The alert from Jax was a blade of raw data, slicing through the sterile quiet of the Antarctic rescue hub. On the terminal Lena Petrova had jury-rigged, a live feed bloomed: a plaza in Vertikalgrad’s undercity, seen through the frantic, jittering lens of a bodycam. The air itself was wrong, shimmering like heat-haze over asphalt. But this was a cold distortion, a place where physics was coming apart at the seams. People ran, their forms blurring at the edges as if being un-written. At the center of the chaos, a device hummed, a vortex of non-light that drank the surrounding neon glow and left only a patch of absolute, featureless black.
Oblivion Systems was no longer testing its weapons in firewalled data-havens. They were deploying them on civilians. They were building an Oblivion well, a weapon designed to erase not just data, but an entire section of the city’s reality, to get at a rival’s hidden archive buried beneath the plaza. Sineus watched the feed, his fractured arm a dull ache inside its new brace. His objective was no longer just the Polaris Vault. It was triage for a bleeding world.
— They're un-writing the whole damn district, Sineus, — Jax’s voice crackled through the comms, a layer of static over his corroded vocoder. — The Un-scripted are holding, but the civvies are breaking.
— The Un-scripted? — The question came from Dr. Aris Vance, his voice a thin, reedy signal patched in from his isolation. The man of logic, cast out from RosNova’s collapsing council, was now a node in Sineus’s fugitive network.
— Locals with so much of their memory cut and sold they don’t have a coherent identity for the well’s memetic field to target, — Lena answered, her voice sharp and clear from her position on the plaza’s edge. She was already organizing them, her academic knowledge of history forged into a field commander’s instinct. — They’re our only asset that can get close.
Sineus processed the data. A decentralized resistance, immune to the enemy’s primary psychological weapon. It was a tactical advantage born from the system’s own cruelty. He flexed his fingers, the connection to his new network feeling more real than the RosNova command structure he had served for a decade. The price of this new alliance was his past. The reward was a future.
He pushed a stream of code through the connection, using the master encryption keys he had stripped from Augustus Paxton’s private channel. The Archive State’s own weapon of control became his scalpel. He sliced through the local network’s memetic noise, the competing AR advertisements and panic-feeds collapsing into a clean, tactical overlay. On the screens of Lena, Jax, and a dozen designated runners, a single, clear path appeared, a glowing line of green light tracing a route through the chaos. The latency was a fire in his mind: 2.5 seconds. A command given now would arrive an eternity later. He had to think ahead of the battle, to live three seconds in the future.
— I need a runner, — Sineus transmitted, his voice a flat, calm signal against the rising tide of panic on the audio feed. — Courier class. Someone who knows the service conduits.
— Kael, — Lena’s reply was instant. — She’s fast. She’s one of the Un-scripted.
A new icon appeared on his tactical map, designated ‘Kael’. He focused his feed on her, a young woman in a worn synth-leather jacket, her face a mask of grim determination. She was a ghost in the system, a person whose history had been so thoroughly erased she had become invisible to the machines that hunted them.
— Kael, this is Sineus. I have a path for you. The target is the well’s anchor point. You place the charge. That is the only objective.
— Just point the way, — her voice was steady, a single clear note in the static.
He traced a vector on his display, a path that hugged cover and exploited the blind spots in the Oblivion proxies’ patrol patterns. It was a high-risk gambit, a surgical strike coordinated from halfway across the world.
— Probability of reaching the anchor point is 30%, — Vance’s voice cut in, a cold dose of logic. — The causal degradation near the well’s core is exponential.
Sineus didn’t respond. The choice was already made. The price was Kael’s life, weighed against the thousands in the plaza. He sent the first vector. — Go.
Kael moved. She ran with a fluid, ground-eating stride, a creature of the undercity’s concrete canyons. Sineus’s voice was a steady presence in her ear, a stream of numbers and directions. — Vector 3-1-5, twenty meters. Now. Left, through the steam vent. Hold for two.
As she neared the well, the world began to glitch. A Palimpsest Phantom of a long-dead archivist flickered at the edge of her vision, its hands flying over a console that no longer existed before it was devoured by the well’s encroaching void. The air grew cold, the sound of gunfire and screams becoming muffled and distant, as if heard through water.
— I see them, — Kael breathed, her voice tight. — The ghosts.
— They are not real, — Sineus stated, his own perception filtering the phantoms from the tactical data. — They are echoes. Scars. Ignore them. Another ten meters.
She pushed on, her body a physical rejection of the un-reality spreading from the well. She reached the base of the device, a humming, obsidian pillar that seemed to pull the world into itself. At its base was a crystalline structure, the anchor, pulsing with a sickly purple light. She pulled a shaped charge from her jacket, its magnetic clamps locking onto the anchor with a solid thud.
— Charge set, — she panted, her breath fogging in the unnatural cold.
— Clear, — Sineus commanded, his mind already three seconds ahead, watching her phantom self already scrambling for cover.
The charge detonated. It was not an explosion, but an implosion. The Oblivion well collapsed in on itself with a sound like tearing fabric, a high-pitched shriek that was felt in the bones. For a single, silent moment, there was a perfect sphere of blackness. Then reality snapped back.
Sound returned like a physical blow. The neon signs flared back to life, their colors bleeding across the wet ferroconcrete. The muffled screams became sharp and clear. The oppressive, ontological cold vanished, replaced by the familiar undercity air, thick with the smell of ozone and recycled nutrients. The attack was broken. The district was saved.
A ragged cheer went up from the crowd of civilians who had been huddled behind makeshift barricades. They looked at Lena, at Jax, at the handful of Un-scripted runners, with something new in their eyes. Not fear. Respect.
On the edge of the blast radius, where the well had been, a single Palimpsest Phantom of the archivist flickered back into existence. This time, it was not being devoured. It was whole, stable. The ghost looked down at its own grey, translucent hands as if in surprise, then slowly faded, leaving only the rain-slicked plaza behind. The scar was healing.
— Network chatter’s spiking, — Jax’s voice came through, the static in his vocoder almost sounding like a laugh. — They’re calling you a ghost saint, Sineus. Our little network just became a viable force.
Sineus terminated the connection, the chaos of the undercity battle dissolving back into the cold silence of the Antarctic hub. The victory was a data point. A successful test of his new, decentralized alliance. Nothing more.
He listened to the quiet hum of the rescue hub’s life support, a steady, mechanical breath in the frozen dark. The only light was the cool, blue glow of the tactical display on his arm, its light painting a faint rectangle on the ice-caked plasteel of the viewport.
A new alert pinged on a different feed, a silent flag from a contested transit zone halfway across the world.
