The hum was a constant. It was the first thing you heard when you woke and the last thing you noticed before you slept. It was the sound of Aethel, the sound of life, the sound of the Covenants that held their gilded cage together. For the Alphas in the Core sectors, it was probably a soothing reminder of their power. For Ren, a Gamma technician in Sub-Level 38, it was the sound of a machine on the verge of collapse.
His job was to slap diagnostic patches on the city's ancient guts. He replaced conduits that were older than his grandfather and reset systems whose functions were lost to time. He was a cog, and his only purpose was to keep the other cogs turning, even if the whole machine was screaming.
Today, the screaming was a little louder.
He was crouched in a cramped accessway, the air thick with the smell of ozone and recycled protein paste. A massive power conduit—the spine of the sector's energy grid—was flickering with a light that was fundamentally wrong. Not the steady, golden glow of a healthy Covenant, but a sickly, violet pulse. The diagnostic panel he'd attached spat out a stream of nonsensical data, the numbers glitching into jagged symbols before resetting.
Ren tapped the panel. "Come on, you rust bucket," he muttered, his voice a dry rasp. "Just hold together until shift change."
He didn't fix things. Gammas didn't fix things. They just applied patches and prayed. The real fixing was for the Betas, and the Betas only came down when an entire sector was about to go dark.
That was when the hum faltered.
It wasn't a shutdown. It was a stutter. The omnipresent, soul-deep thrum of the city's heart skipped a beat, and in that half-second of silence, a profound and terrifying emptiness washed over everything. Ren's breath caught in his throat. Every Gamma in the sector froze. The hum had never, ever stopped.
Then it returned, but it was different. It was discordant, a harmony twisted into a low, grating growl. Lights flickered across the substructure, their golden glow replaced by the same violet sickness from the conduit. A deep, metallic groan echoed from miles below, the sound of the city's foundations twisting in agony.
Panic was a spark. A nearby technician dropped his toolkit with a clatter that sounded like a gunshot in the sudden tension. Then another. Someone screamed.
Ren was already moving. He didn't run towards the central lifts with the others. He ran the opposite way, deeper into the maintenance corridors. Crowds got you killed. The diagrams he'd memorized over years of thankless labor were now his only map to survival. There was a service tunnel three corridors down that led to a vertical shaft. He could bypass the chaos.
He rounded a corner, his worn boots splashing in a puddle of grimy lubricant, and saw it.
The wall wasn't a wall anymore. The polished alloy surface was rippling, its metallic sheen flowing like water. It wasn't melting; the physics of the thing were simply wrong. As he stared, a patch of the wall dissolved into a haze of black-and-violet static, a pixelated hole in the world that began to spread. It didn't make a sound, but the sight of it felt deafeningly loud.
From within the static, a high-pitched shriek tore through the air, a sound of corrupted data and impossible geometry that clawed at his mind.
Ren didn't hesitate. He turned and sprinted, the sounds of screams and the sickening crunch of unraveling matter echoing behind him. He wasn't thinking about the city, or the Alphas, or the reason for the collapse. He was thinking only of the next turn, the next corridor, the sealed blast door of the maintenance tunnel that meant safety.
He skidded to a halt in front of it. The thick, multi-ton slab of reinforced alloy was his sanctuary. He slammed his hand on the activation panel.
Nothing happened.
He tried again. The panel was dead. A slow, cold dread began to seep into his bones, colder than the recycled air.
Then, a synthesized, impossibly calm voice echoed from the overhead speakers—the voice of an Alpha, broadcast from the heavens of the Core.
"Containment protocol initiated for Sub-Levels 35 through 40. For the security and stability of Aethel, this sector is now under permanent seal. We thank you for your service."
The voice cut out, replaced by the rising wail of lockdown alarms. A series of heavy, echoing thuds sounded in the distance as the main sector gates sealed forever.
They had been sacrificed.
Ren pounded his fist against the unmoving door, a single, hopeless act of defiance. The shrieking sound was getting closer. He turned, his back pressing against the cold metal, and saw the violet-black static creeping around the far corner, consuming the corridor like a digital plague. It wasn't a monster. It was the absence of reality. And it was coming for him.
He was trapped. He was going to die.
And in that moment of absolute despair, as he stared at the dead activation panel on the blast door, he saw it for the first time. Not the metal, not the circuitry, but a faint, shimmering web of violet threads woven into its very existence. The Covenant. The city's source code.
And in the center of the web, he saw a single, loose seam.