REBORN CONSPIRACY: FROM WITHIN
Science-fiction conspiracy horror / thriller
Approximately 105,000–110,000 words after revision
In 2014, a teenage accomplice named Colin helps the serial killer known as the Zodiac abduct a hitchhiker in the Sierra Madre. Their victim knows impossible things about his captors and seems strangely unafraid of death. Before Zodiac can kill him, invisible beings attack. Colin is overpowered, something drills into his skull, and a voice tells him that he will soon have a purpose.
Years later, military veteran and contractor Jack Trimmer works as an outside consultant to the FBI in New York. While investigating the murders of two attorneys connected to organized crime, Jack and his young FBI partner, Samuel, discover unusual amber crystals threaded with red veins inside the victims' skulls. Contact with one crystal triggers fragments of Jack's suppressed memories from Iraq, where his unit encountered creatures that should not have existed and Jack lost his left eye.
FBI criminal analyst Rosa begins studying the crystals. Soon afterward Samuel disappears. He has been abducted by the same hidden organization responsible for the murders and implanted with a crystal that subordinates his mind.
Rosa notices suspicious wounds on Samuel and senior FBI personnel matching the wounds found on the murder victims. When an invisible creature attacks her at home, she realizes the conspiracy may already exist inside the Bureau. At Jack's urging, she abandons normal communication channels and hides with a friend.
Jack follows Samuel's trail to a warehouse and encounters police officers who have also been compromised. A firefight leaves several officers dead or injured. The evidence is manipulated to make Jack appear responsible, and he is arrested.
Police forensic analyst Morris independently finds that the physical evidence does not support the official account. Blood patterns and shooting angles indicate multiple shooters, but his findings are altered by superiors. He initially suspects ordinary corruption.
While still held at a police precinct, Jack contacts hacker and NSA employee Malcolm and his former military comrade Talon. Talon gathers the surviving members of their old team—Jester, Rabbi, and Pipe—while Jack also uses leverage over a corrupt NYPD contact in an attempt to protect himself. The policeman instead tries to betray him.
Jack is transferred to prison, where the infection already inside his body accelerates. Strange organisms begin emerging from him, and Jack discovers that he can perceive the world through their senses. When assassins attempt to kill him in his cell, the creatures defend him.
Talon's team intercepts Jack during a medical transfer. Almost immediately afterward, the prison complex is devastated. Thousands of prisoners and staff vanish.
The destruction is blamed on Jack and his associates.
The fugitives soon learn that the missing prisoners were not simply killed. The Reborn—the organization behind the crystals—used the destruction as cover to abduct and subordinate thousands of people.
Meanwhile, Samuel is found executed with a weapon linked to Jack, strengthening the official narrative that Jack is a terrorist murdering witnesses and law-enforcement officers.
Malcolm discovers similar unexplained incidents outside New York, suggesting that the conspiracy is international. Surveillance by Jack's group reveals numerous apparently ordinary FBI and police personnel carrying the same physical signature associated with the crystals.
Before they can expose what they have discovered, the Reborn attack their hideout. Jack is captured and taken into a vast tunnel system beneath New York, where he encounters Zodiac again and sees evidence of a hidden biological infrastructure beneath the city.
The Reborn attempt to implant Jack with a crystal.
The procedure fails.
A titanium plate in Jack's skull, left from an old military injury, interferes with their attempt to completely control him. Instead, Jack gains access to the Reborn network.
He suddenly senses hundreds of people linked through implanted crystals and realizes there had recently been thousands more within range. More dangerously, he discovers that he can seize control of some of them and of the biological creatures connected to the same network.
The Reborn immediately begin withdrawing their people from Jack's vicinity.
Talon and the others penetrate the tunnels and help Jack escape. Jack later uses his new abilities to locate and save Rosa, who joins the fugitives and begins studying their infections. She discovers that Jack and several members of the group are undergoing increasingly radical biological changes.
The group tries to release video evidence, but authentic recordings are dismissed as artificial-intelligence fabrications. The Reborn exploit the same uncertainty by flooding information channels with false material, making genuine evidence indistinguishable from disinformation.
During another major attack, Talon and Pipe are killed and Jack loses an arm. Through the growing crystal structure inside him, Jack begins perceiving what appear to be the consciousnesses—or souls—of Talon, Pipe, and others who died nearby.
Morris investigates the aftermath and encounters an operative from PTSD, the Paranormal Threat Suppression Department, a secret unit that deals with anomalous threats. The agent warns Morris that his own superiors are compromised and demonstrates an ability Morris cannot explain. What began as a forensic investigation into corruption becomes proof that Jack's impossible claims may be real.
Rosa volunteers to return to the FBI and search for evidence from inside. There she learns that Samuel's death has officially been attributed to Jack and discovers further signs of deliberate manipulation. When another invisible attacker reaches her inside the Bureau, she escapes.
Jack concludes that digital evidence will never be enough. The group kidnaps a mob boss already controlled by the Reborn and takes him to an abandoned subway station. Their plan is brutally simple: surgically expose the crystal inside his skull on a live broadcast.
Police surround the station and deliberately block the transmission.
At the same time, Reborn forces attack from the tunnels.
The subway becomes a battlefield involving controlled humans, engineered organisms and weapons capable of manipulating matter. The fighting causes catastrophic destruction beneath Manhattan and contributes to the collapse of a building above.
Morris reaches the police perimeter and discovers that the communications blackout is intentional. He infiltrates the command area and steals a copy of the suppressed video, becoming one of the few independent witnesses with physical evidence of the conspiracy.
Rosa is captured in the aftermath.
As Jack and the survivors flee underground, they encounter the Cleaners, entities capable of moving through solid matter and manipulating normal space. One pulls Jack completely outside the three-dimensional world.
In an impossible environment, Jack meets Ivan the Magician, another being familiar with the Reborn. Ivan explains that the crystals are four-dimensional structures capable of manipulating matter, biology and consciousness. They can also preserve and exploit something associated with the dead. Ivan begins teaching Jack to use the same principles to phase through matter and teleport.
Jester, meanwhile, draws a different lesson from Jack's survival. Learning that titanium interferes with Reborn control, he deliberately protects himself with it while keeping the abilities granted by the crystal. He begins killing and subordinating people, discovering that death increases his power.
When the Reborn later attack Rabbi, Jester returns with followers of his own and saves him. Jack confronts his former friend and recognizes what Jester represents: the future Jack fears for himself—a man who possesses the enemy's power and eventually decides that possessing the ability to control others gives him the right to do so.
Jack tries to persuade Jester to return. Jester refuses and disappears.
Malcolm initially manages to trace Rosa through official custody records and arranges legal protection for her. Then the records contradict themselves. One agency claims she has been transferred; the supposed destination insists she never arrived.
In reality, two humans working voluntarily for the Reborn—neither of them implanted—have taken Rosa outside the city. They lead her into a tunnel lined with the same amber crystal structures she has spent the book investigating.
Jack reunites with Rabbi, Morris and Malcolm. Every normal method of exposing the conspiracy has failed: police, FBI, media and the internet can all be manipulated. Jack decides on one final attempt.
Using stolen information, hacked communications and political leverage, Malcolm arranges an emergency meeting at New York City Hall involving Mayor Abbazi, Senator Logan Weiss, a senior Pentagon general and other officials.
The plan works far too easily.
At City Hall, Jack realizes the Reborn wanted him there.
Their psychic influence overwhelms his resistance. Jack is forced to turn his weapon on Rabbi and kill one of his last surviving friends. He is then compelled to shoot himself.
At the final instant, Jack uses one of the crystals to shift partially outside normal space. The bullet passes through him.
The Pentagon general realizes something impossible is occurring and intervenes. Jack is taken into military custody, but during the chaos the general himself becomes infected.
Held in a secret military facility, Jack discovers that he can perceive the world through the general's developing infection. Through him, Jack watches a high-ranking official begin his own investigation.
The general uncovers traces of erased classified programs named PROJECT REBORN and PROJECT STUPIDITY.
For the first time, someone powerful enough to matter begins to believe Jack.
In the epilogue, a Cleaner finds Jester and takes him deep beneath the city.
There, Jester sees the scale of the Reborn for the first time: biological factories, controlled soldiers, engineered creatures and an enormous organic spacecraft. He also sees Rosa. She is alive, but a crystal has been implanted in her skull and she is now under Reborn control.
Jester learns that the Reborn cannot simply take Jack from military custody because another power, Vimana, is watching them.
He then encounters the Zodiac, although the original Zodiac is dead.
The man standing before him is a clone.
Jester is finally integrated into the Reborn network and replaces Zodiac as the new leader of the New York Hive.
Jack has survived and finally gained the attention of the military—but Rosa is lost, Rabbi and his other friends are dead, Jester has joined the enemy, and the conspiracy he tried to expose is far larger than anything he understood when the investigation began.
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