LOCATION: THE VOID / OUTER SYSTEMTIME: UNKNOWN
There was no light, nor was there darkness. There was only the flow.
In the center of the void, something observed. It was not a god of starlight, but a construct of cold, shifting geometry—a consciousness vast enough to swallow a star system, yet silent as a grave.
The Archiver.
Before it suspended a pale, azure sphere. The planet rotated sluggishly. Fissures of corrupt red data bled from its core, silent evidence of a system in critical failure.
"Eden-04," a voice resonated—not spoken, but transmitted directly into the vacuum. It came from a golden polyhedron hovering at The Archiver's shoulder. "Corruption at 92%. The cache is full. The cooling systems are failing."
The golden shape projected a stream of images: burning forests, oceans thick with oil, a famine-struck child gnawing on a dry bone.
The Archiver did not sigh. He did not mourn. He simply processed the input.
"Inefficient," The Archiver stated. The sound was the hum of a billion drives spinning in unison. "Intelligence and Emotion were granted as tools. They have been repurposed as weapons."
A finger of white light extended, hovering millimeters from the sphere's surface.
"Shall we format?" the polyhedron asked. "A complete wipe. Restore factory settings."
The Archiver paused. The swirling code in his eyes shifted from white to a deep, warning crimson.
"No. A format teaches us nothing."
He withdrew his hand.
"Lower the firewall. Open the ports to the Outer Network."
The golden shape hesitated, its rotation slowing. "The viral load will purge 99% of the biomass."
"Execute."
LOCATION: CENTRAL PLAZA - MEGACITY ONEDATE: NOVEMBER 20, 2050 (THE FINAL YEAR)
It was a Tuesday. The sky was a perfect, manufactured blue.
Beneath the hologram towers of Aether Corp, the crowd moved like a single organism. They didn't speak. They didn't need to. The silver ports at the base of their skulls—the Linkers—hummed with the collective knowledge of the species. A surgeon didn't memorize anatomy; he accessed it. A structural engineer didn't calculate load; she streamed it.
Then, the sky blinked.
It didn't darken. It simply stopped rendering.
The sun vanished. The clouds froze, tearing into jagged, digital squares. A flat, suffocating blue swallowed the horizon. It was the color of a dead monitor.
FATAL ERROR.
The text appeared in the sky. Stark. White. Courier font.
For three seconds, there was absolute silence.
Then, the connection snapped.
It wasn't a sound. It was a physical severance. In the plaza, ten thousand people simultaneously reached for their necks. The silver ports seared flesh.
A man in a tailored suit fell to his knees. He stared at the tablet in his hand. He knew it was important. He knew the symbols on the screen meant wealth. But as he looked at them, the concepts evaporated. The numbers became meaningless shapes. The panic in his eyes wasn't fear of death; it was the terror of a sudden, hollow mind.
From the glitching sky, red lines descended.
They moved slowly, sweeping across the city like a scanner bed.
A woman standing near the fountain raised her hand to shield her eyes. The red line passed over her.
She didn't scream. There was no blood.
Her hand simply ceased to be.
It didn't get cut off; it decompiled. Flesh and bone shattered into a mist of glowing cubes, drifting upward like dust in a sunbeam. She stared at her wrist, at the smooth, flat stump where her hand had been, unable to comprehend the physics of her own disintegration.
Beep.
The man in the suit convulsed. The scanner hit him. His body scattered into a cloud of blue particles. His briefcase hit the pavement with a heavy thud. His empty suit collapsed, the tie still knotted perfectly, a hollow shell on the concrete.
The plaza became a graveyard of laundry.
A young man stood amidst the piles of clothing. He was shaking. He looked at the car parked at the curb—a sleek, magnetic-levitation vehicle. He wanted to flee. He grabbed the handle.
He looked at the dashboard. At the pedals.
His breath hitched. He knew this machine moved. He knew it could save him. But the knowledge of how was gone, wiped clean along with the rest of the world.
He sat in the driver's seat of a miracle he could no longer understand, and wept.
LOCATION: SECTOR 13 SCRAPYARD - THE NEO-ALLIANCETIME: 214 YEARS AFTER THE PURGE
Rain fell on Sector 13.
It was heavy, oily, and smelled of sulfur. It turned the scrapyard into a quagmire of black mud and rusted iron, lit only by the flickering violet of a dying neon sign.
Caleb kneeled in the filth.
He was thin, his frame wire-taut beneath a canvas jacket that was two sizes too big. His hands, stained permanently black by grease, moved with the frantic precision of a starving animal.
He pried open the chest of a rotted industrial droid. Inside, beneath a nest of corroded wires, sat a circuit board. Green. Gold-plated.
He didn't smile. He just exhaled, a puff of white steam in the freezing air. Three doses of painkillers, he thought. Maybe four.
He reached for it.
Snatch.
A hand darted in. Fast.
Caleb flinched, but the board was gone.
"Look at that shine," a voice grated.
Gary stood atop a pile of tires, holding the board up to the neon light. He was a twitchy, rodent-faced man who always smelled of copper. "Restricted salvage, Caleb. That's a violation."
"Give it back," Caleb said. His voice was rough, unused. He stood up, mud sliding off his knees.
"Problem?"
The ground vibrated.
Rictus emerged from the shadows. The overseer was a wall of muscle and grease. His left leg was gone, replaced by a crude, hydraulic piston that vented steam with a rhythmic hiss-clank. He didn't look at Caleb; he looked at the board in Gary's hand.
"He was pocketing it, Boss," Gary said, stepping quickly behind Rictus's massive bulk. "Trying to steal from you."
Rictus turned his head. His eyes were small, buried in folds of flesh. He didn't shout. He didn't look angry. He looked bored.
"Caleb."
"It was Zone C," Caleb said. He kept his hands open, visible. "Zone C is open salvage."
Rictus didn't argue. He swung his arm.
It was a lazy backhand, but the weight behind it sent Caleb sprawling into the sludge. The taste of copper filled his mouth.
"My yard. My rules."
Rictus unholstered a weapon from his belt. An old energy pistol. The metal was pitted, the grip wrapped in duct tape. He leveled it at Caleb's forehead.
Caleb lay in the mud. The rain stung his eyes. He looked up at the black bore of the barrel.
Fear spiked in his chest, hot and sharp. But his eyes didn't lock onto Rictus's face. They locked onto the gun.
He saw the heat distortion around the emitter. He saw the hairline fracture running down the cooling vent.
The capacitor is swollen, his mind registered. Not a thought, but a reflex. The vent is clogged with grime. If he fires that, the thermal feedback has nowhere to go.
It wasn't a readout. It was the simple physics of a bomb waiting to go off.
"You're trash, Caleb," Rictus said softly. "Don't forget it."
Rictus didn't fire. He spat on the ground next to Caleb's ear, holstered the gun, and took the circuit board from Gary.
"Half pay today. For the attitude."
The piston hissed. Clank. Hiss. Rictus walked away. Gary followed, shooting Caleb a sharp, mocking grin before disappearing into the rain.
Caleb lay there for a long time. The cold seeped into his bones.
Slowly, he pushed himself up. He wiped the blood from his lip with a shaking hand. He wasn't thinking about the lost money. He was thinking about the fracture in the metal.
It's going to blow, he thought. Sooner or later.
He grabbed his pliers from the mud. He needed to find something else. Anything. Lyra couldn't wait.
He stepped forward, and his boot skidded on something smooth.
He froze.
He crouched down and brushed away the layer of black sludge.
It wasn't scrap. It wasn't a rock.
It was a cube. Perfectly black. Perfectly smooth. It sat in the chaotic mess of the scrapyard like a geometric error.
It didn't hum. It didn't vibrate. It just existed, absorbing the neon light without reflecting it back. On its top face, a faint silver triangle was etched into the surface.
It looked wrong. It looked like it didn't belong in this world.
Caleb stared at it, the rain dripping from his nose. He didn't know why, but the hair on his arms stood up.
He reached out and touched it.