The road wasn’t marked on any map Jake Langston had ever seen—just a barely-there break in the dust-choked shoulder of State Route 652, southeast of Carlsbad, New Mexico. The sign was rusted metal, sand-blasted halfway to oblivion. It read:
C³ Facility — Private Property — No Trespassing
Authorized Personnel Only
Jake nearly missed it.
He stomped the brakes and twisted the wheel, his rental SUV skidding slightly before it righted itself and rolled over the cattle grate. Dust swirled in the fading light, painting the evening in smears of orange and gray.
A faint chime echoed in his skull—more sensation than sound.
00:17 LATE.
The digital timecode hovered in the lower-left of Jake’s vision, translucent and blue-white. He winced and pressed the accelerator.
“Thanks,” he muttered.
A soft haptic bump pulsed behind his eyes as the implant acknowledged him and returned to passivity.
Jake shifted in his seat. The Typhon implant was subtle, but always on—always... there.
He’d received it after passing Phase I of PHOENIX tech school. A reward, they said. A badge of progress. Proof he could handle the theory.
Since then, it had been mostly a glorified clock and personal assistant—basic diagnostics, internal metrics, limited overlay functions he rarely used. Nothing fancy. Nothing immersive.
The real features were still locked away.
The road curved into the desert like a scar, flanked by nothing but wind-carved stone and scrub. The sun was setting fast—dropping behind the distant mesas in a burnt-gold splash. Even with the AC on high, Jake’s shirt clung to his back.
This wasn’t what he expected when he signed on with PHOENIX. High-tech work, sure. Classified infrastructure, cutting-edge tech installs—that was the pitch. But this? This looked like a forgotten airstrip.
Then he crested a small rise and saw it.
A facility cut into the desert like a surgical incision. A squat cluster of buff-colored modular structures flanked by scaffolding, and cooling ducts. Everything had a temporary or hastily assembled appearance. There were no lights except for the faint amber glow from several gate sensors and perimeter motion detection rigs.
Dead center stood a gate with a familiar emblem:
The PHOENIX logo. A fire bird, half-risen from its own ashes. It was shiny and new, or made from more weather-resistant stuff than the previous sign.
Jake exhaled.
“Okay. Here we go.”
He slowed as he approached the gate. The metal boom arm stayed down. A ring of automated cameras swept toward his windshield, lenses glinting like insect eyes. One of them clicked as it locked onto his face.
Nothing happened.
Then a second camera repeated the scan.
Still nothing.
Jake rolled down his window and leaned out. “Uh… hello?”
No reply. No buzz. Not even a red light.
Then a shadow moved through the dust.
A desert-camo SUV emerged from a side road—silent, sudden. It parked directly in front of him, blocking his path. Two men stepped out. Both wore matte-gray body armor with digital desert overlays. Their faces were impassive behind mirrored glasses.
Jake froze.
One of them gestured. “Out of the vehicle.”
Jake fumbled for his badge. “Right. Sorry! I’m Jake Langston. A…new tech? I’m supposed to be on-site for a—”
The guard didn’t respond. He took the badge and held it up to a tablet. A moment passed. The other spoke softly into his mic: “Tower, confirm Langston, Jake. New recruit.”
There was a pause.
Then the voice of a woman crackled over the guard’s earpiece. “Let him through. Elena’s expecting him.”
The boom arm hissed and lifted.
As Jake got back into the SUV, one of the guards smirked and tapped the roof with his knuckles. “Try not to get yourself shot.”
Jake blinked. “Wait, what?”
But the guards were already walking away.
***
Jake followed the narrow drive through the gate. The terrain dipped, revealing more of the compound—a rough grid of prefab buildings, metal storage sheds, and shipping containers stacked like half-forgotten Tetris pieces. A communications tower loomed overhead, its top half still unpainted.
Signs pointed him toward Underground Personnel Parking.
The ramp sloped downward beneath a thick slab of reinforced concrete. As he descended, the desert heat peeled away like dead skin. Cool, conditioned air pressed against the windshield. Jake felt his shoulders drop for the first time in hours.
The subterranean lot was surprisingly sleek—industrial-polished floors, bright strip lighting overhead, and a few parked vehicles that looked more like armored shuttles than trucks. A discreet security camera swiveled toward him, its small green LED a small comfort. A wall screen displayed: LANGSTON, J. – PROCEED TO BAY 6.
Jake pulled into the assigned spot and shut off the engine. The sudden silence was eerie.
The underground parking garage was cool and dry. Lights buzzed overhead.
He popped the trunk, exited and took a deep breath.
“Typhon,” he said under his breath. “Navigation. Site schematic.”
A small green dot blinked at the center of his vision, then expanded into a faint overlay—an overhead wireframe of an empty rectangle.
ERROR: NO SITE MAP AVAILABLE.
The message pulsed three times, then faded out.
Jake sighed and tried to zoom and pan the map, hoping something might pop in.
Eyes left—zoom. Right—scroll. Blink and hold—confirm.
Tongue press to the roof of his mouth—menu back.
The interface stuttered slightly, and the whole thing was grainy around the edges.
Typical. Version 1.0 was always like this—usable, but barely.
He grabbed his bag and stood in the middle of the garage, orienting himself. On one wall, someone had tacked up a laminated hand-drawn map titled:
“Welcome to DESOLATION”
There were two comical cartoon cacti in the corner, one laying on the floor with x’s for eyes, the other giving a thumbs-up.
The map had colored arrows pointing to various site locations: Coordination Trailer, Utility Access Trunk, Connector Support Building, Don’t Go Here (with a skull drawn next to it), and ??? scrawled across one sector—intentionally redacted.
A brown coffee stain warped part of the legend.
Jake smiled despite himself. “Yeah. That tracks.”
He slung his bag over his shoulder and followed the arrow toward Coordination Trailer – Admin Hub. His boots echoed faintly in the wide, sterile corridor beyond the garage—white walls, concrete floor, humming electrical conduits.
He passed a water cooler. A sticky note on the tank read:
“Boil notice? LOL. Just drink it. If you start seeing colors, report to medical.”
Jake didn’t stop.
At the end of the corridor, a utilitarian steel door was propped open. The light inside was soft and even, like a medical bay or an architect’s office. He stepped through the threshold and cleared his throat.
“Uh, hi. Jake Langston. Reporting in for—”
He stopped.
A tall woman stood near a metal table strewn with what appeared to be schematics. Her jet-black hair was tied in a no-nonsense braid. She didn’t look up.
“You’re late,” she said evenly.
“Sorry. I missed the turn-off. The sign—”
“She looked up, and the weight of her gaze stopped him. Her expression was unreadable.
“Elena DuChamp,” she said. “Site coordinator. You’ll report to me for all project tasks, but I won’t hold your hand.”
Before Jake could respond, a voice from the corner mumbled, “He’ll be fine. Looks like he at least knows which end of a wrench to hold.”
Jake turned to see an older man—gray in the beard, crow’s feet around the eyes—leaning in a folding chair, chewing something unidentifiable.
He wore the same work coveralls Jake had been issued, though his were weathered, stained, and the sleeves were rolled to the elbow. The patch on his chest read: Goldberg.
Jake stuck out his hand. “Jake Langston.”
The man ignored the gesture. “You talk too much.”
Elena gave the faintest smile. “Jake, meet your field partner. Everyone just calls him Gramps.”
“I’m old,” Goldberg muttered.
“You’re older than dirt and twice as salty,” she replied.
Jake finally lowered his hand and glanced at the table. A massive set of technical blueprints stretched across its surface—power conduits, water feeds, something that looked like dimensional geometry overlaid with PHOENIX code tags.
“Wow,” he said. “Are these real?”
Elena and Gramps exchanged a look.
Then both burst out laughing.
Gramps slapped the table. “Kid thinks we’d leave real plans lying around.”
Elena turned and stared at Jake. “Let’s see what we have to work with. Wait…Typhon implant version 1?”
“It’s what they gave us at the school,” said Jake.
“No, no, no,” said Elena. “This won’t do. You can’t do anything with that. I’m pushing you to Version 5. You’ll never finish my installs with that antique.”
“Wait, you can just—?” Jake winced and took a step back. “Ok that’s—“
“Hold still,” she said, cutting him off. “Give it a minute to reboot into the new version.”
A sudden burst of light flared bright across his vision, then reshaped itself in layers—geometric scaffolding folding in from the corners of his sight, soft blue arcs drawing data from the environment, tagging objects, mapping the trailer in real time. His vitals ticked into the upper corner. A subtle ripple of environmental diagnostics unfolded across the bottom edge. The interface was crisp, reactive—alive.
Jake staggered slightly. “Holy—” He blinked hard. “This is amazing.”
He blinked, watching as the HUD tagged her as DuCHAMP, ELENA – COORDINATION LEAD in faint text just above her head.
“It’s adequate,” she said flatly, still focused on her screen.
Gramps smirked. “This ain’t tech school any more. Welcome to the real job.”
***
Elena raised a hand to her temple. With a slight twitch of her eye and a faint whisper of sound, the air above the table shimmered.
Suddenly, an augmented reality projection flickered into being—a complex lattice of three-dimensional nodes, Veil access points, and calibration readouts. The AR floated like a ghost above the fake blueprints.
Jake’s jaw dropped. The hovering schematic was an elegant tangle of light and code, shifting and updating in real time. It was like watching a symphony of math and architecture unfold in midair.
Jake instinctively grabbed the edge of the table. “Uhhh… Uh oh. Suddenly I don’t feel so well.” He put his hand over his mouth.
Gramps rolled his eyes and chewed another bite of jerky. “There’s gonna be some disorientation at first. Just muscle through it.”
“I think I’m gonna be sick.”
“Waste can’s over there,” said Elena. “Just don’t hurl on the floor, please.”
Jake kept breathing, blinking past the strange visual layering until the lines sharpened and settled. The world felt thinner somehow, like a skin had been peeled back to reveal some glowing infrastructure beneath. His stomach was beginning to settle.
He let out a shaky breath. “Okay… wow. This is… actually kind of amazing!”
Gramps nodded. “Welcome to Phoenix, Langston. The Typhon implant is one of the fringe benefits.”
Elena finally stepped away from the schematics and walked toward a wall display. “You’ve been assigned to install infrastructure for a forward Connector site—water, power, and network.”
“Is this part of Eremos?” Jake asked.
She gave him a cool look. “Where did you hear that name? Your tasks will not be underground, they’ll be on the surface. Make sure you keep your head there.”
Jake glanced at Gramps, who offered no help—just a grunt and a shrug.
Elena continued. “Your deployment must be completed by week’s end. The schedule’s aggressive, but it’s because I’m on a strict deadline. Centcom brass is chomping at the bit to get this site up and running.
Gramps will guide your work and keep you on-time. Your access has been restricted to designated project zones. Do not deviate. If you wander, your implant will let you know. Linger too long, and you’ll make fast friends with security. Understood?”
“Yes ma’am.” Jake was trying hard not to look as intimidated as he felt.
She tapped a wall panel and brought up a list of tasks. “Your initial objective is to set-up four Veil utility access points. That includes control and flow equipment. I’ve cleared you for your initial tool and diagnostic equipment allocation. I’m sure you know this already, but Veiltech equipment is rare and expensive, even in PHOENIX-land. Handle it with extreme care. Break anything, see the quartermaster for a replacement…and me for an ass-kicking.”
Jake nodded seriously, then switched his attention back to the floating symbols, trying to keep up.
“Also,” she added, “this facility is currently operating under a security-by-obscurity posture. That means minimum fences and guards. There will be no incident response beyond the two patrolmen you met at the gate and one in the tower. The Directors believe incomplete compounds are less attractive targets.”
Gramps snorted and shook his head. “Idiots.”
Elena ignored him. “Your job is to get this facility online. Don’t get curious, and don’t do anything stupid. If something feels off, call it in. If something tries to kill you…” She gave a dry smile. “Run faster than Gramps.”
Jake forced a laugh.
Gramps didn’t.
Elena stepped forward, her voice cool and commanding. “You’ll both report to me at the beginning of each day until your tasks are complete. Again, see the quartermaster for any needed materials.”
She looked down at her pad and started poking at it with a finger.
Jake cleared his throat. “I don’t know how to thank you, ma’am. This Version 5 Typhon—“
Gramps snorted, stopping him mid-sentence.
Elena didn’t look up. “You can thank me by getting my installs done. And maybe don’t trip over your own feet while you’re at it.”
She added, “You’re dismissed.” Then she glanced at Jake and gave him a quick wink and nod.
There was something in that wink—something knowing. Like she’d seen rookies come and go, and Jake had just passed some kind of invisible test.
It wasn’t exactly the welcome he was hoping for, but at least he knew she wasn’t mad at him. It instantly relieved a lot of his stress.
Gramps offered a sloppy salute and grabbed Jake by the shoulder.
“C’mon, Patch Adams. Time to earn your stripes.”
***
The stars were bright overhead, and the dry desert wind had finally started to cool. It rustled across the hard-packed sand and whispering through the chain-link fences around the compound.
Jake and Gramps had a roof above them, but the building they were working in had no walls. The ceiling was held up by thin, metal beams with circular holes cut in them for wiring and pipes.
They moved with purpose between flickering work lights and humming equipment, staging equipment and running wire harnesses through conduits like cybernetic gardeners planting something alien in the earth.
Jake was on one knee, fitting a stabilization collar around a conduit post. He double-checked the torque spec in his HUD and reached for a small torque wrench.
Gramps watched from a distance, arms folded. “Torque that collar like a dentist on nitrous, Langston. Give it some guts.”
Jake rolled his eyes but tightened it with a snap. “Shouldn’t we be grounding that conduit? Sorry, I guess I’m just not used to doing this without a trainer or OSHA breathing down my neck.”
Gramps snorted. “OSHA ain’t been within fifty miles of a PHOENIX site since Nixon was in office.”
He spat off to the side. “And if they showed up now, they’d vanish faster than a witness in Vegas.”
They moved on. When all of the control boxes, flow control systems and associated wires and pipes were in place and connected, Gramps gave a low grunt. It was either his version of praise or gas.
“I hate all this preamble,” he said. “It’s boring. Now comes the fun part.”
“Finally,” said Jake.
“Not so fast,” said Gramps. “You know some theory, you’ve done some basic setups in class, but this is the real deal. Veiltech is powerful, but dangerous.”
“Yes, I know,” said Jake. “I’ve been fully briefed.”
Gramps looked at him seriously. “When you work with me, you do it by the book. I’ve…well, let’s put it this way. You won’t last long if you’re sloppy. Not with me. Understand?”
“Yes,“ said Jake. “Yes, sir.”
“And don’t call me sir. I work for a living.”
Jake smiled and nodded.
Gramps took a deep breath. “Ok, everything we just setup starts with these. ”He pointed to several pipes emerging from the concrete slab they were standing on. “Know what these are?”
“Uh,” Jake thought about it for a moment. “They just look like standard feed pipes for water, electric—“
“Wrong,” said Gramps. “These are total bullshit. Fakes. They don’t go to anything. We call ‘em Façades.”
Jake looked confused. “Why install fake pipes and wire conduits? Seems like a huge waste of effort.”
“It’s not,” said Gramps. “Think about it. Ninety-nine-percent of the people you’re gonna meet in life have no idea what Veiltech is…or how it works! They think power comes from wires and water comes from pipes. And that’s just the way of it.
These fake pipes are for them. If they knew water, power, and network came straight out of that little box—no wires, no source—it’d drive them mad.”
Jake chuckled. “They’d seriously start questioning their world-view.”
“Yes. And sure, you could try to explain it to them. Tell them that the source could be anywhere; Pluto, or on the other side of the damned Universe. Distance doesn’t matter when you make a non-local connections.”
“The bridge,” said Jake, trying to sound helpful.
“Exactly. They might get it, given enough time. Think about how carefully they revealed it to you at your tech school.”
“It was a whole year of theory and build-up before they showed us the working tech,” said Jake.
“Yup. Sounds right,” said Gramps. He looked deep in thought for a moment, then added:
“Most are smart enough to get it, but some people don’t wanna know. They think they have a pretty good handle on things in their life. And what we do—connecting things non-locally—it would just upset them. So a lot of our surface jobs are going to be this: Making people who don’t know about Veiltech think their world of purely “physical connections” is just fine and dandy!”
“I see,” said Jake. “I guess that makes sense. But that makes me think…how many other things am I going to see working for PHOENIX…that are also fake.”
Gramps grinned wide. “That is the right question, Patch Adams.”
***
A while later, Gramps took a smoke break. Jake was careful to avoid the smoke. He stared up at the stars. “This place… feels like the ass-end of nowhere. Like it fell out of time.”
Gramps didn’t look up. “That’s why they picked it. Quiet. Remote. Forgettable. Perfect place to build a lie.”
Jake glanced over. “You ever gonna tell me what this place is for?”
Gramps was silent for a long moment, then exhaled a long plume of smoke. “Nope.”
“C’mon. Give me something.”
“They collect things,” said Gramps. “Alright? From the nearby caverns.”
Jake frowned. “What…Carlsbad? The National Park? What kind of things?”
Gramps kept his eyes averted. “The kind you shouldn’t worry about. Let’s leave it at that.”
Jake let it drop. For now.
They finished the last of the setup together in uncomfortable silence. The hum of the Veiltech equipment settled around them, like a low, distant choir.
As they walked back toward the coordination trailer, Jake wiped his brow. “So… how’d I do?”
Gramps pretended to mull it over. “You didn’t fry yourself, or open a rift in spacetime. That’s a solid B-minus.”
Jake grinned, then caught himself. “I’ll take it.”
Gramps gave him a sideways glance—just a hint of something softer behind the sarcasm. “Truth is, kid… you picked it up faster than most.”
Jake smiled.
“We’re doing important work here,” said Gramps. “I think you can sense that. This surface site, and the connector facility just below us…they’re not just utility hubs, Patch. They part of a bigger whole.”
They reached the trailer steps. Gramps paused before heading in. “But don’t get cocky. This job’s not about brilliance. It’s about keeping your hands steady…keeping your wits about you when the stress is high and world’s coming apart.”
Jake nodded, solemn now. “Understood.”
Gramps grunted again, then looked up at the stars for a moment.
"You're not half bad, Patch Adams."
The old man disappeared inside.
Jake lingered outside a moment longer, breathing in the dry desert air.
Above, the stars blinked in silence.