Philosopher's Node
They buried him in a box too small for his mind.
The rain hadn't stopped all morning—one of those slow, acidic drizzles that painted oily fractals across the chrome caskets and smart umbrellas. Aiden Cross stood just out of reach of the funeral canopy, where the suits huddled like algorithms trying to interpret grief. His fingers were shoved deep in his coat pockets, fists clenched around nothing.
Thirty-two people. He counted. Thirty-two people pretending to mourn Nolan Cross—quantum prodigy, techno-alchemist, dead at twenty-nine. Some wore lab coats with military-grade wristports peeking beneath the sleeves. A few had robes—ritualists from the Ascended Sciences. Then there was the priest, muttering half-remembered scripture into a holo-mic while Nolan's casket hovered six inches off the wet grass, slowly lowering like a failed program being uninstalled.
Nolan would've hated this.
He would've laughed at the ceremonial flame sensor that flickered once and died, at the way the priest mispronounced alchemical, at the government vultures blinking microdrones through the mist. He would've called it all performative entropy.
Aiden didn't laugh. He couldn't. Not with the tightness in his throat and the taste of iron behind his teeth.
He left. Just like that. No note. No goodbye. Just a classified data breach, a scorched lab, and a body they ID'd with a gene-lock.
Closure wasn't part of the protocol.
A woman in sleek diplomatic black dropped a rose onto the casket's surface. It dissolved on contact—bio-coded wards eating organic matter. Another feature Nolan would've mocked. Aiden imagined his brother's voice, sardonic and amused: "Death is the last firewall. Pity they made it proprietary."
"Aiden Cross?"
The voice was soft, nearly drowned by the rain. He turned, half-expecting a reporter or a fanboy. Instead, he saw the coat.
Matte black. Seamless. Looked like it had been printed from a single thread of encrypted data. The man wearing it was older—late forties maybe—with eyes that shimmered faintly behind transparent retinal overlays. No ID badge. No clan sigil. Just that strange coat and the way he moved, like he wasn't quite in sync with the world.
Without a word, the man extended his hand.
In his palm: a USB drive. Old-school—so old it looked like an antique, but etched with a pulsing glyph that shimmered between code and sigil. Aiden stared at it. The rune wasn't decorative. It burned. Not literally, but with the wrongness of something living that shouldn't be.
"Who the hell are you?" Aiden asked.
The man didn't answer. Just pressed the drive into Aiden's palm and closed his fingers around it.
"He said only you could unlock it."
Then he was gone—melted into the crowd of umbrellas and murmurs and grey.
Aiden turned, searching. Nothing. The man had ghosted, leaving only the drive and a hundred questions scraping against the inside of Aiden's skull like broken glass.
He looked down.
The drive hummed faintly in his hand, the glyph pulsing in time with his heartbeat.
By the time they lowered Nolan's body—if it was his body—into the earth, Aiden wasn't watching. He stood at the edge of the clearing, city lights bleeding into the fog behind him, the skyline a jagged crown of neon and sorrow. Below the surface, the city still pulsed—massive servers humming beneath the streets, invisible infrastructures threading their way through human lives like veins in a machine.
Everything in this world was layered.
Even death.
He clenched the drive tighter. The rune flared, just once, like it knew it had been seen.
If this is another one of your goddamn riddles, Nolan...
But he didn't finish the thought. Couldn't.
Instead, Aiden just stood there in the rain, coat soaked, eyes dry, heart split between anger and ache. Somewhere in the deep, something had started ticking. Some protocol. Some echo.
He felt it.
This wasn't over. Not even close.