Chapter 1, Part 1: Zone #616
The steel was sweating. That was the first thing I noticed. The humidity from the Grandriver had crawled up the piers overnight, coating the girders in a slick, grey film that made every step a gamble. I wiped my palm against my work pants, but the fabric was just as damp.
I was eighty feet up, suspended over a river that didn't move. In Zone #616, the water didn't flow so much as it sat there, thick and heavy, reflecting a sky that was a flat, unblinking blue. I reached for the torque wrench, my fingers stiff. The metal was slick. It slipped, the wrench clattering against the beam with a sharp, lonely ring before I caught it.
I took a breath, forcing my heart to settle. I've done this a thousand times, but today the iron felt cold in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature.
I looked down toward the access road. A car was parked near the silt fence—dark, expensive, and out of place among the mud-caked trucks. A man stood beside it, his back to me. He was just a shape in a dark coat, looking at the water. He didn't look like he belonged to the union, and he definitely didn't look like he was here to inspect the welds. He just stood there, completely motionless while the rest of the city started to hum.
I turned back to the beam. I had a job to do, and the steel didn't care about strangers on the shoreline. I set the wrench to the primary bolt, but as I checked the alignment, the numbers in my head hit a wall.
The gap was off. Only by a fraction of an inch—hardly enough for most eyes to see—but in my world, a fraction is a failure. I'd set this section myself yesterday. Steel doesn't migrate on its own.
Something was shifting, and it wasn't the wind.
Chapter 1, Part 2: The Static Grid
I didn't take the lift down. The lift was for inspectors and the soft-handed city reps who came to sign off on progress they didn't understand. Instead, I unhooked my primary lanyard and began the descent through the skeletal bracing of Pier 4. Every rung of the utility ladder was a cold shock against my palms, the humidity of the Grandriver having turned the dust on the steel into a fine, abrasive paste.
Down here, away from the wind of the upper tiers, the air was stagnant. It smelled of wet concrete and the metallic tang of oxidized iron—the scent of Zone #616 at rest.
The gap I'd seen haunted the back of my eyes. Twelve millimeters. To a layman, it was the width of a fingernail. To me, it was a scream. Steel doesn't migrate that far in six hours unless the earth itself is giving way, or someone has compromised the load-bearing integrity of the secondary plates. I reached the staging deck, my boots hitting the heavy plywood with a dull, flat thud that didn't echo. The atmosphere in the basin was too thick for echoes.
I headed for the site office—a reinforced shipping container tucked under the shadow of the bridge approach. It was painted a faded industrial orange, the "616" stencil on the door chipped and weeping rust.
Inside, the air was worse. The window unit was hummed a low, dying tune that did nothing to move the heat. Miller, the site lead, was hunched over a cluttered desk covered in coffee-stained manifests and half-eaten sandwiches. He didn't look up when I entered. He didn't have to. He knew my stride.
"The alignment on Pier 4 is drifting south," I said. I didn't waste breath on a greeting. I went straight to the terminal in the corner, my boots tracking grey river-mud across the floor.
"Not today, Erika," Miller groaned, rubbing his eyes. "We've got the city auditors coming in forty-eight hours. I don't need 'Wakowski-grade' precision slowing down the rivet teams. If it's within a half-inch, it's green."
"It's at twelve millimeters and climbing," I replied, my fingers flying across the keys. The interface was old—a legacy System that responded with a sluggishness that grated on my nerves. "And it's not thermal expansion. The river temp hasn't shifted enough to justify the movement."
I pulled up the telemetry for the strain gauges. My eyes scanned the columns of data, looking for the tell-tale signs of a failing weld or a shifted pylon. I stopped.
The screen showed a perfect, unbroken line of zeros.
Every sensor on Pier 4 was reporting 0.000% variance. It was a mathematical impossibility. A bridge of this mass, anchored in a riverbed of shifting silt and clay, is never truly still. The wind, the current, even the rotation of the planet creates a micro-oscillation that the gauges are designed to catch. To see a triple-zero across the board meant the sensors weren't reading the bridge. They were reading a loop.
"Miller, look at this."
He leaned over, his breath smelling of stale tobacco. He squinted at the screen for a long beat, then shrugged. "So? It's stable. Maybe the new dampeners are working better than the specs said."
"The dampeners don't stop physics," I snapped, pointing at the midnight timestamp. "Someone ran a remote diagnostic at 00:00. Look at the digital signature."
The entry was clean. No name. No employee ID. Just a cold, alphanumeric string: J-101.
I looked out the grimy window of the shack. Down at the waterline, the dark sedan was still there. It sat near the silt fence like a predator waiting for a wound to open. The man in the dark coat remained in the driver's seat, a silhouette framed by the flat blue of the sky. He wasn't a surveyor. He wasn't a contractor. He was something else—a variable that didn't belong in the 616 equations.
"Who is J-101?" I asked, my voice dropping.
"Internal auditor from the funding group," Miller said, turning back to his sandwich. "They're checking the efficiency of the grid. Standard stuff. Don't go looking for ghosts, Erika. Just go back up and finish the bracing."
I didn't answer. I watched the car. My mind was already calculating the force required to mask twelve millimeters of drift in a live system. It wasn't just a glitch. It was a deliberate overwrite. Someone wanted the bridge to appear perfect on paper while the iron was failing in the real world.
I grabbed my harness from the hook by the door, the nylon webbing heavy and familiar.
"Where are you going?" Miller asked.
"To check the manual tension," I said, my hand on the door handle. "If the system is lying, I'm the only sensor left that works."
I stepped back out into the humid air. The silence of the site felt different now. It wasn't the silence of a project at rest; it was the silence of a trap being set. I started back toward the pier, my eyes locked on that dark car at the river's edge. I wanted to know what J-101 was waiting for.
Chapter 1, Part 3: The Ghost in the Grain
The climb back up was slower. Every muscle in my forearms burned with a dull, heavy heat that felt honest, but my mind was elsewhere. I wasn't looking at the steel anymore; I was looking for the lie.
I reached the 120-foot mark, where the primary tension cables anchored into the pylon core. This was the heart of the 616 crossing. If the bridge was drifting, the evidence would be here, in the hydraulic tensioners. These were analog backups—physical dials that didn't rely on the digital grid. They couldn't be looped. They couldn't be hacked.
I hooked my safety line to the static rail and leaned out over the abyss. The humidity from the Grandriver felt like a wet shroud, clinging to my skin, making the air feel too thick to breathe. I wiped the grime from the glass face of the primary gauge.
The needle was vibrating.
It wasn't a mechanical vibration. It was a visual stutter—a rapid, high-frequency flickering of the needle that defied the weight of the cable it was measuring. One second it read 400 tons of pressure; the next, it flickered to 0, then back to 400. It looked like a frame-rate drop in a video feed, a jagged inconsistency in the fabric of the world.
I reached out and touched the gauge. My heart skipped. The metal wasn't cold. It wasn't hot. It was... nothing. It lacked the granular texture of galvanized steel. For a split second, my fingertip didn't rest on the surface; it sank a millimeter intothe glass.
I pulled my hand back as if I'd been burned. I stared at my glove. The fabric was fine. But when I looked back at the gauge, the flickering had stopped. It sat at a perfect, stable 400.
"Check your status, Wakowski."
The voice didn't come from Miller. It didn't come from the radio on my hip. It sounded like it was being spoken directly into the center of my skull, crisp and devoid of the ambient wind noise of the heights.
I spun around, my boots slipping on the slick iron. There was no one there. Just the empty girders and the flat, oppressive blue of the sky.
"Who is that?" I shouted. My voice felt thin, swallowed by the silence of the 616.
I looked down. At the river's edge, the dark sedan was gone. In its place, a small, floating geometric shape hovered a few feet above the mud where the car had been. It was a perfect, glowing white cube, no larger than a fist. It stayed for three seconds—unmoving, unbothered by gravity—and then vanished into a spray of translucent pixels.
My stomach turned. I've lived in Grandriver my whole life. I've built its kingdom with my own hands. I know the weight of the world. But as I looked at the steel beam in front of me, I noticed something I had missed every day for ten years.
At the very edge of my vision, where the steel met the blue of the sky, there was a seam. A thin, glowing line of code-like symbols that bled into the horizon before snapping back into the shape of a cloud.
The "J-101" signature wasn't an auditor's ID. It was a patch version.
I wasn't standing on a bridge. I was standing on a set of assets. And for the first time in my life, I felt the ground beneath me lose its mass. I wasn't a builder in a city; I was a unit in a System that was beginning to fail its own rendering.
The "external force" wasn't a banker. It was a player. And I was just the logic meant to hold the iron until they arrived.
Chapter 1, Part 4: The Hard Logout
I stared at the spot where the pixels had dissolved. My breathing was shallow, but not from the climb. It was the rhythm. I recognized the stutter of that gauge. I didn't know it from a textbook; I knew it from a HUD.
I reached up to the side of my head, my fingers searching for a temple-switch that wasn't there. Or shouldn't have been there. My skin felt like skin—warm, slightly damp, pores open to the humid 616 air—but as I pressed down on the bone behind my ear, a ghost of a sensation flickered in my mind. A tactile memory of a haptic interface.
I wasn't a resident of Zone #616. I was an architect. A Tier-S Structuralist.
The name World Regency hit me like a physical blow. It didn't come as a thought; it came as a data-dump, unblocking a suppressed layer of my own consciousness. I wasn't building a bridge for a city. I was grinding Kingdom Building points in a high-fidelity industrial sim.
I closed my eyes and tried to force the menu. Command. Status. Exit. Nothing happened. The "Stern" silence of the Grandriver remained absolute. The blue sky didn't flicker. The heavy steel beneath my boots didn't turn back into wireframes.
"System," I whispered. My voice was a dry rasp. "Open User Interface."
A thin, transparent pane of glass materialized in the air six inches from my face. It wasn't the vibrant, gold-trimmed menu of a top-tier player. It was grey, translucent, and flickering with the same jagged frequency as the needle on the gauge.
[USER: WAKOWSKI_E] [LEVEL: 92 - ARCHITECT] [ZONE: #616 - GRANDRIVER (INSTANCE LOCKED)][STATUS: CRITICAL - SIGNAL INTERFERENCE DETECTED]
My heart hammered against my ribs—real, physical thuds that the System was registering as a biophysical spike. I looked at the word Locked. In World Regency, you could always leave. You just sat down, initiated the five-second countdown, and woke up in your pod.
I looked back at the access road. The dark sedan was gone, but the impression of it remained in the mud, a visual artifact that hadn't been cleaned up by the local rendering engine. That man—the one the logs called J-101. He wasn't a banker.
He was a Player. But unlike me, he was moving with permissions that shouldn't exist in this instance. He was a "Suit"—a high-level Admin or a corporate-tier player who was "auditing" the 616 by physically deconstructing it.
I looked at my hands. They were trembling.
If I was a player, then the "Twelve Millimeter Drift" I'd measured wasn't a structural flaw. It was a deletion. He wasn't fixing the bridge; he was unmaking the assets of my kingdom, piece by piece, while the system lied to me about the variance.
I checked the Exit button on my flickering menu. It was greyed out. A small string of red text hovered over it: Action Restricted by Regional Overseer.
I wasn't just a builder anymore. I was a prisoner in a collapsing simulation. And the man in the dark coat had the only key.
I unhooked my safety line. If the physics were breaking, I didn't need a lanyard. I needed to find the edge of the map. I needed to see what happened to Zone #616 when the rendering stopped.
Chapter 1, Part 5: The Static Hum
The flickering menu stayed pinned to my retinas, a ghost-image that refused to fade even when I blinked. Locked. The word sat there like a lead weight. In World Regency, a locked instance was usually reserved for server maintenance or regional re-writes, but there was no countdown timer. There was only the humid, oppressive silence of Zone #616.
I climbed down from the pylon, my movements mechanical. Every time my boot hit a steel rung, I waited for the sound to lag, for the haptic feedback to fail. The world felt like it was made of thin glass.
I reached the bottom of the pier, where the mud of the Grandriver bank met the concrete foundation. The dark car I'd seen earlier was gone, replaced by a white utility van parked near the silt fence. A man stood by the open rear doors, his frame rigid. He was dressed in a charcoal suit that looked far too expensive for a construction site, his dark hair neatly cropped. He looked like a professional, but his eyes were darting, searching the empty air for something I couldn't see.
This was Joniah Rainier.
I approached him, my heavy work boots squelching in the silt. I wanted to demand an exit, but the "Stern" atmosphere of the 616 seemed to dampen my voice before I could even open my mouth.
"You," I said, the word coming out as a low growl. "Why is the instance locked? And why are my sensors reading a looped zero?"
Joniah jumped, nearly dropping a ruggedized data tablet. He spun around, and for a second, his image stuttered—a frame-rate drop that made his suit look like it was vibrating. He stared at me, his face pale, and when he spoke, the sound was a series of sharp, nervous squeaks that didn't match his stoic appearance.
"I—I—" He started, his voice a digital chirp. "Architect Wakowski. You shouldn't... the rendering cycle is... it's compromised. Squeak! The collision physics are already being de-prioritized. You have to move. Squeak!"
"I'm not moving until you open the gate," I said, stepping closer. I reached out to grab his shoulder, to force him to look at the bridge he was helping to delete.
My hand passed through his lapel. No resistance. No haptics. My fingers closed on empty air, even though I could see the weave of his suit clearly.
Joniah let out a long, high-pitched whine—a sound like a failing hard drive. "I'm sorry," he whispered, his voice tiny and terrified, trembling as he clutched the tablet to his chest. "Bolivar... Bolivar Brandenburg is already leveling the ledger. If the 616 stays upright, the regional audit won't close. Squeak! He's clearing the assets, Erika. All of them."
He scrambled back into the van, his movements jerky, his image still ghosting at the edges. Through the window, I saw his UI—a bleeding, aggressive red filled with warnings I didn't recognize.
The van didn't drive away. It simply faded, the white paint turning translucent until the riverbank was empty again.
I stood alone in the mud. I looked at my hand. The skin was starting to look pale, and through the back of my knuckles, I could see the grain of the wooden silt fence. The Kingdom I was building wasn't being audited; it was being erased by a man who treated my life's work like a line of bad code.
Chapter 1, Part 6: The Ledger District
I didn't run. Running was a waste of stamina, and in a failing instance, I couldn't be sure my heart rate wouldn't trigger a secondary biophysical spike. I walked. I kept my eyes on the pavement, watching for the tell-tale chromatic fringes that signaled a texture-map was about to drop.
The Administrative Plaza was a ghost town. The NPCs—the digital laborers and transit-bots—were gone, likely de-spawned to save processing power for the liquidation. I crossed the marble threshold of the Carlisle & Associates building. This was the hub of the 616 financial grid, a neo-classical fortress of grey stone that looked like it could survive the end of the world.
Inside, the silence was absolute. The air was chilled, filtered, and smelled of expensive paper—a sensory detail the System was still prioritizing over the bridge's physics.
At the end of the mahogany hallway, I saw a light. It came from an office labeled Institutional Oversight.
A man sat behind a desk piled high with digital ledgers. He was thirty-two, his face clean-shaven and sharp, carrying the look of someone who had spent every waking hour of his six-year tenure perfecting the art of the climb. This was Henry Voss Carlisle. To the high-level players who controlled the regional servers, he was "Voss," a reliable hand in a crisis. To the rest of the world, he was Mr. Carlisle—the banking student who was currently managing the financial flow of a dying zone.
He was focused, his eyes tracking a series of vertical graphs. He didn't look like he was part of the purge. He looked like he was trying to save the balance sheet.
"The bridge telemetry is a lie, Mr. Carlisle," I said, my voice echoing off the high ceiling.
He didn't jump like Joniah had. He looked up slowly, his expression neutral, a professional mask that had been hardened by years of high-stakes simulation. He didn't recognize me. To him, I was just another Level 92 Architect—a specialized asset he hadn't yet filed.
"I'm aware the data is... inconsistent," Carlisle said. His voice was steady, lacking the digital squeaks of the man at the riverbank. "But I don't recall an appointment for a structural audit today. Who authorized your access to this floor?"
"The steel authorized it," I said, stepping up to his desk. "The 616 is being de-prioritized. Joniah Rainier is down at the riverbank watching the collision data dissolve, and he's doing it on orders from Bolivar Brandenburg. You're the one holding the ledger. Tell me you aren't signing off on this."
Carlisle paused. He set his stylus down with a precise, deliberate click. He didn't know Erika, but he knew the name Brandenburg.
"Mr. Brandenburg is a powerful force in the regional market," Carlisle said, his eyes narrowing as he finally began to read my Player ID. "He has his eyes on a different horizon. My job is to ensure that the transition is... orderly. I have a company to build, Architect. I don't have time for local anomalies."
He was ambitious, a student of the banking system who viewed the world as a ladder. But he was also a powerful ally to the very forces currently hitting 'Delete' on my life's work. He didn't see a woman standing in front of him; he saw a variable that was making his ledger messy.
"There won't be a transition if the physics collapse before the audit is done," I warned. "We're locked in, Voss. If the instance goes dark while the ledger is open, you're trapped here just as deep as I am."
The use of his informal name made his jaw tighten. He looked at the red warnings on his own screen, then back at me. For the first time, a flicker of doubt crossed his stoic face.
Chapter 1, Part 7: The Kyushu Fracture
The silence in the Carlisle suite was different from the silence of the riverbank. Here, it was expensive—a deliberate dampening of the world's chaos. Voss sat motionless, his fingers hovering over the glass of his desk, watching the data-streams of the 616 purge with a focused, ambitious intensity. He was a man who saw a crumbling world and calculated the profit of the wreckage.
"You're a student of the system, Mr. Carlisle," I said, my voice echoing against the high marble walls. "But you're studying a textbook that's being burned while you read it."
Before he could respond, a side door slid open with a soft, pneumatic hiss.
A woman entered the room. She moved with a grace that didn't belong to the mainland—a fluid, regal carriage that felt like a legacy from a more refined simulation. This was Brenna Kusura. Her dark hair was pulled back, her eyes sharp and observant, betraying a level of experience that far exceeded the "housewife" role she played in the Carlisle ledger.
She was a former royal from the Kyushu server—Zone #1. Her kingdom had been archived years ago, and she had integrated into the Grandriver grid as Voss's wife. To him, she was a supportive partner in his climb to the top. To the System, she was a high-tier refugee.
"Voss, dear," she said, her voice steady and calm. "The Architect is right. The pressure in the central pylon isn't just a glitch. The whole 616 node is vibrating at a frequency that suggests a hard-delete."
Voss looked up, a soft smile touching his face—the only time his professional mask slipped. "It's just a regional audit, Brenna. Mr. Brandenburg has everything under control. He's just... clearing the cache for the new expansion. It's a standard banking maneuver."
Brenna walked toward the window, looking out toward the bridge. I saw her hand brush against a console on the wall—a movement so fast and precise it looked like a glitch. A flicker of a hidden HUD appeared in the reflection of the glass: [FACTION: AEGIS - ACTIVE].
She was part of the resistance against Bolivar Brandenburg, operating in the shadows of her husband's own office. She knew exactly what J-101 was doing at the riverbank, and she knew that the "liquidation" was a cover for a total purge of the player-base in the sector.
"You shouldn't worry yourself with the ledger, Brenna," Voss said, turning his attention back to me. "Architect, if you want to save your bridge, you need to provide a fiscal justification for its existence. Otherwise, the 616 remains scheduled for de-prioritization."
Brenna turned back from the window, her eyes meeting mine for a fraction of a second. In that look, there was a wealth of data—a silent acknowledgement from one high-tier player to another. She didn't know me, but she knew the "Stern" necessity of the steel I built.
"Perhaps the Architect can show you the manual tension logs, Voss," Brenna suggested, her voice deceptively light. "Sometimes the raw data is more... honest than the digital reports."
She was handing me a lead. Voss didn't see the weapon she was giving me, but I did. She was inviting me to expose the lie in Brandenburg's ledger right under her husband's nose.
Chapter 1, Part 8: The Anchor Point
Voss didn't answer me immediately. His eyes were still glued to the red-tinted telemetry on his desk, his jaw set in a line of stubborn professional denial. But the room's frequency changed the moment the heavy oak doors at the far end of the office creaked open.
A small figure stepped in, breaking the sterile perfection of the workspace. This was Ruichi Carlisle Kusura. At eight years old, he was a living synthesis of two servers—carrying the sharp, ambitious brow of his father and the quiet, observant eyes of his mother's Kyushu heritage. He was dressed in simple, sturdy brown work-tunic and trousers, a stark contrast to the charcoal tailored suits of the district, looking like a miniature version of a laborer from the low-iron sectors.
He held a small, mechanical model of a pylon, his fingers smudged with grease. He looked up at Voss, his expression uncharacteristically grave for a child his age.
"Father," Ruichi said, his voice small but clear. "The gears in the clocktower are skipping. I tried to grease the primary drive, but the teeth aren't catching anymore. It's like they've lost their mass."
Voss's entire demeanor softened. The banking student who lived for the ledger disappeared, replaced by a man who looked at his son as his only true successful "build." He stood up, walking around the massive desk to kneel beside the boy.
"It's likely just the humidity, Ruichi," Voss murmured, his hand resting on the boy's shoulder. "The Grandriver air is heavy today. It makes the metal expand."
"It's not expansion," Ruichi countered, holding up the model. "I measured the gap. It's twelve millimeters, just like the bridge."
I froze. Even an eight-year-old child in this instance was tuned to the specific frequency of the collapse. The "Twelve Millimeter Drift" wasn't just a structural error I'd found on the bridge; it was a systemic rot that was manifesting even in the toys of the elite.
Voss looked at the model, then back at me. For the first time, the "Audit" alarms on his terminal seemed like background noise. He was distracted, his focus entirely consumed by the concern in his son's eyes.
Brenna moved silently toward me while Voss was occupied with Ruichi. She didn't speak, but her hand brushed against my forearm. This time, there was no glitch. I felt the warmth of her skin, a solid, high-priority haptic connection that she must have manually boosted.
She leaned in, her voice a breath in my ear. "He's blinded by the ladder he's climbing, Erika. He thinks the system will protect the boy. He doesn't realize Bolivar is deleting the foundation Ruichi is standing on."
She slipped a small, translucent data-chip into my palm—the kind used for offline faction communication.
"Voss is going to be busy with the boy for the next ten minutes," Brenna whispered, her eyes darting toward her husband. "Go to the server room behind the vault. There's a manual override that hasn't been patched by the 'Suit' protocols yet. If you can bridge the pylon data there, you might stop the deletion before it hits the city center."
Ruichi looked at me then, over his father's shoulder. He didn't know me, but he saw the Architect's gear on my belt. He gave a tiny, solemn nod, as if he knew exactly what his mother was handing me.
"Go," Brenna urged, stepping back into her role as the supportive wife. "Before the next rendering cycle starts."
Chapter 1, Part 9: The Basement of Logic
I slipped through the mahogany doors while Voss was still kneeling on the marble floor, his world narrowed down to the mechanical model in his son's hands. The heavy click of the latch behind me was the last "real" sound I expected to hear for a while.
The descent to the server room felt like walking into the gut of a dying beast. The air here was stripped of the artificial humidity of the Grandriver, replaced by the dry, ozone-heavy breath of thousands of cooling fans. The lights didn't flicker; they pulsed with a low-frequency hum that vibrated in my teeth.
As I reached the vault level, the collision data took another hit. The floor felt spongy, my boots sinking half an inch into the solid steel plating before the system recalculated my mass and pushed me back up.
The room was a labyrinth of black towers, their status lights blinking in a frantic, uncoordinated rhythm. In the center of the room, tucked between two high-capacity storage banks, I saw a flash of charcoal grey.
"Squeak!"
I rounded the corner, and there he was. Joniah Rainier was huddled in the corner of the server rack, his back against a humming cooling unit. He was clutching his tablet so tightly his knuckles were white. The "Double-Image" effect was worse here—two versions of Joniah were occupying almost the same space, overlapping in a jagged, vibrating mess of pixels.
"Joniah," I hissed. "What are you doing here? I thought you faded at the riverbank."
"I—I—I couldn't leave," he squeaked, his voice cracking into a digital screech. "The exit-nodes are... they're gone, Erika. Bolivar didn't just lock the instance; he's scrubbing the gateway. Squeak! I came here to try and... to try and hide my PID in the legacy archives. If I'm not in the active ledger, he might miss me when he hits 'Enter'."
"He won't miss anything," I said, holding up the chip Brenna had given me. "He's deleting the whole sector, Joniah. Legacy archives included. My bridge is already drifting twelve millimeters. Ruichi's toys are doing the same. The rot is everywhere."
Joniah looked at the chip, his eyes wide. "That's... that's an AEGIS key. Squeak! Where did you get that? If Brandenburg finds that signature on the grid, he'll—he'll accelerate the purge."
"Then we have to be faster than him," I said, pushing past him toward the manual override terminal. "Brenna said this console hasn't been patched. If I can bridge the pylon telemetry to the central core, I can force the system to recognize the bridge as a 'Critical Asset.' He can't delete what the system thinks is foundational."
"It won't work," Joniah whimpered, his image stuttering as he stood up. "The 'Suit' protocols are... they're too deep. He's using a high-tier banking logic. He's not deleting the bridge because it's broken; he's deleting it because it's expensive to keep rendered. Squeak!"
I ignored him and jammed the chip into the terminal slot. The screen erupted in a flood of red text, but beneath it, I saw a familiar set of coordinates. Zone #616 - Pier 4.
Suddenly, the room went silent. The cooling fans died. The humming stopped.
A new window opened on the terminal, larger than the others. It wasn't a warning. It was a direct video feed.
A man was standing on the very beam I had been sitting on earlier. He was tall, dressed in a coat that seemed to absorb the light around it. He wasn't looking at the bridge. He was looking directly into the camera lens, as if he could see me standing in the basement of the Carlisle building.
Bolivar Brandenburg.
"Architect Wakowski," a voice boomed through the server room speakers, devoid of any digital squeak or tremor. It was the voice of a man who owned the air itself. "You're making the ledger very untidy. And I do so hate a messy account."
Chapter 1, Part 10: The First Clue
The server room felt like it was being compressed. The cooling fans remained dead, the silence so heavy it felt as though the oxygen itself had been de-prioritized. On the screen, Bolivar Brandenburg stood on my bridge, his silhouette cutting through the haze of the Grandriver like a shard of obsidian.
"Architect," Bolivar's voice echoed, cold and resonant. "You are Level 92. You have spent years calculating loads and balancing stresses. Surely you understand that when a ledger is out of alignment, the only solution is to zero the account. The 616 is a liability. Your presence is an entry error."
I gripped the edge of the terminal, the metal feeling slick as my collision data continued to ghost. "The people in this zone aren't entries, Brandenburg. Joniah is here. Your own auditor. Voss and his family are just floors above us. You're deleting lives to make room for a 'Premium' expansion."
Beside me, Joniah let out a series of frantic, high-pitched squeaks. He was staring at Bolivar on the screen, his "Double-Image" flickering so violently he looked like a smudged charcoal drawing. "He—he won't stop, Erika. Squeak! He's already initiated the 'Hard Purge.' The sector boundaries are collapsing."
Bolivar leaned forward on the screen, his eyes narrowing. For a fleeting second, the mask of the cold Macro-Economist slipped. A shadow of a smile—something far too young and far too personal—tugged at the corner of his mouth.
"You always did prefer the steel to the story, didn't you, Joniah?" Bolivar said. The voice was still deep, but the cadence shifted. "Even back in Muskego, when the reeds were high and the water was clean, you were looking at the pylons instead of the person standing right in front of you."
Joniah froze. The squeaking stopped instantly. He looked at the screen with a dawning, horrific recognition.
Muskego. That zone had been archived fifteen years ago, a low-level starter region that had nothing to do with the high-finance of Grandriver or the industrial grit of Detroyn. It was a private memory, a place where Joniah had raised a son named Elliott before the boy had supposedly been lost in a server-wipe.
"Elliott?" Joniah whispered, his voice finally sounding human, devoid of the digital chirps.
Bolivar's expression hardened instantly, the "Suit" protocols snapping back into place. "The name is Brandenburg. And the account is closing."
The screen went black.
The terminal began to scream—a high-pitched data-shredding sound that signaled the AEGIS chip was being incinerated by a counter-script. I grabbed Joniah by his charcoal lapel, hauling him toward the emergency exit as the ceiling tiles above us began to turn into translucent pixels.
"We have to go," I shouted over the roar of the collapsing logic. "He gave us a coordinate, Joniah. Muskego. If he's who you think he is, the key to stopping this purge isn't in this server—it's in the zones he's already deleted."
I didn't know how we were going to get there. I didn't know how a Level 92 Architect and a glitching auditor were going to cross a locked map. But as we burst out into the dimming light of the Administrative Plaza, I looked toward the horizon.
Far to the west, past the crumbling edges of the 616, I saw a flicker of green—the ghost of a marshland that shouldn't exist. The case was open. One hundred chapters, three zones, and a legacy of blood and code stood between us and the man who called himself Bolivar.
I gripped my wrench. The steel was failing, but the hunt had just begun.