The familiar, metallic mist that filled the lungs of Nova-Veridia dispersed as it hit the quarantine barricades of Sector 9. As Detective Kaelen's old model sedan cut through the puddles on the asphalt, the growl of the engine echoed like a curse in the silence of the abandoned streets. This was the city's cancerous cell; sealed off years ago under the pretext of a "biological leak," erased from maps, and left to rot.
His knuckles, gripping the steering wheel, were stark white. Pip's trembling voice spun like a warning siren in the backrooms of his mind: *"He should take his childhood traumas, not his gun."*
Kaelen had taken his gun anyway. The .45 at his hip instilled a false sense of security with its cold metal. But tonight, he felt to his bones that the barrel of that gun would be no different than a water pistol against whatever lurked in the dark.
On the hill, rising through the mist, St. Jude's Orphanage for Lost Souls appeared. The building was a twisted example of gothic architecture; its towers jutting into the sky like broken teeth, and its windows staring into the darkness like empty eye sockets. It was as if the building was constructed not from brick and mortar, but from a frozen scream.
The rusty sign in front of the main gate swayed, groaning in the wind: *"Children Are Our Future."* But the hopeful word at the end of the sentence had been savagely defaced with black, viscous spray paint, and beneath it, a single word was scratched in shaky letters: *"We are a mistake."*
Kaelen pushed the heavy iron door. The hinges shrieked open, as if they had been waiting for this moment for centuries. Inside, it was filled with the smell of damp, rotting wood, and an unidentifiable, ozone-like scent that burned his nostrils. He switched on his flashlight. The beam of light illuminated the dust motes suspended in the air; the dust wasn't dancing, but rather trembling in the air as if frozen.
The entrance hall was like the stage set of a childhood nightmare. The heads of the plush bears on the floor had been torn off and sewn back on upside down. Toy cars were nailed to the walls with an irrational fury.
XXXQUOTEXXX "You can abandon a building, but memories are like the mold beneath the wallpaper; even if you don't see them, they continue to breathe, grow, and rot the house from within."
— Architect K. V., *Notes on the Memory of Concrete*
Kaelen held his breath, trying not to let this suffocating atmosphere fill his lungs. The coldness of the hall was not physical, but mental.
"Jester?" he called out. His voice didn't echo in the void. The walls absorbed the sound like a sponge, swallowed it, leaving only a muffled rasp.
The answer came not with a human voice, but with a mechanical melody. From the upper floors, a key on an out-of-tune piano was being pressed. A single finger, a single note, insistently...
*Ding... Ding... Ding...*
Kaelen headed for the stairs. With each creak of the wood on every step, uninvited guests assailed his mind. The snap of his father's belt, the beatings he took in the schoolyard, birthdays spent alone... This wasn't just a building; it was a frequency amplifier, turning up the volume on the "fear" channel in Kaelen's mind to its maximum.
As he reached the second floor, the piano sound cut off like a knife. At the end of the long, dark corridor, a sign reading "Dormitories" swayed on a single nail. He turned his flashlight in that direction. The light caught the familiar silhouette standing in the middle of the corridor, a purple stain defiant against the gray world around it.
Jester was facing the wall, his back to Kaelen. The wall was covered in chaotic drawings, scratched by the fingernails of children who had stayed here years ago.
"You came," Jester said. He hadn't turned around. His voice was far from his usual high-pitched, mocking clown tone. It was flat, weary, and eerily human.
Kaelen lowered his gun slightly but didn't holster it. "What is this place?"
Jester ran a gloved finger over one of the drawings on the wall. The drawing depicted a faceless black man stuffing children into a gigantic box. The lines were scratched so deeply that the plaster had flaked off, revealing the brick underneath.
"This isn't where I was born, Detective. This is where I *died*," Jester said.
He slowly turned around. The white makeup on his face had run, the black paint beneath his eyes streaking down his cheeks, but it wasn't from rain. His eyes glowed with an unnatural phosphorescence, like a cat's eyes in pitch darkness.
"The coordinates I saw in that arcade machine were correct," he continued, his voice crackling like radio static. "But they didn't hide a treasure here. They're using this place as a *server*."
Kaelen frowned. "A server? This ruin?"
"Yes. The human brain... especially a traumatized child's brain... Imagination is the purest energy source of the Static Age, Kaelen. The energy that fried the man in the phone booth has been pumped from here for years, from the fears absorbed by these walls."
Jester suddenly fell silent. His pupils dilated, and he brought his index finger to his lips. "Shhh. Do you hear it?"
Kaelen listened intently. There was nothing but the howl of the wind. "I don't hear anything."
"Exactly," Jester whispered. "Absolute silence. There are no mice in this building, no cockroaches, not even bedbugs. Because they're all *afraid*."
No sooner had he finished his sentence than the dormitory door slammed shut violently, as if by an invisible hand. *BANG!*
The air in the middle of the room rippled. Dust bunnies on the floor began to rise, defying the laws of physics, and coalesce. The dust transformed into gray, flickering pixels. When the image solidified, what stood before them resembled a human, but it was not human.
This was the technician who had died in the phone booth. But it had no face; where its face should have been, there was the static of a broken television screen.
**"HELP... ME..."**
The voice was mechanical and fragmented, as if coming from a broken speaker, not a throat.
Kaelen didn't think. With a reflex born of years, he raised his gun and pulled the trigger. The muzzle flash briefly illuminated the dark room. The bullet passed right through the ghost's chest and embedded itself in the wall behind.
The entity didn't even flinch. It merely tilted its head slightly, as if examining a data error.
"Bullets don't work on memories, Kaelen!" Jester shouted, tearing off his purple jacket and flinging it aside. "Put down your analog weapons!"
The ghost expanded with a high-pitched, electronic shriek. The room's temperature instantly dropped below zero. A black, tar-like viscous liquid began to seep from the walls. The floor warped like a corrupted video cassette, colors bleeding into each other.
Jester leaped in front of Kaelen. "Hold onto me! Don't let go!"
"What are you doing, you madman?"
"I'm going to disrupt the frequency! We need to change the channel!"
Jester spread his arms wide. In that moment, Kaelen witnessed the strangest thing he had ever seen. Jester's body began to tremble, but it wasn't from cold. His body was glitching, like a television image with a bad signal. For a moment he appeared on the right, then vanished on the left. He seemed to exist in ten different frames per second. This was his "Glitch" ability; tearing the fabric of reality, infiltrating the universe's code.
Jester lunged at the ghost. This was not a collision of flesh and bone. Jester was injecting his own chaotic presence into the ghost's static structure, like a virus.
The room was rocked by a blinding burst of light, a mix of purple and gray. Kaelen closed his eyes, covering his ears with his hands. It was as if thousands of panes of glass were shattering simultaneously, thousands of radios crackling at once.
When the sound ceased, the light faded.
Kaelen opened his eyes. The ghost was gone. The floor had returned to normal. But Jester lay on the floor, in a fetal position. Smoke was rising from his body. Kaelen rushed to his side.
"Jester! Are you alright?"
When the Detective grabbed the clown by the shoulder and turned him over, his breath caught. Jester's right arm... it seemed to be gone. Or rather, it was there, but completely transparent. His bones and veins were invisible, only a faint outline was discernible. It was as if someone had started to erase him with an eraser but had left it unfinished.
Jester raised his semi-transparent arm, the wall behind him visible through it. A pained, twisted grin appeared on his face.
"Oh, great," he gasped. "My graphics settings are messed up. Opacity level dropped to 20%. It'll render back in a few hours, it'll be fine."
Kaelen tried to lift him by his armpit, but Jester pushed him away with his intact left hand. His eyes were locked on a small object glowing on the floor where the ghost had vanished.
He crawled and picked up the object. It was an old-fashioned **Music Box Key**, made of brass, with intricate teeth at its end.
"This key," Jester said, turning the key between his transparent fingers. The sight was surreal; the key seemed to float in mid-air. "It opens the safe in the Director's office. Years ago... we weren't allowed in that room. Those who went in never came back."
"Why?" Kaelen asked, his voice hushed.
"Because that room held the 'Game Master's' plans. We were just pawns, Kaelen."
The door to the Director's Office at the end of the corridor was a sturdy mahogany door, more robust than the others. It was locked. Without waiting for Jester to say, "Let me break the lock's code," Kaelen delivered a hard kick to the door with his boot. The wood splintered, the lock bursting from its frame.
Inside, it was impeccably clean, a stark contrast to the decay in the rest of the building. There was no dust. No cobwebs. Even the papers on the desk were neatly arranged.
But the walls... The walls were a map of madness.
Hundreds of passport-sized photographs were arranged side by side, completely covering the wallpaper. Kaelen approached the photos, and his blood ran cold. These weren't random people. These were people who had "disappeared," "escaped," or fallen victim to unsolved murders in Nova-Veridia over the last twenty years. Beneath each photo, a date and time were written in red ink: *03:14:02*.
At the very end of the wall, separated from the others, was an empty frame. There was no photograph inside. Only a red question mark was drawn.
Jester approached the polished wooden music box on the desk, free of dust. He inserted the key he held into its slot. His transparent hand trembled, but he managed to turn the key.
The mechanism clicked. In the silence of the room, a mournful, metallic, and all-too-familiar lullaby began to echo.
The box slowly opened. No ballerina emerged from within. Nor was there money or jewelry. On the velvet cushion lay an angular, futuristic **Data Chip**, glowing with a neon blue light. It looked too advanced to belong to 1990s technology.
Jester picked up the chip, holding it to the light. The expression on his face fluctuated between fear and awe.
"Bingo," he said. "This is the source code of the 1989 experiment. The black box of the White Noise Incident."
Kaelen asked, his hand going to his gun, "Who left this here? That ghost?"
Jester gazed for a long time at the dark shadow in the corner of the room, as if someone were there. "No. The one who drew us here. The one who killed that technician. This isn't a trap, Detective, it's an invitation."
He slipped the chip into his pocket. His transparent arm slowly began to regain color, taking on a flesh tone, the pixels settling back into place.
"The party's just starting, Detective," Jester said, heading for the door. The mask was back on his face; he was no longer a frightened victim, but a trickster who knew the rules of the game. "And I think I have an old friend in the DJ booth."
As they exited the building, dawn was breaking, but the sun wasn't rising. The sun never rose over Nova-Veridia. The sky had merely shifted from black to a dirty, dead gray; like a colossal screen with its signal cut. The city was silent, in the lethargy of a nightmare that refused to wake.
Kaelen opened his car door, while Jester was about to become a shadow in the mist. The city awaited them, and the game's difficulty level had increased.