In the guts of Nova-Veridia, at that ultimate point where even the sewage lines refused to vomit, the dominion of maps ended. This was not a geography, but an erasure. The city's foundations opened into a bottomless canyon, as if carved out by a colossal, invisible hand.
Kaelen felt his stomach clench as he stood on the edge of the abyss. From below, from seven layers beneath the earth, the sound wasn't wind; it was the muffled, mechanical groan of millions of fans spinning simultaneously. A hot, vibrating hum that made one's tooth fillings ache.
"This place..." Kaelen said, covering his nose with the back of his hand. The smell was a nauseating mixture of the sharp acid of burnt copper cables and the sweetish stench of damp, rotting flesh. "This place smells like the bottom of hell."
"You're wrong, Detective. This isn't the city's dump, it's its recycling bin," Jester corrected.
The Clown was crouched dangerously close to the edge of the abyss. He dropped a rusty bolt he'd picked up from the ground into the darkness. There was no sound of the bolt hitting anything. Only an endless swallowing.
"Every deleted file, every forgotten memory, every lost person falls here," Jester said, his voice echoing in the void. "And the Syndicate mines here."
Kaelen frowned. "What are they extracting? Gold? Uranium?"
"Data," Jester said, without taking his eyes off the darkness. "Ciphers from ancient eras, dead people's bank accounts, covered-up state secrets... And most importantly: **Raw Reality Fragments.**"
Kaelen looked around. He searched for an elevator, a crane, any descent vehicle belonging to the civilized world, but to no avail. There were only rusty service ladders hammered into the wall like a spine, and rails gleaming with grease, descending at a steep angle towards the heart of the darkness.
"We're not walking, are we?" Kaelen asked, looking at those endless stairs.
"Never," Jester said. The makeshift, motor-oil-smeared smile on his face widened. He pointed to an empty mine cart on the rails, its wheels locked. "We're sliding."
***
As the cart surrendered to gravity and plunged into the darkness, Kaelen bit his lips until they bled to keep from screaming. The high-pitched shriek of metal grinding against metal grated on his ears. Jester, meanwhile, perched on the front edge of the cart, letting the wind comb back the black paint on his face. It was as if he wasn't on a deadly descent, but a grotesque roller coaster.
However, this adrenaline rush was cut short by a strange light appearing in the depths of the tunnel.
The yellow beam of the headlights illuminated a dense layer of fog. But this wasn't the kind of vapor they knew. It was a shimmering, static-filled cloud of dust, composed of grey and white pixels, suspended in the air.
"Hold your breath!" Jester shouted, his voice competing with the roar of the wind. "This is 'Corrupted Data Fog'. If you breathe it in, it's not your lungs that burn, but your memory! Hallucinations begin!"
Kaelen pressed the collar of his leather jacket over his nose and mouth, but it was too late. As the cart entered the fog, the world lost its resolution. Faces began to appear on the wet walls of the tunnel.
First they were blurry, then they sharpened.
His ex-wife. Sarah. Pale as she was on that rainy day, the moment her coffin was closed, but with open eyes. Reaching out to him from the wall. Right beside her was Mike, his partner lost last year; static interference, not blood, flowed from the bullet hole in his chest.
"Join us, Kaelen," the walls whispered. Their voices crackled like a corrupted radio broadcast. "There's no pain here. Only silence."
Kaelen's eyes glazed over. The hand holding his jacket loosened. He no longer felt the jolting of the cart. He only saw that inviting, peaceful void. His body involuntarily leaned towards the edge of the cart, about to surrender to the emptiness.
"Hey!"
The voice cracked like a slap. Jester's hand grabbed Kaelen's collar and yanked him roughly back into the cart, onto safe ground.
"They're not real, Detective!" Jester shouted, looking at Kaelen's face. "They're just a spam folder! Unimportant files that need to be deleted!"
As the cart burst out of the fog, Kaelen began to cough, taking deep breaths. The air filling his lungs was clean, but his mind was still clouded by the weight of those images. When he lifted his head, the sight before him took his breath away again.
They had entered a colossal cavern.
This resembled a technological tumor more than a natural formation. The cavern walls weren't rock; they were composed of hundreds of meters of stacked old server cases, their LED lights still faintly flickering. Millions of black cables, like a colossal spiderweb, enveloped the cavern ceiling, hanging down.
And below, on the floor of that digital hive, hundreds of figures moved.
**"Data Miners."**
Kaelen could see what they were without needing binoculars, and what he saw turned his stomach. They were dehumanized. Slaves with crude cybernetic implants screwed into their eye sockets, their arms severed at the elbows and replaced with rusty data ports and pickaxes.
"God..." Kaelen said, his voice dropping to a whisper. "These are..."
"The lost people," Jester said. His voice this time wasn't mocking, but icy. "Street children, the homeless, those 'statistics' no one looks for. The Syndicate uses them as 'processors'. They exploit not their bodies, but the processing power of their brains. Biological batteries expended for cracking ciphers."
The cart stopped at a loading station with a noisy screech of brakes. Jester and Kaelen slipped into the shadows, behind stacked empty cases.
"The Envoy must be here," Jester said, scanning the surroundings. "We need to find the main control room. That's the brain of this whole hell."
However, advancing was no different than walking through a minefield. The cavern wasn't just filled with those unfortunate slaves. There were patrolling **"Security Bots."** They were four-legged, dog-shaped, but headless; where their necks should have been, there was a constantly rotating radar dish scanning the surroundings with green lasers.
Jester raised his hand, wanting to snap his fingers. He could create a "Glitch" and make those bots explode. But Nena's warning echoed in his mind: *"Do it again, and you won't see a blue screen, but a black one."*
He clenched his hand into a fist and lowered it. Old school.
A Security Bot was approaching the cases where they were hiding. The *click-click-click* sound of its mechanical claws on the metal floor announced an approaching death.
Jester picked up a palm-sized piece of metal from the ground. He looked at Kaelen and, with his eyes, indicated the opposite side of the bot. He threw the metal piece.
*CLANG!*
The sound echoed in the cavern's silence. The bot's radar dish instantly turned towards the sound, its body lunging in that direction with menacing speed.
Jester signaled 'now' to Kaelen.
Kaelen emerged from the shadows like a ghost. He slipped behind the bot. With years of street experience and rage, he plunged his knife into the exposed hydraulic cables in the robot's neck. The bot collapsed to the ground with a brief sizzle and scattered sparks.
"Nice work," Jester said, coming up beside Kaelen and whispering. "But we have a problem."
Before Kaelen could say 'What?', the colossal screen hanging in the middle of the cavern flickered to life with a loud noise. Through the static interference, the Envoy's smooth, masked face appeared.
**"WELCOME, GUESTS. I WAS EXPECTING YOU."**
The voice came from every corner of the cavern, from every speaker, simultaneously. The hundreds of miners below simultaneously stopped their work. They lifted their heads with an eerie synchronization, turning them towards the platform where Kaelen and Jester stood. The color of the implants in their eyes shifted from pale blue to a menacing red.
**"SEIZE THEM,"** said the Envoy.
The order was simple. The result was chaos.
Hundreds of slave miners, raising the metal tools, crowbars, and cables in their hands, began to run towards the platform like a silent and deadly zombie horde, without screaming. The metal ladders trembled under the weight of hundreds of feet.
"There are too many of them!" Kaelen shouted, drawing his pistol and aiming, but he couldn't pull the trigger. "I can't shoot, Jester! They're civilians! All of them are victims!"
"Don't shoot anyway!" Jester said, looking around in a panic. "We're escaping!"
"Where? We're cornered!"
The miners had already started climbing the first steps. Jester pointed to the wide channel running through the middle of the cavern, through which not water, but a glowing, dense blue liquid flowed.
"To that river," Jester said. "That river carries coolant to the main server. A mixture of liquid nitrogen and data flow. It will take us directly to the Envoy's doorstep."
Kaelen looked down at that deadly blue glow. "We'll freeze solid in that thing!"
"Either we freeze or we get torn apart, Detective! The choice is yours!"
As the foremost miner swung his metal arm, about to leap at them, Jester threw himself into the channel without a second thought. Kaelen swore, holstered his weapon, and jumped in after him.
The liquid wasn't like water. It was jelly-like in consistency, and its touch felt like thousands of needles piercing his skin. The cold penetrated to his bones, but its fluidity dragged them along at an incredible speed.
They passed through tunnels, between colossal spinning fans. Jester, at the last moment, twisted and dodged to avoid hitting the razor-sharp blades of a fan, not with superhuman reflexes, but with the agility born of pure terror. Kaelen mimicked him, escaping death by mere inches.
Finally, the current flung them into a wide basin, onto a metal grate. Kaelen, breathless, clung to the grate's bars and grabbed Jester by the arm as he was being swept away.
Soaked and trembling, they looked behind the grate. What they saw was the complete opposite of that rusty, dirty mining world.
A sterile, stark white, tiled colossal laboratory. And right in the center of the laboratory, suspended in the air within a glass containment unit, held by cables hanging from the ceiling, was a colossal organ.
A human heart.
But not of normal size; it was the size of a car. It was beating. *Thump. Thump.* With each beat, not blood, but a neon blue light, pure data, was pumped through its veins.
Jester pushed his wet hair back and peered through the grate. In his eyes was a mixed expression of awe and horror at what he saw.
"There it is," he said, breathless, his teeth chattering. "The heart of Project 1989. The 'Chronos Core.'"
But he wasn't alone inside. The Envoy was there, hands clasped behind his back, observing his masterpiece. And beside him was someone Kaelen knew very well, someone whose back, at first sight, made him feel as if he'd been punched in the stomach.
A man in uniform. Ranks on his shoulders. Slightly bowed before the Envoy, he was handing him a black, leather briefcase.
The Police Chief. Kaelen's mentor. The man he called 'father,' who had pulled him out of this swamp.
"Betrayal," Kaelen said. The word tasted like ash as it left his mouth. "The Chief... he's working with them."
Jester placed his hand on Kaelen's trembling shoulder. His voice, for the first time, was compassionate, but it held that familiar, dangerous undertone.
"Loyalty is the quickest thing to corrupt in this city, Detective," he said. Then he reached for the grate's lock. "Now, quiet. Time to crash the party."