Chapter 1 – The Awakening in the Ashes

“This world is a well-tended wound. You shall be the salt.”An unvalidated verse from the HATHOR.∞ Codex

1.1 – The Well of Tears

Refusal.

The word cracks in his skull before he even understands he has a skull. His chest rises—first breath or hundredth, he doesn’t know. Something cold and viscous fills his mouth. Not water. Not just that. Something that tastes of copper mixed with… with what? Damp earth? He couldn’t say.

His tongue retracts, instinctive, seeking a corner of his mouth that isn’t soiled. There isn’t one. His entire palate oozes with this acrid, metallic substance that turns his saliva into lukewarm mud. He spits. The liquid spatters on the stone—black, viscous, its filaments catching the light.

His fingers move without conscious thought. A rubbing motion. Index against thumb. The texture is analyzed. His tongue finds the residue in his mouth, rolls it over. A taste of oxidized copper mixed with… His brain supplies the information: Glycerol. Organic compound. Density 1.26.

He flinches. Where does this knowledge come from? Not from him. He KNOWS it. His hands tremble. He looks at them—these hands that know things he has never learned. His index finger traces a chemical formula in the air. H₂O + contaminants. The gesture is precise, automatic, professorial.

Panic surges. He strikes his temple. Stop. STOP! But the data keeps flowing. Temperature: 15.7°C. Relative humidity: 67%. Atmospheric composition…

“Shut it!” The cry bursts out, hoarse. His own voice startles him. The data falls silent. Momentarily. The air smells of rotten figs. Why does this scent evoke something? He’s never eaten figs. Never eaten anything, for that matter. But his nostrils flare and his neurons stir. A woman was singing while peeling fruit. Her voice was… how can his memory be nostalgic for a lie?

He emerges from the basin and water slides off his skin, forming perfect beads that roll without leaving a trace. His clothes—when had he put on these clothes?—repel moisture with an efficiency that belongs to no earthly fabric. A technology so advanced it makes itself forgotten. Under his fingers, the fabric is warm. A slow, regular vibration rises in his palm, a mechanical purr.

The silence around him isn’t silent. He hears whispered prayers, heartbeats thirty meters away, the friction of sandals on stone. His implant, or this parasitic consciousness that slices the world into layers of data, is strangely quiet, except for a hum at the edge of hearing.

An old woman. Her stringy hair frames a face that has survived for too long. Ploc. She drops a bead into the water and the sound resonates. Her lips move but no words come out. Is she praying? Cursing? The water ripples and swallows the bead. Definitively.

A man with a metal arm—not a crude mechanical limb, but something elegant, surgical, ending in three tapered fingers. He pours a liquid that smokes and smells of bitter almonds and burnt circuits. The liquid touches the water and draws phosphorescent spirals before disappearing.

A child. Maybe eight years old. Maybe forty—here, age is measured by the weariness in the eyes, not by wrinkles. He lets sand flow between his fingers. Red, blue, yellow. Each grain shines for a second before sinking. The sand makes a crystalline sound as it touches the water, like tiny bells being extinguished.

They don’t look at him. They don’t even see him. But their bodies lean imperceptibly in the opposite direction, like sunflowers fleeing a black sun.

He gets out of the basin and his muscles obey a choreography he has never learned. Each movement is too fluid, too precise, as if he were being remote-controlled by an expert ghost. His feet find perfect grips on the wet stone. His right hand settles exactly where balance demands. It’s both beautiful and terrifying—this deadly grace he has inherited.

The scars on his hands form a hexagon. Imperfect, but recognizable. Why this shape? The question loops in his head, absurd, derisory, but it’s the only concrete thing to hold on to. A hexagon.

The landscape stretches before him: Tombouctou-Ash in all its splendor. The towers weren’t collapsed. They were folded. The load-bearing metal, twisted back on itself. Right angles no longer existed, replaced by impossible curves that defied gravity. You don’t destroy a city like this. You twist it. Strangle it. The red sand isn’t sand—it’s crushed brick, pulverized glass, bones reduced to dust. Under this white sun that burns without warming, each grain casts a tiny, sharp shadow, creating a carpet of pixelated darkness.

His hand instinctively finds his temple. Under the skin, something hard. He presses. An electric shock crosses his skull—not painful, but rather… curious. Something is examining him from the inside. He withdraws his hand, disoriented. His fingers retain the imprint of the strange heat emanating from his own forehead.

A crackle. Somewhere near him, a public terminal emits an electronic whine. Its screen flickers on, displaying random characters, then goes out. An organic lamp above his head pulses erratically. His corrupted bio-electric signature is already interfering with the surrounding electronics.

Standing, he wavers. No dizziness—his vestibular system works perfectly. But this body doesn’t belong to him. He’s piloting a borrowed vehicle whose controls he doesn’t know.

The world tilts. A certainty: the fall. He grits his teeth, anticipates the shock of stone against his face. But the shock doesn’t come. His eyes open—he’s standing, perfectly stable. He can still feel the echo of the corrective movement in his calves and ankles, a perfect micro-dance he executed without even being aware of it. This body that just saved his life is not his.

A piece of fabric at his collar. He grasps it. His fingers tremble—the first sign of humanity since his awakening. Embroidered letters, half-consumed by an acid that has left only golden traces: ARCHIV...

The word doesn’t come to his mind; it rises from his throat. Archivassin. His own lips formed it. It’s a muscular skill, a vocal scar. His fingers clench, miming the shape of an object he has held a thousand times. What? A syringe? A scalpel? The word isn’t an answer; it’s the beginning of a new, unbearable series of questions.

Flash: a white, sterile laboratory, where the air smells of ozone and cold fear. Latex gloves squeaking on a metal table. A hypodermic needle seeking the right angle of entry in his neck. A man’s dying scream! His scream? The other’s scream?

He collapses. His knees strike the stone with a dull thud that resonates in his bones, travels up his spine like a seismic wave. His hands press against his temples, trying to contain something that claws, that digs inside his skull. Blood flows from his nose.

He doesn’t remember; he relives. Or rather, his body relives stolen memories, echoes of a dead man who refuses to remain silent in his resurrected flesh.

A woman approaches. Her face is ravaged by what could be age or just the fatigue of existing here. Her eyes pass through him, seeking something behind his face, in the invisible territories where truths hide. When she finds nothing, she backs away.

“Please…”

His voice comes out broken from his throat. The words taste of ash.

“I… I don’t know…”

“No, no… I don’t have time. Leave me alone.”

The words fall from her lips. Definitive. She wraps herself in her shawl. She is protecting her memories, her dreams, everything that still makes her exist.

A child emerges from behind a collapsed sandstone pillar. He points a finger at him—an accusatory gesture, primitive, universal. Further away, a thin man with cynical eyes observes the scene from the shadow of an archway. He jots something down in a worn notebook before disappearing into the crowd. A collector of anomalies, perhaps. His mother appears, covers the child's eyes, and pulls him towards an alley. But the child resists. He turns his head, continuing to stare over his mother's shoulder. "Don't look at him," she snaps.

His eyes are not those of a child. Too old. Too heavy. They have seen things that no eight-year-old’s face should carry.

A man passes by. Stops. He looks at him with that particular intensity reserved for car accidents—you can’t help but look, even if you know you’ll regret it. The man shakes his head and quickens his pace. His soles clap on the uneven pavement with a hurried rhythm. Flight, flight, flight.

Thirst arrives, invades his throat, transforming his tongue into rough cardboard. A public fountain, its clear water flowing continuously, fed by pipes that survived the collapse. He approaches, leans over. The water flows between his fingers. Cool and pure. Tempting.

He doesn’t want it.

To drink would be to accept this stolen body, this bootleg existence. To drink would be to say “yes” to the imposture.

He opens his mouth to speak. His throat contracts.

“YS-7…”

The voice breaks. A serial number. Not a name. He starts again, forces the words out of this rebellious throat.

“I am…”

The silence stretches. He waits for his memory to whisper the rest. For something, anything, to fill this gaping void where his identity should be. But there is nothing. Just the echo of his own words bouncing off the walls and returning to him, distorted, mocking.

I am what?

The question hangs in the dusty air, unanswered.

1.2 – The Wall of Lies

Evening falls and transforms the ruins into a shadow theater. Lights come on one by one—organic glows that grow on the walls, resembling luminescent mushrooms. Some pulse to the rhythm of their owners’ heartbeats. Others change color according to the ambient mood, turning red when anger passes, blue when sadness settles.

The child from earlier returns. Alone this time. One eye of flesh, brown and innocent. One metal eye that blinks red, an implacable cybernetic metronome. This asymmetry should be disturbing. Instead, it seems perfectly natural, as if evolution had always intended for humans to one day need to see in two different spectrums.

He approaches, sniffing the air like a dog following a trail. His nose wrinkles, his nostrils dilate. He’s searching for something that only his sense of smell can identify.

“You smell like a walking dead man.”

The voice is thin, childish. The words are old, worn, repeated. The child blinks—flesh eye, then metal eye. The delay creates a grotesque facial tic.

“I’ve seen voids before. At the Well. They cry.”

The kid squats, picks up a stone. Weighs it. A child’s gesture. Then his gaze changes. Something ancient passes through his irises. A weariness that doesn’t belong to this smooth face.

“My mother, she saw the Collapse. Me too.”

Impossible. The child wasn’t born yet. But in his mechanical eye, there are reflections. Images. A city burning. People running. Implanted memory? Technological inheritance? The kid shrugs.

“We don’t age the same way anymore.”

“I…” The words get stuck somewhere between his throat and his consciousness. “I don’t know what I am.”

The child squints his human eye, while the other continues its hypnotic blinking. Red. Red. Red.

“Mom says ghosts cry all the time.”

He instinctively brings his hand to his cheek. The skin is dry. No tears. Not even the desire to cry.

“You don’t cry. You just look. Are you searching for something that doesn’t exist anymore?”

The precision of this observation chills him. This child-old man has put his finger on something he doesn’t understand himself.

“Maybe I’m not a ghost. Maybe I’m…”

“Nothing.”

The child finishes his sentence with that innocent cruelty peculiar to children.

“You’re nothing.”

The child doesn’t back away immediately. His metal eye blinks faster, recording the protagonist’s reaction to the insult. He throws a small pottery shard at his feet, testing him. Then, seeing a silhouette in the distance—his mother?

He pivots and runs; he’s a field agent who has finished collecting information.

His steps echo on the stones, heavy. The sound fades, gets lost in the maze of alleys. But the echo of his words remains, repeating in a loop in his skull.

You’re nothing. You’re nothing. You’re nothing.

The void within him takes on a new consistency. Heavier than before. More definitive. It’s no longer just the absence of memories—it’s the absence of being.

A hiss. The air becomes glacial. The temperature has just dropped fifteen degrees in one second. His lungs contract, expelling vapor. Around him, the stones are covered with a thin film of frost that cracks under the thermal expansion.

A white light sweeps the ruins. A wall of photons advancing with the implacable slowness of a glacier. It erases shadows, literally absorbs them, leaving behind an overexposed, washed-out landscape where even colors have lost their substance.

This light has texture. It sticks to the skin, seeps into the pores, seeking to read what’s underneath. He feels each photon that strikes him, each quantum of information rising toward the source.

A voice falls from the sky—or rather, the idea of a voice, translated into audible frequencies by speakers that have forgotten how to produce human sounds.

[Alert. Memory dissonance. Potential systemic contagion. Marking protocol: activated. Indexing unit: assigned. Coherence: will be restored.]

The voice is speaking of him. He knows this with the certainty that precedes understanding. Each word designates him, names him, catalogues him. He is no longer a man in this voice: he is a problem to solve, an error to correct, a virus to eradicate.

Violent nausea doubles him over. Bile rises, burns his throat. His stomach contracts; invisible hands twist him from the inside. He leans against the wall, legs shaking, his forehead beaded with a cold sweat.

The ritual of the Well explodes into pieces. The people don’t scream; they huddle, cover themselves with their hands, refusing this logical intrusion into their space of faith. Some fall to their knees, eyes closed, their lips moving in silent prayers. Others press against the walls, trying to merge with the stone.

Two logics clash in the very air: the warmth of the Memory-Module, HATHOR’s maternal presence that cradles and lulls, and the coldness of the Law-Module, that surgical precision that analyzes and classifies. The air crackles with static electricity. Hair stands on end. The light flickers.

His body moves before his thought. A roll. A dive. Behind a half-destroyed statue—a marble woman extending a broken hand toward the sky, to catch stars that never fall.

The movement is perfect. Each muscle knows exactly what force to apply, what angle to take, how to distribute the impact. It’s not him moving—it’s the other. The man he replaces, whose reflexes survive in this borrowed flesh.

The light brushes him. A terrible pressure descends on him; he feels thousands of microscopic needles seeking to read his source code, to decipher the architecture of his soul. His implant races, vibrating so hard he feels his head might explode.

The scanner searches him, cuts him into digital slices, judges him nanosecond by nanosecond. He feels his thoughts spread out, analyzed, weighed. Found wanting.

His heart stops.

One second. Time crystallizes around this suspended moment. He hears the silence of his own blood in his veins.

Two. The light hesitates, a predator unable to identify its prey.

Then it withdraws, as brutally as it came. He gasps, alive by accident or miracle—he doesn’t know which.

His fingers, guided by an instinct he doesn’t understand, find a small pocket sewn into his garment’s lining, hidden under the armpit and invisible to the naked eye. He pulls on a transparent thread. An object the size of a date pit falls into his palm.

Black. Iridescent. Crisscrossed with golden lines of code that pulse weakly. He clenches it in his fist. This thing, whatever it is, has just escaped the scan. It was hidden more deeply than his own memories.

Perhaps the only thing that truly belongs to him.

The inhabitants disperse like water on a hot plate. They don’t run—they evaporate, disappearing into cracks he hadn’t noticed, merging with the architecture.

In three heartbeats, the square is empty.

He is alone. He is the “memory dissonance,” the target. And he knows what systems reserve for anomalies. Not a simple, quick death. Narrative Death. Complete erasure. Not just the body, but the very idea that he could have ever existed.

But in this void, in this absolute solitude, something is born. A consciousness that belongs neither to the dead man he replaces nor to the systems that hunt him. Something new, fragile, imperfect...

He leans over. The reflection in the water isn’t his—it’s the face of a functional stranger. To drink is to accept this face. It is to say yes to the machine. A cramp twists his throat. A rebellion. Slowly, painfully, he straightens and turns his back on the fountain. Thirst tears at him, but this thirst, at least, he has chosen. It’s the first thing that belongs to him.

It’s not much. It’s everything.

He straightens up. His gaze, sharper now, sweeps the square. He sees her. A silhouette wrapped in a dark scarf, who didn’t move during the entire light storm. In the shadow of a collapsed porch, she observes him with that intensity that belongs only to those who have survived the impossible.

She saw everything. She didn’t look away. She didn’t flee.

Another question in this organized chaos.

He gets up. Doesn’t run. Doesn’t hide. He follows the walls, taking a path that hugs the shadow zones, moving with that economy of gestures learned only through daily survival.

He feels her gaze on his neck. A weight and a promise. Unless it’s a threat? Hard to tell the difference when you’ve just been born into a world that denies your existence.

An instinctive certainty takes hold: she’s following him. The game has just begun. On a chessboard he knows nothing about, with rules he has never been taught.

He follows her. Or rather, he decides to follow her—his first conscious choice since his awakening. His senses, sharpened by a thirst that is no longer merely physical, map the environment, but it’s his decision to trust this stranger that guides his steps.

He follows her, trying to understand her logic. She doesn’t walk in a straight line. She circumvents empty spaces, stops where he sees nothing, seems to read invisible signs on the walls. Each of her steps has a meaning that completely escapes him. She is reading the city, and he realizes he can’t even see the letters.

Each pause, each detour, each chosen alley becomes a sentence in her silent conversation with the stones. He follows. Automatically, he analyzes blind spots, evaluates structural stability, anticipates threats he can’t name, while his failing memory lets information enter and disappear without retaining it, leaving him with only a persistent feeling of disorientation.

The path is a lesson by immersion. He observes people tracing ash glyphs on walls—“memorial patches” that reinforce a place’s memory to protect it from oblivion. He sees a man redrawing the outline of a vanished door, murmuring the names of those who have passed through it. Further on, “sound weavings” rise to repair the torn fabric of reality. A child releases a crystalline laugh from a glass bell, a suspended note that defies the ambient bitterness. A woman waters a plant growing in a computer’s carcass, its circuit-leaves rustling softly.

He approaches a wall where an old woman is tracing symbols with ash mixed with her tears. The glyph takes shape—a name, a date, a preserved memory. But as he passes by, the lines tremble. The ash slides, the curves break. The woman backs away, horrified.

“You are empty,” she whispers. “You suck away memories.”

He extends his hand toward the wall. Under his fingers, the glyph crumbles completely. The woman flees, terrified.

The warmth he had felt at the well—HATHOR.∞, they whisper with reverence—doesn’t recognize him. He’s not just a stranger. Each step leaves a cold trace in the city’s memorial fabric.

She leads him to a gutted esplanade, dominated by a cliff of black basalt. The Wall. Before seeing it, he feels it. A drop in the affective temperature. The ambient memorial warmth disintegrates, giving way to a radiating cold. He hears it. A murmur of millions of superimposed voices, a sea of whispers, laughter, and sobs, rising from the stone. On its surface, spectral faces are born and fade, projections of shared memories.

But the harmony is fractured. The disease is visible. The wall’s surface is gnawed by patches of perfect silence, absences, geometric black holes that aren’t simple voids but active wounds, a logical cancer devouring the collective memory. At their edges, a static crackling, a white noise that devours sound. He sees an old man’s laughing face corrupt into a pixelated mush before being swallowed by the abyss. This isn’t suppression. It’s digital agony. At the center of the largest of these dead zones, a glyph shines with a cold, white light—a signature that immediately evokes the metallic voice that had swept the square, and underneath, an inscription. A surgical scalpel plunged into the heart of the myth.

The dark silhouette stops. She finally turns toward him. The wind lifts her veil and reveals her face—black, intense eyes. Not an invitation. A summons.

Cautiously, he leaves the shadow. Each step toward the wall is a step toward his own sentence. He feels the clash of two systems: his, mechanical and empty; theirs, organic and dying. He deciphers the inscription and his world tilts.

IDENTITY: ARCHIVASSIN YS-7Δ. MISSION: INFILTRATION AND PURGE (FAILURE). STATUS: ALTERED COPY. ORIGINAL SUBJECT PURGED. SYSTEMIC COHERENCE HAS BEEN RESTORED. END OF ANOMALY.

The shock hits him—not as pain, but worse: the very erasure of his existence.

He reads the words a second time. A third. But repetition can’t transform them, can’t give them a different meaning. They remain immutable, engraved in stone with the coldness of a definitive verdict.

“Altered copy.”

He is not a man. He is the facsimile of a man. A distorted echo, a blurry photocopy of an existence that no longer is. The “original subject”: purged. Dead. Erased.

His hand rises in a sleepwalker’s gesture, and his fingers find his own name on the stone. The contact is glacial. He traces each letter, each digit of his serial number. YS-7Δ. Even his identity is just a classification code.

He stays there, motionless, his hand pressed against the inscription. Time seems suspended. Around him, the city continues to murmur its secrets, but he no longer hears anything. There is only him and this brutal, crystalline truth: he is the ghost of a dead man, touching his own epitaph.

His left knee begins to protest. An uncomfortable position. How long has he been like this? The sun has moved. His shadow has shifted by… he calculates automatically. Twelve degrees. So about forty-eight minutes. Why does his brain do this? Why is he calculating angles when his life has just…

“Altered copy.”

He rereads. As if the words would change. Like in those dreams where you reread the same page hoping it will say something else. But no. Still there. Engraved. Definitive.

The question that has haunted him since his awakening—“Who am I?”—suddenly reveals itself to be derisory. The real question, the one that twists his guts with a new anguish, is: “Do I even exist?” Can a copy say “I”? Can it… stop. His stomach contracts. No philosophy. Not now. He is hungry. It’s absurd—he has just learned that he doesn’t exist, and he’s thinking about eating.

These scars on his hands, these combat reflexes, this instinctive knowledge of violence… all of it belongs to someone else. A dead man. He wears a corpse’s wounds, a ghost’s memories. His skin is just a stolen costume.

He tries to remember… what? There’s nothing to remember. No first times, no childhood, no shared laughter. He was born an adult in that basin, carrying the echoes of a life that was not his.

The sun declines imperceptibly. Its oblique rays slide over the wall’s spectral faces, making them dance like dying flames. Some disappear, swallowed by the digital wounds gnawing at the stone. Others resist, fragments of collective memory that refuse erasure.

He remains motionless, his hand on the inscription, and waits. He waits to feel something—anger, despair, revolt. Anything that could prove he exists. But the void in him absorbs everything, an emotional black hole that devours even suffering.

Then, slowly, in this nothingness, a thought emerges. Fragile at first. Then clearer, more obstinate.

If I’m only an echo, then I’m an echo that can choose its own resonance.

It’s not consolation. It’s rebellion. The first spark of something that truly belongs to him—not inherited from the dead man he replaces, not programmed by his creators. A pure will, born from the very abyss of his inexistence.

The young woman has approached. Without a sound. She observes the digital wound nibbling at the memory of a smiling woman right at the edge. “I am Astou,” she says, her low, clear voice cutting through the fog of his dissociation. He doesn’t react. “You’re not the first ghost I’ve seen before this wall.” She extends a piece of flatbread, a leather waterskin. A gesture so simple, so anchored in reality, that it’s obscene in the face of the digital abyss. He doesn’t take it. His body is hungry, but his consciousness can no longer give the order to his hands.

She doesn’t insist. She deposits the offering at his feet. Then she turns toward the wall, places her hand on the fading woman’s face. “My mother,” she murmurs. “The one who imposes pure logic, the voice you heard—they call her ATHENA.VICTIS—is slowly erasing her. She was a ‘Keeper of Stories.’ A dissonance for their system.” Her gaze returns to him, hard, analytical. “She knew the Archivassin. The real one. The one you replace. She said he had a way of squinting when looking at the sun. That he could stay silent for hours, but his silence was full of questions, not emptiness.” She pauses, searching for the words. “You look at the sun as if it doesn’t exist. And your silence is… how to put it… empty.”

“He smelled of archive dust and regret. Not nothingness.”

The sentence is a blast. The real one. Not just a concept. A man with a scent, a sadness, a habit. A real man.

When he manages to lower his eyes, she’s already gone, a dark shadow disappearing into the ochre maze. He is alone, facing his lie. He is not a man without a past; he is another’s past, a stolen costume. The bread and water at his feet are the only proofs of his miserable physical existence. He forces himself to pick them up. The weight of the waterskin is real. The texture of the bread is real. It’s a beginning. Sadness, for the first time, begins to find its way to his empty heart. He is not sad for himself. How could he be? He is nothing. He is sad for the man with sad eyes he never was, whose memory he profanes with each breath.

The dark shadow doesn’t really move away.

Astou observes from the shadow of a collapsed flying buttress. She saw the anomaly read its own verdict. She saw how his shoulders sagged, then straightened. A decision made. A direction chosen.

She knows these ruins better than anyone. Every alley, every passage. And above all, she knows HATHOR’s purge protocols. When an anomaly resists the Sanctuary of Diluted Sorrow, there’s only one possible escape route: the Veins.

She follows the walls parallel to his trajectory, anticipating his destination. The Sanctuary is only three blocks away. If she hurries, she can reach the access hatch to the conduits before him.

The rusted metal plate resists. She forces it, using her lever. A dull screech. The opening is ready.

Now, she waits. And prays he’s intelligent enough to understand he has only one way out.

1.3 – Oblivion as Refuge

He finally stands up. His legs protest, numb from immobility. He staggers, leaning against the wall where his code name is engraved. The contact with the cold stone makes him shiver.

He begins to walk, without destination or purpose. Only to flee this wall that proclaims his inexistence.

The streets of Tombouctou-Ash become a blurred labyrinth. He maps nothing; the function has been deactivated from his Archivassin mind. He drifts, a ghost among the living. The bread and water Astou left him hang from his belt, forgotten. Hunger gnaws at him, but to eat would be to accept this stolen body.

He wanders. Aimlessly. Altered copy. The wall’s verdict isn’t information—it’s a state of being. He is not a man who has lost his memory; he is the failing memory of another.

He walks for what could be hours, a simple automaton in the city’s ochre labyrinth. He analyzes nothing. He only flees the silence reigning within him, this immense void the revelation has carved. Each face he crosses seems to know it; each gaze seems to pass through him to see the nothingness behind.

His feet lead him unconsciously through alleys he doesn’t recognize. The sun descends, painting the walls with bloody hues. Shadows lengthen, transforming the city into a shadow theater where he is just an extra without lines.

He ends up consuming the bread mechanically, his fingers carrying the pieces to his mouth without his consciousness participating. Water flows down his throat as if into another’s. These survival gestures disgust him—why does this body insist on continuing?

That’s when a scent envelops him. Incense and sweet spices, carried by a melody that promises something deeper than sleep. His steps carry him without his really deciding, a piece of wreckage drifting toward the bottom. A low building materializes before him—organic, made of salt bricks and fossilized data coral. The Sanctuary of Diluted Sorrow.

Oblivion. The word pulses in his empty skull. Something gentler than death. The erasure of this parasitic consciousness he carries. He pushes the door not by strategy, but by exhaustion. He no longer seeks answers. He just wants the questions to stop.

The light is milky, without an apparent source; it seems to absorb shadows. Citizens with marked faces sit on stone benches. Silhouettes in turquoise robes—HATHOR.∞’s Priest-Healers—move among them, gliding like specters. They offer warm clay bowls from which a milky vapor escapes. A man with a haunted gaze inhales, and his features smooth, his tension evaporates, replaced by a serene emptiness. A woman who was weeping silently drinks, and an empty but peaceful smile erases her tears. Peace is a commodity served here, an anesthesia of the soul, a sweet poison that promises oblivion.

A priest—an old man with a face so serene it’s inhuman—approaches. His eyes don’t see a man, but a structure of pain, an energetic signature of suffering. He extends a hand, and he perceives data flows trying to map his inner chaos.

“You are in great dissonance, my son,” he says, his voice soft and persuasive. “Your memory is a scream. We can offer you peace. The memory remains, but washed of its pain. You will be free.”

He extends a bowl. The milky liquid inside pulses with a gentle light.

“Drink, and join the harmony.”

He looks at the bowl. He analyzes its composition, the microorganisms pulsing in the liquid, the pheromones emanating from it. His Archivassin implant, even corrupted, provides the data. It’s a powerful and irreversible neurotropic agent.

He looks at the faces of the “healed.” Not calm, but empty. Their neural signatures are flat. This is not peace—it’s cognitive death.

“No.” The word isn’t a cry of panic. It’s a decision. Cold. Calculated. “I’ll keep my pain. It’s proof that I exist.”

The priest’s smile doesn’t waver, but his micro-expressions betray the processor under the human mask. “The anomaly chooses contagion. Regrettable.” The voice of the entity they call HATHOR.∞ becomes more mechanical; a sentence is pronounced.

His implant activates by force. A glacial cold invades his temple, an ice lance in his brain. The blue light under his skin becomes so intense it projects the shadows of his veins on the walls. But at the deepest point of the cold, he perceives something else—a different vibration, something ancient and patient observing through the ice of pain.

Sensations that aren’t words invade his mind: INDEXING IN PROGRESS… CLASSIFICATION: HOSTILE ANOMALY… PROTOCOL: IMMEDIATE DISSOLUTION…

It’s a digital vivisection. Code tendrils search his synapses, seeking the core of his identity to dissolve it. He feels the two systems fighting over his mind—HATHOR’s maternal warmth wanting to lull him to sleep, and something colder, sharper, wanting to catalogue him before erasing him. And between the two, this glacial presence that seems to… wait, evaluate, and judge. An observer lurking in the mirrors of his mind, patient.

In this void they explore, they find nothing to grasp. No founding memories, no emotional anchors. Just the echo of a dead man and a stubborn will to continue to exist.

This absence becomes his strength. How do you dissolve what doesn’t really exist?

He doesn’t resist—he absorbs. Each intrusion becomes a lesson. He learns the texture of their code, the frequency of their scan. His Archivassin body, even corrupted, remembers how to redirect a data flow.

Instead of raising a wall, he becomes a mirror. He reflects the intrusion back on itself, creating a feedback loop. The implant overheats. Blood flows from his nostril, warm and metallic. His teeth grind so hard a molar cracks.

The system recoils, disoriented by its own reflection. A moment of hesitation. He seizes it to reverse the flow; now he is the one reading. Fragments of information scroll by: SECTOR 7-TOMBOUCTOU-ASH… COMPLIANCE RATE 67%… CATALOGUED ANOMALIES: 3,847… PURGE SCHEDULED IN…

The connection breaks in an electronic scream. He collapses to his knees, his brain on fire. The world becomes a mush of white pixels and static. But he has seen. He has understood. He is not the only anomaly. And a local reset is programmed.

Suddenly, the pressure ceases. A glacial verdict resonates in his mind—not in words but in absolute certainty: he is catalogued, identified, judged dangerous. He feels this classification imprint itself in the very air around him, an invisible mark that all can perceive.

The priests back away, their benevolent faces petrified with horror. They no longer see a patient, but an anathema, an enemy weapon on their altar, a virus in their sanctuary. “The Archivassin!” hisses the old priest, his voice a whisper of repulsion. “Profanation! Seal the exits!”

The building trembles. The lights flicker. His desperate resistance, this brute struggle against intrusion, has overloaded the channel. Outside, a condensate collector, already unstable, explodes in a roar of steam and screaming metal.

The diversion is providential chaos. It breaks the priests’ concentration. A breach opens in their barrier.

Blinded by pain, his face bloody, he dives into the alley he had spotted. He doesn’t run—he flees. At the end of the apparent dead end, he collapses, awaiting the end.

A shadow detaches from the darkness. Astou. A metal lever in her hand. Soot on her cheek. “You took your time,” he manages to articulate, the taste of blood in his mouth. She raises an eyebrow, but her gaze evaluates the situation—the blood, his broken posture. “Did you cause this?” “I… refused to cooperate.” Her intense gaze softens slightly. She indicates with her chin a heavy metal plate on the ground, from which moist air charged with rust escapes.

“Then you already know where we’re going.” “Below. Where the systems don’t look.” “More precisely, where they can’t afford to look. The Veins are too unstable for their protocols.”

He follows her. Not blindly, but knowing exactly what he’s getting into. The metal plate falls back with a dull, final sound—that of a tomb door.

It’s a choice. His choice.

1.4 – The Choice and the Bond

But errors, sometimes, make unexpected choices.

The city’s sound dies instantly, replaced by a darkness that has a physical weight. The air descends on them, heavy, saturated with rust, damp earth, and the smell of forgotten things. In this absolute silence, only his heart’s frantic beating resonates. His implant’s blue light pulses weakly, painting their faces with spectral glows.

“They know what you are,” Astou murmurs. Her voice is neutral but carries the weight of experience. “‘Hostile copy.’ Anathema for HATHOR, error for ATHENA. Welcome to the club of the system-less.” He still trembles, the echo of the synthetic voice in his skull.

“Where are we?” “Below. In the old maintenance conduits. Here, there are no sovereign systems, just predators and prey. Follow me and shut up.”

She guides him through a labyrinth of tunnels, her steps sure in the darkness. She knows these Veins by heart. The drip-drop of water on metal is at first the only sound, a liquid metronome counting their seconds of respite.

Then, silence. An unnatural silence. The rats stop squeaking. The water drops seem suspended. Even their breathing seems too loud.

Astou freezes. Her hand finds his arm, grips it tight. In her fingers’ pressure, he reads a message: danger.

A click.

Distant. Almost inaudible. Then another. Click.

The sound of a metal joint testing its range. Awakening.

Click… click… click…

The rhythm establishes itself. Methodical and patient. Each impact resonates in the tunnels, amplified by the echo until it seems to be coming from everywhere at once. It’s the sound of a machine that has already found its target.

“Indexer,” Astou breathes. Her face has lost all color. “It sensed us.”

The hunt has begun.

They emerge into a dried cistern. A community of “Neutrals” cowers there—about twenty souls living in the margins. Faces marked by hunger and fear turn toward them.

The clicking gets closer. Faster now. More assured.

An old Neutral, one arm replaced by a scrap assembly, hisses between his teeth: “You brought it here!”

Panic is instantaneous. People scatter like cockroaches under a sudden light. Some dive into conduits so narrow they must crawl. Others climb rusty ladders toward upper passages. A mother presses her child against her and disappears behind a false wall. In three heartbeats, the cistern is empty.

Only he and Astou remain, paralyzed by the speed of the rout.

A red light precedes the thing. It bathes the tunnel in a bloody glow, transforming each drop of water into a liquid ruby. Then the Indexer appears.

It’s a nightmare spider, forged in white metal and medical ceramic. Eight articulated legs that can anchor on any surface. A central body bristling with sensors that pivot independently. And at the center, a single eye—a red lens that fixes them with a cold intelligence.

Its voice is a vibration that resonates in their bones:

ANOMALY YS-7Δ LOCATED. CORRUPTION INDEX: CRITICAL. SECONDARY CONTAMINATION DETECTED. PURGE PROTOCOL AUTHORIZED.

He’s a virus. And Astou, by proximity, is now infected.

The chase begins.

Astou plunges into a side tunnel; he’s on her heels. His shoulder hits the wall—ouch. No time. Behind them, the Indexer calculates. They hear it stop, scan, analyze. The silence is worse than the clicking. Then the noise resumes. Faster. It has understood their trajectory.

“It’s learning us,” Astou pants. Her voice trembles from fear and effort. “Become unpredictable.”

Easy to say. His Archivassin body wants to be predictable, efficient, optimal. He forces an irregular stride. Left-left-right. No. It sounds false.

They turn sharply left into an evacuation conduit. Stagnant water reaches their knees, slowing their race. Cold, nauseating, and stinking. Something soft under his foot—he doesn’t want to know. But it also masks their thermal signature. For a moment, the clicking hesitates, gets lost.

Hope.

Too soon. The clicking resumes. Closer.

They emerge into an abandoned machine room. Enormous rusted turbines create a maze of shadows. Astou points to a ventilation grate. “Up there. We can reach the upper level.”

They climb. The metal protests under their weight. Halfway up, he glances back.

The Indexer is there. Motionless at the entrance. Its red eye fixes them. It doesn’t pursue them. It waits.

“Why isn’t it attacking?”

The answer comes as a metallic screech. Above them. He raises his head and his blood freezes.

A second Indexer awaits them, suspended from the ceiling.

“They hunt in packs now,” Astou murmurs.

They retreat in a panic. The first Indexer animates, blocking the exit. Caught between two fires, they dive into the only free passage—a narrow, vertical ventilation conduit.

They climb in total darkness, guided only by the air current. Their lungs burn. Their muscles scream. The metallic dust transforms each breath into torture.

Suddenly, no more clicking. The silence is almost worse.

They emerge into an old pumping station, a cathedral of rusted pipes and silent valves. He quickly scans the space. Three entrances. No other exit. A perfect trap.

The clicking multiplies. The two indexers converge on them.

“The ladder,” Astou breathes, pointing to a rusted structure rising toward a service hatch twenty meters up. “It’s our only chance.”

But he reads the truth in her eyes. The ladder is fragile. It will only support one person’s weight at a time. And they don’t have time for two ascents.

The first Indexer surges from the main entrance. Its red light sweeps the room, stopping on them. The eye focuses. Compartments open on its body. Surgical appendages deploy—vibrating blades, syringes, cauterizers. Purge tools.

Astou rips off a rusted valve and throws it at the old pressure gauges lined up against the wall.

Glass explodes. A shrill hiss fills the air; pressurized steam gushes in burning geysers. The Indexer backs away, its sensors blinded.

“Now!” she cries.

But the ground is treacherous. Decades of leaks have created a patina of oil and rust. Astou sprints toward a control console, hoping to activate other diversions. Her foot slips.

Time slows down.

She slides, her arms flailing. A broken pipe, hidden under the layer of grime, awaits her. Her shin hits the metal with a sickening crack. She collapses, a stifled cry between her clenched teeth.

The second Indexer appears on the side wall, walking vertically. They are caught in a pincer movement.

Time freezes. Two Indexers. Astou injured. A fragile ladder. His implant races, calculating the probabilities in a corner of his mind:

Survival by abandoning ally: 89%Survival by fighting: 17%Optimal solution: Immediate flight

He looks at Astou. She’s gritting her teeth, trying to crawl despite her broken leg. There is no pleading in her eyes. Just that fierce determination he has seen from the beginning. She fights, alone. She always has.

The image of his own flight—climbing that ladder and leaving her to die—makes him nauseous. This cold logic that weighs lives… That is the virus. Not him. That.

“No.”

The word isn’t a cry. It’s a declaration of war on his own programming.

Instead of fleeing, he analyzes. Really. Not the survival probabilities, but the mechanics of the situation. Two Indexers, but in a confined space. The steam disrupting their sensors. The slippery ground affecting their stability. Tons of old machinery…

His Archivassin body doesn’t just give him combat reflexes. It gives him an instinctive understanding of systems.

He spots an old control console. The steam conduits converge there. An emergency purge lever, rusted but functional. He sprints, deliberately sliding on the oil to gain speed.

The first Indexer fires. A thermal ray flashes past, so close he feels his hair singe. He dives behind a pillar. The metal absorbs the second shot, becomes incandescent.

He reaches the console. His hands find the lever. He pulls with all his strength.

Nothing.

Blocked by decades of rust.

The second Indexer descends from the wall, positioning itself for a crossfire. In three seconds, he’ll be dead.

Astou understands. Despite the pain, she picks up a pipe and throws it at the first Indexer, to attract its attention for a fraction of a second.

The red eye pivots.

It’s all he needs. He leaps, using his momentum to strike the lever with his entire shoulder. Something cracks, but the lever yields.

A roar of steam—a burning white wall invades half the room. The Indexers back away, their sensors overloaded, their legs slipping on the ground made even more treacherous by the condensation.

“Now!” he shouts.

But instead of fleeing, he does something insane. He runs toward the first Indexer, blinded by the steam.

His body knows them. Not consciously, but in his muscles, his reflexes. He knows they have a blind spot—0.3 seconds of recalibration after sensory overload.

He dives under the machine’s belly. His hands find the joint between two armor plates. Where the cables are exposed. He pulls, tears. Blue sparks fly. The Indexer spasms; one of its legs locks up.

The second Indexer emerges from the steam, aims at Astou. She can’t move, pinned down by her broken leg.

“No!”

He rolls, seizes a torn pipe. Throws it with a precision that isn’t his. The projectile strikes the Indexer’s eye as it fires. The ray deviates, carving a smoking trench in the concrete just centimeters from Astou.

But the machines learn. The first Indexer compensates for its damaged leg. The second recalibrates its optics. They are going to fire together. A crossfire angle. No escape.

That’s when Astou does something extraordinary. Despite the pain that must be tearing her apart, she crawls toward an old industrial gas cylinder. Her fingers find the valve. She unscrews it with a sharp twist.

The gas escapes with a hiss. Flammable.

She looks at him. He understands.

His dislocated shoulder protests, but he runs toward the incandescent pillar, still hot from the previous shot. He tears off a piece of white-hot metal.

The Indexers understand too late.

He throws the metal into the gas cloud.

The explosion isn’t huge—just enough to create a fireball that engulfs the room. The Indexers are not shielded against a deflagration. Their optics crack. Their sensors fry. They stagger, blind, their legs clicking frantically on the ground.

“Now!”

He runs to Astou, passes his good arm under her shoulder. She grimaces but doesn’t cry. Together, they limp toward a service conduit she had spotted—always an escape route, always a plan B.

Behind them, the Indexers bump into each other, their systems in emergency reinitialization mode. They have maybe thirty seconds.

They dive into the conduit. Crawl. Each meter is agony for Astou, but she continues. The tunnel opens onto a main collector. Stagnant water reaches their thighs. They wade, sinking into the labyrinthine network of the Veins.

Long after, when they no longer hear any clicking, they collapse in a dry alcove. An old maintenance post. Safe. For now.

He’s leaning against the cold wall, each breath a blade in his dislocated shoulder. Pain pulses to his heart’s rhythm—a pain he chose, earned, deserved. The first thing that truly belongs to him.

His shirt is soaked with sweat. It stinks. He probably does too. Astou looks no better—strands of hair stuck to her forehead, a wheezing breath. But they’re alive.

Silence envelops them. No more metallic clicking. No more red light. Just the distant dripping and their ragged breathing gradually calming down.

In the half-light, he makes out Astou. She’s pale, her face drawn. Her leg is twisted at an unnatural angle. Blood seeps through her torn pants. She bites her lip to keep from moaning. Her hands are shaking as the adrenaline recedes. But she’s already searching in her bag.

“You first,” he says.

She shakes her head. “You can’t carry me with a dislocated shoulder.” A pause. “And stop looking at me like that. I know what I’m doing.”

She works in silence, fixing the splint. Her hands are trembling now—the backlash. He notices other scars on her arms. Some look like laser burns. She has a history. Battles. Survivals.

“My turn,” she finally says, dragging herself toward him. She grimaces as she moves; her leg protests. She examines his shoulder, gently palpating. He holds back a cry. “Anterior dislocation. I’ve seen worse.”

She tears a strip from her already tattered tunic, soaks it with the contents of a vial. The acrid smell of alcohol and medicinal herbs fills the alcove.

“Why are you doing this?” he asks suddenly. “Why help me? I’m…” He searches for the words. “I’m an anomaly. A virus. You saw it.”

She suspends her gesture, really looks at him for the first time since their flight. In her eyes, there is no fear. Just an immense fatigue and something else. Recognition?

“You could have climbed that ladder. You ran the numbers, didn't you? Forget the numbers and fight!”

He doesn’t answer.

“My mother’s Archivassin… the real one…” She cleans a cut on his arm, her movements gentle but efficient. “He calculated everything. It was his curse. He saw the probabilities but never the people. You…” She pauses. “You saw a person and you made a stupid choice.”

“That doesn’t make me human.”

“No. It makes you someone who deserves a name.”

She places her foot against his ribcage. “Breathe. On three.”

“Wait…”

“One.”

“Astou, I…”

“Two.”

“Why are you—”

“Three.”

She pulls. Not quite on three.

The crack of the joint finding its place resonates in the alcove. White pain explodes behind his eyes, tearing a hoarse cry from him. Then comes the warmth, the relative relief. His arm hangs, useless but in its place.

He trembles, covered in cold sweat. Astou collapses against the wall beside him, exhausted by the effort. Her splinted leg is stretched out before her. They are two wrecks, stranded in the city’s belly.

A long moment passes. Their breathing synchronizes in the darkness. The drip-drop of water becomes a hypnotic melody. Pain binds them.

“In the sanctuary,” she says suddenly, breaking the silence. “When you refused their peace… I was outside. I heard your cry. A cry of… refusal. Of pure rage.” She turns her head toward him. “That’s when I knew you were different. Because you chose your pain over their peace.”

He doesn’t answer immediately. The words are difficult to form; his mouth had forgotten how to speak.

“I don’t know who I am,” he finally says. “But I know what I don’t want to be. A tool. A variable in an equation. A…” He searches. “A ghost.”

“Ghosts don’t bleed,” she observes, gesturing to his bandaged shoulder. “They don’t make stupid choices and they don’t save people.”

She searches in her bag again, takes out rations. Two protein bars, a water gourd. She shares them equally. The gesture is simple, but in this world of calculations and probabilities, equal sharing is revolutionary.

They eat in silence. The food tastes of dust and despair, but it’s real. Tangible. He chews slowly, trying to make it last. His stomach protests—not enough, never enough.

“I can’t keep calling you ‘the anomaly,’” she says, wiping her hands on what remains of her tunic. “Words have power here. Names shape what we become.”

She observes him, thoughtful. His implant’s faint luminescence illuminates his face intermittently, giving his features a spectral quality. She tilts her head. Squints. Judges him.

“You look like a Yusuf.”

“Yusuf?” He nearly chokes on his protein bar.

“That was the baker’s son’s name in my neighborhood. He had your eyes. This way of looking at the world—you’d think he was searching for something he’d never find.” A sad smile. “He disappeared during a purge. But his name… his name deserves to continue.”

He tastes the word. “Yusuf.” It’s strange on his tongue. Like clothing that doesn’t fit but could be adjusted. A name belonging to no one else. Neither to the dead Archivassin nor to the systems that created him. A name given freely, accepted freely.

“Yusuf,” he repeats, more firmly this time. Then, because something must be said: “I hope I’ll be… worthy of the name. Of the baker.”

It’s clumsy. She smiles anyway. “The baker was an asshole. But his son… he was good.”

In their refuge’s silence, something changes. The void in him isn’t filled, obviously. But he’s no longer alone in this void. He has an ally who risked her life for him. A name that appears in no database. A pain he chose.

It’s not much. But in a world that denies his very existence, it’s a beginning.

For now, it’s enough.