Part 3 – Short Story Series – Science Fiction/Futurism
In Part 3 of The Scarcity Engine series, Kai is forced to confront what’s rising from beneath the city and from the past he thought he could outrun. A corrupted relay surges. A drone circles above, scanning for signals. And then, a voice. First his mother’s. Then a girl’s. Both echo through the broken network, carrying truths too dangerous to ignore.
If you missed the earlier parts:
👉 Read Part 1: The Ghost Economy – where survival is routine and resistance is buried beneath memory.
👉 Read Part 2: The Hidden Signal – where a ghost in the network points toward something stirring underground.
Now, in The Hidden Fault, Kai’s silence ends. The signal is no longer static. And it’s calling him out of the dark.
The workbench lights flickered again, low blue pulses trembling like breath held too long. The soldering iron dimmed, then sparked back to life with a sharp crack. Kai didn’t look up.
From the far side of the room, a voice finally stirred the silence.
“It’s surging on line six.”
It wasn’t a question. Drayce rarely asked those.
He had once been military. Not frontline — logistics, field repair, maybe blacksite. He never said. But the way he moved, the way he handled tools like weapons and silence like currency, told Kai everything he needed to know. Whatever Drayce had seen before the fall, it had carved the questions out of him. Left behind only decisions.
They didn’t talk about the old world. Not much. But Kai had never needed to ask why Drayce stayed.
He stayed because someone had to.
Kai shifted, twisting the metal housing in his hands until the cracked capacitor finally clicked free. “It’s not the line,” he said. “It’s the relay grid. We rerouted last week. This is feedback.”
Drayce was already moving. Quiet boots crossed recycled metal flooring, weaving between crates and salvaged heat shielding. He moved like he was part of the system. Smooth. Necessary. Almost absorbed into it.
The command center was breathing again, barely. Cooling fans whispered against the stale air. Piles of old equipment hunched along the walls, some cannibalised, some waiting for a second life. In the corner, two hand-built micro turbines whined at mismatched frequencies, harvesting warmth from waste heat and feeding it back into emergency capacitors.
Everything was a loop.
Kai leaned over the open panel, torchlight haloing the components like a post-collapse autopsy. The insides of the transmitter were charred. Too many repairs. Too many corners cut.
“These boards weren’t built to live this long,” he muttered, mostly to himself.
Drayce didn’t answer. Instead, he powered up the auxiliary monitor. An old transit display buzzed with mismatched resolution and the faint smell of warm plastic. Lines of diagnostics scrolled past. One column blinked yellow.
“Southern relay node’s cycling,” Drayce said. “Too regular to be random.”
Kai joined him at the monitor, hands streaked with blackened resin and copper dust.
“Could be weather interference.”
“Probe ping’s another option. There’s also the chance Vorn’s network is flickering back to life.”
Kai didn’t reply. The signal blinked again. Steady. Deliberate. It didn’t feel random.
The overhead lights dimmed. Not failure. Just balancing. One of the newer solar-conversion cells was unstable again, bleeding into the main grid.
“We should isolate that node.”
“Not yet.” Kai hesitated. “I want to see what it does next.”
Silence settled. In the far corner, the chemical air filter kicked in louder. The room now smelled faintly of lichen and warm metal.
Behind them, the bunker walls bore signs of recent growth. Fresh 3D-printed concrete ridged like insect wings. Reinforced rings still curing under heat lamps. A new corridor waiting to be claimed.
“The print rig’s nearly done with the west arch,” Drayce said.
“We’ll need better conduit insulation.”
“I’ve been stripping foam from refrigeration units.”
“Any good?”
“Not waterproof. But it’ll hold.”
The room paused around them. Every breath felt measured. In the corner, a stripped drone carcass waited for repurposing. Next to it, a power coupler built from three separate devices bore a hand-scrawled label: Stable at 3.2V. Test again.
Kai crossed to the drawer. The one he never opened.
Inside, padded in old foam, lay a black polymer casing. A pocket data crystal. Its surface dulled by years of turning it over, not playing it. Not deleting it either.
He pulled it out and slotted it into the reader.
The screen buzzed, faint and cracked. Sound loaded first.
“If you’re hearing this… it means you made it. Or someone did.”
Lani’s voice trembled, but her eyes didn’t waver. A cut glinted on her temple, barely healed.
“I was wrong to stay. But I couldn’t watch it collapse without trying. I thought maybe if I stayed inside the process, I could slow it. Redirect it. But I was naive.”
She glanced offscreen, lips thinning.
“The truth is… I helped design the early resource allocation models. Phase One. I never imagined they’d twist them into a mechanism of denial. But they did. Efficient. Quiet. No bombs. Just absence.”
She leaned forward, static crawling across the screen.
“I left what I could. It’s not everything. But it’s enough to see it for what it is. If you find the fallback node, you’ll understand.”
Her voice softened.
“I hope you’re still the man I raised. Not the man they tried to make you.”
Then the screen flickered hard. The feed fractured.
Drayce moved to the console. A new window lit the wall. Pale grey with a pulsing red grid overlay.
“Perimeter alert,” he said. “Northern vent tower. It’s a drone. Circling low.”
The motion feed showed it. A black shell gliding over the skyline, silent but for a thin, vibrating whine. Beneath it, the sensor array blinked like an artificial eye, shifting with surgical precision.
Kai leaned closer. “That’s not a survey route. It’s a focused scan.”
Drayce adjusted the frequency filter. Static lines cleared from the screen. The drone was running a fan pattern, slicing invisible lines through the surface. It was tracing for thermal pulses or EM bleed.
“It’s not just watching,” Drayce said. “It’s listening.”
A faint clicking sound echoed through the structure. Not loud. But real. The kind that vibrated in the jaw. The drone was emitting pulses. A sonic probe. It was surveying for life, human life.
Kai’s throat tightened. “Since when do they use those?”
“Since they started losing contact with underground sectors.”
Another ping. Closer. Sharper. It passed just above the southern shaft. The signal board flared orange.
Drayce muttered, “It’s narrowing in.”
Kai stood frozen.
Drayce turned toward him, voice low but sharp. “She knew. She tried to tell you. And now we’ve got a new signal from a live contact in the same zone. We have to move.”
Kai didn’t answer immediately. His hands hovered above the map, tracing the same line he’d drawn days ago.
Drayce stepped closer. “You’re waiting for what? A better moment? There won’t be one. We’ve stayed silent long enough.”
Kai met his eyes. “We’ve stayed alive.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“I built this place to disappear,” Kai said. “To finish what she started without being found.”
“And how’s that working?” Drayce gestured at the console, the blinking warning lights, the signal that hadn’t stopped pulsing. “We’re not hidden anymore. We’re being watched. And someone’s asking for help. You heard her.”
Kai looked away.
“She’s just a kid.”
“She’s not just anything. She’s the only signal we’ve had in six months that wasn’t trying to kill us.”
Kai’s voice dropped to a whisper. “If I go back out there, I can’t undo it.”
“You don’t have to undo it. You just have to show up.”
The interference wavered. Then the signal snapped into focus just long enough to carry a voice.
“…if anyone’s out there…”
It was a girl. Young. Breathless. Fighting through static.
“This is… this is Ward Nine. I’m not military. I’m not armed. I have food caches and comms. I just…”
The audio fractured again.
“…they’re sweeping Sector Two. Not random. It’s like they’re… hunting for heat, or…”
Another burst of static.
“…if someone hears this, I have the last node map. It’s printed. Not digital. I didn’t transmit it. They can’t trace it…”
Silence.
Then a final whisper.
“…I saw something move underground.”
Kai leaned forward. The signal vanished.
Only silence.
He stood in the low light of the control room. The air filter had gone still. Only the faint flicker of monitors gave off warmth now.
He’d thought survival would feel like discipline. Like principle. But now, it just felt like distance.
His hands moved without thought. Sealing a case. Checking a coil. Counting tools. But in his head, Lani’s voice kept replaying. Not the words. Just her face. The way she’d said the man I raised.
She had built something and watched it twist. So had he.
He glanced at the sealed drawer with the old photo. Her smile, before the world divided.
He didn’t speak.
But something in him moved.
The hatch hissed open. A wave of cold crept in.
Beyond it, the black of the tunnel waited. The drone descended. The signal pulsed. Milla’s voice echoed beneath it all.
Something’s underground.
Kai stepped into the dark.
The Scarcity Engine is just getting started.
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The system is watching. But so are we.
