Consciousness arrived like the strike of a static wave.
The first thing Kai felt was an unnatural cold—the kind of chill that didn't just pierce the skin but felt as though it were trying to erase his very existence. His eyes opened slowly, but all he saw was a pulsating darkness. Black pixels danced at the edges of his vision, a warning sign that his neural synchronization was at a critical breaking point.
He tried to move his hand, but his fingers felt heavy, as if bound by thousands of invisible threads. As he forced himself to sit up, the sharp screech of grinding metal shattered the silence.
Kai realized he wasn't lying on solid ground. He was atop a mound of mechanical carcasses, stripped cables, and piles of control panels that had long lost their glow. The stench of ozone and burnt plastic stung his senses.
"Where... is this?" his voice cracked, barely audible amidst the constant hiss of the Sector 13 wind.
He looked toward the sky. There were no clouds. Only endless layers of megastructures, soaring high until they vanished into the data-fog above. The only light in this place came from the faint green glow of chemical waste flowing between the heaps of trash, casting long, haunting shadows.
Kai tried to stand, but his balance faltered. He tumbled back into the scrap metal, and that was when he saw it.
A silhouette approached from behind the veil of Bit-Dust.
At first, Kai thought it was a Scrubber—an automated cleaning drone that would delete anything deemed organic waste. He held his breath, trying to blend into the wreckage around him. However, the figure didn't move with the rigid whirring of a machine. Its footsteps were heavy, rhythmic, and... human.
Then, a light appeared.
Not a sharp neon glare, but a calm, steady blue radiance. The light emanated from an ancient lantern held by an old man. He wore tattered gray robes, his face hidden behind the shadows of a hood, but his eyes—weary yet piercing—stared directly at Kai.
Kai scrambled backward, his hand grasping a sharp shard of iron nearby. "Don't come any closer!"
The old man stopped. He didn't seem threatened. Instead, he lifted his lantern higher, allowing its light to envelop Kai. Instantly, the biting cold began to recede. The black pixels in Kai's vision slowly dissolved, replaced by a clarity he had never experienced before.
"Breathe, lad," the man's voice was heavy, like the sound of grinding stone. "If you let panic override your code, the system will detect your heartbeat as noise. And in this place, noise means deletion."
Kai froze. The man's words made no sense, yet his body obeyed instinctively. He took a deep breath, inhaling air that now felt more stable thanks to the lantern's glow.
"Who are you?" Kai asked, slowly lowering the iron shard in his hand.
"My name is Diogenes," the man replied as he stepped forward and sat on a cracked concrete block not far from where Kai had fallen. "And you... you are something that shouldn't be here. Someone with a data structure far too clean to be discarded in Sector 13."
Diogenes placed his lantern between them. The blue light seemed to create a safe zone, a bubble of reality amidst a sea of ruin.
"I don't remember how I got here," Kai whispered, staring at his pale hands. "My name... Kai. That's all I know."
"Kai," Diogenes repeated the name, as if tasting a new line of code. "A short name. Easy to remember, easy to hide. That is good."
He reached into the heavy pocket of his robes and pulled out a small, dimly glowing object. It was an irregularly shaped crystal, a murky purple with fine circuits pulsating inside.
"An Ether-Shard," Diogenes muttered, tossing it toward Kai.
Kai caught the crystal. It felt cold and vibrated in his palm, emitting a static hum audible only to his nerves.
"Don't just stare at it. Press the crystal against your wrist. Let the code sink in," Diogenes commanded. "It's a fragment of expired logistics memory from Sector 12. It will feel like swallowing shards of electric glass, but it's the only way to keep the system from flagging you as a 'Dead File'."
Kai hesitated for a moment, then pressed the sharp tip of the crystal against his pulse. The moment it touched his skin, it didn't cut; instead, it liquefied—turning into a stream of liquid light that seeped into his pores.
Kai flinched. His head was instantly bombarded by thousands of flashing images: rows of numbers, shipping manifests, and warehouse navigation maps that appeared and vanished in the blink of an eye. The pain was sharp, but his vision—previously cluttered with red glitches—suddenly became crystal clear. His body, which had felt transparent, regained its weight.
"Incredible..." Kai whispered, staring at his wrist where the crystal had vanished, leaving behind faint circuit lines that slowly faded.
"It only lasts for twelve hours," Diogenes warned. "After that, you'll start to fade again. In Sector 13, you only live as long as you have crystals to burn."
"Why are you helping me?."
Diogenes chuckled softly, a dry, hollow sound.
"Because I'm bored of talking to piles of iron, Kai. And because this lantern..." he pointed to the light, "...reacted when I approached you. Its glow grew brighter. That means you aren't just trash. You are a key that hasn't found its lock yet."
Kai looked at the lantern, then at the old man before him. In a world built on cold logic and algorithmic calculations, this encounter felt like a glitch—a beautiful mistake.
"What do I do now?" Kai asked.
Diogenes stood up, retrieved his lantern, and began to walk away. "Now? You learn how to hold a hook. You learn how to tell the difference between valuable data and mere refuse. If you want to get out of here, you must become more valuable than the system that threw you away."
Kai hesitated, glancing at the endless mounds of trash surrounding him, then he stood up and followed the blue light moving through the darkness.
His first step in Sector 13 had just begun.