[System Warning: Location Tag Lost – You are no longer synced with Cityframe™ protocols.]
Aiven's footsteps echoed down the narrow corridor of the undersector tunnel. The hum of the city dulled overhead, muffled through layers of reinforced infrastructure that hadn't seen surface light in decades. Beneath New Luma's hyper-clean skyline, this place was something else—raw, exposed, and far too analog.
Wires, not clouds.
Rust, not glass.
The underlayers whispered in static.
He stopped when the PATCHCAST halo around him finally began to sputter. The firewall folded in on itself, collapsing like a closing aperture, until only faint embers lingered in the air. He exhaled sharply. The cast drained him. Not physically—but mentally, emotionally. Each Patch drew power from neural bandwidth, and the longer it ran, the more of himself it consumed.
"One minute longer and I'd have memory bleed," he muttered.
He tapped his wrist, though the CTRL-link remained stubbornly dark. No signal. He wasn't just off-grid—he was beneath it. And that made what he was about to do even riskier.
Sector Dissonance is what happens when a part of New Luma becomes unsynced from the master system update cycle. These zones—often beneath the city or on its fractured outskirts—are unpredictable. Gravity may fluctuate. Time may stretch or snap. Memory can replay itself, bleed into the present, or overwrite reality entirely. Sector 11, nicknamed the "Thought Sink," once looped a 45-minute sequence of its citizens' final moments before Concord permanently sealed it off.
But that's exactly why Aiven came here.
Dissonant sectors store Echo Trails—remnants of overwritten updates, buried code from older builds of the city. Places the system failed to purge. Places where the truth might still exist.
He reached a rusted panel at the end of the tunnel, half-buried behind thick conduit. The old keypad flickered in his peripheral vision.
[HARDLINE DETECTED. ACCESS REQUIRES ECHO AUTHORIZATION.]
Aiven smiled grimly. "Figures."
He placed his palm on the panel. The metal was cold—reality didn't always sync properly in the lower tiers. A faint crackle ran down his arm as the Echo Command ghosted into his nerve pathways.
[> ECHO COMMAND: UNFOLD 041 – Memory Sigmatch Confirmed.]
The panel peeled back—not mechanically, but like a reverse burn. It didn't open. It forgot it was ever closed.
Beyond it was a stairwell. Stone. Ancient. From a time before even the city's first virtualization phase. A time when people still believed the soul was something spiritual—not executable.
He stepped through.
Down.
Further down.
The air was thicker now. And darker, not because there was no light—because the air didn't permit light to exist beyond a certain distance. A concept called blackdata density. It fed off noise, emotion, thought. Even his heartbeat felt muffled.
Then, a flash.
Not ahead. Not behind. But within.
Aiven froze.
There was something—someone—inside his head.
"You shouldn't have come here alone."
The voice wasn't his own.
"You don't know what you're carrying yet."
He spun, but the stairwell behind him had shifted. It no longer spiraled up. It led sideways—into a long hallway lined with mirrors, none of which reflected him.
He felt the hairs on his arms lift. Something was wrong. He'd entered a Soft Patch Zone—a place where reality buckled softly, like memory foam made of time and self-perception. Walking through it felt like stepping into someone else's dream mid-render.
And then…
One of the mirrors pulsed. Not with light. With consciousness.
A face stared back.
His face.
But not quite.
This version had older eyes. A scar down his neck. The telltale imprint of full synchronization branding on his left cheek—proof that he had once been integrated fully into the Concord's central server.
"You're not the first me," it said.
"But if you're hearing this… I was the last who made it this far."
Aiven leaned forward. His breath trembled.
"You've been overwritten," the reflection continued. "Your memories, your past, your origin—they're fragmented because they were removed. And every update that comes next will delete a little more of you."
The reflection raised a hand. A sequence appeared on the mirror.
[> PATCHCAST: DEEPLINE_RIPTRACE_07X]
[> INITIATE AT CORE NODE 001.]
"That's where the source is. The truth. The Original Patch. The one they buried with me."
And then the mirror cracked—not shattered, but decompiled, its structure breaking into floating command lines that spiraled upward into the void.
Aiven stood frozen.
"The Original Patch…"
He barely noticed the red light pulsing from the ceiling. A motion sensor. Or rather, a Concord Hunter Beacon.
They'd tracked his PATCHCAST signature.
And worse—they weren't alone.
The Concord Hunters are not human. Not really. They were once citizens whose systems failed to synchronize, or who tried to resist the updates. Their punishment was Forced Integration—their minds rewritten, their bodies enhanced through nano-grafting, and their souls linked permanently to the Cityframe.
Hunters don't sleep.
They don't stop.
They're not programmed to ask questions. Only to restore "system integrity."
Two shapes dropped through the void above, sleek and faceless, with segmented armor that hissed with the sound of pulsing code. Their eyes—if they had eyes—glowed with cascading update logs.
Aiven didn't hesitate.
[> PATCHCAST: NULLJUMP_FORK.ENGAGE.]
He slammed his fist to the floor. Reality around him blinked.
He didn't teleport—teleportation was predictable. Instead, he forked his consciousness along three adjacent probability threads. Each one a version of himself moving differently, slightly off-axis. Only one was real. The others were ghost protocols—temporary, fragile, and meant to confuse predictive AI like the Hunters.
It bought him three seconds.
Just enough time to reach the far corridor.
To breathe.
To remember the code.
"Core Node 001…" he whispered. "That's where it started."
But first—he'd have to find someone who could take him there.
Back in Sector 14, deep within Concord Tower, a woman stood watching multiple feed windows flicker. She wore an obsidian suit etched with data veins, her face calm, her eyes unreadable.
Her name was Spectra Virell.
Concord's Chief Memory Architect.
She zoomed in on the footage of Aiven's escape, pausing at the moment he cast the NULLJUMP.
Her fingers twitched. The screen glitched.
"You're supposed to be dead," she whispered.
"But so was I, once."