The years slipped by since Danielle wasn’t around, and a lot has changed. The twenty-first century arrived with an explosion of various internet platforms. Smartphones, once hailed as bridges of connection, had turned into invisible leashes—tracking, measuring, bending the psyche of those who clutched them. Then, like a badly staged play, came the breakdown of the European Union. The grand stage cracked, actors stumbled, and the audience no longer believed in the script. People refused to be stripped of their identities beneath the mask of equality. Every nation, every ethnicity had its own voice to offer, something unique to the progress of humanity. The diversity among the members of that Union had always been vast— a comfortable lifestyle in the West set against the bare survival of the East, where small nations were left to fend for themselves. After years of exploitation, when the so-called “new democracies” were drained dry, a new way of thinking emerged: one that revolved around national identity — the idea of forcing cultures so wildly different under one universal label collapsed under its own weight. In time, it became clear that though the human body follows one design, the mind refuses imitation. Language, memory, and belief carve invisible borders between people —not to divide them, but to shape the many ways in which existence can be lived. And perhaps that is where the true elegance of humanity resides: not in sameness, but in the quiet freedom to see the world through a different light. From then on, Group A was reserved for the rich and the seven great powers, while the rest were treated as if they were medieval colonies, stripped of resources—not only of land and minerals, but of the most precious wealth of all: human. Among those drained nations was the small country of Bulgaria — a land of millennia-old history, bled by irreparably greedy politicians, yet carrying within its people something priceless: a genetic legacy whispered of in legends, stubborn, persistent, and never entirely forgotten.
Centuries ago, one of the world’s earliest civilizations had risen upon this land—the Pelasgians. With every excavation, scientists unearthed older and older traces. These fragments whispered of events long before the Black Sea deluge, when the waters were still a vast freshwater lake and around its shores flourished a culture older even than the Thracians. It was said that from the Balkans—Bulgaria and Turkey—humanity itself had once spread. The West, uncomfortable with such claims, dismissed them as “conspiracy theories.” Yet that very discomfort revealed the truth: powerful forces, both European and overseas, had always sought to plunder and erase the region. They could not allow their people to awaken — to feel the gravity of their own existence — for consciousness would make them useless to those who thrived on their obedience.
Turkey, somehow, had learned to slip through the geopolitical web — bending rules, absorbing pressure, and surviving the blows meant to crush it. Bulgaria had no such privilege. This small, fragile, yet radiant land became a focal point. In this place, they believed a pure strand of cosmic DNA pulsed beneath the soil, a spark capable of accelerating human evolution beyond the slow mercy of nature. And the West, ever impatient for progress, could not wait. For this land — and for the sacred code it carried — wars had been waged since antiquity. The Bulgarian bore a rare sensitivity to invisible realms, to the hum of forces that most could not name. Knowledge seemed to pass through them effortlessly, as if recalled, not learned — and for that very gift, they were coveted. This tiny nation had given the world teachers and prophets whose visions, once dismissed as mysticism, were now quietly converging with reality. Petar Dunov, Baba Vanga, Dyado Vlaycho, Slava Sevryukova — only a few of the names that surfaced. Many others remained hidden, veiled by choice or by fate. Yet they existed. And their knowing — their light — still traveled the same path: the secret line of human DNA.
***
In the car, on the way to Danielle’s place, she felt rather strange than tired. Something stirred inside her – a quiet unease, a whisper beneath the skin. It wasn’t about what she might see; it was about who she might meet, and what would unfold. Her inner sense—an instinct she had long since learned to trust, an oracle that had never deceived her – was speaking again. “Places don’t matter”, it told her. “People do. And the knowledge they carry.”
Daniele sensed the change in the air. To steady the moment and to feed his own curiosity, he asked how the trip had been. He knew her too well. She was one of those rare women who could never slip unnoticed through life. Wherever she went — by chance or by a design that felt almost deliberate — she left a trail of stories, people, and moments that seemed to bend toward her orbit. The world reacted to her. She drew it in, shaped it, and arranged it to her rhythm and intention. And he, knowing this all too well, waited for the next story — because of course he did.
Since the early days of the internet, through the rise of digital platforms, Ale and Daniele had never truly lost touch. He knew she wasn’t indifferent, no matter how gently his parents tried to persuade him otherwise after the family settled in Auckland. They saw the quiet ache beneath his calm. Like all loving parents, they wanted to ease it — arranging accidental introductions to daughters of Italian friends, girls with kind eyes and careful manners. At one point, there were talks of engagement — family hopes more than his own. He had been polite, attentive even, but his heart never crossed that line. None of them carried her fire, her defiance, that dangerous, bright unpredictability that made Ale impossible to forget. Others came and went — brief, effortless romances, pleasant enough to distract, but not to stay. They left no trace — only smoke where he had once known flame. And so he turned to the one devotion that never betrayed him — his work at the Ministry of Defense, where precision and duty could quiet the storm within, at least for a while.
Even in small, green New Zealand, the development of weapons and systems for mass control was no stranger. Beneath the velvet cloak of forests and “nature parks,” far beyond the marked trails, three military bases pulsed in secret. Scientists and soldiers from the U.S., Australia, and the U.K. worked there unseen — but not alone. There were Others. No one spoke their names, and few dared to ask who—or what—they were. They came and went without a trace, leaving only silence in their wake. He had never seen them, yet he knew when they were near: a sudden stillness in the air, the faint hum of something aware. Sometimes he caught voices behind mirrored glass, issuing calm instructions without reason, asking questions no human would phrase that way. They were not soldiers. Not scientists. Not entirely human, perhaps. Known only as the Others — and even that name was whispered.
When he was working with them, a Soft, pleasant voice spoke in flawless, textbook English—guiding him, questioning him, always circling back to his work. He could never place their accent. His closest brush with these “observers” came during an experiment conducted behind a one-way mirrored window. The task: to activate a machine by thought alone, to command through nothing but the sharp blade of mental focus.
The human body carries its own field, subtle and electric, shifting in response to intent. The ancients had named it differently—chakras, bioenergy, aura. But now it was measured in impulses, faint as moth wings. Two problems rose immediately. First, the machine itself: it had to detect, identify, interpret, and respond to those infinitesimal changes. Second, and far more daunting, was the human factor. Few could train themselves to hold a thought steady, to rule their inner states. Psychologists and psychiatrists agreed: such a task demanded not only discipline but an unusually sensitive nature, coupled with a rare, inherited intelligence.
And intelligence, they insisted, was not simply taught. It was bred and passed through the blood like memory, which is why their search turned again and again to the Balkan peoples, and especially to the Bulgarians—the defiant ones, who had never vanished quietly from the map. Even when scattered across the world and mixed with others, their genes endured, prevailed, and refined, even awakened thoughts. That endurance was precisely what the ruling elite feared. They did not need thinkers. They needed specimens – trainable, controllable, released only under strict command, always bent to one purpose: absolute control over the masses. To the ordinary citizen, living paycheck to paycheck, this all sounded like science fiction. However, to the scientists, it was more than just a theory. It was an obsession.
“Why not?” Daniele thought. “Machines already read fingerprints, scan irises, recognize faces… Thought was simply the next frontier.”
He had the mind for it. Brilliant at designing complex programs in encrypted computer languages, he quickly rose above his peers. After graduating from the University of Auckland, he was granted a research scholarship at Mokovsky University. That had been one of the strangest moments of his life. His employers convinced him that he was the ideal candidate because he spoke flawless Russian—a language Bulgarians seemed to absorb almost naturally, as if the shared alphabet and tangled roots of vocabulary unlocked a hidden door in the brain. His Slavic ancestry on his mother’s side was treated as an undeniable advantage. “As if DNA actually
