Plot

A covert extractor is burned mid-mission after recovering an anomalous artifact. Hunted and altered by its power, he's forced into a shadow agency fighting to contain non-human tech-while his own humanity begins to slip away.

After a covert asset extraction goes sideways, elite thief Silas "Cipher" Jackson is burned by his own handlers and left stranded in the woods with a mysterious orb. When an unknown source begins feeding him coordinates, Silas follows the trail to an abandoned cabin-only to discover the orb is far more than advanced tech. Contact triggers strange hallucinations, physical mutations, and a rupture in reality itself. Captured and taken to an off-the-books government blacksite, Silas meets Agent Atlas, a representative of a secret agency that manages containment of Non-Human Intelligence (NHI) artifacts. Offered a choice-sign on or face consequences-Silas' body and mind begin spiraling beyond his control. As his perception fractures, he glitches out of containment, crashing into a surreal bureaucratic facility where humans and alien dignitaries appear to coexist. Now caught between collapsing reality, unexplained transformations, and a shadow war he never agreed to join, Silas is forced to confront a terrifying truth: the artifact didn't just change him-it may have claimed him.