Broken streets and broken people.
The city I emerged into wasn't the one I remembered from my four years of Academy imprisonment. That city had been a controlled product—perfectly packaged so you'd forget it was a cage. Sanitized interfaces. Optimized traffic flows. A machine that ran on schedules, surveillance, and the comfortable lie that quarterly projections always showed growth.
This city was screaming.
Market crash, my brain supplied automatically. Total brand collapse. Zero customer retention.
Panic was the new currency. Fire bloomed in distant buildings—three, four, five of them—their smoke rising in black pillars that stained the indigo sky like ink bleeding through wet paper. Emergency sirens wailed from directions I couldn't pinpoint, their frequencies overlapping into a discordant symphony of crisis management failure.
I walked through it like a ghost.
The smell hit first: burning polymer, ozone from overloaded systems, and underneath it all, something organic and wrong. Fear, maybe. The collective terror of millions realizing their subscription to normalcy had been cancelled without notice.
No refunds available.
Trains had stopped mid-track. Through their windows, I could see the passengers—some crying, some frozen in that particular paralysis of people who had never faced a world without a customer service hotline. A woman pressed her face against the glass, her mouth moving in what might have been prayer or profanity.
Same demographic response, I noted clinically. Different coping strategies. Similar conversion rate to uselessness.
Cars clogged the streets in an impossible gridlock. Others were abandoned entirely, doors hanging open like mouths mid-scream. Citizens were using vehicles as barricades, deciding they'd rather face the end behind steel and glass than trust the system that had failed them.
Smart pivot. Terrible execution.
Then came the military. Convoys rolled toward the Academy, soldiers in combat gear that looked too modern, too sleek—like something from a war that hadn't happened yet. Or one that had happened so long ago everyone had been made to forget. Their equipment hummed with neural dampeners and reality anchors. Weapons designed for targets that weren't entirely physical.
Premium product line. High customer acquisition cost. Probably terrible ROI.
I pulled my stolen overcoat tighter around my shoulders. The dark fabric hid the jian strapped against my thigh. The sword's weight was a reassuring constant. Familiar in ways my conscious mind refused to acknowledge.
Brand recognition without brand memory. The worst kind of déjà vu.
No one noticed a young man in school clothes walking the opposite direction of the crowd. When your market share of sanity is already zero, you stop competing for attention.
I kept walking.
The architecture changed as I penetrated deeper into the old district. Neural-integrated glass gave way to brick and stone—older bones that had stood for generations before algorithms took over.
Legacy infrastructure. Deprecated systems. Still operational when the new ones fail.
The air tasted less processed here. Real. I reached the hill—the highest altitude park in the city. A geographic anomaly urban planners never managed to develop. A natural monopoly.
I passed families heading down the hill, parents gripping children's hands with the fear of people whose risk assessment had failed. A little girl, no older than seven, looked at me.
"Mister," she whispered, "why are you going up when everyone is going down?"
Target demographic: innocent. Expected response: reassuring lie.
Her father pulled her away before I could deliver. Customer journey interrupted. Conversion lost.
I kept climbing. A guardian's work, after all, is protecting the small ones from truths too large to process. The thought felt heavier than the sword.
The park opened before me like a memory that had refused to be overwritten.
Glowing trees lined the paths—not the bioluminescent fakes of the Academy, but something older. Their branches hung heavy with auburn leaves that fell in patterns too organic to be coincidental, carpeting the stone in copper and gold.
Autumn in a controlled climate zone. Either a system bug or a feature nobody remembered implementing.
The park was empty now. Total market evacuation. I walked the familiar paths with feet that remembered routes my mind had discarded. Past the playground where rust claimed the swings. Past the fountain that hadn't worked since my previous iteration.
Muscle memory as backup storage. The body keeps the receipts the mind burns.
I reached the maze. It was a garden of concentric circles, hedges trimmed to heights that challenged children but barely reached my chest. A place designed for the experience of being lost in a world that insisted on GPS accuracy.
Sometimes the product isn't the destination. It's the journey.
Through the outer ring. Past the second. Into the heart of the maze where a weathered pavilion stood. The bench I was looking for faced inward. It was paired with another, back-to-back, like two people who had decided to watch different sunsets from the same moment in time.
I sat. Placed the jian at my side.
And waited. The most undervalued business strategy in existence.
The leaves rustled like whispers in a language I'd stopped trying to translate.
One hour passed. Maybe two. I was drifting in that dangerous space where dreams and memories blur into the same corrupted data stream, when I heard them.
Footsteps. Steady. Rough. Deliberate.
Incoming stakeholder. High confidence approach.
The old man took his position on the opposite bench. Back-to-back. Like we always did—a mirror of two people sharing the same timestamp in a world trying to delete them both.
"So you're here today too, young man."
His voice hadn't changed. Gravel and authority. My spine straightened without permission—my body remembered saluting even if my mind had archived that protocol.
"Well," I said, not turning to look. "At least I'm in better shape than you. You look like you got hit by a truck on your way to a board meeting."
He wore wrinkled clothes, torn in places by something with claws. He had the face of nobility, of an executive presence that closed deals and won wars.
Now, he was just... tired. Market leader experiencing disruption.
"I guess I'm getting old," he said.
"Still," he continued after a pause, "change always comes."
I pushed my fake sneer away. My voice went rigid. "So, Captain. How are things on your side?"
He didn't answer immediately. He never did. "You talk different every time I come here," I continued, frustration bleeding through. "Days. Months. Years. Different warnings. Cryptic bullshit I can never remember long enough to act on."
I stood and turned to face him. The movement felt like breaking a ritual.
"Tell me what the fuck is happening here."
He looked at me with eyes that had seen things I didn't want to recover.
"I already accepted everything," I hissed. "Being small. Being stupid. Not remembering—"
Pain hit like a hostile takeover of my nervous system. White. Hot. Absolute. Memories tried to surface through walls I'd built across lifetimes. Truths attempted a leveraged buyout of my ignorance.
I doubled over. The body rejected the merger. I vomited bile and the metallic taste of memories too dangerous to digest. The world dissolved into static.
When I came back to my senses, I was alone.
The Captain was gone. The park was empty. Not just of people—but of presence. The birds, the leaves, even the air had stopped, frozen mid-breath.
System crash. Total service interruption.
The surroundings began to distort. The air thickened until it was honey-heavy. Colors flickered—green, auburn, grey—stretching like a rendering engine struggling on failing hardware.
Reality experiencing technical difficulties. Please stand by.
Light changed. Trees cast shadows in impossible directions. The sky darkened toward absence. I tried to stand, but my legs refused. I tried to reach for the jian.
The park disappeared.
Hell broke loose.... Literally.
I was in the "Between." A void in the spaces between moments and dimensions. Negative space as product design.
And then—Light. Not the kind that illuminates, but the kind that sells. The kind that makes you want to buy whatever it's attached to, even if the price is your soul.
She descended from a direction that didn't exist. Six wings spread behind her—not feathered, but made of concepts given form. Light that remembered how to be solid. Fire that had learned patience.
Her hair was golden—actual metal that flowed like water. Her eyes were red. Not the red of blood, but the red of stars in their final moments. The red of endings waiting to begin.
She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Beauty that didn't negotiate.
Unfair competitive advantage. Monopoly on aesthetic perfection.
And she was utterly terrifying.
She stopped close enough to touch. Those red eyes studied my soul, or the deprecated feature that used to be one. Her lips curved into a smile that was also a threat assessment.
"There you are."
Her voice was the same one from the shrine. Angelic. Perfect. Wrong in all the ways perfection becomes wrong when it's engineered.
"I've been looking for so long."
She reached out. Her pale hand pressed against my chest, where the golden cubes had lived, where the Curse of Greed now churned.
"Little brother."
She said it like a prayer. Like a contract she'd waited eternities to execute.
"You've forgotten so much," she whispered, her eyes searching mine. "Become so... small."
Her smile widened.
"But I remember. I remember everything."
Reality began to tremble like a market about to crash.
"And now—now we can finally fix what you broke."
I stared at her. At this impossible angel. At the creature whose beauty made me want to weep and whose presence made me want to audit my life insurance.
I said the only thing my marketing-trained brain could produce:
"...Who the fuck are you?"
Her laugh was like bells made of breaking glass.
"Oh, Light. You really don't remember."
She leaned closer. I could see infinite depths in those red eyes—ledgers of transactions I'd made and never paid for.
"I'll help you remember," she whispered. "Whether you want to or not."