Bitstream

Bitstream

By Rowdha Al Sol

Part 1

The Algorithm of Grief

"I will show you fear in a handful of dust"

— T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

I don't remember who I was, or what killed me, but I know this: the afterlife isn't black.

It's grey and cold and hums with a charge that never seems to end. In old stories they might have told you there was something waiting for you on the other side: a loved one you couldn't save when the fire struck and the plywood got a little too out of control, or maybe a god – not one with a massive, unkempt beard, but something funny, something unexpected, like a little rabbit that says, 'Welcome to paradise.'

But there's no one here: no voices, no faces, no signs. Whenever I try to move, I feel like I'm not even there. Like I'm thinking through a body I can't find.

If this is heaven, the holy men's pamphlets failed to mention the boredom.

Though, it's not all bad.

Every so often, a little spark drifts by, like it's checking in on me, making sure the system hasn't completely shut down. I always wait for it. I hope for it. Each time it nears, I wonder if it's God's way of saying, 'Hang on, kid. Not done with you yet.'

It's easy to lose yourself out here. The quiet's so deep it starts to feel like you were never real to begin with. That's why I wait for the spark. It's nice to be reminded there's still life. Something that doesn't want to delete me… not yet, anyway.

Oh, here it comes now.

Hey, little guy. Back again? Drifting closer this time, huh? You always liked keeping your distance before. Bright blue and lost, no sense of direction. I get it. I feel that way too. Sometimes we need space, you know? But – hell – you're really coming in fast now, aren't you? Almost brushing against me. Static, sharp and warm, raising hairs that aren't even there anymore. You wouldn't zap me, would you, little buddy? Not after all this time.

ZzzRRKT!

Ow. Okay. Guess you're feeling a little rough today. That's fine. I can take it. Not your fault, right? Maybe you're just trying to wake me up. Gentle prod. That's all.

ZzzRRKT!

Christ – okay, that's not a prod; that's a cattle prod. Easy now. We're friends, remember? You kept me company. You kept me awake out here. You wouldn't hurt me on purpose.

ZzzRRKT!

Hey, seriously, stop. Please. You're scaring me now. What happened to you? What happened to the little spark that used to float by so harmlessly?

ZzzRRKTTTTTTT!

It hurts! It fucking hurts!

And then God answers:

"Cardiac system restored."

The grey begins to shift, and for the first time, I see the light. It's not holy or otherworldly: it comes in the form of little red ones and zeroes that flash, dive, and zip. They carve out walls in the distance, structures built from what I can only describe as code. Streaming, the numbers soar, higher and higher, then swoop bravely into the trenches of shadow, moulding buildings, streets, a river. After a moment, the grey turns black, forming a cosmic grid without end; wondrous things, so divine, the result of something immense and unseen punching keys into an algorithm that bleeds creation with every stroke.

It is deliberate, composed, as if each digit is a note in some ancient song.

Sounds a little something like this:

Bumpbump.

Bumpbump.

Bumpbump.

A heartbeat. Oh, so slow, so powerful.

But oh Lord, tell me: where are the people, the children, the angels? This cyber reality is beautiful, but it's… it's…. No, this isn't real. Why, this is a lie.

You are not my Lord, are you? You're a cheat, a machine. I will not be swayed by your computational grandeur nor your endless glittering workmanship. Why, you are dressing up emptiness and trying to give it meaning, to give it a pattern, but I see it now. I see you. There's no soul in this skyline. No laughter in the code. No weight, no texture, no heart, no love, no divinity, no control, no spark, no truth, no time, no death, no ache, no smell, no taste, no blood, no breath, no—

Rhea.

—warmth, no memory, no music, no sin, no forgiveness, no her, no me, no us.

I will not be swayed.

Do you hear me? I am the master of this world. I have the power, and right now I'm stuck. Maybe I can…. Yes, I can move. Come on, get up.

Despite my attempts, something keeps me back. Your numbers, they warp around me. Two vertical lines form. Then four, and they fuse, square. Another grid, smaller, starts to crawl. Twitches. Then – snap. It locks into place, and now, finally, I see texture: metal.

It's a dumpster. A digital one, perhaps, but real enough to stink. And I'm lying in it, covered in something viscous.

I have to get out. I have to beat The Machine. Come on. Kick. Kick, damn it. Kick. Kick!

My legs respond, barely. The lid flies open and a flood of code comes crashing down. I try to shove the stream aside, but my right arm won't answer. So I claw with my left, pulling myself up.

Don't stop. Don't think. Just keep going.

But my foot catches on something. An edge? A break in the construct? I don't know. I lose balance.

And I fall.

Head over heels through a world that shouldn't exist. Geometry bends. Angles flex. Gravity stutters as I tumble through screaming data: error messages, red logic, corrupted code flashing past like traffic lights in hell.

Then impact. Something real.

And for a second, I just lie there.

Breathing. Hurting. Alive.

But it's enough.

I roll to my side, shove my weight onto trembling knees. The ground below isn't ground; it's splintered plastic under a thin crust of glitch. Every move sends ripples through it, like stepping on the surface of a screen that hasn't finished rendering. But I don't stop to understand.

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I crawl.

And there, just ahead, something flashes.

Green.

No hesitation, no logic: I lunge. My fingers close around it, and I pull.

I've got it, shift it in my hand. It's heavy and angular and cold. A head. Synthetic, but shaped exactly like a human's. The optics are still wired in: dark glass, though faintly lit. I place it down, careful now. No time to think about where it came from or who it used to be. I just know what I have to do.

I reach for the eyes and pry the optics from their sockets, slow and steady, and then begin inserting them into my own, praying I don't cross the wrong wire or fry what little of me still works. One… then the other. Cold metal slides into my face with a soft click I feel more than I hear.

At first, nothing.

Then the surge. Oh, the surge. It hits hard: my vision spasms, static rakes across the inner lens, and symbols tumble past too quickly to read. I blink, and the world leaps forward, frame by frame, as if God's flipping through creation on a broken slide projector.

The image stabilises.

Water.

Dark, rain-rippled, a canal winds slow and silent through the wreckage of a forgotten borough. Above it, a bridge hangs, casting a long skin of shadow that drapes the water in a burial shroud. And higher again, buildings glow through day with chromatic sheen. They breathe. They blink. They burn. A city that's still alive, that never stopped watching.

And underneath it all...

Bumpbumpbump.

Not the city. Not the realm this time.

Me.

My heart, hammering against the bone and steel that tries to contain it. I look down and see tracer markings along my naked body, tattoos of some lost identity. Blood: dried, cracking. Bullet holes in the shoulder. Blade scars near the hip, some deep, some angry.

And everywhere else: wreckage. Broken limbs, metal husks drowned in waste, robots, androids twisted into awful shapes. Rust, oil, circuitry, filth. This place is a pit. A dumping ground. A graveyard for things that once thought.

Was I one of them? No idea. But I'm still moving, and that counts for something.

I turn. The severed head is right where I left it, jack glowing at the temple. An audio chip. I reach in, fingers steady, and yank the chip free. I slide it into the port above my ear, into the mess of wires and the wreckage of my neural core.

The world keels sideways.

And then, sound. A siren, distant, shrill, winding down a street. The hiss of tyres on wet pavement. A crow – haw-haw! – tearing at the air, and the steady drum of rain against metal.

I know these sounds, but I don't know how I do. These instincts, these impulses.... Where do they come from? And how long was I down here? A day? A decade? God... how much time do I have left?

I blink. Nothing. The vitals display is a smear of corrupted glyphs bleeding across the screen.

I need a new system.

But then, I hear them.

Voices, low and casual, threaded with laughter that doesn't belong in a place like this. The sound bounces off steel, warped by the humidity in the air. They're getting closer. I twist around, enough to see movement on the rise behind me. Three shapes pick their way down the junkpile – two men, one woman – hopping across the carcasses. Their boots crunch against cracked casings and shattered limbs, leaving behind dents in dead faces. The slope behind them climbs upward into a break in the structure, a doorway or hatch maybe, leading somewhere out of this hellpit. Maybe to the city. Maybe to worse.

Their faces are masked by blue-glow visors, thin glass strips that shimmer, pulsing with waveform animations that react to every word. Equalizer bars dance across their faces, and they wear sleeveless kuttes, old-world biker gear slapped together with synth-thread and duct tape. Symbols stitched in crooked patches: a clown with bleeding eyes, a spider cradling a fetus, a snake eating a keyboard, a rabbit with a gun to its own head. The leather is peeling. The people inside it aren't much better. Neck implants gleam through the grime, wires threaded under the skin. Tech. Real tech. But you don't need to be rich to wear it. Just desperate enough to steal it and dumb enough to try.

Scavengers.

Shit. I try to stand, but my knees sag beneath me. Muscles fail. Circuits misfire. I hit the ground with a thud that echoes, and my breath stutters as though my chest can't decide if it wants to keep going.

The woman gets to me first. She moves like she's done this before: quick, but bored. She grabs my jaw and turns my head towards her, tilting it with a kind of gentleness that twists my stomach.

"Definitely a shoo-in for repair," she says, and there's nothing kind about it. "XV-2054 model. They don't make 'em like this anymore."

"'Cause they stopped makin' crap," the taller man replies, pulling a bent menthol out of a crumpled pack. He sticks it between his teeth and sparks a flame from his fingertip, index digit clicking. "Question is," he adds, squinting, "you think it's an android or just another fried-out junkie wearing the wrong skin?"

The woman's already tapping her port, a click near her temple. A neon ripple spreads across her visor, scanning. Green now. Brighter than before. It reflects in her teeth when she smiles. "Part-human," she says. "Definitely. Part-'borg. Old school. Full of back-alley mods and bootleg wetware. Probably spent more time in a tech-surgeon's chair than in her own bed. I've seen cleaner scrap in a landfill."

The third one laughs. He hasn't spoken yet. Just watches, chewing on something.

And that's when I realise: these people are not talking to me.

They're talking about me.

And that's worse, because it means I've already lost a part of me I didn't know I was still holding onto: my humanity.

The taller man drops to one knee and exhales a long ribbon of smoke into my face. It burns my eyes. My lungs twitch, not from the smoke itself, but from the insult buried in the act. I am not some worthless trash. I'm a person. A living, breathing person.

"See anything worth dragging home?" he says.

The woman tilts her head, visor flashing green and gold as she studies me. "Hard to say. The shell's taken a beating. Some parts aren't even registering. Locked out or fried."

"Cheap goddamn optics," the short one says. "Figures."

She doesn't look at him. "Could strap it up, haul it back to the truck. Easier than pulling it apart here with all this junk in the way."

The tall man reaches into his coat. I know what's coming before I see it. Heavy hand. Slow draw. He pulls out a short, ugly thing: fat barrel, scorched casing, that weird orange glow at the muzzle. The ring-trigger clicks as he thumbs the safety off. "Want me to ice it now?" he asks.

She shrugs and backs away. "Just between the eyes. Anything lower, you'll cook the core. Might melt what's left of the processor."

This can't be it. Not after everything. Not after crawling out of that hole. To die here, tossed aside, turned into spare parts by bottom-feeding parasites in knockoff leather and steel.

He leans in. Real close. "Adios, dustbucket." He presses the barrel against my temple.

The air swells around me, and heat floods my nerves. Any moment now, a slug will punch through my skull and scatter whatever I have left. The light will go out. I'll stop. Not sleep. Not drift. Just stop.

And what comes next? Is it really just static? Broken code? A fall into the dead circuits of a world that forgot me?

Not again. Not like this.

"No," a voice says.

Not his. Not hers.

Mine.

Thin. Cracked. But mine.

"The hell?" he growls.

"Not now," I repeat, and I feel it this time, feel the note in the voice, the timbre I hadn't noticed until now. Faint. Feral.... Feminine.

The woman laughs. It's not nice. It's not surprised. It's amused, like she's watching a pet twitch in its sleep. "She talks. Christ. That's wild. Probably been here ten years, and she still remembers how to speak."

"Poor thing," the short man says, licking his teeth. "Should do her a favour. Mercy kill. That's balance, right there."

My heart kicks harder. The circuits light up, pulling power from places I didn't know still had juice. My chest contracts with sudden force, every nerve alight, every system screaming in unison. Something deep in me snaps into place. "No," I say again, louder now. "I can't die!"

"The hell you can't," the tall man snarls. He swings, aiming to plant his palm across my forehead, to knock me flat and finish what he started. But I don't go down. My neck locks.

His eyes go wide.

Mine narrow.

Before he can bring the barrel back to my skull, I move. Cybernetic fingers lash out. Clamp down. His wrist crunches under the pressure: tendons tearing, bones breaking.

He screams. Real pain. No bravado. Just a raw, broken howl.

The pistol jerks in his hand. The shot cracks.

Too late.

"Kill her!" the short one yelps, voice tight and high.

The woman stumbles, boots slipping on the heap of twisted limbs and scorched metal. Her hand flies to her hip, searching for a sidearm she should've drawn sooner. But my arm moves first, faster than I expect, faster than she expects, and drives forward, carrying the tall man's limp body with it. He doesn't fight. Doesn't scream. He's already on his way out.

She raises her weapon.

Something in my left forearm clicks. A mechanism unlocks.

The blade shoots free: long, curved, raptorial.

It rips through the tall man's chest and keeps going, carving through the air and into her neck with a sickening whisper of torn tissue and fibre. She jerks once. Hands open. The gun slips from her grip. Her visor stutters, then dims. For a heartbeat, she just kneels there, trembling.

Then, she drops.

The short one watches it happen. He doesn't speak. His mouth is open but empty. He sees the blood pool at their feet, sees the truth settle in: they picked the wrong corpse.

I slide the tall man off my blade. The metal cuts clean, but his insides don't let go easily. Something wet and coiled drags behind him as he slumps to the side.

The short one chokes out a gasp, then drops his little knife, like it matters, and bolts. He makes for the mountain of dead androids, half-stumbling, half-crawling, losing his footing twice before he finds it again. He doesn't look back.

And I let him go. He's not what I need.

I drag myself forward, towards the woman's body, still twitching with dying nerve signals. I carve through her chest, straight down the middle. My blade retracts into its housing with a hiss, sliding beneath the plates in my arm. Inside the cavity, past the bone, nestled beneath the heart, I see it: the chip. Small. Clean. Still glowing. Her operating system. I reach in and unlatch it, careful not to snap the link points. My fingers shake, not with fear, but with urgency. I don't have long. Replacing a system chip is surgery by lightning, and there's no backup plan if it goes sideways. I press a fingertip to my neural port. My chest hisses open with a hydraulic sigh. Plates part.

No more time.

I grab the discarded switchblade from the ground and jam the tip under the lip of the operating chip already inside me. It resists, then gives. The moment it pops free, the world falls out from under me. My lungs seize. My vision blurs. Quickly, I place the woman's operating system into my chest and watch as the plates seal it shut. Then, everything turns black. Not quiet. Absence. Hurled into a vacuum. Weightless. Gone.

"Operating system online."

My body convulses. Air slams back into my lungs. My eyes snap open.

I'm flat on the ground. But everything feels different.

Clean.

My arm moves smooth as silk. No tremor. No delay. My heart doesn't race; it pulses, steady and strong. Across my neural display, green lines bloom. Bars fill. My vitals spike into the clear. I look down. My torso's still bare, still sliced open in a dozen places, but that's changing. Microbots crawl across my skin in neat rows, stitching torn flesh with thread. I watch as wounds close. Tissue seals. Systems reboot.

"Vitals stabilised," a female voice says, God's voice, calm and almost cheerful. "Have a nice day, Rhea Steele."

A name. Mine.

Rhea Steele.

It rings in my head. Familiar, but warped. Distant. But it fits.

And behind that name, behind that voice, there's something waiting.

More.

Much, much more.