The rusted service ladder vibrated under his grip, each rung slick with condensation. Croft descended, leaving the filtered air of the upper city for the thick, wet breath of the Symbiote Sectors. His goal was simple: find the coordinates Kennet had sent, find the ghost named Sabine Weil. The air quality dropped with every meter he dropped, the clean ozone of CI-Div territory giving way to a complex stench of mildew, hot electronics, and the sweet, cloying smell of biological residue left by memetic conflict.
He stepped off the ladder onto a grated walkway slick with black moisture. Below, a river of refuse flowed sluggishly. The noise was a physical presence, a cacophony of overlapping public address systems, distant shouts, and the hum of failing infrastructure. This was the city’s underbelly, an unmapped and hostile ecosystem where the rules of his training were secondary to the laws of infection.
A narrow corridor opened before him, crowded with people whose Somatic Sigils pulsed with the aggressive certainty of their respective Host-Swarms. A man brushed past, his sigil a glaring safety-orange. The Patriot-Primal parasite in Croft’s head recoiled, flooding his mind with a silent, chemical scream of disgust. A few meters later, a group chanted a slogan under a dripping magenta hologram, and the Equity-Aggressor parasite flared with its own revulsion at their ideological impurity.
A new protocol suggested itself. A terrible, necessary one.
Instead of fighting the internal war, he would use it. He let the two parasites pull at him, their equal and opposite revulsion becoming a strange kind of compass. He was a living dowsing rod for cognitive neutrality. He began to move, following a path of least revulsion, a tightrope walk through the narrow channels that separated the warring meme-nests. The strategy was working, with an estimated encounter avoidance of 85%.
This path led him through a market where vendors sold bootleg emotional suppressants and nutrient paste in unlabeled tubes. The air smelled of fried protein and desperation. A public speaker, its grille stained with something that looked like rust-colored mold, crackled to life.
— Your purchase is a political act, — a synthesized voice declared. — Choose compliance. Choose flavor.
He passed walls plastered with layers of memetic graffiti, a geological record of belief. One layer, a fractal of interlocking hands in collectivist red, was half-covered by a newer stencil of a lone, snarling wolf in stark white. The parasites in his head offered their usual useless commentary, one decrying the erasure of communal art, the other celebrating the assertion of individualism. He filtered it out. It was just noise.
He was so focused on his internal compass that he almost missed them. Ahead, at a junction of walkways, stood a four-man CI-Div patrol. Their grey, non-porous uniforms were spotless, an obscene statement of purity in the surrounding filth. They moved with the rigid, predictable patterns of Division training. Croft knew those patterns. He had taught them.
He ducked into a darkened alcove, the space between two humming utility conduits, just before their helmeted heads turned his way. The patrol swept the area with thermal scanners, the beams cutting white slices through the humid air. Croft held his breath, pressing himself against the cold, vibrating metal. He was a ghost to them, an anomaly they were not yet hunting. The price of his mission was this new solitude; he was now hiding from the only system he had ever known.
The patrol moved on, their synchronized footsteps fading into the general din. He waited a full minute before emerging, his heart rate a steady, elevated drum. The encounter was a reminder that Hasek’s leash was long, but it was still attached. He proceeded with a new layer of caution, sticking to the shadows, his every sense alert.
He finally arrived at the coordinates Kennet had provided. It was not a door. It was a solid ferroconcrete wall, indistinguishable from the kilometers of stained concrete around it. The only feature was a large, glitching hologram advertising a NuMeal protein bar. The image of the bar would flicker, dissolve into a spray of static, and then reform. It was a dead end.
His parasites, however, saw an opportunity for analysis. The Equity-Aggressor immediately flagged NuMeal’s long history of anti-union practices and its role in suppressing cognitive diversity in corporate work environments. The Patriot-Primal countered, noting that the bar’s synthetic proteins and nutrient fillers were all sourced from off-world colonies, a betrayal of terrestrial sovereignty. The internal debate was pointless, a recursive argument about the ideological sins of a product that wasn’t even there.
He felt a familiar throb of a tension headache begin behind his eyes. He needed the clean, analytical space of the REM Diagram, the quiet white room where he could strip away the parasitic noise and see the raw data. But he was awake, and the Diagram was a world away. He had to be his own analyst.
He forced the parasites down, a mental act like shoving two fighting dogs into separate cages. He ignored the content of the advertisement. He ignored the brand, the product, the slogans. He watched the glitch. The flicker of static was not random. It was a pattern. A sequence of short and long bursts of noise, repeating every thirteen seconds.
He recognized it. A prime number sequence. Two, three, five, seven, eleven. It was a simple cipher, a digital knock for those who knew how to listen past the shouting. It was a test.
He reached out, his fingers hovering over the flickering light of the hologram. This was the true door. To knock was to abandon the last shred of his official identity, to step completely outside the protocols that had defined his life. He could still turn back, report the dead end, and let the system absorb the failure. That was safety. That was the cage. He chose the risk of the unknown over the certainty of failure. The price was his deniability; once he crossed this line, he was a rogue agent by any definition.
His fingers tapped the intangible light of the hologram, matching the rhythm of the prime number sequence. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the hologram dissolved not into static, but into a clean, white light. A low grinding sound echoed from the wall as a section of the concrete slid sideways, revealing a dark, narrow opening. The air that drifted out was cool and smelled of ozone and old wiring.
The internal noise of his parasites quieted, replaced by a sharp, clean focus. It was a pale echo of the silence in the REM Diagram, a flicker of his own reason asserting control. He had passed the test. He had chosen.
He took a breath and stepped through the doorway, leaving the known world of CI-Div procedure and the chaotic order of the Symbiote Sectors behind. He was entering the true wilderness, the hidden space between the city’s warring truths.
The heavy door slid shut behind him, plunging him into absolute darkness. Before his eyes could adjust, there was a sharp, metallic click. A single point of light flared in the blackness, the beam of a weapon-mounted tac-light that blinded him completely. From behind the light, a voice, raspy and laced with years of paranoia, cut through the silence.
— You smell like the system.
A gun barrel, a perfect circle of black metal, was pointed directly at his face.
He was unarmed and in a compromised position.
The irony was a blade in his gut: the ghost he needed to save him was about to make him one.
