The rain-slicked street waited. Croft took the final step, crossing the shimmering quarantine barrier that separated the noise of the Sprawl from the silence of Sector Gamma-7. The effect was not gradual. It was a switch being thrown in the center of his skull. The constant, warring chatter of the Equity-Aggressor and the Patriot-Primal—the twin parasites that had turned his mind into a twenty-four-hour cable news debate—vanished. There was no fade, no echo. Just a sudden, profound absence.
The silence was not peace. It was a vacuum. A negative pressure that pulled at the edges of his awareness, making the hairs on his arms stand up. The air, thick with the familiar city smells of wet ozone and nutrient-paste exhaust, felt thin and sterile here. He stood for a moment, letting the unnatural quiet settle, his body a machine suddenly unplugged from its power source. The relief was terrifying.
He moved down the center of the street, his boots splashing in the grey puddles. The CI-Div tactical team, four figures in heavy, non-porous grey uniforms, fanned out behind him, their movements tight and professional. The street was not empty. Dozens of hosts sat on public benches, stood under awnings, or leaned against the ferroconcrete walls of their housing blocks. They were not dead. They were not screaming. They were simply… present. Their eyes were open but unfocused, staring at nothing.
The true horror was on their skin. The Somatic Sigils, the bio-implants that normally blared a host’s ideological allegiance in vibrant, clashing colors, were all inert. Every single one was a uniform, matte grey. It was the color of a dead screen, of cold ash. A street that should have been a chaotic symphony of magenta, electric blue, and a dozen other warring hues was now a monochrome landscape of absence. This was not a truce. This was an extinction event.
One of the tactical agents, his helmet designation marking him as Unit Four, approached a man sitting on a bench. The host, a middle-aged man in a worn synth-leather jacket, did not react. He did not even blink as the agent waved a hand in front of his face. His responsiveness was zero.
— No response, Doctor, — Unit Four’s voice crackled in Croft’s earpiece, the sound unnaturally loud in the dead air.
— Proceed with protocol, — the team lead, Unit One, commanded.
Unit Four raised his Scrubber. The device, a pistol-like tool of polished chrome and sterile white ceramic, was the CI-Div’s hammer for every memetic nail. It was designed for cognitive sanitation, to violently decouple a parasite from a host’s neural pathways. The agent pressed the muzzle to the man’s temple.
He fired. There was no psychic shriek, no violent convulsion that accompanied a normal scrubbing. There was only a soft, polite chime from the device. A three-note tone of polite failure. The Scrubber’s diagnostic light flashed an amber error code. The agent tried again. The same gentle chime. The Scrubber efficacy was zero.
— Sir? — Unit Four asked, his voice tight with a confusion that protocol had no answer for.
The team lead looked at Croft, his helmet obscuring his expression but his posture radiating uncertainty. The system’s primary weapon was useless. The rules no longer applied. In that moment, the operational authority shifted from the men with the guns to the man with the disease.
Croft ignored them. He knelt in front of a young woman slumped against a graffiti-stained wall. She couldn’t have been more than twenty. Her eyes, a pale, watery blue, were clear and empty. There was no fear in them. No anger, no hope, no belief. He had seen the eyes of hosts consumed by rage, by ecstasy, by a thousand different certainties. He had never seen this. This absolute, placid void.
He fell back on his training, the familiar ritual a flimsy anchor in this sea of nothing. He unsealed a sterile sample kit from his belt. The sharp click of the plastic case echoed down the silent street. He gently took a saliva swab from the woman’s mouth and then a blood sample with a micro-lancet. She did not flinch. She did not seem to register his existence at all.
As he worked, the profound wrongness of the scene coalesced into a specific, analytical thought. It was a term his own rational mind, The Analyst, had coined during a late-night session in the mental construct of the REM Diagram. This was not a new infection. This was belief starvation. The parasites hadn’t been killed. There was simply nothing left for them to consume.
The team lead stepped up beside him, his heavy boots crunching on unseen debris.
— Your call, Doctor. This is beyond our operational scope.
Croft sealed the sample container, the hiss of the vacuum lock a punctuation mark. He looked at the rows of grey, silent hosts. He had been sent to assess a threat for containment, to provide the data Hasek needed to justify a redaction. That was the job. But looking at the empty eyes of the young woman, he knew that was the wrong answer. The price of following that order was to never understand this.
He made the choice. This was not a problem to be erased. It was a mystery to be solved.
His perception shifted. The move toward reason was a physical sensation, a sharpening of the world. The rain was no longer just a miserable drizzle; it was a solvent, washing the city’s ideological grime into the gutters, leaving behind this terrifyingly clean slate. The inert grey of the Somatic Sigils was no longer just the color of absence. For a fleeting second, it reminded him of the clean, quiet potential of his own REM Diagram before the parasites began to scream.
He stood, turning his back on the vacant hosts.
— The perimeter is stable, — the team lead stated, waiting for an order.
Croft activated his comms, bypassing the general channel and routing the signal directly to Dr. Oran Kennet’s secure line. The connection chimed, a sound of sanity in the void.
— Oran, it’s Julian.
— I’m reading you, — Kennet’s calm voice replied, a lifetime away.
— Standard protocols are ineffective, — Croft said, his voice low and steady.
— The agent is not an ideology. It’s a nullifier. The Scrubber can’t find anything to erase.
There was a pause on the other end. Kennet was processing the implications. A weapon that couldn’t be fought with the Division’s only weapon.
— What do you need? — Kennet finally asked.
— I need a specialist, — Croft stated, the words feeling heavy and final.
— Someone who understands memetic architecture from the ground up. Not just a sanitation worker with a Scrubber.
The rain continued to fall, each drop a quiet tap on the silent pavement. The city held its breath around them.
He keyed the request into his comm: the file on the vanished heretic.
