The underbelly of Nova-Veridia was always more honest than the city above. Those leaden clouds hanging in the sky could lie, but the sewers, rusted pipes, and forgotten basements never did.
It was forty minutes past midnight. The rain had finally ceased, but the dampness it left behind clung to the city's lungs like pneumonia. When The Nameless Jester creaked open the iron gate of the arcade known as "The Neon Graveyard," the air that hit his face from inside carried the scent of mold, dampness, and electrical circuits that hadn't cooled in a decade.
This was where the opulent, neon-lit, synthetic joy of the 80s had come to die. Hundreds of arcade cabinets lined the dark corridor, flickering erratically like colossal fireflies in their death throes. On most screens, the image was frozen; *Pac-Man* ghosts trembled in the corners of the labyrinth, and pixelated *Street Fighter* characters hung suspended in the middle of an eternal fight.
Jester slid his purple jacket from his shoulders and flung it onto a dusty *Tetris* machine. The dull thud of the fabric hitting the metal echoed in the void.
"Home sweet static," he murmured. His voice, muffled and eerie, resonated in the acoustics of this abandoned temple. This wasn't his home —he had no home, his had burned to ashes in 1989— but this was his church. A sanctuary where frequencies were prayers, and pixels transformed into icons.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the burnt circuit board he'd ripped from the phone booth. The board was still warm in his palm. It wasn't just a physical warmth; the object had trapped the dying man's last-second terror like a magnetic field. He felt a slight tingling in his fingertips. Data was more enduring than flesh.
His steps led him to the very end of the arcade, to a colossal gaming machine with a jet-black casing, standing apart from the others. It bore neither a logo nor a game title. It was unplugged, its screen dark. But as Jester approached, a deep, almost imperceptible "hummm" began to emanate from within the machine. Inanimate objects always grew restless in Jester's presence.
"Wake up, big boy," Jester said, pressing his gloved hand against the machine's icy glass. The painted smile on his face glowed stark white in the darkness. "I've brought you food. A little pain, a little metal."
He moved behind the machine. He didn't need a screwdriver; his fingers knew the panels' locking points by heart. He separated the cables with a surgeon's precision —no, with a butcher's savagery. As he integrated the burnt card in his hand into the system's motherboard, the sound of metal grinding against metal was teeth-grating.
This wasn't a hacking operation. This was a dirty blood transfusion for a dying patient.
The machine violently shuddered. The black casing vibrated as if being punched from within. The screen first fizzed with static, gray and black dots merging, then a blinding white light tore through the arcade's darkness.
**SYSTEM ERROR... DATA INTEGRITY COMPROMISED... 1989 DATA PACKAGE LOADING...**
Jester slumped onto the metal stool in front of the machine. There was no joystick. No buttons. Only a bare, conductive metal panel. He placed his hands on the panel and closed his eyes.
In that moment, the world vanished.
His mind began to flow amidst copper wires and silicon valleys. The silence of the arcade was torn by a screeching, digital shriek. This wasn't something he heard with his ears; it pierced directly into his brain's auditory cortex. The static from the phone booth was now crystal clear.
*...can you hear me? ...please, I only wanted to fix my watch... the hands are turning backward... time isn't flowing back... why are my hands pixelating?...*
The dying technician's last thoughts echoed in Jester's mind. He felt the terrifying sensation of melting, the boiling of the man's brain, within his own body. Jester's spine tensed, he gritted his teeth. The static was like thousands of ants crawling beneath his skin.
"Bypass the pain," he commanded himself, from the depths of his mind. His voice was authoritative, even in the realm of thought. "Emotions are parasites. Find the source. Trace the frequency."
In his mental map, a three-dimensional, wireframe model of Nova-Veridia appeared. Within a gray mist, a throbbing red thread glowed. The thread burst forth from the phone booth at the scene, filtered through the city's sewage system, and stretched towards that ominous building piercing the metropolis's skyline like a dagger: **Chronos Tower.**
Jester's mind followed the thread. He expected it to ascend to the tower's peak, but no... The thread descended. To the tower's lobby, its parking lot, its foundation, and even further down. Into a dark void, not even present on the city's maps.
"Underground," Jester whispered, his lips trembling in the physical world. "It's always underground. The cesspit is always at the bottom."
Just as he was about to clarify the exact coordinates, the machine triggered a defense mechanism. The white light on the screen abruptly turned black. From within the darkness, a colossal, distorted face woven from pixels appeared.
This face was identical to Jester's. But its eyes were hollow, and its mouth was stitched vertically.
**"I SEE YOU, CLOWN,"** said the digital voice. The voice was like a superimposed, unsynchronized chorus of hundreds of different people —women, men, children—. **"WHAT YOU SEEK WILL BE YOUR END."**
Purple electrical arcs leaped out from the machine's casing. Jester's arms tensed, he was thrown backward, but he didn't remove his hands from the panel. His palms burned, the smell of burning flesh filled his nostrils.
"Threats?" Jester laughed. A thin trickle of blood from his nose stained the white paint above his lips red. "My end was written twenty years ago, sweetheart. You're just a rerun! I've seen this movie, and the ending sucks!"
He gathered his mental strength. This machine operated on logic; with 1s and 0s. Jester, however, was an error. An anomaly. He was illogicality itself. He focused the chaos in his mind, the purest, rawest form of his madness, like a weapon. A joke, an insoluble paradox, a number divided by zero.
"Chew on this!" he roared.
The machine couldn't process this chaos. Its logic circuits locked up in the face of Jester's absurd data surge.
**ERROR... ERROR... LOGIC NOT FOUND... INFINITE LOOP...**
The screen's glass cracked like a spiderweb. Black smoke billowed from within the machine. The image flickered, distorted, and died. But just before it faded, a final coordinate was etched onto the screen with the trace of burnt phosphor. It hung there like a ghost:
**SECTOR 9 - "THE OLD ORPHANAGE"**
Jester severed the connection and threw himself backward. He collapsed, breathless, onto the dusty carpet. His chest heaved like a bellows. His hands trembled uncontrollably. He removed his gloves; his fingertips were blackened but healing. Beneath his skin, not red blood, but a gray, mercury-like fluid moved, reweaving the burnt tissue.
"The Old Orphanage," he said. The words spilled from his mouth like a curse.
XXXQUOTEXXX "The past is not a corpse we bury; it is a decaying guest who knocks on our door every night, asking why we left it alone."
— Dr. Elias Vane, *Memory Architecture in the Static Age*
The damp air of the arcade suddenly turned icy. Jester felt crushed under the weight of that word. It wasn't just any orphanage. It was where the "Richert Incident" began. It was where he had been on the night of 1989, when the sky turned white. It was the hell he had lived in before he became "nobody," back when he had a name.
Returning there was no different than opening a grave and stepping inside.
Jester rose from the floor. His knees were trembling, but to conceal it, he brushed off his dusty jacket with an exaggerated, theatrical gesture. He put on his smile again; this time not out of joy, but defensively, like a wound scabbing over.
"Alright," he said to the empty hall, his voice a little hoarse. "The second act of the show will take place in the graveyard of memories. I hope the popcorn isn't stale."
As he headed for the door to leave the arcade, he noticed a small shadow in the faint light of the streetlamp outside. Pip. A skinny child of about ten, who knew the rules of the streets better than the books in school. He held a rusty flashlight.
"Mr. Jester?" the child said, his voice trembling. His eyes were wide. "From inside... there were monster noises from inside."
Jester stopped. He ruffled Pip's rain-soaked hair. His hand was surprisingly gentle, as if it wasn't the hand of someone who had just torn apart a machine with his mind.
"No monsters, Pip," he said. From his pocket, he pulled out a golden token that gleamed brightly in the streetlamp's light. The token wasn't real, it was a simple illusion he'd created from static energy, but for Pip, it was the world's most precious treasure. He tossed the token into the air, and the child caught it mid-flight.
"Just old ghosts arguing," Jester said, winking. "And I won. As always."
"Where to now?" the child asked, clutching the token tightly in his palm.
Jester looked into the misty darkness of the street, towards the city's oldest and most wounded district.
"I need you to deliver a message to Detective Kaelen, little one," he said. His voice grew serious, the tired man beneath the clown mask appearing for a moment. "Tell him: The Clown is coming home. If he's going to follow me, he should bring his childhood traumas, not that useless gun of his. He'll need them more."
As Jester turned the street corner and melted into the mists, a distorted advertisement appeared on one of Nova-Veridia's giant screens. On the grainy screen, as the face of a happy family melted and streamed, the following text scrolled below:
*"Can't Remember Your Past? Perhaps It Never Happened."*
The Nameless Jester merely gave a bitter grin at this cosmic irony and vanished into the darkness.