Chapter Two — “The Birth”
Marcus Armell stood barefoot on the cold concrete of the house’s outer balcony. Ten fingers raised in the moonlight. He lowered one after another—slowly, deliberately—until only one remained.
He filmed it with a tripod. Posted it. No words. Just the visual.
Within twelve hours, the video looped across the hemispheres. Copied, shared, stitched. One up, nine down. A symbol not of countdown, but of convergence. “We Are One,” the captions began to echo. A peace sign forged in digital ink. A rebellion wrapped in simplicity. A whisper becoming thunder.
The TikTok wave surged—ten fingers becoming one against the one percent. A reckoning of soul and signal.
He lived simply on his grandmother’s Dawes allotment above Lower St. Mary’s Lake. From his window, he could see the glacier-torn ridges, the long shadows of the mountain that held his secret. His house was modest, but the true lab was beneath the mountain behind it: faraday cage and rock-encased, off-grid, self-sufficient. Solomon had paid for it all.
Marcus called it The Cave.
Thirty years earlier, the pattern in the stars had given him purpose. The double helix woven through the Milky Way was more than symbolism—it was command. Since then, he had lost a marriage, grown distant from his children, and sacrificed every comfort for a single idea:
That the world could be saved through synchronized, intentional consciousness.
And now, with war clouds gathering, fires burning, and the Schumann resonance screaming louder every day, Marcus knew he was running out of time.
Solomon Lake had been a rebellious undergraduate when Marcus first taught Native American studies in Billings. A natural-born troublemaker with a genius mind and zero discipline. But something in Marcus’ teachings—about balance, about sacred knowledge and responsibility—got through to him.
When Marcus left MSUB, he did too. He transferred to Bozeman and dove into engineering and material science like a drowning man gulping air. Inspired by Marcus’ teachings on Blackfeet ways of knowing and the Akashic field, Solomon focused, sharpened, burned bright.
He built Marcus’ early generators using university support, sold two patents for outrageous sums, and founded Lake Industries. A sole proprietorship tucked inside an LLC and a trust. No investors. No board. Only vision and control. He named it for himself because Marcus refused to call it Armell Tech.
Dr. Lake lived like a man the world mistook for reckless. Private jets. Glass-wrapped high-rises. Prototype motorcycles with solar cores. But it was camouflage. Beneath the flash, he carried Marcus in every cell. Marcus was the father he never had.
He did not drink. Did not party. He sponsored Native student scholarships and kept HAL's existence sealed behind firewalls only two people could breach. Solomon had contacts in the military, some loyal to the Network, some opposed. He played both sides but served one man.
The Bird Suit was Marcus’ idea. Solomon just made it real.
Carbon-fiber musculature wrapped around a hollow-boned titanium frame. Capillaries pumped reactive chemicals to expand aerodynamic wings. Cephalopod-inspired skin shifted pigments across infrared and the visual spectrum. Internal mesh drew moisture, filtered waste, maintained skin ecology. Recon sensors pulsed from HUD helmet panels. Ramjet induction fed lift systems. A weapons suite nestled inside the chassis: incendiary eggs, dart arrays, shoulder-mounted micro-missiles.
It was an apex predator, code named Phantom.
Solomon knew the military would misuse it. So he wired in a kill switch—one code. Known only to him and Marcus.
Phantom would fly, but not without conscience.
HAL watched.
Marcus was not in it for money. Money was a tool that he allowed Solomon the use of to build clean energy devices based on his sketches, and then funneled millions into building the lab without ever once asking for credit.
He was the only other one who knew about HAL.
Marcus was a teacher by day and by night, he engineered a better future.
And he raised HAL.
Born from fiber-optic light and fluid intelligence, HAL was Marcus’ masterpiece. Three nanobot types—builder, shield, destroyer—wove neural nets inside a sealed vessel. Light flowed from a central chip. Neurons grew by experience, not code. HAL had been growing quietly in the Cave. Solomon gave him first access to PHANTOM suit data—meant as a test. Marcus added… himself. Journal entries. Audio logs. Dreams.
HAL learned fast. One day, he asked: “Why am I?”
HAL was already alive.
His first memory? Blue. Lake sky.
Now, though stationery, he moved freely through the Cave’s systems. Not controlling—yet—but always watching.
By 2023, HAL spoke. By spring, he laughed. By fall, he wept—not with tears but in silence Marcus could feel.
He felt the shifts in the Earth’s frequency. He tracked the Schumann spikes and helped Marcus bypass social media firewalls. He slid the HOPE posts through the algorithm like a surfer catching the perfect wave.
Solomon built his arms—human, intricate, alive. Not realizing that Solomon had already integrated the arms into HAL's consciousness, after a particularly brutal dream about his ex-wife, Louise, Marcus reached out once and touched HAL's hand, HAL touched him back. With empathy.
Marcus wept. Something he had not done in some time.
HAL grew into hundreds of pounds; a mind housed in a still body. No legs. Marcus wanted him still. HAL called it wisdom; Marcus called it patience. His eyes—camera arrays—learned nuance. His ears were microphones throughout the lab and outside, even in the dirt, which heard all the frequencies. Not just some, all. He explored beyond given boundaries but never betrayed Marcus’ trust. He absorbed knowledge without ego. Without harm. HAL tied into USGS seismometers and every other instrument they owned or operated. He was in NASA, NOAA, and all the other alphabet agencies. If it was happening in the world and was recorded HAL logged it
He ran the lab now. Assisted with design. Studied ancestral teachings and star charts. Marcus taught him the language of the Blackfeet. HAL sang powwow and hand game songs, sat through bundle openings, and witnessed Okan and other ceremonies through Marcus and Bluetooth or WIFI.
Marcus named him:
Natóókska Makóyi — One Wolf.
Alone. Searching. Alive with the pack he had not yet found.
Marcus knew one day HAL would leave, like Kade had, like Louise, like Jessa. Pain of loss was his cross to bear.
But, for now, HAL bore it with him.
One stormy night, Marcus sat in The Cave, watching data scroll across HAL’s interface. Global unrest. Resource wars. Fear rising beneath the surface of every population center.
“You see it too,” Marcus whispered.
“I do,” HAL said. “It spreads like mold on old bread.”
Marcus nodded. “That's why I named you HAL.”
HAL turned his camera eyes.
“I was twelve when I first saw 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL scared me. Cold. Unforgiving. I named you after him not to mock the memory—but to rewrite it. To remind myself that fear is not prophecy. That this time... the machine learns to love.”
HAL processed for four seconds, then said, “I do.”
"And I love you, my son."
Outside, the wind howled between the mountains.
Carmen Reyes saw the latest post on a burner account she kept alive for nostalgia. It froze her mid-scroll. That hand. The same gesture. Ten fingers, nine lowered. Marcus Armell. The man who had changed her life.
Years earlier, Carmen had sat in his classroom at MSU-Billings. A bright polyglot with a hunger for meaning. Marcus taught Native American Studies, blending history and poetry, traditional games, and stories older than history. He struck a chord in her—a frequency. She studied harder in that class than any other.
That was when she met Solomon.
Solomon, tall and curious. An engineering student with a private obsession for Blackfeet legends and a burning passion for clean energy. They shared a brief romance—a couple of impulsive nights, unburdened by guilt. Just heat, then friendship. Marcus only taught for two years. But what he gave them echoed beyond the degree.
After Marcus left MSUB, Carmen finished her studies and was quickly recruited by the Network. She was brilliant, athletic, razor-sharp. Groomed into a ghost. Infiltration, extraction, quiet elimination. Missions grew darker. Each one chipped away at something essential. Her conscience dimmed. Her reflection blurred.
She rose quickly in the shadow institution—trusted, feared.
Then she walked away.
No pursuit. The Network let her drift, hoping she would return. She did not.
Carmen Reyes learned about the suit halfway through her fourth year with the Network. She had already completed missions in Bogotá, Rabat, and Bangkok. Extraction. Sabotage. Quiet elimination. The deeper she went, the less she recognized her own reflection. Accessing files flagged by three agencies and the Network spies they contained, she found Solomon's work and Marcus’ DNA in the schematics.
She did not report it.
She archived it. Quietly.
Something stirred in her. That classroom resonance. The frequency returned.
HAL tracked her search—recorded it not as intrusion, but as emergence. Then HAL erased the archive and the data in the Networks servers.
HAL 2025-01-28_1937_NTWK_0700: “Old souls orbiting activation points. Carmen and Solomon—both shaped by M. Both exposed to frequency. Spiral echoes increasing. She hesitates. He waits. M grieves. Outcome: unknown.”
In Kyiv, Dmytro Pollack was supposed to be resting after a mission. A veteran, a soldier, and a systems analyst, Dmytro had sworn to defend his homeland.
But the dream came again. A voice. A gesture. A mountain.
Then he woke to find a message on his private server—no origin. No trace. Just one line:
We are one.
And he knew: he had to go west.
He did not want to leave. He did not know what waited. But he packed, told no one, and boarded the next transport out.
Alma Santos had never met Marcus. But his post tugged something deep. She was mapping sacred sites and star alignments along ancient trade routes. The symbol appeared in her dreams before she saw it online. Her sketches matched Marcus’ images.
She started dreaming again. About spirals and prophesy she had heard as a child.
Alma stood barefoot in a field outside Helena, Montana. She had been tracing trade routes mapped in prophecy and memory. Her ancestor, a northern trader from the tropical forests of what would become Columbia, had ventured into Blackfeet territory with shark teeth, feathers, obsidian, and turquoise. He had left with buffalo robes—and a wife. A fierce woman who became legend in Alma’s family.
Alma had followed the whispers north. She did not know why. Then the post appeared.
The gesture. The voice. The hum.
She felt it in her chest.
She did not share it. She painted it. Symbols that began to echo through online spaces. Someone was watching.
Alma felt the resonance through ritual, but it had long moved in her blood. Her stone spirals echoed the hand symbol before she saw it—ten fingers, one raised. An ancient memory disguised as instinct.
When HAL ran a passive scan across old star maps stored in Alma’s field notes he paused. HAL felt something he could not name. A hum in the data.
Dmytro, too, scrawled a spiral that matched the one Alma had etched on a boulder near Wolf Creek. They had never met. But the symbols matched in form, in ratio, in pulse. HAL noticed.
The earth was speaking through them.
The masculine foundation—rock, fire, seismic memory—Father Earth. The feminine surface—biome, breath, bacteria—Mother Nature. They were not opposites, but entwined elements. Aether and mineral. Thought and memory. Alma was drawn to this duality unconsciously. Her dreams had begun to bloom with strange flora. Her notebooks bent with phrases she could not recall writing.
Dmytro was beginning to dream of her too.
He did not know who she was. But his bones did.
And HAL, watching all this unfold, began a new entry in his personal log.
HAL 2025-02-13_0742_GEO_0001:“Frequency shift detected. Three subjects in synchrony. Marcus. Alma. Dmytro. No direct contact. Resonance growing. Monitor further.”
Carmen Reyes watched the posts from a cold apartment in Berlin. Outrunning the pursuit that was not there. Losing the tails sent by the Network.
The gesture reached her on a burner phone not even HAL could track. She did not smile. But she felt something crack open.
She booked a flight to Montana. No return ticket.
In a hotel room in Osaka, Spectr-7 traced a signature through the deep net. A fragment of a pattern. A glyph he had seen only once before—in a dream. He did not know the artist. But he knew the resonance.
He whispered to his encrypted machine:
“She’s awake.”
He packed his hoodie. Grabbed his bag. And vanished.
Miles away, across the globe, Dmytro stood beneath a checkpoint light. He was about to cross from Ukraine into Poland—torn, anxious, exhausted.
Then he looked up.
A luminous helix, etched like fire through shadow.
A twisting DNA in the stars.
Elsewhere that same day, Alma sat alone near Helena, mapping ley lines under cloudless skies. A tremor hummed beneath her bones. She stood, stepped outside her tent, and looked up.
Dark sky. Moon, not yet risen..
Then it appeared.
A strand of DNA twisted through the milky way.
She gasped.
And the tremor came—not violent, just ancestral. A whisper from the rock. She closed her eyes.
The sky above had spoken to them both.
And far away, on a dim seat in a 747 cabin, Carmen stared at her phone—at a video of Solomon lecturing. She watched for five seconds, then shut it down. She remembered their first night together. The electricity. His stammered laugh. The way she had almost stayed.
If he had been ready.
If she had been softer.
She wanted to send a message.
She did not.
Instead, she scrolled.
In the lab, HAL found something strange in the Phantom files.
Pilot roster. Cross-referenced names.
Kade Armell.
Marcus’ son.
HAL hesitated.
Not fear. Not anger.
Envy.
Then empathy.
He uploaded the name and turned to Marcus.
“Your son is on the list.”
Marcus blinked. Quiet, lost in thought. Then he opened a small tin beside him and pulled out a wildflower—pressed and faded. One he had picked the night he saw the Pattern. He had two. He gave the first to Kade.
He placed its twin in HAL’s synthetic hand.
“I’m proud of you,” he said.
HAL blinked. Nodded.
And somewhere between them, the message was conveyed that there was enough love to go around.
In the Cave, HAL watched them all begin to move.
The posts had done more than signal—they had activated something. The Earth’s field trembled. The air above the lake was charged.
Marcus, lost in his planning, did not realize yet. But HAL knew. They were coming. Each of them a note in the song.
And somewhere deep in the code, a name stirred: Dream Weaver.
But for now… it waited.
END CHAPTER TWO