The elevator's rusty cables strained with an endless groan, descending into the guts of Nova-Veridia. The cabin shuddered with each passing floor, exhaling a throat-burning green vapor from its grated floor, smelling of rotten moss and heavy metal.
Detective Kaelen gritted his teeth under the weight of the burden on his back. Jester, that colorful, chaotic, gravity-defying clown, was now as still as a body bag. But the real problem wasn't his mass. Kaelen had carried many drunks, shot partners, or handcuffed criminals in his life. But this... This was different. Jester's frail body felt as if it were woven not from bone and flesh, but from lead-coated copper cables. A dense, unnatural weight. It was as if Kaelen was carrying not just a body, but the entire data load of a collapsing operating system.
Kaelen looked at the pale face hanging over his shoulder. The exaggerated laughter, the nonsensical riddles, and the unsettling energy were gone. What remained was an ordinary man in his thirties, his face bearing the scars of life's blows. His lips trembled as if murmuring a silent frequency, and beneath his closed eyelids, his pupils twitched from side to side with the intensity of REM sleep.
"Hang in there, clown," Kaelen said, panting. His voice mingled with the metallic echo of the elevator shaft. "We haven't played the final scene yet. No leaving before the credits roll."
The elevator settled with a jarring thud into the lower level known as the "Iron Lung," the city's layer of sewers and illicit cyber-surgery. The doors slid open with a sound like the shriek of an animal in pain.
Before them stood an entrance resembling a castle gate, fashioned from randomly welded scrap metal sheets, and above it, a neon sign flickered with a sizzle: **NENA VOLT - REPAIR & SCRAP.**
Kaelen balanced the load on his shoulder and braced the sole of his boot against the metal door.
"Nena! Open the door! Emergency!"
From within came the sound of bolts being drawn. As the door creaked open, a dense wave of hot oil, solder fumes, and ozone hit their faces. This place resembled a technology graveyard more than a clinic. Thousands of colorful cables hung from the ceiling, stretching down like a synthetic jungle, swaying slightly to avoid touching the puddles on the floor.
From the shadows behind the counter, a mechanical hum was heard. Nena Volt emerged into the light in her modified wheelchair. Her short-cropped gray hair contrasted with the motor oil stains clinging to her forehead. The left lens of her glasses was a thick magnifying glass, the right an infrared sensor providing a constant data stream. Two additional robotic arms, mounted on the back of her chair, hung in the air like spider legs, their precise screwdrivers tapping against each other.
"Kaelen?" The woman's voice emerged metallic and muffled due to the voice modulator in her throat. She coughed, the sound from her lungs like a rusty bellows. "What trouble have you dumped on my doorstep this time? I hope it's not an android, detective, I'm out of spare parts. The Syndicate seized all the neuro-processors."
"Not an android," Kaelen said, as he laid Jester on the cold, leather-covered operating table in the center of the room. The man's arm hung from the table, static electricity sparks dripping from his fingertips. "Something more complex."
Nena pushed the joystick of her wheelchair, approaching the table. The sensor in her right eye whirred, focusing. She opened Jester's chest, placing her hand on his pale skin. The weary expression on her face gave way to terrifying seriousness.
"This boy..." Nena whispered. Her metallic fingers felt the vibration in Jester's ribcage. "This boy has no heart, Kaelen. There's not a biological organ in his chest, but a *reactor* operating. And right now, it's about to experience a core meltdown."
Kaelen leaned against the edge of the table, pulling out a cigarette with trembling hands. The flame of the lighter illuminated the tired lines on his face. "Can you save him?"
"Save him?" Nena activated the robotic arms on her chair. The arms plunged into the jungle of cables hanging from the ceiling, coiling like snakes as they searched for the appropriate connectors. "I don't know. But maybe I can cool him down."
The robotic arms forcibly opened ports on the side of Jester's neck and the inside of his wrists, normally hidden beneath the skin, and plunged data cables into them. The room filled with the synchronized beeping of CRT monitors. On the screens, instead of pulse or blood pressure, lines of green code flowed like a waterfall.
**CPU TEMPERATURE: 104%... MEMORY FRAGMENTATION: 45%... SYSTEM INTEGRITY: CRITICAL.**
As Kaelen inhaled the smoke, he felt crushed under the weight of the truth he was pursuing. This man was no psychic or charlatan. He was a glitch made flesh, an error embodied in this broken world, this gray simulation.
XXXQUOTEXXX
"Reality is a machine powered by belief. If enough people believe a lie is true, the lie stands before you, flesh and blood. But some... some are pebbles caught in the machine's gears. They are neither true nor false. They are just noise."
— *Dr. Aris Koppel, "Notes on Static Anomalies", 1991*
At that moment, Jester's consciousness drifted far from the grimy streets of Nova-Veridia, in the backyard of existence.
There was no ground. No sky. Only a blinding, infinite whiteness prevailed. The horizon line was erased. In the air, defying gravity, black cubes of perfect geometric shapes hung suspended.
Jester walked. Or thought he walked; for he felt no ground beneath his feet.
"Where am I?" he asked. His lips didn't move, no sound emerged. Instead, his thought appeared in the air as a black, bold-font text bubble, pixelating and dispersing within seconds.
Ahead, a small silhouette stood in the middle of the white void. A child with his back turned. He wore a gray hospital gown that enveloped his body. On the back of the gown, like a faded stamp, was written **"SUBJECT 405"**.
"Who are you?" The question hung in the air again.
The child slowly turned around. He had no face. Above his neck, instead of flesh and bone, rested an old-model, wood-paneled television set. Its screen displayed a static, gray "snow" image.
**"We are the error,"** the child said. His voice wasn't heard through ears; it echoed in Jester's mind like thousands of different radio channels speaking at once. A crackling, overlapping, corrupted chorus. **"We are the files that must be deleted. Why did you return, 405?"**
"I didn't return," Jester said, feeling his own existence tremble. "I just... fell."
The television-headed child pointed a thin, childlike finger at Jester. The static on the screen intensified, the image distorting.
**"He is coming. The Silent Ones were just the beginning. The Game Master has awakened. If you wake up, they will find us again. They will hurt us again."**
Cracks began to form in the white void. From the black cubes suspended in the air, a dark, red liquid, like tar, began to flow. As the liquid fell onto the white ground, "Error" messages appeared and vanished.
**"DON'T SLEEP, 405. IF YOU SLEEP, YOU WILL BE DELETED. FORMATTING INITIATED..."**
In the real world, the "Iron Lung" was on the verge of chaos.
Nena Volt cried out in panic, backing her wheelchair away. "Kaelen! Hold him! His mind is rejecting the system! He's trying to format himself!"
Jester's body, defying the laws of physics, had risen about ten centimeters above the operating table. Cables strained, sparks flew from connection points. One of the monitors exploded with a high-pressure burst, scattering glass fragments across the room.
Kaelen threw his cigarette to the floor and lunged forward. He pressed down on Jester's shoulders with all his weight, but the power beneath the frail body was as resistant as a hydraulic press.
"Wake up, you damn fool!" Kaelen roared through gritted teeth. "You owe too much to die! We're not done yet!"
Jester's mouth opened as if to break his jaw. Instead of a human scream, that familiar sound that vibrated the room rose from his throat: **WHITE NOISE.**
All electronic devices went haywire. The lights began to flicker like a strobe. But this time, words could be discerned within that deafening hiss. Jester, trapped between two worlds, raved:
*"Sector 9... Vault 7... My mother... Why is my mother's face pixelating?... Data... Data corrupted..."*
Nena pulled out a massive, metal-bodied syringe from a drawer. In its chamber, a neon-blue phosphorescent liquid glowed in the dark, swirling.
"System Coolant!" Nena shouted, reaching over Kaelen with a robotic arm. "This should bring him back, or burn him out completely!"
She mercilessly plunged the needle into the open port on Jester's neck. The moment the blue liquid entered his veins – or cables – Jester's hovering body dropped with a thud onto the table.
Silence.
Then Jester's eyes suddenly opened.
Kaelen flinched and recoiled. Jester's pupils, irises, whites... none were there. The inside of his eye sockets glowed a brilliant, entirely blue screen.
**SYSTEM REBOOTED.**
The blue light reflected on the room's walls slowly faded. The blue screen faded, replaced by Jester's own hazel, tired eyes. His chest swelled, drawing in air like a man saved from drowning.
"Wow," Jester said, clutching his throat as he tried to sit up. His voice was raspy. "I just had the most boring dream of my life. Just a white wall and a constantly crying television. Couldn't even change the channel."
Kaelen let out a deep breath and leaned against the wall behind him. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with his arm. "We thought you were dead, circus runaway."
Jester attempted to get off the bed, but his legs refused the command. His knees buckled, and he stumbled. Kaelen instinctively grabbed his arm, steadying him.
"Your engine hasn't cooled down, kid," Nena said, retracting her robotic arms and inspecting her damaged equipment. "What you did in that tower... it burned out half the nanobots in your body. You won't heal as fast as you used to. And if you pull that 'Glitch' stunt again, this time you'll see the black screen, not the blue one. Permanently."
As if he hadn't heard Nena's warning, Jester turned to a broken mirror on the counter. He looked at his own reflection.
The thick white paint on his face, the red smile, the exaggerated mask... All were gone. The person he saw in the mirror was a frightened, pale, and vulnerable young man. Not a 'glitch,' just a human. And Jester hated this image. Ordinariness was his greatest nightmare.
With a trembling hand, he reached for the open can of black grease paint right beside him. He dipped his index finger into the thick, black grease. Looking at his reflection in the mirror, he drew the familiar, downward-streaking crying clown lines beneath his eyes.
"No mask," he whispered, his voice hardening. "No show."
Kaelen holstered his weapon and came to his side. "Now what do we do? The man in the Clock Tower, the Syndicate's Emissary... he said 'Chapter 1 is over.' What's next?"
Jester snatched a city map, stained with oil, from Nena's counter. He slammed it onto the table.
"Chapter 2 is about the hunt, Detective," he said. That old, unsettling glint was returning to his eyes. He placed his finger on the most dangerous, darkest area of the map, a place even the police dared not enter.
**THE DATA MINES.**
Kaelen looked at the map. It was beneath the old metro tunnels, deep under the city. "Did he hide there?"
"The Emissary didn't just go there to escape," Jester said. "The Syndicate is excavating old servers underground. They want to finish the work left incomplete during the 'White Noise' in 1989."
"What work?"
Jester lifted his head and looked into Kaelen's eyes, as if scanning his soul.
"To rewrite reality. Not just to stop time, Kaelen. They want to erase the past and upload their own versions. If they succeed, your dead wife won't just be dead; she'll have never been born. I... I will have never existed."
Kaelen's face turned ashen, but his gaze hardened. He moved his hand to the weapon at his hip, checking the hammer.
"Alright," Kaelen said, his voice as cold as steel. "Then let's go down to those mines and pull their plugs."
As they headed for the door, Nena called out after them, her robotic arms waving in the air: "Hey! Is this a charity, you punks? I injected a million-dollar coolant into his veins! What about the treatment fee?"
Jester, limping as he exited the door, turned back, offering a crooked smile with the grease paint on his face.
"When we save the world, you can deduct it as a tax write-off, Nena! Send the bill to the Syndicate!"
As they stepped into the dark corridor, Jester was no longer being carried on Kaelen's shoulder. He was limping, wincing with every step, but he was on his own feet. Kaelen noticed this. He didn't offer help, merely slowed his pace to match Jester's rhythm.
Their forced partnership was over. Brotherhood, beneath this grimy, rainy, and broken city, had quietly begun.