The adrenaline crash left Kael feeling hollowed out, his limbs shaky and cold despite the bodega's stuffy air. The silence that followed the grey sedan's departure pressed in, thick with the ghosts of unseen threats and unanswered questions. He stood there for a long moment, listening to his own ragged breathing and the rhythmic patter of rain, the scent of ozone slowly fading beneath the familiar smells of stale coffee and disinfectant.
Reality check: The store was a mess. Spilled rock salt crunched underfoot like gritty snow. Half the lights were out, casting long, eerie shadows. The automatic door hung drunkenly open, letting in the damp chill. And the vibrant 'Midnight Munchies' sign, the greasy beacon of his nightly purgatory, was dead.
Survival instincts, honed by years of avoiding trouble rather than confronting it, finally kicked back in. He couldn't just stand here. Mrs. Petrov would be here in the morning. Questions would be asked.
With leaden movements, Kael found the broom and dustpan. Sweeping up the salt felt absurdly mundane after facing down a Void Echo. Each scrape of the plastic bristles against the linoleum seemed amplified in the quiet. The Loom, helpfully, offered analysis: [Action: Tidying - Material Displaced: Sodium Chloride (Contaminated with trace Void Resonance) - Recommendation: Dispose of residue outside standard waste channels].
Outside standard waste channels? What did that even mean? Like he had a special bin for metaphysically tainted trash? Kael swept the salty dust into a garbage bag with the usual coffee grounds and discarded wrappers, tying it off tightly. He'd just dump it in the alley dumpster like always. The Loom could complain later.
Next, the fuse box. It was in the cramped back storeroom, smelling faintly of mildew and rodent repellent. Kael flipped breakers, guided partly by memory and partly by The Loom highlighting the tripped circuits on the panel itself: [Circuit 3: Overload Detected - Status: Tripped], [Circuit 7: Short Circuit (Sign Transformer) - Status: Tripped - WARNING: Component Failure Confirmed]. He managed to get most of the interior lights back on, banishing the worst of the shadows, but Circuit 7 stayed stubbornly dead. The sign, and likely the door motor wired into the same mess, was definitely fried.
The phone call loomed. Mrs. Petrov was a stern, pragmatic woman who tolerated little nonsense. Explaining this was going to be… difficult. He rehearsed lines in his head. Power surge? Bad storm? Gremlins?
He dialed, his thumb hovering over the call button. The Loom offered: [Physiological State: Elevated Heart Rate, Stress Hormones Rising - Vocal Analysis Projection: High Probability of Deception Detected by Recipient]. Shut up, Loom. He pressed call.
"Midnight Munchies," Mrs. Petrov answered, her voice already tinged with the weariness of someone woken too early.
"Uh, Mrs. P? It's Kael." He winced at the tremor in his own voice. "Listen, something weird happened with the power."
"Weird how?" Suspicion sharpened her tone.
"Like, a big surge or something? The lights went completely crazy, flickering like mad for a second. Half the breakers tripped. I got most of them back on, but..." He trailed off, deciding how much to admit. "...the outside sign won't turn on. And the automatic door seems stuck."
There was a pause. Kael braced himself for the yelling. Instead, Mrs. Petrov sighed, a long, drawn-out sound. "The sign again? Always the sign. Wiring in this district is junk, Kael. Probably the storm. We get surges sometimes, shakes things loose."
Kael blinked. That was... easier than expected. "Yeah, maybe the storm," he mumbled, glancing at the steady, non-stormy rain outside.
"Just prop the door open if you have to, put the wet floor sign out. I'll call Sparky's Electrical in the morning. Don't worry about it too much. These old buildings... they have their nights." She sounded tired, resigned even. "Anything else break?"
"No, just that," Kael said, relief washing over him. "Everything else seems okay."
"Good. See you at seven for handover." She hung up.
Kael stared at his phone. These old buildings... they have their nights. Was that just a turn of phrase? Or did Mrs. Petrov know more about the weirdness clinging to this part of the city than she let on? The Loom remained silent on the matter, offering no analysis of her potential hidden knowledge.
With the immediate crisis averted, the deeper anxieties returned. The Void Echo. The grey sedan. The scan. He leaned back against the counter, the earlier adrenaline replaced by a gnawing unease. He needed to understand The Loom. He needed control. But how?
He closed his eyes, focusing inward, trying to direct a thought at the system cohabiting his senses. 'Loom. Access history. Show me the readings from the past hour.'
The response wasn't text, but a jumble of sensory data – flashes of the crimson fear-colour, the static crackle of the EM burst, the icy signature of the Void Echo, the focused hum of the scanner. It was raw, unfiltered, overwhelming. Like trying to read a log file written in pure sensation.
[Query: History Access - Result: Raw Sensory Data Playback Initiated - Warning: Potential for Cognitive Overload]
Kael flinched back, cutting off the mental request. Okay, not like that. 'Define: Void Echo.'
[Query: Definition Request - Term: Void Echo - Processing... Cross-referencing Esoteric Databases (Restricted Access)... Result: Fragmentary Data Available. 'Void Echo': A transient, non-corporeal resonance phenomenon manifesting as a localized distortion. Often drawn to strong anomalous energy signatures or reality fissures. Originates from/mimics properties of the Outer Void. Highly unpredictable. Further data classified under DOS Protocol 7-Gamma.]
Outer Void? DOS Protocol 7-Gamma? More questions than answers. 'Who was the person in the car?'
[Query: Entity Identification - Target: 'Grey Sedan Occupant' - Processing... Cross-referencing logged resonance signature (####-####-####-####) with known databases... Result: No Match Found in Public or Low-Clearance DOS Archives. Signature exhibits characteristics consistent with advanced shielding and possible bio/techno-augmentation. Affiliation: Unknown. Threat Level: Indeterminate (Assessment Capabilities Exceed User's Current defensive/analytical parameters). Suggest Avoiding Direct Confrontation.]
Great. Not DOS, or at least not overtly. Shielded, augmented, and capable of analyzing him better than he could analyze them. And The Loom logged their signature? Like a metaphysical license plate? Small comfort.
Kael paced the length of the small store, feeling trapped. He kept glancing out the half-open door, imagining the grey sedan parked just out of sight, watching. He went to the spot where the figure had stood, scanning the damp pavement. Nothing. No footprint, no dropped object, not even an oil stain from the car. It was unnervingly clean.
He pulled out his battered smartphone, thumbs fumbling on the cracked screen. He typed "Ontological Inertia" into the search bar. He got links to obscure philosophy blogs, a physics forum thread devolving into arguments about quantum mechanics, and one locked academic paper titled "Inertial Properties of Stable Reality Constructs." Nothing about repelling void entities with rock salt. "Void Echo" brought up results for a new indie band, generic space ambient music playlists, and several forums filled with blurry photos of 'sky anomalies' and frantic, ALL-CAPS warnings about government conspiracies, often linking back to DOS 'disinformation' sites. Useless.
The night dragged on. Kael refilled the coffee machine he wouldn't drink from, straightened magazines he hadn't seen anyone buy in weeks, wiped down counters already clean. The mundane tasks felt alien, performed by a body running on autopilot while his mind raced. Every creak of the old building, every distant siren, every pair of headlights sweeping past made him jump.
Dawn began to bleed into the sky, painting the clouds in bruised shades of purple and grey. The rain finally softened to a drizzle. Delivery trucks rumbled past. The familiar rhythms of the city waking up started to overlay the night's strangeness. Kael felt a pang of longing for the ignorance he'd lived in just yesterday, for the simple boredom of his dead-end job. That life felt miles away now.
6:45 AM. He counted the till, locked the meagre earnings in the drop safe. He propped the broken door open a few inches and placed the bright yellow 'Wet Floor' sign strategically, hoping Mrs. Petrov wouldn't look too closely at the scorch marks near the frame.
As he prepared to leave, locking the back door and grabbing his thin jacket, The Loom flickered one last time, not with a warning, but with an update. It appeared as faint text overlaid on his own reflection in the dark window.
[User Resonance Signature: Recalibration Complete following Void Echo interaction & External Scan. New Baseline Established. Attractor Factor: Increased by 18.7%. Probability of attracting Low-Level Anomalous Phenomena: Elevated. Probability of attracting Targeted Observation: Significantly Elevated.]
His stomach plummeted. Increased attractor factor. Not only had he survived, but the encounter and the subsequent scan had made him more of a beacon, more likely to draw things like the Echo, and more likely to be noticed by people like the figure in the sedan.
He pushed the main door open (it scraped loudly against the floor) and stepped out into the cool, damp morning air. The streetlights were off now, the sky growing lighter. The world looked normal. But Kael knew, with chilling certainty, that it wasn't. Not for him. Not anymore. He pulled his jacket tighter, glancing nervously down the empty street. Every shadow seemed deeper, every distant figure potentially an observer. He was marked, a flickering anomaly in a world of regulated weirdness, armed with nothing but a broken cosmic radio and a growing sense of dread. Where did he go from here? He had no idea. He just started walking towards his bus stop, feeling eyes he couldn't see tracking his every step.