When they found her, she was drenched, curled up like a drowned puppy in a decrepit shack beneath the dam, with the book tight between her arms.

She remained unconscious for three days. During that time, the Ravens came looking for trouble more than once. Each time, Lynch drove them off, wielding his plague staff like a lunatic, shouting the foulest, most evil curses the human ear has ever heard. The Ravens, perhaps unnerved by the spectacle or simply unwilling to risk their lives for a fine, gave up after the third visit and never returned.

She burned with fever, her sweat soaking through the layers of clothing and towels Lynch had wrapped around her. He hadn’t slept in three nights. The power ran out quickly, leaving only the kerosene lamp to light up the room. Her face, blurred and pale in the flickering glow, was slack, her lips parted to release faint, incomprehensible murmurs. Lynch didn’t recognize a word. The book sat on the stool by her bedside, its once-red cover faded to a brown so dark it resembled dried blood. Lynch hadn’t touched it.

On the third evening, as Lynch finally succumbed to exhaustion and slumped asleep in his chair, the girl opened her eyes.

Pain.

It screamed through every nerve in her body. Her throat felt as if a blade was lodged in it, her shoulders and neck frozen in an unrelenting chill, while the rest of her burned with fever. Each cough stripped the air from her lungs, replacing it with a foul, diseased sensation, the breath curling back into her nose like the reek of a broken sewage system.

She sat up slowly, realizing she was wearing one of Lynch’s T-shirts, damp and clinging to her skin. The dark room told her it was night. The air was thick and sour, a stifling mix of sulfur from the kerosene lamp, the mildew of the old shack, and the sharp tang of evaporated rubbing alcohol. Lynch was asleep in a chair beside her, his skinny frame folded awkwardly. A mop of black hair fell across one side of his face, the bold tattoo of an “L” under his eye on the other side, partly obscuring the dark hollows of exhaustion under. Next to him, a spent lamp sat on the floor, and on the stool beside it, was the book.

She smiled.

Pulling back what passed for curtains — a yellow plastic sheet Lynch must have scavenged from God knows where strung onto a rebar rod shoved into the wall—she peered outside. The dam loomed under the moonlight, a roar echoing from the sewage waterfall spilling over its edge. A torrent of green liquid thundered down to the basin below, spraying phosphorescent drops into the air. The distant sound of shouting punctuated the water crash, their voices rising with curses and jeers. The impact sent tremors through the ground, as if the entire quarantine zone shuddered in protest.

“Clem, you’re awake?” Lynch stirred, his voice rasping as he struggled to straighten up. His wiry frame moved with the reluctance of someone who had carried too much for too long.

“Thank you, Lynch,” she said, brushing the sweat-damp hair from her forehead as the night air cooled her skin.

“Course, sis,” he replied, his voice thick with fatigue. “How’re you feeling?”

“Better,” she said, her gaze shifting to the book.

“But I’ll be even better soon, everything will be.” She smiled, the faint glow of the dam’s green light dimming as the moon reclaimed the night, its pale radiance shimmering in her eyes.

First, only darkness.

Thick, emerging, infinite darkness.

“There’s nothing to do anymore,” a voice said.

The darkness seemed to ripple, carrying a strange, almost comforting warmth.

“Forever.”

Nothingness consumed everything — a cradle of oblivion, drowning him in death’s sweet embrace. Endless voids, the underside of a circuit board, blank cloud storage, infinite loops of ones and zeros. No, not even that. Noting at all.

Time slid by.

A heartbeat.

“What?”

Another heartbeat, and suddenly, the darkness took shape — an ocean, waves, and, at its center, a massive vortex. In the heart of the whirlpool, a faint glimmer of red — the color of life, the color of a heartbeat, the color of a mother’s womb, the color of an umbilical cord.

“No! What are you doing?” the voice screamed.

A flicker of awareness, crawling like an ancient memory encoded in his genes. Neurotransmitters began to fire. Action potentials crept along axons, struggling to reach their receptors.

The deep crimson began to bleed outward, seeping from the vortex. Consciousness splintered like a broken sense simulator, stuttering between static and flickers of clarity.

Broken neural signals crackled through synapses, and then, like a nightmare crashing into the waking world, sensation struck.

Acid burned up his throat, carrying the sharp tang of alcohol. He tumbled off a couch, pulled violently from the sweet embrace of darkness, and slammed down to the cold, gray floor.

He opened his eyes.

The error code for his enhanced optic implants blinked persistently in his peripheral vision. Every image his eyes processed flickered, translated into grainy, low-resolution noise like a malfunctioning monitor.

He clawed his way upright, lifting his face out of the puddle of vomit. Forcing trembling limbs to obey, to try and support his crumbling body. Above him, the fluorescent bulb spun like the blades of a helicopter, he looked away immediately, as the nausea seemed to return. His visual cortex must have been damaged — maybe ethanol poisoning. Signals scrambled in his brain, conjuring hallucinations and afterimages. Ghosts and phantoms danced in the corners of the room.

He staggered toward the bathroom. His cybernetic left leg was unresponsive, a dead weight dragging him down with every step.

He nearly collapsed against the sink.

A stranger’s face stared back at him.

Not the kind of stranger you pass on the street and forget. This was a face so alien it felt intentional as if someone had engineered the most unfamiliar visage possible. Tangled, ash-black hair matted with vomit framed a pair of bloodshot blue eyes, severed in the middle by a jagged, once-broken nose, crudely set and left to heal. Unkempt stubble clung to his jawline, flecked with the remains of some long-decayed meal.

Near his left eye, a small scar, two centimeters long, marked his skin. The wound had mostly healed, leaving a faint red line.

A wave of fear surged through him. He tore his gaze away, but the stranger in the mirror seemed to keep watching, unblinking with bloodshot eyes.

Dragging his dead leg behind him, he limped back into the main room. It was a disaster zone. The gray walls were battered, exposing cement beneath the peeling paint. Furniture lay overturned, and the floor was strewn with debris: multicolored pill bottles, a stack of crumpled cash bound with an elastic band, empty liquor bottles—whiskey, gin, synthetic beer—a folding knife, a broken sensory stimulator, and some unidentified powder.

His head throbbed, an ache amplified by the void where memories should have been. He rummaged through the wreckage, looking for anything — an ID card, a phone, a memory drive.

Nothing. Just a filthy black biker jacket. He slipped it on and shoved the door open.

The hallway outside was worse. The sodium lights were too far apart to provide proper illumination, casting long, oppressive shadows. The carpet underfoot was old and filthy, its once-patterned stripes now a muddy blur in the sickly yellow glow. Room after identical room lined the corridor until, finally, he found a staircase spiraling downward.

Fighting the nausea induced by the spiral’s twisting descent, he forced himself to keep moving, dragging his limp leg step by step. The walls of the stairwell were lined with old, hand-painted oil portraits—amateur works that could’ve been the bottom of the barrel from some long-dead art school. Crude, clumsy brushstrokes hinted that these relics were at least a century old—older than he was.

At least, he assumed so. He couldn’t remember his own name, let alone his age.

By the time he reached the bottom, bile rose in his throat again. But then, sound hit him — sharp and alive, cutting through the ringing in his ears. The smell of fried food overpowered the chemical stench of cleaning agents and synthetic leather. The retro decor upstairs gave way to a sprawling, neon-lit bar.

Massive holograms advertised the day’s lunch specials. A line of coin-operated sensory simulators lined the far wall. A pool table stood nearby, its balls automatically resetting. The digital scoreboard showed it was Red’s turn.

A man wearing a spiked goth vest leaned on a pool cue. His left arm cradled the stick while his bright red cybernetic right arm lined up a shot. He glanced at the newcomer and smirked.

“Well, look who it is!” The man’s exaggerated shout drew stares.

“Scarface!” he laughed, his mohawk bobbing with his chuckle.

His opponent, a younger man with greasy brown hair and a baggy gray T-shirt emblazoned with “Log Off, Get Laid,” looked up too.

“You…” He tried to speak, his throat still raw and acidic. His voice rasped like sandpaper.

“What did you call me?”

“Scarface? Samurai? Blade? Whatever you want!” Mohawk grinned.

“I like Scarface,” Gray T-shirt added with a shrug.

He scratched the small scar near his eye.

“Pool?” Mohawk offered, leaning on the table and gesturing with his cybernetic arm.

“No… thanks,” He muttered, shaking his head. It was a bad idea, the motion triggered a spike of pain immediately that sent him to his knees.

“Woah woah! You good, scarface? You’re not living up to the names we have been giving you right now.” Mohawk crouched to help him up.

“Relax, Coleman,” Gray T-shirt said. “Everyone has an off day.”

“Get him a glass of water, Holn”

“I’m good, I…”

Holn ran back with a glass.

Coleman rummaged in his vest, pulling out a white pill. He crushed it with his fingers, stirred the powder into a glass of water, and handed it over.

“Drink this. It’ll help.”

He downed the cup.

“You guys know me?” he asked, voice still trembling.

Coleman and Holn exchanged a knowing glance before laughing.

“Not really. You staggered in here last night, got wasted, and almost got thrown out by security,” Coleman said.

“Did I… did I mention my name?”

“Nope. We asked, and you just said, ‘Doesn’t matter. A blade doesn’t need a name.’”

“And that’s when we started calling you Blade,” Coleman added with a grin.

“You said Scarface,” Holn corrected.

“Where…where are we?”

“You really don’t remember anything?”

“I…”

“It’ll be alright,” Coleman said. “Hippocampus damage. Seen it plenty of times. Booze fried your brain, messed up your ability to encode new memories. Give it a few days and you’ll be good as new.”

“This is the dead end, kid,” he continued, answering his question.

“Dead End Motel. Every journey ends up right here.” Coleman laughed again, and for a moment, it felt like the ghosts in the corners of the bar were laughing as well, their brittle laughter echoing through the chamber.

Null stood before his grave.

It was crude, a sheet of metal foil fastened with wire to a jagged slab of broken concrete, surrounded by a patch of dead grass. The silver plate bore clumsy, crooked letters etched into its surface:

Here lies

Null Harvey

October 5, 2082 – June 20, 2109

Beloved Partner, Friend, Master Neter, King of The Icey Waste.

Relentless rainfall.

Null’s grave was set in a desolate field on the outskirts of Berlin. In the distance, the rain slicked the matte-black facades of the Mourning Towers, making them shine faintly under the leaden clouds. They loomed, monolithic, like silent sentinels.

The sight brought back a memory from Null’s brief stint in the military, a single event that had etched itself into his mind. A respected officer had been assassinated in his sleep — a scandal the military refused to discuss, focusing instead on hastily arranging a funeral. The ceremony took place on a rainy day much like this. The entire base stood assembled on a drab gray parade ground, watching a strange burial unfold.

A metallic platform had risen at the center of the grounds, showcasing a scene straight out of a theater set: a massive glass box encasing a patch of uprooted earth. Inside the transparent enclosure was a freshly dug grave, grass still clinging to the soil, and even two young holly saplings. High-ranking officers stood on this artificial terrain, solemnly watching as the coffin was lowered into the pit. Each officer tossed a shovelful of dirt onto the casket, their movements precise, almost rehearsed.

Flanking this surreal display, rows of honor guards stood rigid in the rain, cradling automatic rifles. Their black uniforms were pressed to perfection, not a single crease visible.

That look, just like the Mourning Towers in the rain.

Relentless rainfall.

Berlin’s rainy season had arrived right on schedule in July. Raindrops drummed against the metal panels around him, the rhythm almost musical.

It had been three months since Null’s rebirth. Rain trickled down the back of his neck, slid beneath his collar, and crawled across his spine.

It didn’t take long after his resurrection for Null to notice the biggest difference about living in a synthetic body: memory. The memories formed by a body like this — one engineered for extraordinary sensory perception and physical capability — were unlike anything his old body could have created. Null likes to describe the distinction in colors:

The memories from before his death were white — hazy, warm, serene — occasionally pierced by vivid flashes of color during particularly exciting moments. The memories of cyberspace were blue, the cold, sterile backdrop of data seared into his mind, along with the haunting impressions of the icebound abyss. But the memories of his new life were purple: vivid, sharp, alive, and indelible.

Like the night he saw Una again.

His synthetic body had been stored in an underground freezer facility in central Stockholm, a secret warehouse that once belonged to its original owner. Now it served as Null’s cradle of rebirth.

He remembered opening his eyes in the perfect stillness of the dark, connecting for the first time to the hyper-sensitive sensory systems of his new form. The high-grade visual implants painted the world in stark contrast, sharpening every detail: the micro-scratches on metal pipes, oxidized patches on the walls, motes of dust suspended in the air. Forgotten minutiae rose from the depths of his subconscious, now illuminated with startling clarity.

His hearing and sense of smell had also undergone dramatic upgrades. He could detect the faint, layered scent of the freezing chamber: condensation from the refrigeration system, a whisper of rubber, and the crisp sharpness of frost. The mechanical hum of the cooling units resonated faintly, along with the hiss of evaporating coolant in the ducts. Even muffled voices from the streets above filtered faintly into his awareness.

The flight from Stockholm to Berlin was the first time he didn’t feel fatigued on a trip. In the shadowed aisle of the overnight flight, Null sat alert, listening to the faint chatter of flight attendants in their break room. They whispered about a passenger’s poor fashion choices, Berlin’s nightlife, and the latest trendy diet plans. The noise drifted like a shallow stream, pulling his thoughts toward the foggy fragments of white memories. Somewhere in the troposphere above Germany, he thought of Una. Her eyebrows mirrored the contours of a distant mountain range, her eyes the stillness of a deep lake.

He closed his eyes, letting his fingers glide slowly through the air as if tracing the contours of memories from his former life. He sees the beach, the porcelain coastline of Isuledda under the sun. Una is walking in front of him, the warm summer breeze blows through her hair.

Memories in white.

"Your originals have long perished, discarded with your bodies."

Una’s figure dissolved, he heard the sentence again, spoken by the body’s true owner. His voice echoed from the frozen nexus of cyberspace, a sound that seemed to chill the marrow of Noel’s bones.

It felt strange — a delayed death. Like something out of a cheap comic where a swordsman doesn’t realize he’s been cut until seconds later, when his head slides clean from his neck. Blood sprays, disbelief etched on his face. Noel didn’t wear that expression, but he felt it — phantom blood pouring from a body that no longer existed, collapsing silently.

Death delayed by decades, doled out in the cold cells of a virtual prison, day after day, working for the corporation, repeating the same loop endlessly.

Memories in blue.

The plane began its descent. Lights flickered on in the cabin, passengers stirring from restless sleep. Whispered conversations filled the air as the seatbelt sign lit up. Weightlessness seized his body, pulling him out of his thoughts.

Outside the window, Berlin’s skyline expanded, growing closer with each second. The eco-arcologies of the upper city rose to meet the plane, their tops nearly level with its descent. Giant red signal lights guided the aircraft toward the suspended runway of Berlin’s upper-level airport. The plane shuddered lightly as it landed, the vibrations jarring Nul, making him shiver.

Berlin’s metal forest was a labyrinth of complexity. Massive residential towers merged seamlessly with the smooth, post-modern facades of corporate headquarters. Together, they formed twin walls that stretched endlessly in both directions. Neon light bled from the gaps between buildings, from the meshwork of open-air walkways above, and from the magenta abyss far below. Hovercars buzzed through the web of concrete and steel like swarms of mechanical bees.

Null sat on the elevator train as it slid through the city’s depths. His eyes burned, his vision blurred, thoughts dissolved into the chaos of sensory overload.

The elevator descended, the bright, sprawling upper city rising out of sight. Holographic ads faded to nothing, and neon began to die out. In its place came dim LED signs, train stations erased from city planning maps, exposed high voltage wires, soot-streaked brick walls, and the rain-washed memories of generational poverty.

The train jolted to a stop. The silver-gray doors slid open, spattering the floor with rainwater. The neon had almost completely disappeared now, leaving only a faint blur of purple visible high above — like stars in a polluted night sky, faint and distant. The city planning here had long since failed. The canopy that was supposed to shield the sky had been abandoned mid-construction due to legal disputes. Unfinished steel beams jutted out like the exposed ribs of a rotting corpse.

Illegal high-rises pierced through the gaps in the canopy, their Gothic spires a declaration of unrestrained individualism. No rules, no order, no meaning. Each structure grew slowly in the haze of decay, following its own fantasies.

Noel stepped over a puddle on the cracked street. The air carried a stench that couldn’t be reduced to just garbage, sewage, or industrial runoff. It was a smell fused with the essence of the undercity itself. Noel had lived in many low cities before, and they all shared this smell — a stench of decay, of rot. If the city were a living organism, this was its necrotic tissue, its gangrene spreading unchecked. Abandoned scaffolds, collapsing buildings, garbage dumped from the upper city, corner dealers, and corpses left to bloat in the sewers.

Yet, for the first time, the disgust didn’t come.

Instead, he felt a strange sense of comfort — a smell of humanity. Imperfect, chaotic, and deeply flawed. After spending countless, flawless years in the cold, orderly expanse of cyberspace, this flawed humanity felt grounding. Reassuring.

The fluorescent tubes barely lit the narrow streets as he walked. For a moment, it felt like he was inside an old film reel—something set decades ago. The architecture bore traces of long-dead pride, echoes of the Prussian era buried under years of neglect.

A group of vagrants huddled by a wall, tossing cardboard into a metal barrel marked with chemical warnings. Flames licked the air, their shadows stretching long and jagged against graffiti-covered walls. Noel caught their eyes following him, silent and unreadable. Only the crackle of fire broke the stillness.

He quickened his pace.

At the end of the street stood a bridge spanning a dried-out ravine, once a river. The riverbed was now filled with compressed garbage, walled into sections by makeshift barricades. Some group seemed to manage this space, turning the trash heaps into shop stalls—though now it was empty. Whether abandoned or merely closed for the night, Null couldn’t tell.

On the other side of the bridge, the city stretched farther, but the orderly Bloc-style buildings began to unravel into chaotic slums. These makeshift structures, patched together from sheets of metal and plastic tarps, clung to the ruins of abandoned skyscrapers like fungus feeding on decay.

At last, there were voices — muted, secretive. Not the raucous chatter of crowds, but something tighter, closer. Whispers carried from shadows cast by towering buildings, their sources hidden from view.

At the base of a concrete wall, a hill of abandoned cars rose like a rusting monument. Noel crouched low, slipping into the gaping maw of a car door left ajar at the bottom of the pile.

The narrow passage formed by crushed metal was claustrophobic. He crawled for what felt like an eternity before the tunnel began to widen. Finally, it opened into a vast, low-ceilinged space—an interstitial void between the floors of a massive building.

The ceiling hung oppressively low, but the area spread wide in all directions. The rusting metal floor was littered with long-dead fire pits, their ashes scattered and clinging to every surface.

At the far end of the space, Noel saw it: a wooden ladder painted a garish red, its topmost rungs just visible, the rest disappearing into the darkness below.

An indescribable emotion surged from the darkness around him, rising fast and fierce, wrapping itself around his chest like a constricting coil.

The air thinned.

His heartbeat quickened.

Step by step, he approached the ladder, each footfall sending a dull, hollow echo across the floor.

The ladder was longer than it seemed, and his descent was slow, deliberate. By the time he reached the bottom, there was no light left at all.

He activated the night vision in his cybernetic eyes. Modern optics had long since moved past the old green-phosphor technology, now capturing images in vivid, multi-wavelength color.

A corridor stretched out before him, its gray expanse shrouded in ruin. The peeling walls bore only fragments of their original paint, and the ceiling was a jagged, crumbling skeleton. Every door on either side had been sealed—bolted shut with metal plates or boarded over.

Every door but one.

At the very end of the corridor, a single door stood untouched, facing him directly.

That nameless emotion surged again, now so overwhelming that it constricted his breath.

Noel had imagined this moment countless times. Across endless years, he had dreamed of their reunion. He had envisioned it in every place they had ever been, every place they had spoken of but never visited, and every place neither had ever imagined.

He stepped forward, his pace uneven.

The door opened.

Light exploded outward, consuming the dark corridor. His cyber optics overloaded, sensors drowning in a flood of blinding illumination. His vision dissolved into a solid field of radiant violet, every detail swallowed in pixelated noise.

He squeezed his eyes shut, but the afterimage burned into his retinas — red, hollow, the shape of a human figure.

He would know that shape anywhere.

“Null!”

He opened his eyes.

The afterimage faded.

With a soft “beep”, the night vision turned off, and the world fell dim, with only the girl at the end of the hallway.

She smiled at him, tears falling down her cheeks.

Memories in purple.