Kaelen's apartment was like a black hole where time refused to flow, only collapsing in on itself. It smelled like the home of a man divorced, sleepless, and with a soul gnawed away by "Static": stale coffee grounds, the sour tang of cheap tobacco clinging to the walls, and a palpable, sticky loneliness.
That eternal, grey dawn of Nova-Veridia, seeping through the window, made the dust motes in the room appear like dead pixels suspended in the air.
Jester sat cross-legged on the kitchen counter with a gravity-defying ease. His translucent arm had returned completely to normal, but his skin was as pale as marble. He was examining Kaelen's old, calcified coffee machine, which stood before him, as if it were a piece of technology fallen from Mars. He tilted his head, his eyes fixed on the machine's dripping spout.
"This machine," Jester said, his voice overly vibrant in the morning silence. He tapped his finger against the glass carafe. "It sucks the soul out of the water, Kaelen. The molecules inside are weeping. It tastes... just like despair. Or maybe like Tuesdays. They both taste the same."
Kaelen entered the living room, pressing the ice pack in his hand against his swollen brow. Each step echoed like a protest on the creaking floorboards. His headache was like a dwarf drumming on his temples.
"Don't criticize my coffee, clown," he snarled, his voice rough as sandpaper. He tossed the ice pack onto the counter. "What are we going to do with that chip? That damn thing we found at the Orphanage."
Jester was flipping the data chip, glowing with a neon blue light between his fingers, like a coin. The chip was an anomaly against the fabric of this dilapidated, analog world; too clean, too sharp, too... *future*.
"You can't plug this into just any computer," Jester said, holding the chip up to the light and scrutinizing its microscopic circuits. "Operating systems are too clunky. Windows 95? Please. Modern processors would mistake this code for a virus, or even a biological threat, and self-destruct. This isn't raw data, Detective. This is crystallized trauma."
Kaelen pulled out a kitchen chair and sat on it backward. "So? Are we going to keep it in a museum?"
"No," Jester said. His eyes narrowed, and the perpetual smirk on his face vanished for a moment, just a moment. "There's only one piece of hardware that can read this, that can handle this frequency."
Kaelen asked: "What?"
Jester tapped his temple, right next to his painted eye, on the thin metallic vein running beneath his skin.
"Me."
XXXQUOTEXXX
> *"Memory is not a recording device; it is a code rewritten every time it is played. If you want to learn the truth, don't press play. Insert yourself into the tape."*
> *— Dr. Aris Thorne, Unit 404 'Human-Interface' Experiment Notes*
The air in the room suddenly changed. The grey light entering through the windows gave way to a colder, more metallic vibration. Kaelen opened his mouth to object, but Jester had already moved.
The clown reached for the old, greasy toaster on the kitchen table. He ripped out its cord in a single, savage motion. He stripped the plastic from the end of the cord with his teeth, exposing the copper wires. He wrapped one end around the blue chip's contact points. The other end, however...
Kaelen winced. Jester parted a small, inflamed slit at the back of his neck, hidden among his hair. It wasn't a USB port. It was a biomechanical input, resembling an unhealed scar where flesh merged with metal, nerve with copper.
"Turn off the lights, Detective," Jester said. His voice was no longer his own; it sounded like it came from a broken radio, deep and crackling. "This is going to be a little... bright."
The moment Kaelen flipped the switch, darkness couldn't dominate the room. Because Jester's eyes and mouth glowed with a blinding neon blue from within. He threw his head back, his spine arching at an impossible angle, his body rigid.
*VZZZTTT.*
In the middle of the room, on the dusty carpet, a holographic projection shimmered, reflected from Jester's eyes. But this wasn't a clear image like in Star Wars films; it was a nightmare, grainy, flickering, and divided by vertical lines, like a corrupted 80s VHS tape.
*VIDEO LOG: NOVEMBER 12, 1989*
*LOCATION: ST. JUDE ORPHANAGE - LOWER LEVEL*
In the hologram, men in sterile white coats were strapping small children into metal chairs resembling dental chairs. Clunky helmets with blinking diodes were placed on the children's heads. Finger-thick black cables emerged from the helmets, piercing the ceiling and leading to a massive, unseen machine above.
Inside the room, a metallic and emotionless voice echoed from the recording:
*"'Subject 404... Frequency alignment failed. Brain death confirmed. Subject 405... Jester... Compatibility 98%. Initiate.'"*
Kaelen held his breath, his hand involuntarily going to the weapon at his hip. That small child in the image... it was Jester. But there was no fear on his face.
"That's you," Kaelen whispered, feeling a cold knot in his stomach.
The child in the image wasn't screaming. He was laughing. But it wasn't the joy of a child playing in a park. It was a hysterical, choking, uncontrollable laugh that tore at his lungs. As the machine operated, the reality around the child in the hologram distorted, walls began to melt and liquefy, metal trays floated in the air. Gravity, in that room, was merely a suggestion.
The image suddenly changed with a harsh cut. Green codes began to cascade like a waterfall across a black background. Names. Hundreds of names. Birth dates and, next to them, death times written in red.
"The list..." Jester said. His voice echoed in the room, but the lips of the rigid body on the table weren't moving. The voice came directly from within the hologram, from the data itself. "These are the 'Sleepers', Detective. Those who were exposed to the frequency that day and survived. And..."
The data stream stopped. A final line began to flash menacingly in red in the center of the screen.
**TARGET: CLOCK TOWER WATCHMAN.**
**STATUS: MARKED FOR ELIMINATION.**
**TIME: TODAY, NOON.**
Jester screamed as if boiling water had been poured on his chest, and yanked the cable from his neck. The sound of flesh and metal separating was wet and sickening. The connection broke. The blue light extinguished, returning the room to the grey morning. Jester collapsed from the kitchen counter to the floor, retching and vomiting a grey, mercury-like liquid onto the carpet.
Kaelen immediately rushed to his side, trying to lift him by the shoulder. "Are you okay? What did you see?"
Jester straightened up, wiping the grey liquid from the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. His entire body was trembling as if exposed to high voltage.
"I'm not okay," he rasped. His pupils dilated and contracted, unable to focus. "That data... it was toxic. They saw me, Kaelen. The moment I read the chip, I sent a signal back to the system. I lit a flare."
"Who saw you?" Kaelen asked, his voice hardening. "The Syndicate?"
"Not the Syndicate. They're just merchants," Jester said, looking at the window with fear. "The shadow behind them. The **'Silents'** are coming."
Kaelen drew his weapon from its holster, disengaging the safety. "The Silents?"
"They don't speak, Detective. They don't make footsteps. They don't breathe. They just..."
Before Jester could finish his sentence, the living room's large window suddenly exploded. But the expected loud sound of shattering glass didn't come. The glass shattered into thousands of tiny diamonds in absolute silence, spilling inwards. As if someone had turned off the volume.
Kaelen felt a sudden, icy burning sensation on his left shoulder. He reflexively brought his hand to it, but his fingers met empty air.
He looked at his shoulder in horror. The shoulder of his jacket, his shirt, and the flesh beneath... *they were gone*. There was no blood. No bone. That part of his shoulder had pixelated, as if erased with an eraser from a low-resolution photograph, turning into fading grey cubes in the air.
"Get down!" Jester shouted, tackling Kaelen's legs.
On the roof of the building outside, amidst the rain clouds and smoke, there was an almost invisible figure. It wore camouflage that bent light, like chameleon skin. The long-barreled rifle it held did not belong to this world; it was matte black, and the air vibrated at its muzzle. The rifle wasn't firing bullets; it was spewing concentrated "deletion frequency".
Kaelen and Jester took cover behind the overturned sofa. The apartment walls were riddled with holes with each silent shot, books on the shelf, paintings on the wall were being erased from existence. A vase, instead of shattering, "glitched" and vanished.
"My gun won't work on it!" Kaelen said, clutching his vanishing shoulder. There was no pain, just a terrifying numbness, as if that part of his body had never existed. "I can't even see it!"
"Physical weapons won't work," Jester said. He lifted his head. The sickly blue light in his eyes had faded, replaced by a dangerous, predatory red. "But gravity works. Newton is still valid in this damn city."
Jester pulled out the half-eaten, browning apple from his pocket that morning. The twisted smile, hovering on the brink of sanity, appeared on his face.
"Kaelen, do you trust me?"
"No!"
"Great. I wouldn't either. Statistically, it's very foolish."
Jester threw the apple towards the broken window. As the apple floated through the air, it traced a curve defying the laws of physics. Jester closed his eyes and snapped his fingers.
**GLITCH.**
That innocent apple in the air suddenly changed its texture. The image of rotten fruit flickered and gave way to a dense, heavy mass. The apple attained the weight of a bowling ball and the speed of a meteor. It tore through the air and struck the roof of the opposite building, where the sniper was located.
*THUD.*
This time, there was a sound. A section of the opposite building's roof collapsed as if hit by a cannonball. Concrete fragments and a cloud of dust rose into the air. The sniper lost balance and fell into the void but didn't die; clinging to the building's facade with hands and feet, like a giant spider, it began to scurry up the vertical wall, disappearing from sight.
"Darn, I missed," Jester said, pouting. "My aiming ability is still 8-bit level. I guess the Atari joystick is broken."
Kaelen got up, supporting himself with his intact arm. His apartment had become less a battlefield and more a corrupted computer file. "We have to go," he said. "They know this place. It's not safe anymore."
Jester stood up, dusting himself off. He had become serious.
"Not just here, Detective. It's not about your home. They targeted the man in the Clock Tower. That man isn't just a watchman. He maintains the city's 'time synchronization'. He's the anchor that keeps time cyclical in the Static Age, preventing us from moving past 2003."
"...the concept of time collapses in Nova-Veridia," Kaelen finished, grasping the truth. "If he dies, this city will be flung outside of history."
Jester touched the "deleted" wound on Kaelen's shoulder. There was a slight electrical tingle at his fingertips.
"Get ready, Kaelen," Jester said, walking towards the door. His steps were resolute. "We just watched the trailer. The movie starts now. We're going to the Clock Tower. And believe me, the stairs there are very long."
As they left the apartment, Kaelen looked back one last time. His home, his memories, the photograph of his ex-wife on the wall... all were riddled with holes, pixelated, merging into a grey nothingness. His old life had been erased. There was no turning back now; only a run forward, towards the ticking of the clock.