Blue flames from the exhaust licked the wet asphalt, covered in the grey, acidic haze of dawn. Nova-Veridia's colossal gates were slowly opening with the painful groan of rusted hinges. This sound was like the final note in the city's never-ending symphony.
Jester was astride the modified beast he called "The Glitch." Neon purple stripes, drawn across its matte black body, glowed as if a poison was seeping from beneath the metal. In the drone bay integrated into the side of the motor, where a passenger sidecar once was, a metallic sphere spun restlessly.
"Atmospheric pressure is dropping," Echo's mechanical voice stated, seeping directly into Jester's headset frequency. "Weather conditions: Seventy-eight percent chance of an acid storm. Route: Unknown. Our fuel reserves are below critical levels for these terrain conditions. A fantastic start."
Jester settled his old-fashioned aviator goggles onto his nose. The black teardrops painted on his porcelain-white face appeared even darker in the dim morning light.
"Stop whining, tin-head," he said, gently twisting the throttle on the motor's handlebars. The engine responded with a growl, like that of a wild animal. "Statistics are just boring scenarios written by cowards. Adventure truly begins like this: with insufficient gear and bad weather."
Under the colossal shadow of the city gate, silhouettes appeared. Kaelen Vance was there. His iconic, battle-worn grey trench coat rippled slightly in the wind. Beside him stood Dr. Scraps, holding oily rags, and a few members of "Unit 404." This was not a hero's send-off, but a fugitive's expulsion into the unknown.
Jester idled the engine and pressed the soles of his boots onto the wet ground. Kaelen walked towards him. His steps were heavy but resolute. The Detective's steel-grey eyes, though bruised from lack of sleep, maintained their usual "weary guardian" gaze.
"You're leaving," Kaelen said. His voice reeked of cigarette smoke and regret.
"The scene is changing, Detective," Jester said, with that unsettling smile on his lips. "The sets are torn down, the lights are out. The audience demands a new act."
Kaelen pulled something from his pocket. In his palm lay a heavy, brass-cased, old analog compass with a slightly cracked glass. He held it out to Jester.
"You're going to places where signals are corrupted, GPS doesn't work, and satellites are blind," Kaelen said, his voice trembling for a moment before he quickly composed himself. "Sometimes the old ways are best."
Jester took the compass with his gloved fingers. He felt the coldness of the metal. When he opened its lid, he saw the needle, instead of pointing to magnetic north, lazily spin around itself, then stubbornly point southwest, to the very spot where they stood.
"It's not pointing north, Detective," Jester said, tilting his head slightly. "It's broken. Just like us."
"No," Kaelen said. He fixed his gaze on Jester's hazel eyes. "That compass was calibrated to find your way home when you want to return. The needle will always point here, to Nova-Veridia."
Jester paused for a moment. The permanent, painted expression of sadness on his face contrasted strangely with the surprise in his eyes. The concept of "home" for "The Nameless Jester," a "glitch" in this world, belonging nowhere... This was a variable that didn't fit the equation.
"Home..." Jester whispered, turning the word over in his mouth like a foreign taste. Then he reverted to his familiar, mocking grin. He placed the compass in his breast pocket, just over his heart (or reactor). "If I get lost, I'll follow the breadcrumbs, Hansel."
Kaelen smiled faintly. It was a rare moment. "Go on. Try not to die."
Jester adjusted his goggles and roared the engine. "Can't give away spoilers, Detective. Watch and see."
The moment he released the clutch, "The Glitch" tore away from the asphalt and surged forward. They plunged out of the city's metallic, suffocating shadow and into the endless void stretching before them. The smoky, crime-ridden metropolis he left behind was no longer a nest of chaos, but a faint lighthouse flickering in the mists.
***
The journey lasted hours, or perhaps days. In the Static Age, time was an unreliable narrator.
Nova-Veridia's industrial waste gave way first to grey sand, then to dangerous glass peaks shimmering under the sun. This was the "Old Battlefields." Plasma weapons and thermal bombs used in the great wars of years past had melted the desert sand, transforming it into vast fields of glass and obsidian.
Jester skillfully navigated the motor through the glass cliffs. The tires screeched on the crystallized ground, and the shock absorbers groaned with every jolt. The landscape resembled a post-apocalyptic art gallery.
On the horizon, colossal metal skeletons, half-buried in sand and glass, appeared. These were the "Titans." Hundreds of meters tall, rusted, with cables dangling out like intestines, these war machines had once played god, and were now metal corpses whistling in the desert wind.
"Radiation levels are rising," Echo warned. The droid rose slightly from its bay, scanning the surroundings. "The cores of these Titans are still leaking."
"History is leaking, Echo," Jester said, as they passed beneath the empty eye socket of a fallen Titan. "Ghosts of the past... they refuse to blend with the sand."
As the sun set behind thick, static-charged clouds, the sky turned a sickly purple and orange. When they made camp in the shelter of an obsidian rock, the desert's freezing cold had begun to seep into their bones.
Instead of building a small fire, Jester leaned against the heat radiating from the motor's reactor. He took out the compass Kaelen had given him from his pocket. The needle pointed in the direction they had come from, towards that dark horizon.
Just then, Echo's sensors blared an alarm.
"Jester. Twelve o'clock. Anomalistic data stream."
Jester looked up. On the horizon, in the pitch darkness, that familiar green beam of light had reappeared. But this time it wasn't steady. It was flickering. It pulsed at regular intervals, behaving not like a laser tearing through the sky, but like a breathing organism.
Echo focused its single-eyed lens on the light. Its internal fans whirred. "Analysis complete. Spectral signature negative. This is not a flare. Nor is it an SOS call."
"What is it then?" Jester asked, his eyes narrowing. His hazel pupils dilated like a cat's in the dark.
"A rhythm," Echo said, its voice carrying a mechanical hesitation. "It's a heartbeat, Jester. Not biological, but not technological either. Somewhere in between... A deviant rhythm."
Jester stood up. The wind whipped his purple cloak. "The Omega Protocol... It wasn't just a machine. It was alive."
As the weight of this discovery hung in the air, a deep vibration from beneath the ground interrupted his thoughts. Sand and glass fragments began to dance around Jester's boots.
"Seismic activity!" Echo cried out. "They're coming from underground!"
Jester's reflexes were faster than his thoughts. He threw himself back onto the motor. "Hunters!"
From beneath the sand, creatures, a grotesque mixture of metal and flesh, burst forth. These were "Sand Sharks." But Mother Nature could not have designed something so hideous. Their fins were of rusted steel, their skin hard and scaly like sandpaper. They had no eyes; only heat-sensitive sensors and mouths full of razor-sharp teeth.
One lunged at Jester. Instead of panicking, Jester glided sideways with the grace of a ballet dancer. The creature's steel fin grazed the edge of his cloak.
"How rude," Jester said, waving his hand in the air like an orchestra conductor. "Biting before an introduction? Do rules of etiquette not apply in the desert?"
The creature fell to the sand and instantly turned, attacking again. Jester didn't flee this time. He activated his "Glitch" ability, that reality-bending anomaly, for a millisecond. Frame skips, like a video cassette malfunction, appeared in his body. The creature passed right through Jester, as if he wasn't there.
Echo, hovering in its droid form, began firing lasers. Red beams left scorch marks on the creatures' armored hides. "Jester! Their numbers are increasing!"
Jester leaped from the motor's saddle, somersaulted in the air, and landed on the back of the nearest creature. The beast thrashed, but Jester remained balanced as if in a rodeo. He placed his hand on the metal plate at the creature's nape.
"Let's see who your manufacturer is..."
His eyes glowed purple for an instant. His biological interface connected to the creature's nervous system. What he saw sickened him. This wasn't evolution. This was an assembly line. Branded onto the creature's skin, at the inflamed point where metal merged with flesh, was a symbol: **Ω**. Omega.
"They're branded," Jester said, as he overloaded the creature's brain with excess voltage, incapacitating it. He jumped to the ground. The other creatures hesitated at the fall of their leader, then plunged back into the depths of the sand.
The desert fell silent once more. Only the sound of the wind and Jester's rapid breathing remained.
"The Omega mark," Echo said, descending beside Jester. "This is something beyond the Syndicate."
"Yes," Jester said, wiping green blood from his glove. "The Syndicate were merchants. These... these are guard dogs."
The next morning, as dawn broke, they rode the motor to a final peak. When they reached the summit, Jester stopped the engine. The sight he beheld was beyond even his wildest nightmares.
Below, on the shore of the leaden, stagnant water known as the "Dead Sea," a city rose, shrouded in mists. But this place wasn't built of metal and concrete like Nova-Veridia.
The buildings seemed carved from a bone-like white, organic substance. Towers curved towards the sky, bending like a spine. There were no windows, only dark, breathing orifices. The city stood in the middle of the desert like a colossal, decaying coral reef.
"Necropolis," Jester whispered. The word appeared in his mind like a memory that wasn't his own.
There was no movement in the city. No light. Only that rhythmic green light emanated from the top of the city's tallest tower. The heartbeat was there.
"I understand now why the Architect feared this place," Jester said, unable to tear his eyes from the dead city. His voice was so low it was almost lost in the wind. "This isn't technology, Echo. This is a graveyard. And we... we've come to be grave robbers."
Echo's lens narrowed. "Entering is illogical. Danger level incalculable."
Jester restarted the engine. Smoke from the exhaust mingled with the cold morning air. Beneath the painted, sorrowful mask on his face, that twisted smile, oscillating between madness and courage, appeared.
"Logic is the refuge of boring people," he said, flooring the throttle. The motor began to accelerate downhill, towards that city of bone.
"Let's go, Echo. Let's wake up some ghosts."