The wind at the top of the world was a physical thing, a solid wall of air and rain that tried to peel him from the grated service platform. Two kilometers below, the lights of The Sprawl of Saint Protagoras were a sick, blurry smear of neon promises. The antenna array, a forest of humming chrome spires, vibrated with enough energy to cook a man from the inside out. It was the city’s central nervous system, and Sabine Weil was about to perform a lobotomy with him as the scalpel.
She worked with a frantic, focused grace, her movements economical against the storm. She jammed the heavy interface cable, a thick snake of shielded wires, into a port on the main antenna’s base. The port hissed, accepting the violation. Sabine turned to him, the other end of the cable in her hand. Her face was pale in the pulsing red and blue warning lights, her eyes wide with a mix of terror and exhilaration.
— Ready? — she shouted over the wind.
He shook his head. No. He wasn’t ready. He would never be ready to intentionally break his own mind.
— Good, — she yelled back, a grim smile touching her lips. — Sanity is a liability right now.
She didn’t wait for another answer. She plunged the connector into the data-port on his neck. The connection was a spike of ice and electricity, a cold, clean shock that bypassed his skin and went straight to his spine. He was jacked in. He could feel the city, a low, constant hum of a billion networked thoughts, a sea of dormant data waiting for a signal. His signal.
He took a breath, the air thin and tasting of ozone and storm. For years, his life had been a constant, exhausting act of suppression. The Analyst in the white room of the REM Diagram, building walls, running diagnostics, managing the two caged monsters in his head. Now, the plan was the opposite. Not to build a wall, but to open a floodgate.
He closed his eyes and reached inward. He found the cages, the shimmering containment fields holding the parasites at bay. He found the Equity-Aggressor, a thing of oily black tentacles and academic jargon, pulsing with righteous fury. He found the Patriot-Primal, a beast of cracked earth and barbed wire, snarling with guttural certainty. He had spent his life trying to keep them from killing each other, and him in the process.
Now, he let them out.
The release was not an explosion. It was a sudden, terrifying decompression. The pressure in his skull vanished, and the two forces, unleashed, surged not at each other, but outward, into the channel Sabine had opened. It was a torrent of pure, weaponized contradiction. A tidal wave of cognitive noise. 1.2 terabytes of raw, unfiltered belief flooding the Panacea Broadcast Mesh every second.
He felt the first tremor as his signal hit the network. It was a flicker, a brief moment of confusion in the city’s data stream. Then the cascade began. Through the link, he could feel it, see it in flashes of corrupted data. A holographic ad for a Panacea Protocols wellness drink, a smiling woman promising a moment of pure thought, suddenly screamed in a man’s voice about seizing the means of production. A CI-Div traffic sign ordering citizens to maintain cognitive hygiene began to display recipes for nutrient paste, each one sourced from a different off-world colony.
The system was trying to process the paradox. It was trying to understand a signal that was simultaneously demanding absolute social equity and rugged, nationalist individualism. It was like feeding a calculator a poem. The logic boards were frying. The absurdity was a weapon, and it was working.
He felt a distant node of the network, a rigid, orderly system of pure command, suddenly shriek in a billion bits of nonsensical data. He knew, instinctively, that it was Hasek’s Redaction Hub. The purist’s clean, sterile world was being flooded with the filth of his own mind. The tactical displays would be useless, a storm of contradictory alerts and false positives. Hasek’s ability to command his forces was gone, nullified by a weapon he couldn't even classify.
Another part of the network spasmed. This one was sleeker, faster, built on profit and efficiency. Vole’s network. He could feel the targeting systems of the Panacea acquisition teams failing, their friend-or-foe trackers unable to get a lock. The Somatic Sigils they used for targeting were now broadcasting a chaotic rainbow of nonsense, flickering between magenta and blue and a thousand other colors that had no ideological meaning. Vole’s technological superiority, his clean corporate scalpel, was neutralized.
But the feedback was building. For every system he crashed, a wave of psychic static washed back up the line, slamming into his consciousness. The pain was a physical thing, a white-hot fire behind his eyes. His consciousness, the fragile thing he called ‘himself’, was starting to fracture under the strain. He was a dam holding back an ocean of chaos, and the dam was breaking. He was on the verge of psychic death, his own mind the price of this attack.
He needed an anchor. Something to hold onto in the storm. The parasites were useless, they were the storm. Sabine was out there, a physical presence, but he was lost in the digital tempest. He was fragmenting, his memories scattering like broken glass. The supermarket aisle. Kennet’s face. The fall.
Then, he saw it. Not a memory, but a concept. A pure, clean thought in the middle of the hurricane. A white room. An infinite grid of pale grey light. No walls, no ceiling. A place of pure, cold reason. The REM Diagram. It wasn’t a place he could go to anymore, but the idea of it, the blueprint for it, still existed in him. It was the last piece of the Analyst that remained.
He clung to that idea. He built a fortress around the concept of that quiet, empty room. The storm of feedback crashed against it, but the walls held. The image of the clean, white space became his shield, a single point of stability in a universe of noise. It allowed him to hold the floodgates open, to maintain the broadcast without being torn apart. He was no longer the victim of the storm. He was its eye.
He felt a hand on his shoulder and his eyes snapped open. Sabine was kneeling in front of him, her face inches from his. Rain and tears streamed down her cheeks, indistinguishable. Her data-slate was held up, its screen showing a flat line where the city’s network activity should have been.
— It worked, — she screamed, her voice raw. — You crashed the whole damn thing.
The deep, resonant hum of the antenna array died, the silence replaced by the raw sound of the wind and the rain. The city was blind and deaf. Their escape window was open.
The city was blind, but their only way down was a two-kilometer fall.
