The static was a physical thing. It had weight and texture, a grinding roar that filled the space where the clean white room of the REM Diagram had been only moments before. The Analyst, his own rational self, was gone. Not dead. Erased. A corrupted file. The psychic architecture that held his warring parasites in their containment cubes had shattered, and now they were free. They surged into the vacuum of his consciousness, not as opposing arguments, but as a single, boiling tide of pure, contradictory command.
He was on his knees in the dark, in a tunnel that smelled of rust and cold, stagnant water. His body was a wire, and two opposing currents were trying to flow through it at once. The Equity-Aggressor screamed for restorative justice against the structural violence of the tunnel’s failing infrastructure. The Patriot-Primal howled about territorial integrity, about the foreign dampness seeping through the concrete. The result was paralysis. A feedback loop of pure terror and incandescent rage that locked his muscles, making his limbs tremble with the effort of doing nothing.
His vision dissolved into a pixelated storm of magenta and electric blue. He felt the oily, pulsing tentacles of one parasite wrapping around his thoughts, while the cracked, sun-baked earth of the other crumbled into his memories. They were no longer just influencing him. They were overwriting him. Every cell in his body received two sets of instructions. Breathe. Don’t breathe. Clench your fists. Open your hands. Fight. Submit. The conflict was absolute, a 100% system load that produced only heat and noise.
A shape moved in the darkness. A sound. A scrape of heavy fabric on concrete. Hands grabbed him, pulling him. The sensation was distant, a report from a failing sensor array. He was being dragged. The rough floor of a smaller utility tunnel tore at his uniform. The world was a smear of abstract sensations, a data stream with no interpreter. He was a machine crashing, his core programming deleted, leaving only the malware to fight for control of the hardware.
Then a new input cut through the static. A voice.
— Julian!
It was sharp, insistent. It was real. It was not a slogan or a talking point. It was a name. His name.
— Julian! Listen to me!
He was being held, pinned against a cold, damp wall. The pressure was a grounding force. The voice was close, right by his ear, a signal piercing the noise. He fought to focus, to find the source of the signal in the storm of his own mind.
— They are a part of you, but they are not you!
The words were a string of code he hadn't heard before. A new axiom. It didn't compute with the binary logic of the parasites. They weren't him? The thought was a sliver of light in the roaring darkness.
— You are the one who listens!
Sabine’s face swam into view, a pale oval in the absolute black. Her grey eyes, sharp and constantly moving, were fixed on his. He could see the thin, white scar that cut through her left eyebrow. He could smell the machine oil and stale coffee on her jacket. She was not an asset. She was not a mission objective. She was a person, terrified and fierce, holding him together with nothing but her hands and her voice. The storm in his head did not stop, but for the first time, he could see the shore.
He made a choice. Not with logic. The Analyst was gone. He made it with the last fragment of his core self, the part that Sabine had called out to. He chose the external reality. He chose her.
He surged forward, his muscles unlocking in a single, desperate act. He kissed her. It was clumsy, brutal, a collision in the dark. It tasted of adrenaline and rain and the metallic tang of fear. It was an affirmation. This is real. The cold wall, the damp air, her. This was the world he would fight for, not the clean, sterile order of the CI-Div, not the warring utopias of his parasites. The price of this choice was clear: a lifetime of this internal war, a constant, grinding struggle to remain himself. The alternative was the peace of erasure. He chose the struggle.
The kiss broke. He was breathing, his lungs aching. The roaring in his head subsided. It didn't vanish. It was still there, a background hum of two incompatible engines. But they were no longer tearing him apart. He was at the center now, a quiet point in the eye of the hurricane. He was the listener.
A new, fragile equilibrium settled over him. He could feel the parasites, their presence a familiar weight. But they were his now. Not his masters. His tools. A new resolve, cold and sharp, formed in the quiet. The Dark Night of the Soul was over. The darkness of the tunnel remained.
He looked at Sabine, really looked at her, and saw not a rogue or a ghost, but an ally.
The first step was getting out of the dark.
