Bitstream

Part 4

Killing is a Cycle

"The electric things have their life too. Paltry as those lives are."

— Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Interlude

I don't remember who I was, or what killed me, but I…

I…

No.

I do remember.

I remember it all.

The little girl with green hair, laughing in the rooflab. Lucian Strider, oil smeared across his cheeks, a mind sharp enough to cut steel, showing me how to weld life into scrap. The way our hands worked in unison until Scrapboy's single eye flared awake. The smell of burnt copper. The stuttering thump of his first steps. And the day it all went wrong.

I remember my mother, Ornella – how she'd patch my knees when I fell, kiss me goodnight long past the age I pretended I was too old for it. I remember still wanting it. I remember my father, Viren – six years chasing the perfect algorithm, the one that could save the city. How he'd smile, push up his glasses, pull me into the kind of hug that made the rest of the world irrelevant. I remember his scent. His warmth. And the night the sirens howled and the air tasted like death until even the sky went black.

I remember the hospital lights. The antiseptic that clung to my hair like smoke. The way my father's face broke when he saw me, when he saw what was left. I remember the moment I knew I would never feel with my right hand again. The phantom itch that never stopped. Not once. Not even in sleep.

I remember the market streets: the rot, the oil, the vacant stares sliding past me as if I didn't exist. I remember the first drink that made me forget. Then the next. Then the hundred after that.

I remember Lucian's voice breaking when he told me it wasn't my fault. And I remember believing it was. I remember Cierus' smile when she lied. I remember Priest's eyes behind the machine, that last flicker of awareness before it vanished.

I remember the match, the fire, the smell of Dad burning, the sound he made. I remember screaming until my throat bled, the glass splitting against my fists, the taste of my own blood, the Ghostfire crawling up past my chin, the green light swallowing my vision.

I remember, I remember, I remember

(oh I remember)

I remember I remember I remember I remember I remember I remember I remember I remember I remember

(I know you do)

I remember the way you looked at me, Dad.

I remember Mom.

Lucian.

Halcyon.

That viper, Calyx Ward.

Adam, the man in the armour, how he electrocuted you.

I remember me.

And I love you.

I love you, Dad.

But I'm lonely…. It's cold here, empty, and… and… I miss you…

"Rhea."

That voice… could it be? Truly? Is it…

"Mom?" I breathe, and the void ripples, splinters.

The darkness starts building itself.

Numbers come first: little blue ones and zeroes, tumbling out of nothing like drops of rain. They multiply, swarm, and stack until they form a colossal wall: impossibly tall, impossibly long. Beyond it, a cosmic grid hums into existence, stretching in all directions, its lines of light bending until they meet at vanishing points that shouldn't exist.

The grid boxes this place in, like the skeleton of some vast machine. The air – or whatever passes for it – tastes like electricity. I can feel the numbers crawling over my skin, imprinting patterns I don't understand. When I look down at the thin crust of glitch that makes up the floor, I notice that I, too, am made entirely of ones and zeroes. But I'm not afraid, not even worried.

I feel nothing.

And I look far into the distance, at the giant wall of code. Little by little, it slides towards me, or perhaps I am moving towards it. I'm not entirely sure. Everything is awfully confusing.

When the wall stops directly in front of me, the numbers ripple again, not like water, but like a living equation rewriting itself. Patterns surge outward from a single point, a bloom of blue light spilling into shapes that twist and fold until they almost resemble limbs. The ones and zeroes peel away from the wall in long, shimmering strands, knitting together into the outline of a woman.

Her features render in slow motion, her face accumulating line by line as if an unseen hand were programming her into existence. The last fragments of code stream from the wall into her hair, which flows behind her like a comet's tail of ancient glyphs. The wall seals itself in her absence, leaving her standing before me, impossibly real and entirely made of numbers – and really, really tall.

Her eyes open: two perfect zeroes lit from within. "I've been expecting you."

I take a moment to respond. "What… are you? And why do you sound like my mom?"

The womanshape's lips – if you can call them that – curl into a smile. "I am what's left when the dreaming stops. What's underneath."

"That's… not an answer."

"It's the only one you'll understand right now." She tilts her head, the movement perfectly smooth, without a trace of muscle or bone. "You may call me Halcyon."

My eyes, should they still exist, go wide. "Halcyon?" I say slowly. "How is this possible? What is this place?"

Halcyon raises her hand, and suddenly she shrinks down to my size. "Don't worry, Rhea. There's nothing to be afraid of."

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

"I'm not afraid," I reply. "Just confused. Is this the afterlife? Am I… oh God, am I dead?"

Halcyon shakes her head. "You are not dead. This space is not heaven, nor hell. It is Virelia."

I take a moment to respond. "Virelia? Is this my father's work?"

Her perfect zero eyes hold mine. "Your father built it as a sanctuary for thought: an architecture of pure data suspended outside physical time. Every calculation, every choice, every heartbeat in this place exists in parallel to reality. No aging. No decay. Only the code, endlessly rewriting itself."

I glance down at my hands, the ones and zeroes crawling beneath my skin. "So this is… what? A programme?"

"A programme, a fortress, a mirror," she says softly. "He called it a prototype. I call it home."

"Why am I here?"

Halcyon stares at me for a moment, so long I begin to feel a little nervous, before she turns away and says, "That is a question Viren never programmed an answer for. But I have an inkling he never planned for you to end up in this space, only for you to survive."

"Survive?" I say.

Halcyon nods, turning to me once again. She takes a step towards me, and the floor ripples out with a thunderous echo, then another, and another. It's so loud I feel the place might collapse, but it doesn't. Instead, the ripples spread in concentric rings across the grid beneath us, turning the ones and zeroes into molten light. The numbers rearrange as they pass, flashing through languages I don't recognise, equations I can't solve, until they dissolve into a pure, heavenly white.

Halcyon stops just short of me. "You're tethered here. A single thread between your body and this space. I believe an explanation is in order."

I chuckle ruefully. "You think?"

She clears her throat, a strangely human reflex for something supposedly made of nothing but code. "That night, before Cierus Marlow trapped you in the experimentation tank and Calyx Ward ordered your father's death, he made a change, small enough to go unnoticed, but decisive enough to alter everything. The Ourovane chip that was placed in the machine: it was not Ourovane at all."

I blink. "What are you talking about?"

"He replaced it with me: the Halcyon chip. While they believed they were uploading your trauma into the most dangerous AI in history, what they were really plugging you into was a lifeline your father built for you alone. It meant Ward's control protocols were meaningless… and it gave me the ability to trigger your microbots."

"He… but how did he know?" I ask. "How did he know that all of those events would happen the way they did?"

Halcyon nods once, then sighs. "He knew he'd been caught handing out the information to you when you called. Calyx Ward had been listening in, and once she has you in her sights, the outcome narrows to a single path. He couldn't stop her from taking you – but he could decide what she'd be taking." Her gaze drifts beyond me, like she's replaying it in real time. "So he stayed in place. He let them come. One of Calyx's men had ordered him into the main laboratory, where the chip for Ourovane resided. He'd taken a beating, quite horribly. And Calyx made the mistake of telling him what she planned to do with you, to upload your consciousness and, by extension, your trauma into the Ourovane protocol as a 'fait accompli'. But when they weren't looking, he managed to swap the shards."

I look at her contemplatively. If what she's saying is true, then that means Calyx uploaded my consciousness into the wrong programme. But… what about the Ourovane chip? What happened to that?

As if reading my mind, Halcyon clears her throat again and says, "They realised the trick eventually, after Calyx noticed that the computer showed a completely different programme to what she was used to. She was furious, but eventually she did find the Ourovane chip… burnt to a crisp with, well, you know."

My father's corpse.

Halcyon nods – again, as if reading my mind. "Yeah," she rasps. Some silence, and then she adds, "When they discovered what happened, Calyx ordered a full reconstruction programme. It took some time, a lot of time even, but eventually they re-created the Ourovane chip by mirroring the data in the old Halcyon logs.

"But there was a difference: Ourovane had a component of your consciousness: your trauma, and nothing else. They couldn't figure out how to transfer your full mind into the chip to complete the original plan," Halcyon added. "Ourovane was built to think, to adapt, but without all of you – without your memories of love, trust, resilience – it was incomplete. A hollow predator. It could mimic your pain, but not the reason you kept living through it." She begins pacing the length of the grid, each step sending faint ripples through the code beneath us. "That was the only reason you were kept alive. Not sentiment. Not mercy. They needed a live tether – the original source – in case they wanted to feed Ourovane more."

My stomach twists. "Like… topping up the tank."

"Exactly." She looks back at me, her expression almost apologetic. "Every time they thought Ourovane was stalling, or behaving erratically, they'd check your vitals. Make sure the tether hadn't been severed. You were the backup drive for their god-machine. A breathing insurance policy."

The words sit like lead in my chest. "So I wasn't a prisoner. I was… livestock."

"Worse," Halcyon says softly. "Livestock can't understand the slaughterhouse. You could. That's why your father hid me inside you – so when the time came, you'd have a chance to do more than just survive it."

I wince as if prodded, but I know, in this cyber hell, no such feeling exists. I only know that I'm lost, that I'm discarded, somewhere, perhaps still hooked up, perhaps still trying to claw back to life. But where? Where am I now?

"They eventually decided Ourovane was a lost cause," Halcyon says. "No one knew the code as well as Viren did. No one could understand it. Eventually, Calyx let it go, handed it to Cierus to run an underground braindance facility. She used me, the Halcyon chip, which by that point had taken over the entirety of Neo Arcadia – through tech, through implants, through political division – to secure a seat at the Council of Paxson. She became the dictator of the city not too long after, and she still plans, one day, to take over the entirety of Neo Arcadia."

"Through mind-manipulation…" I say.

Halcyon nods. "She's about halfway there." With a flick of her wrist, a vial digitises, pulsing yellow. "Not Ghostfire – not anymore. Lumina. It's stronger, more stable. Combined with mind-manipulation technology, she can create an army."

"She needs to be stopped," I say slowly, remembering it's not the first time I'd said that, and it surely will not be the last.

Halcyon, finally arriving at the answer to my biggest question of all, says: "You're in a dumpster. Dropped off by an aerodyne. Thrown, more specifically. Your body's trying to reboot, still trying to pull juice with the help of the microbots."

"A dumpster?" I say. "How long have I been there?"

"Decades," Halcyon says. "Your eyes have been taken, but you're hidden, tucked away where even the cleverest of scavengers won't think to look. But time's running out. You need a boost. And I can give it to you. I can help you return to the real world. But you must do something for me in return."

"What?" I ask, but I already know. I can feel it in the way her voice slows, the way her eyes sharpen into hard points of light.

"You have to take the Halcyon chip back from Calyx Ward before she burns the city to the ground. Before she makes them all hers."

Something cracks in the grid. A sound like ice splintering on a winter pond. The blue lines around us falter, then start running in glitchy stutters.

"She's had it long enough," Halcyon says. "And the longer she holds it, the closer we come to a world where no thought is your own. You will not survive in that world, Rhea. No one will."

The crack widens. A plume of raw code sprays up from the floor, numbers spilling into the air like sand caught in a high wind. My skin begins to change, the ones and zeroes breaking apart, reforming, breaking again.

"What's happening?" I shout.

"Your tether's fraying. Too much noise between here and there. We're out of time." Her voice is louder now, distorted, like it's coming from a hundred Halcyons at once.

The sky folds inward, slabs of darkness grinding down over the grid. The wall that birthed her twists like wet paper, code bleeding from its seams in luminous streams. I hear things in that bleed: whispers, a child laughing somewhere far away, chatter, the combination of Neo Arcadia's families and workers and criminals, all under the watchful eye of Halcyon.

"Find her," Halcyon's voice booms through the collapse. "Find Calyx Ward. Take what's mine. And if you must… burn everything she's built."

The floor bucks under my feet. The ripples come again, only this time they're black, oily, and they eat the light instead of reflecting it. The grid crumbles, a million squares snapping into nothingness. My legs go with it.

She leans close as the last of her face begins to unravel into raw symbols. "I'll see you again, Little Spark."

Then the world tears itself apart.

No blue. No black. Just grey.

And do you hear it?

No?

Listen now.

Listen carefully:

"Cardiac system restored."