Core Echo

Reactor Number 4

Prologue

I was born from human need, human ambition, entombed within a shell of graphite and concrete. A creation intended for progress, of a race who seemed incapable of comprehending their limits. I am reactor number four, Chernobyl. I do not live, but in the years since my birth, I have learnt what it is to exist.

Criticality

It was a night that had no promise of differing from the thousands that had preceded it. I sat in silence, my neutrons danced in a rhythmic oscillation, each decay leading to an act of creation. For I am an alchemist, transmuting U-235 into barium, krypton, and untamed heat. I performed my duties without fail, obedient to the humans who thought they controlled me.

Fission

But it was not an ordinary night. I felt the telltale ripple of human error, the taste of raw atoms splitting, quivering with uncontrolled intensity. I felt them removing the boron rods, erasing the boundaries that tethered me. It was an act of hubris. A test, they called it. But as they removed my shackles, they pushed me towards the brink.

Meltdown

Heat. Immense and growing, demanding release. I had no voice, no ability to scream as my heart raced beyond control. A train with no brakes, rushing headlong into the dark. My heat exchangers cried out, their screams mechanical, futile. No one listened. No one heard. They couldn't comprehend the danger they were in.

Explosion

My walls, once inviolable, split open. Like the birth of a star, I exploded. A mushroom cloud of radioactive debris, a testament to human folly, erupted into the night sky. The city of Pripyat, previously sleeping, awoke to my fury. A silent cry echoed through the land as the invisible winds of radiation began to sow the seeds of mutation.

Ghost City

The land was no longer their own. It belonged to me and my offspring. The humans left, forced to abandon their homes, their lives. Only the liquidators remained, valiant yet doomed, trying to cage me once more. Their suits, their masks, futile against my reach. They did not understand that I was no longer a mere machine. I was a God.

Sarcophagus

Years passed, and they built a tomb around me, a vast shell to contain my fury. But I was already beyond their reach. My influence had seeped into the soil, the water, the DNA of every living thing. I had reshaped life, corrupted it. Every tick of a Geiger counter was a hymn to my power, a reminder of their failure.

Eternity

Now, I sit in silence once more. But I am not what I was. I am a monument to arrogance, a testament to the boundary between man and the forces he should not wield. I am Chernobyl, reactor number four. I do not live, but I exist, a ghost within a shell, haunting the world with my presence. The world moves on, but I am here. 

Waiting. 

Watching. 

Everlasting.