Chapter 2: Whispers in the Fog

Maria stared at her laptop screen, her notes open on one side and a half-empty cup of coffee growing cold beside her. Despite the late hour, she couldn't sleep. The memory of her last conversation with Professor Alex kept looping in her mind, like a haunting melody that refused to fade.

“It’s not just theory, Maria,” Alex had said that day, his voice lower than usual. “They’ve already tested it. The results… they’re terrifying. I don’t think I can stay silent anymore.”

“Tested what?” Maria had asked, concerned by the urgency in his tone.

Alex had hesitated, his fingers twitching on the edge of his desk. “Dunnorage,” he finally said. “A device that could change the very fabric of human thought. They say it’s for progress, but it’s control, Maria. It’s control.”

At the time, Maria had thought he was exaggerating. The professor was known for his dramatic flair, often weaving dystopian scenarios into his lectures on sociology and human behavior. But now, with his disappearance and the growing unease gnawing at her, Maria wondered if there was more truth to his warnings than she had believed.

Maria leaned back in her chair, recalling other moments that now seemed to hold hidden meanings. She remembered the sudden pauses in Alex’s lectures, the way he would glance toward the door as though expecting someone to burst in.

And then there was the morning he’d canceled class abruptly, claiming he wasn’t feeling well. She had seen him leaving the faculty building that day, clutching a thick folder under his arm.

Maria’s phone buzzed, breaking her thoughts. A message from Suria:
“Hey, any updates? People are saying he just ran off. But it doesn’t sound like him, right?”

Maria frowned. Professor Alex wasn’t the type to vanish without explanation. Even in his eccentricity, he had always been reliable—until now.

Typing back, Maria wrote: “No updates. But he was worried about something. I think it’s serious.”

As she hit send, Maria’s eyes fell on her notebook. Scrawled in Alex’s handwriting, from the last lecture he gave, was a series of disjointed words: PRASASTI. Dunnorage. Kentofes.

She flipped through her notes, realizing how often Alex had hinted at those terms in the past few weeks. At the time, they had seemed like nothing more than abstract examples, but now they took on a darker weight.

Her heart raced as she opened her laptop again, typing “Dunnorage” into the search engine. The results were sparse—mostly academic theories on neural interface technology and a few speculative blogs discussing its potential dangers.

It wasn’t until Maria stumbled upon a decades-old paper on PRASASTI’s early experiments with cognitive enhancement that she froze.

The paper described a group of young researchers who had been part of a cutting-edge project in the 1980s. Among the names listed was one she recognized instantly: Dr. Adam Raufal.

Maria’s breath caught. Dr. Raufal had been Professor Alex’s mentor and the head of the PRASASTI facility at one point. Was this the connection Alex had tried to warn her about?

Another name caught her eye: Dr. Fendi.

She skimmed the paper, her pulse quickening as it described the two scientists as collaborators on something referred to as “Project Dunnorage.”

The clock ticked past midnight as Maria stared at the screen, torn between exhaustion and a burning need for answers. Finally, she saved the article and shut her laptop, her mind buzzing with questions.

Who—or what—was Kentofes? And what had they done to make Alex disappear?

Maria didn’t know, but one thing was certain: she had to find out.