Ficool

Chapter 301 - The City of Silence

The void wasn't empty anymore. It was screaming with light.

"Incoming!" Valentina yanked the train's throttle.

The locomotive didn't turn—it couldn't leave the rails—but it tilted. The hover-wheels shrieked against the magnetic field.

A beam of pure white energy slashed the space where the cabin had been a second ago.

It didn't explode. It just deleted the air. The sound was a terrifying, vacuum-sealed thwump.

"They aren't missing!" Taranov yelled, clinging to the coal tender. "They're erasing the track!"

Jake looked ahead. The massive chrome Sentinel ships were hovering over the rails like vultures. Their undersides opened, revealing lenses the size of swimming pools.

"They're formatting the drive," Yuri said calmly. He was holding the pressure valve shut with his bare hands. "They are removing the path to the CPU."

"We need to jump!" Jake shouted.

"Jump where?" Oppenheimer screamed, pointing at the endless drop. "There is no ground! Just the abyss!"

"There!" Jake pointed at the massive green city-chip looming below them. "The CPU surface!"

"That's a hundred miles down!"

"And we have a train that defies physics," Jake snapped. "Valentina, derail us!"

"You want me to crash the Stalin Train?"

"I want you to turn it into a meteor!"

Valentina looked at him. She grinned, a sharp, manic expression.

"Hold onto something solid," she said.

She didn't slow down. She pushed the lever past the red line, into the danger zone marked 'CRITICAL'.

The boiler groaned. The blue fire of the Hoover-fuel roared.

"Targeting the junction!" Valentina shouted.

Ahead, the glowing rail split. One way went left, toward the blockade. The other ended in a broken spur.

Valentina took the spur.

The train hit the end of the track at Mach 2.

The metal shrieked. Sparks—actual fire sparks mixed with digital blue cubes—showered the void.

The locomotive launched into the air.

For a second, they were weightless. A steam train flying through the digital cosmos, trailing smoke and history.

"We are falling!" Menzhinsky wailed, floating off the floor.

"Gravity is subjective here!" Yuri said, grabbing the spy's ankle.

The Sentinel ships reacted. They swiveled their guns.

"They're locking on!" Taranov warned.

"They can't hit a moving target this fast," Jake said.

He was wrong.

A smaller hatch on the nearest ship opened. Something shot out. Not a laser.

A pod.

It slammed into the roof of the train with a metallic clang that shook Jake's teeth.

"Boarders!" Taranov roared.

The roof of the cabin sizzled. A circle of metal turned red, then vanished.

A mechanical leg stabbed through. Then another.

A creature dropped into the cab.

It looked like a spider made of chrome and glass. It had no head, just a single red camera eye in the center of its body.

"Search Bot," Yuri identified. "It indexes unauthorized files."

The spider lunged at Oppenheimer.

"No!" Taranov tackled it.

He grabbed the spider's legs. The machine whirred, its servos whining. It was strong. It threw Taranov against the boiler.

"It's heavy!" Taranov gasped. "It has mass!"

The spider raised a sharp, needle-like limb. It aimed for Taranov's throat.

Jake stepped forward.

His right arm was numb. It was glowing a sickly translucent blue. He could feel the code eating his shoulder bone.

"Hey!" Jake shouted.

The spider turned its red eye toward him.

Jake didn't punch. He swiped his hand through the air, like he was clearing a notification on a screen.

"Dismiss," Jake snarled.

His glitch-hand passed through the spider's metal body.

ERROR.

The spider froze. Its red eye flickered.

Then, it inverted. The legs twisted inside out. The metal crumpled like paper.

The machine collapsed into a dense cube of scrap metal.

Jake fell to his knees.

Agony ripped through his shoulder. He grabbed his arm. The transparency had moved up to his neck. He felt cold—a deep, absolute zero cold that froze his lungs.

"Warning," Yuri said, looking at Jake. "Corruption at 18%. If it reaches the brain stem, your consciousness will fragment."

"We have bigger problems," Valentina shouted. "Impact in ten seconds!"

Jake dragged himself to the window.

The surface of the CPU city was rushing up to meet them. It wasn't a flat chip. It was a metropolis of golden light.

Buildings made of pure circuitry towered miles high. Data streams flowed like rivers. It was beautiful and terrifyingly sterile.

"We're going to hit the cooling tower!" Oppenheimer judged the angle.

"Aim for the river!" Jake ordered. "The data stream!"

"It's not water!"

"It's fluid dynamics!" Jake yelled. "It's the best chance we have!"

The train fell. The wind roared like a banshee.

They smashed through a layer of green clouds. The golden city rushed up.

"Brace!" Taranov grabbed Menzhinsky and pulled him under the dashboard.

Jake grabbed Yuri.

They hit.

There was no splash.

There was a sound like a gong being struck by a mountain.

GONG.

The train slammed into the river of light. The impact tore the locomotive apart.

The cabin sheared off. The boiler exploded, sending a shockwave of blue fire across the golden city.

Jake was thrown clear. He tumbled through the air, spinning wildly.

He hit the "ground."

It was hard, cold, and smooth as a mirror. He slid for a hundred yards, his uniform tearing against the golden surface.

He came to a stop against a wall that hummed with power.

Silence.

Absolute, ringing silence.

Jake lay there, gasping. His ribs felt cracked. His glitch-arm was buzzing like a broken neon sign.

"Sound off," he wheezed.

A groan nearby. Taranov sat up, shaking glass out of his hair. He was bleeding, but it was red blood. Real blood.

"Still... tangible," Taranov grunted.

"Yuri?"

The boy walked out of the smoke. His white suit was pristine. Dirt apparently refused to stick to him.

"Structural integrity of the group is at 60%," Yuri said. "Menzhinsky is unconscious. Oppenheimer is hyperventilating."

"Valentina?"

"Here." She limped over from the wreckage of the train. The locomotive was gone, dissolved into the data stream. Only a few twisted pieces of black metal remained on the bank.

"We lost the train," she said quietly. "She was a good ship."

Jake stood up. He looked around.

They were in a plaza. The ground was gold glass. The sky was a vaulted ceiling of circuit boards, pulsating with green energy.

The buildings around them were immense geometric shapes—pyramids, cubes, obelisks—floating slightly off the ground.

There was no dirt. No trash. No chaos.

"Where are we?" Menzhinsky woke up, looking around wildly.

"The Kernel," Oppenheimer whispered, staring at a floating obelisk. "The center of the Operating System. This is where the rules of the universe are written."

"It's quiet," Taranov said. "Too quiet. Where are the people?"

"There are no people here," Yuri said. "Only Processes."

A sound echoed across the plaza.

Click-Clack. Click-Clack.

Footsteps. Perfect, rhythmic footsteps.

"Company," Jake warned. "Form up."

They gathered in a circle. Taranov held a jagged piece of metal from the train wreckage. Jake held his glitch-hand ready, though the pain made his vision swim.

A figure emerged from the golden archway ahead.

It wasn't a soldier. It wasn't a monster.

It looked like a bureaucrat.

He wore a grey suit that was perfectly tailored. His face was handsome, symmetrical, and completely devoid of emotion. He held a clipboard made of light.

He stopped ten feet away. He looked at the wreckage of the train. Then he looked at Jake.

"You have caused a segmentation fault," the Bureaucrat said. His voice was smooth, like synthesized jazz.

"We're refugees," Jake said. "We want to speak to the Admin."

The Bureaucrat tilted his head.

"The Admin is deprecated," he said. "I am the Archivist. I manage the file structure."

He looked at Jake's glowing arm.

"You are corrupted," the Archivist noted. "You are a virus."

"I'm a user," Jake corrected.

"Users are not permitted in the Kernel," the Archivist said. He tapped his clipboard. "Protocol dictates immediate quarantine."

"We aren't going to jail," Taranov growled.

"Not jail," the Archivist corrected softly. "The Defragmentation Chamber. It will separate your atoms and sort them by color."

Behind the Archivist, more figures stepped out. Dozens of them. All identical. All wearing grey suits. All smiling politely.

"We are outnumbered," Valentina whispered.

"And outgunned," Oppenheimer added. "They control the physics here. Look."

The Archivist snapped his fingers.

The gravity around Taranov increased instantly. The big man fell to his knees, groaning as the floor cracked under him.

"Kneel," the Archivist commanded.

Jake felt the pressure pushing him down. It felt like the sky was falling on his shoulders.

He looked at Yuri.

Yuri wasn't kneeling. The boy was staring at the Archivist with cold curiosity.

"Yuri," Jake gritted out. "Do... the math."

"Calculating," Yuri said.

The Archivist stepped closer to Jake.

"You possess the Root Access code," the Archivist said. "Surrender the crystal, and your deletion will be painless."

Jake struggled against the invisible weight. His glitch-arm flared. The blue light pulsed brighter.

"I didn't come here to surrender," Jake gasped.

"Then why are you here?"

Jake looked up. He forced a smile. It was the smile of Joseph Stalin, the smile of a predator.

"I came to file a complaint," Jake snarled. "About the management."

He thrust his glitch-hand forward.

He didn't aim at the Archivist. He aimed at the ground. At the golden glass floor of the Kernel.

"Yuri! The vampire drive logic!" Jake shouted. "Invert the floor!"

Yuri understood instantly. He touched Jake's shoulder.

They combined the glitch with the math.

Jake slammed his hand into the ground.

RE-WRITE.

The golden glass turned black. The texture flipped.

Instead of solid ground, it became a void.

The gravity reversed.

"Protocol Error!" the Archivist shouted, losing his balance.

The grey-suited men floated upward, flailing.

"Run!" Jake yelled.

The pressure lifted. They scrambled across the floating debris of the plaza, running toward the massive central tower in the distance.

Behind them, the Archivist regained his footing on a floating slab. His polite smile was gone.

"Activate the Firewall," the Archivist ordered. "Purge them."

The sky turned red.

The City of Silence woke up. And it was angry.

More Chapters