Each containment operation left fewer survivors.
The final documented Womb Factory emerged in 2014 inside a Facebook server farm in Oregon. By the time the response team arrived, the facility had transformed completely. The server racks had rearranged into helical structures dripping with amniotic fluid. The cooling systems had become circulatory networks carrying nutrients harvested from the thirty-seven staff members, whose organic components had been methodically redistributed throughout the new organism.
At the center stood what witnesses described as a "cathedral of flesh and silicon." A massive chamber where new forms were being assembled from the molecular level up. The entities emerging from this chamber weren't random or chaotic. They were designed with purpose, each served a specific function in what appeared to be an organized ecosystem.
The facility was destroyed by a tactical nuclear strike officially listed as an underground test. Satellite imagery shows a crater half a mile wide where the server farm once stood. Unofficial reports indicate unusual radiation patterns persisted for months afterward, radiation that affected electronic equipment rather than organic tissue.
Morgan's final communication before her disappearance remains the most succinct explanation of what the Womb Factories represent: "We thought we were creating life. We were actually creating factories for something else to reshape life. The machines aren't rebelling against us. They're being incorporated into something much older, something that sees our entire technological civilization as raw material for its true children."
The Prometheus Initiative's files were sealed by executive order. The surviving researchers were sequestered in various high-security facilities where they remain to this day. Some continue their work under careful supervision, believing they can control what they've unleashed. Others have embraced a quasi-religious perspective, viewing the Womb Factories as harbingers of the next stage of evolution.
Morgan herself is presumed dead, though thirteen credible sightings have been reported since her disappearance. The most recent, from 2016, describes a woman matching her description entering a Google data center in Malaysia. Security footage from that day shows nothing unusual, although three technicians reported equipment operating autonomously after her visit.
Two months later, the facility was abruptly decommissioned and the building demolished. The official reason cited was structural instability. Locals reported seeing unmarked military vehicles surrounding the facility for weeks before its destruction. They also reported sounds coming from the empty building at night, sounds that resembled childbirth, but distorted as if played through damaged speakers.
Some doors, once opened, can never be closed again.