The diagnostic pod was cold, its white interior smelling of sterilized air and ozone. Sineus stood motionless as the articulated arms, tipped with chrome emitters, scanned his body. The process was a daily ritual, as ingrained as breathing. A low hum vibrated through the deck plating, the only sound in the sealed chamber. His body was not his own; it was a RosNova asset, a weapon system requiring constant maintenance.
A thin needle of data, cold and sharp, lanced into his neural port, testing for lag. The wall display flickered with green text. Latency: 0.002 milliseconds. Acceptable. A low-frequency wave passed through him, checking for microfractures in the carbon-fiber weave of his skeleton. Augment efficiency registered at 99.8%. The system confirmed his operational readiness. He was a perfectly tuned instrument, his purpose defined by the metrics on the screen. The pod’s arms retracted with a soft hiss, and the door slid open.
He stepped out into the antechamber, the diagnostic pod sealing behind him. The room was as sterile as the pod, another white cube in the endless geometry of the Upper Spire. Before proceeding, he paused. From a sealed pocket in his tunic, he retrieved a small, smooth object. It was an archaic data-chip, made of a dark, dense polymer with no visible ports. It was inert, a physical dead-end.
Sineus closed his hand around it, the chip’s coolness a solid anchor in the intangible world of data streams and augmented overlays. Volkov had given it to him years ago. It contained his service record, a hard copy backup of his identity, un-networked and un-editable. It was a piece of his own past, tangible and real. Holding it was a private ritual, a silent acknowledgment of a truth that existed outside RosNova’s servers. A small, solitary rebellion against the curated lie. He held it for three heartbeats, then slipped it back into its pouch.
The transit station was a cavern of white ferroconcrete and armored glass. The air was still, scrubbed of all scent. There were no crowds here in the Upper Spire, only the silent, automated glide of maintenance drones and the distant hum of the arcology’s lifeblood. He walked to the edge of the platform, his footsteps echoing in the vast emptiness. A maglev car, a seamless tube of black composite, slid to a halt before him, its door whispering open.
He stepped inside. The interior was a sterile continuation of the station, a single, silent car designed for one purpose: efficient transit through the golden cage of the elite. The door sealed, and the car accelerated with an unnatural smoothness, the only sensation of movement a faint pressure against his back. The maglev shot through its transparent tube at 400 kilometers per hour, a ghost in the machine.
Sineus stood by the window, looking out not at the sky, but down. The transit tube was suspended thousands of meters above the arcology’s base, a spine running through the clean, sunlit air of the upper levels. Below, the world dissolved into a solid deck of grey industrial haze, a permanent ocean of smog that concealed the undercity. It was a physical barrier between the controlled, pristine reality of the Spire and the chaotic, inconvenient truth of the millions living and dying in the perpetual twilight below.
The swirling patterns in the vapor were hypnotic. For a moment, they coalesced into familiar, unsettling shapes—the shifting, unresolved forms of a million silent ghosts. He saw the faint, wavering outlines of countless Palimpsest Phantoms, a visual echo of the city’s erased history. A metropolis built on a foundation of forgotten truths, its stability paid for by the constant, brutal amputation of its own past. The sight put a familiar pressure behind his eyes, the strain of seeing the seams in a world that insisted it was seamless.
A chime, sharp and intrusive, shattered the perfect silence of the car.
The sound was a violation. On the surface of his personal terminal, a small screen embedded in his wrist, a single crimson glyph pulsed. A Level-1 override. Priority: Absolute. It bypassed every standard protocol, a digital scream that cut through all other traffic. His scheduled maintenance day was over.
He accessed the alert. The text was stark, stripped of all context but pregnant with meaning. ‘Chronos Shard activation confirmed. Sub-Scripta. Vector is live.’
The words hung in his mind, each one a heavy weight. Chronos Shard. A pre-war relic, a piece of data so pure it was considered a myth. Sub-Scripta. The data catacombs beneath Vertikalgrad, a digital graveyard. Vector is live. Not data, but a direction. A piece of raw, un-editable truth had just torn a hole in the fabric of the cold war. The price of this knowledge was the immediate and total destruction of his routine, of the controlled order he was a part of.
His reaction was not a thought, but an impulse. There was no debate, no weighing of options. His fingers moved across the terminal’s interface, his movements economical and precise. He accessed the maglev’s navigation system, his command-level clearance slicing through the civilian protocols.
The destination screen showed his current route: Maintenance Sector Delta. He deleted it.
He keyed in a new destination: RosNova Command. The system, designed for the predictable lives of the elite, flashed a request for confirmation. A change of this magnitude, overriding a pre-set schedule, was an anomaly. He bypassed the query with a second command string, forcing the change.
The maglev car shunted sideways with a barely perceptible lurch, a smooth, hydraulic shift as it moved onto a new track. The display updated. New ETA: four minutes. The car accelerated, the white support structures of the transit tube blurring into streaks of light. He was no longer a tool being serviced. He was a weapon being aimed.
The race had just begun.
