Chapter 4: Frequency
Three days after the Rifts, Jake Morgan learned two things about the warmth inside him.
The first thing was that it was growing.
Not dramatically — not the exponential, cinematic escalation of a superhero origin story where the protagonist goes from zero to world-saver in a training montage. The growth was incremental, quiet, measurable only because Jake was the kind of person who measured things. Three seconds of glow on the first night. Five seconds in the restaurant bathroom. Eight seconds on Wednesday morning, standing in his apartment with his hand extended toward the wall, watching the blue light illuminate the water stain on the ceiling and transform it from a map of a nonexistent country into something that looked, briefly, like a window into somewhere else.
Twelve seconds on Thursday. The glow was brighter. The warmth was deeper, settled into a lower register, the way a furnace settled after the initial ignition — less volatile, more sustained. And underneath the warmth, like a bass note beneath a melody, something else: a hum. Not audible. Not physical. A vibration that existed in a space between his chest and his consciousness, a frequency that he could feel but not hear, sense but not locate.
By Friday, the twelve seconds had become thirty. The glow had intensified from a faint phosphorescence to something that cast actual shadows — hard-edged, defined shadows that proved the light was real and directional and not a trick of his eyes or his mind. He could sustain it with concentration, the way you could sustain a held breath, and when he released it the warmth flooded back to his center with the satisfied settling of something returned to its resting state.
The second thing Jake learned was that the warmth responded to emotion.
He discovered this on Thursday morning when the client — the Apple-with-a-tattoo client, the testimonials-section client, the client whose name was Bradley and whose startup sold artisanal dog treats and whose emails arrived with the frequency and intensity of mortar rounds — sent a message that said: “Hey Jake, I know we agreed on the testimonials section, but can we pivot the whole landing page to a different color scheme? I’m thinking dark mode. Like, what if the whole thing was black? The treats are organic, and organic feels dark to me. Dark like the earth. Can we do this by tomorrow?”
The warmth surged. Not the controlled, intentional pull that Jake had been practicing — a surge, a spike, a geyser of heat that shot from his chest to his fingertips in the space between reading “Can we do this by tomorrow?” and forming the thought are you kidding me. His hand, resting on the desk, flickered blue for half a second. The desk lamp — the LED one, the $15 Target purchase that served as his primary light source — exploded. Not dramatically. The bulb simply shattered, the LED element burning out in a pop of white light and the thin, acrid smell of heated plastic.
Jake stared at the lamp. At his hand. At the lamp again.
Okay, he thought. So anger is a trigger.
He tested this hypothesis over the next two hours with the scientific rigor of a man who had learned to code by reading documentation and who approached problems the way documentation approached solutions — methodically, sequentially, with a focus on reproducibility.
He tried fear. He watched a compilation of jump scares on YouTube. The warmth stirred but didn’t spike — a flutter, a ripple, the equivalent of a sleeping animal twitching at a distant sound.
He tried joy. He watched videos of dogs being reunited with their owners. Nothing. The warmth remained dormant, unmoved by the emotional content of golden retrievers.
He tried sadness. He thought about his father. About the cologne in the car. About the empty chair at the dinner table. The warmth responded — not a surge but a deepening, a lowering of the frequency, a settling into a minor key that felt not like power but like gravity. Like the warmth was acknowledging the sadness, resonating with it, matching its frequency the way a tuning fork matched the vibration of the string it was held against.
He tried urgency. He set a timer for ten seconds and told himself: produce the glow before the timer runs out or something bad happens. Nothing specific bad — he couldn’t trick his own amygdala with a countdown timer and a vague threat. The warmth didn’t care about manufactured urgency.
He tried focusing on the memory of the creature. The hand on his ankle. The seven fingers. The mouth that glowed with the nameless color. The moment between the grab and the pulse.
The warmth erupted.
Not a surge — an eruption. Full, immediate, volcanic. The heat flooded his body in a wave that started at his chest and radiated outward through every limb, every finger, every toe, every follicle of hair on his head. His hands glowed — both hands, not just the one, blue light pouring from his palms like water, casting the studio apartment in deep electric azure. The leaning chair threw sharp shadows on the wall. The B-flat refrigerator’s surface reflected the light, turning its white enamel into a mirror of blue. The water stain on the ceiling became a portal, a window, a gateway to somewhere made entirely of light.
It lasted seven seconds. Then it collapsed, all at once, the warmth retreating like a tide, leaving Jake standing in his darkened apartment with his hands shaking and his heart pounding and the acrid, ozone smell of something that had been very close to burning filling the space between the walls.
He sat down. The leaning chair accepted him with its familiar leftward tilt. He breathed. In and out. The way his mother had taught him when he was six and afraid of thunderstorms — breathe in for four, hold for four, out for four.
So, he thought. Fear of dying. That’s the trigger.
Not fear in general. Not the manufactured jump-scare fear of YouTube compilations. The specific, embodied, visceral fear of a creature’s hand on your ankle and its mouth opening and the certainty — the absolute, cellular, non-negotiable certainty — that you were about to die. That was what the warmth responded to. That was the frequency that made it sing.
Which meant that to use this power — whatever this power was — he had to access the part of himself that remembered dying. Not remembered in the cognitive sense, not as a narrative or a story or an anecdote he could tell. Remembered in the body. In the nervous system. In the specific, ancient, animal part of his brain that had recorded the creature’s grip not as information but as trauma, and that would replay the trauma on command if he asked it to, producing the warmth, the light, the surge.
This was not a comfortable realization.
The internet, in the three days since the Rifts, had become a different place.
Not broken — functional. The servers held. The infrastructure bent but didn’t break. What changed was the content. Every feed, every platform, every corner of the digital world had been reorganized around a single topic: the Awakened.
Jake scrolled. Sitting in his leaning chair, laptop balanced on his knees, the blue glow still tingling in his fingertips like the residual vibration of a bell.
Reddit had created r/Awakened within six hours of the Rifts closing. It had 2.3 million members. The top post was a video from Seoul: a woman standing in the ruins of a Gangnam office building, her hands wreathed in fire — not blue like Jake’s glow but red, orange, the color of actual flame — holding back a creature ten times her size while a line of civilians evacuated behind her. The video had 47 million views.
The comments were what you’d expect. Awe. Terror. The inevitable comparisons to Marvel and DC and anime and every other fictional framework that humanity had developed for processing the concept of people with powers. And underneath the pop-culture references, the real conversations: What did this mean? Were the Awakened dangerous? Should they be registered? Controlled? Weaponized?
Jake kept scrolling. He found what he was looking for on a thread titled: “Awakened Abilities — What We Know So Far (Day 3).”
The post was long, compiled by someone with the username ManaTheory42, and it was organized with the meticulous care of a person who processed chaos by categorizing it.
The abilities fell into categories. Elemental: fire, ice, lightning, earth, wind. Physical: enhanced strength, speed, durability, regeneration. Sensory: heightened vision, hearing, electromagnetic detection. Mental: telekinesis, limited precognition, empathic sensitivity. And a final category that the poster had labeled “Unclassified,” containing abilities that didn’t fit the others — a woman in Brazil who could phase through solid matter, a man in Japan who could stop time for 0.3 seconds, a teenager in Nigeria who could see the Rifts before they opened.
Jake read through the list. None of the descriptions matched what he could do. The elemental users described their abilities as external — projecting fire from their hands, summoning ice from the air, calling lightning from above. Jake’s glow wasn’t external projection. It was… emission. Radiation. The light came from inside him and went outward, like a flashlight, like a star.
And none of them described the warmth. The constant, background, always-on sensation of something burning at low heat in the center of his chest. The other Awakened described their abilities as tools — things they activated and deactivated, switched on and off. Jake’s warmth wasn’t a tool. It was a state. A condition. A permanent alteration of his baseline.
He found one comment, buried deep in the thread, from a user named QuietHunter:
“Does anyone else feel like their ability is always on? Not using it. Just… there. Like background noise. Like a frequency you can’t stop hearing.”
Two replies. One said “yes.” One said “you should see a doctor.”
Jake stared at the comment. Read it again. Read it a third time.
Like a frequency you can’t stop hearing.
His father’s words. The radio that no one else could hear.
He closed the laptop.
On Friday afternoon, the government held a press conference.
Jake watched it on his phone, sitting on the floor of his apartment because the leaning chair had finally, after two years of faithful service, developed a second lean — this time backward — and was no longer safe to sit in. The laptop was propped against the wall. The President stood at a podium in the Rose Garden, flanked by the Secretary of Defense and a woman Jake didn’t recognize — mid-forties, glasses, the posture of a scientist or an academic, someone who had been plucked from a laboratory or a university office and deposited in the Rose Garden with the slightly dazed expression of a person who had been studying something theoretical and was now watching it become very, very real.
The speech was what speeches were: a collection of words designed to convey control in a situation where control was an aspiration rather than a fact. The Rifts were a global phenomenon. The creatures — officially designated as “Rift Entities” — had caused significant casualties in every major city. The Rifts had sealed. The government was working with international partners. A task force had been established.
Then the woman spoke.
Her name was Dr. Sarah Chen. MIT. Theoretical physics. She had been studying electromagnetic anomalies in the upper atmosphere for fifteen years and had, she explained in the measured tones of an academic who was about to say something that would change the world, a working theory about the Rifts.
“The Rifts are not random,” she said. “They follow a pattern. A mathematical pattern. The spacing between Rifts, their duration, the energy signature they produce — all of it conforms to a structure that we’re still decoding, but that appears to be deliberate. Designed.”
A reporter asked the question that everyone was thinking: “Designed by what?”
Dr. Chen paused. The pause of a scientist choosing her words. The pause of a woman who knew that the next sentence would be replayed ten million times.
“We don’t know,” she said. “But the pattern suggests intelligence. Not human intelligence. Something else. Something that operates on a scale and a logic that we don’t yet understand, but that is, by every metric we can measure, intentional.”
Jake sat on the floor. The warmth in his chest pulsed.
Intentional.
The Rifts were intentional. The creatures were intentional. The Awakening — the fact that certain humans, exposed to the Rifts, had developed abilities that defied physics — was intentional.
Which meant that he was intentional. His warmth. His glow. His three-seconds-becoming-thirty-seconds of blue light. Not an accident. Not a side effect. A design choice, made by something that operated on a scale and a logic that he didn’t understand.
The press conference continued. More questions. More non-answers. The usual post-crisis dance of information and obfuscation. But Jake had stopped listening, because his phone was buzzing with something else — not a news alert but a notification. An app notification. An app that he had not installed.
He looked at the screen.
The icon was simple: a white circle on a black background. No name. No label. The notification said:
SYSTEM INITIALIZED.
WELCOME, AWAKENED.
He tapped it. The app opened. The screen went black, then white, then the nameless color — the color from the Rifts, the color that existed outside human vocabulary — and then, floating in the center of the screen in letters that were not typed but seemed to have been grown, organic, alive:
AWAKENED: JAKE MORGAN
CLASS: UNASSIGNED
MANA CAPACITY: [MEASURING]
The warmth in his chest surged. Not from fear. Not from anger. From recognition. The frequency — the background hum that had been with him since Tuesday night — resonated with the words on the screen, harmonizing with them, matching their vibration, as if the phone and the warmth were two instruments playing the same note in different octaves.
The screen changed.
MANA CAPACITY: ∞
ERROR: VALUE EXCEEDS SYSTEM PARAMETERS.
RECALIBRATING.
MANA CAPACITY: ∞
ERROR: VALUE EXCEEDS SYSTEM PARAMETERS.
RECALIBRATING.
MANA CAPACITY: ∞
The loop ran three times before the screen froze. Then, after a pause that lasted exactly seven seconds — Jake counted — a new line appeared:
ANOMALY DETECTED.
FLAGGING FOR REVIEW.
The screen went black. The app closed. The icon remained on his phone, silent, dark, waiting.
Jake sat on the floor of his studio apartment, in the city of Los Angeles, on the planet Earth, in a universe that had, three days ago, cracked open and revealed that it contained things that it had not previously contained. He looked at his phone. He looked at his hand. He looked at the ceiling, at the water stain, at the shape of a country that didn’t exist.
Infinity, he thought. My mana capacity is infinity.
The warmth in his chest — the pilot light, the furnace, the frequency, the radio that no one else could hear — hummed its agreement.
And somewhere, in a place that was not a place, in a system that was not a system, something that was not a thing noted the anomaly, flagged the review, and began — with the patience of a process that had been running longer than the universe it operated within — to pay attention.
Jake called his mother.
She picked up on the first ring. She always picked up on the first ring when Jake called, because a Korean mother’s phone existed in a state of permanent readiness, the ringer volume at maximum, the device never more than arm’s reach away, the reflex of answering honed by twenty-four years of being the person that a particular human being called when the world stopped making sense.
“Jake-ya.”
“Hey, Mom.”
“You ate?”
“I ate.”
“What did you eat?”
“The galbi-jjim.”
“Good. What else?”
“Rice.”
“Side dishes?”
“Mom. I need to tell you something.”
The pause. The mother-pause. The microsecond recalibration of a woman’s entire nervous system as it shifted from feeding-mode to crisis-mode, the way a radar system shifted from search to track.
“Tell me.”
“There’s an app on my phone. I didn’t install it. It appeared. It says I’m Awakened. It says my mana capacity is infinity.”
The silence that followed was not the silence of a woman who didn’t understand. It was the silence of a woman who understood perfectly and was choosing, with the deliberate, controlled precision of a person standing on the edge of something very high, how to respond.
“Come over,” she said.
“Mom, I don’t think galbi-jjim is going to fix this.”
“Jake-ya. Come over. Now.”
“Okay.”
“And bring your phone.”
“I was going to bring my phone.”
“And bring laundry.”
“Mom.”
“What? The world is ending. Your laundry still needs to be done.”
He drove to Glendale. He brought his phone. He brought his laundry. Because in the hierarchy of urgencies that governed the Morgan-Jung household, infinite mana was alarming and unprecedented and possibly world-altering, but dirty socks were dirty socks, and dirty socks waited for no apocalypse.