The Data Shard’s Scream
The data shard sat in Kaelen’s palm like a sliver of frozen light, no bigger than her thumbnail. She’d pried it from the dead man’s skull in the backward room, her fingers slick with coolant that smelled like burnt sugar. The shard was warm, pulsing with a faint rhythm that matched her heartbeat. She didn’t like that.
Her apartment was a coffin of rusted metal and flickering neon. The walls wept condensation, and the single bulb above her desk buzzed like a trapped insect. She sat on a crate that used to hold protein paste, the shard balanced on her knee, and plugged it into a reader she’d stolen from a Guild scrapyard three years ago. The reader was older than she was, its screen cracked, its wires exposed. It hummed to life with a sound like a dying cat.
The shard’s data unfolded in jagged lines of code, then resolved into a face. A man, maybe fifty, with hollow cheeks and eyes that had seen too many equations. His hair was a shock of white, his jaw sharp enough to cut glass. Text scrolled beneath his image: *Dr. Aris Venn, PhD. Theoretical Gravity Dynamics. Disgraced. Status: Fugitive.*
Kaelen leaned back. The name meant nothing to her, but the word “disgraced” was a familiar perfume in Aetherfall. Every genius ended up either dead or running. Venn had chosen the latter.
She tapped the reader. More data spilled out—schematics, equations, a map of the city’s gravity grid with a single point marked in red. The point was in the outer slums, a sector called the Rot, where the artificial gravity was so weak you could jump three meters and feel like you were flying. The Rot was where people went to disappear.
The shard also contained a message. Audio. She played it.
A man’s voice, ragged, breathless. “If you’re hearing this, I’m already dead. Or I will be. Time is... complicated for me now. The room you found—that was my first success. And my first failure. The Guild knows. They’ve been hunting me for six months. They want my research. They want to fold gravity into a commodity, sell it like water. But folding isn’t a tool. It’s a wound. And wounds bleed.”
A pause. The sound of something heavy being dragged across a floor.
“Lyra Saito is the key. She volunteered. She has a disease—a genetic cascade that’s eating her from the inside. I folded her into a stable time-bubble. She’s alive. She’s safe. But the bubble is growing. Every day, it expands by a fraction of a millimeter. In a year, it will swallow this sector. In five, the entire city. I can’t stop it. I can only delay. Find me. I’m in the Rot. I’ll give you the rest. But hurry. The Guild is already at my door.”
The message ended.
Kaelen stared at the reader. Her left hand was numb. She looked down. The skin on her knuckles had turned a deep, bruised purple, and the veins beneath it glowed faintly, like embers in ash. The gravity-skin was spreading. She could feel it—a cold, crawling sensation under her dermis, like worms tunneling through her flesh. She flexed her fingers. They moved, but slowly, as if the bones were made of lead.
She had six months. Maybe less. The shard’s data confirmed what she already knew: the skin was eating her. Every time she used its power, she accelerated the process. The star’s death was becoming her own.
She needed a drink. But her credit chip was empty, and the bottle of synth-whiskey on her shelf was a lie—it was mostly industrial solvent and regret. She stood, her joints popping, and grabbed her coat. The leather was cracked, the lining torn, but it had deep pockets and a collar that hid her face. She needed to see Jinx.
Jinx operated out of a meat-market in the lower rings, a place called the Gut. It was a warehouse converted into a bazaar of flesh and chrome, where organ dealers and cybernetic surgeons plied their trade under flickering lights that buzzed with the frequency of a dying star. The air smelled of antiseptic, blood, and ozone. Kaelen walked through the crowd, her boots sticking to the floor, her hand resting on the grip of a kinetic pistol she’d never fired. The gravity-skin made her stronger than any weapon, but she liked the weight of it. It reminded her she was still human.
Jinx’s stall was in the back, behind a curtain of plastic strips that clattered like bones. Jinx herself was a woman of indeterminate age, her face a patchwork of synthetic skin and scar tissue, her eyes replaced with black glass orbs that reflected nothing. She was threading a needle through a slab of cloned liver when Kaelen pushed through the curtain.
“Voss.” Jinx didn’t look up. “You look worse than the last corpse I harvested. Sit down before you fall down.”
Kaelen sat on a stool that wobbled. “I need information.”
“You always do. And you never pay.” Jinx set down the needle and wiped her hands on a rag that was more blood than fabric. “What is it this time? A new kidney? A memory splice? I can get you a clean neural map for three thousand credits. Cash only.”
“I need to find a man named Aris Venn. Disgraced physicist. Hiding in the Rot.”
Jinx’s black eyes flickered. For a moment, Kaelen saw something like fear in them. Then it was gone. “Venn. You’ve been digging in deep shit, Voss. That man is a ghost. The Guild has been hunting him for months. They’ve killed three people who got too close. One of them was a friend of mine.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. She was an idiot. She thought she could sell Venn’s location to the highest bidder. The Guild found her first.” Jinx picked up a scalpel and turned it over in her hands. “Why do you want him?”
“I was hired to find a missing girl. Lyra Saito. Venn has her.”
Jinx’s hands stopped moving. “Lyra Saito. The billionaire’s daughter.” She set down the scalpel and leaned forward. “Voss, do you know what the Guild does to people who interfere with their operations? They don’t kill you. They fold you into a gravity loop. You spend eternity falling, never hitting the ground. Your body ages, but your mind stays sharp. Forever. I’ve seen it. It’s not pretty.”
“I’ve seen worse.”
“Have you?” Jinx gestured at Kaelen’s left hand. “That skin on your arm. It’s spreading. How long do you have?”
“Six months. Maybe less.”
“Then you’re a dead woman walking. Why not spend your last days drinking and fucking and forgetting? Why chase a ghost?”
Kaelen looked at her hands. The purple had spread to her wrist. She could feel the cold creeping up her forearm, a slow tide of nothing. “Because I made a promise. To an AI. To myself. I don’t know anymore. But I can’t stop. If I stop, I’ll have to think about what’s happening to me. And I don’t want to think about it.”
Jinx was silent for a long moment. Then she reached under her stall and pulled out a data slate. She tapped it, and a map appeared—the Rot, with a single building highlighted in red. “This is where Venn was last seen. Three days ago. A warehouse on the edge of the sector, near the gravity-farm. The Guild has it under surveillance. If you go in, you’ll be seen. And they will kill you.”
“I’m already dying. What’s the difference?”
Jinx handed her the slate. “The difference is that you can still choose how you die. Don’t let them choose for you.”
Kaelen took the slate. Her fingers brushed Jinx’s, and she felt the cold of the woman’s synthetic skin. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Just don’t get me involved. I have enough problems.”
Kaelen stood. The stool wobbled, then fell over. She didn’t pick it up. She pushed through the plastic curtain and walked back into the crowd, the slate heavy in her pocket. The Gut was louder now, the noise pressing against her skull like a physical weight. She needed air. She needed space. She needed to find Venn before the Guild did.
She stepped out of the warehouse into a narrow alley. The sky above was a patchwork of neon and steel, the rings of Aetherfall spinning in a slow, hypnotic dance. The gravity here was weak—maybe half a G—and she felt light, almost buoyant. She jumped, and her feet left the ground for a full second. The gravity-skin hummed in response, a low vibration that traveled up her spine.
She landed softly. Her left hand was completely numb now. She looked at it. The purple had reached her elbow, and the veins were glowing brighter, a sickly green that pulsed with her heartbeat. She could feel the skin moving, shifting, adapting. It was alive. And it was hungry.
She walked. The Rot was a maze of rusted catwalks and crumbling buildings, where the poor huddled in the shadows and the weak were prey. She passed a group of children playing with a dead rat, their laughter hollow and sharp. She passed a woman selling her body for a meal, her eyes empty, her skin covered in sores. She passed a man who was screaming at the sky, his voice cracking, his fists shaking. No one looked at her. No one cared.
The warehouse was a squat, ugly building of corrugated metal, its roof caved in, its walls covered in graffiti. The red mark on the slate blinked as she approached. She stopped at the entrance, a gaping hole where a door used to be. Inside, it was dark. She could hear something—a rhythmic thumping, like a heartbeat. Or a machine.
She stepped inside.
The air was thick with dust. Her boots crunched on broken glass. The thumping grew louder, more insistent. She followed it, her hand on her pistol, her gravity-skin humming. The warehouse was empty, save for a single object in the center: a metal chair, bolted to the floor. And in the chair, a man.
He was tied down, his wrists and ankles bound with cable. His head was slumped forward, his white hair matted with blood. His chest rose and fell in shallow breaths. He was alive.
Kaelen approached slowly. “Dr. Venn?”
He lifted his head. His eyes were glassy, unfocused. But when he saw her, something flickered in them. Recognition. Or fear. “You’re... not Guild.”
“No. I’m here to find Lyra Saito.”
He laughed, a wet, broken sound. “Lyra. She’s safe. For now. But the bubble... it’s growing. I can’t stop it. I need... I need to finish the equation.”
“The Guild is coming. We need to move.”
“No.” He shook his head. “They’re already here. They’ve been watching. They let you in. They want to see where I lead you.”
Kaelen’s blood went cold. She turned. The entrance was blocked by three figures in black armor, their helmets sleek, their rifles trained on her. The Guild. They’d been waiting.
The lead figure stepped forward. A woman’s voice, distorted by a speaker. “Kaelen Voss. Ex-detective. Current status: terminal. You’re a dead woman walking. Hand over the physicist, and we’ll let you die in peace.”
Kaelen’s left hand throbbed. The skin was crawling, spreading, reaching. She could feel the gravity in the room, the mass of the rifles, the weight of the armor. She could crush them. She could fold them into a ball of meat and metal. But it would cost her. Another week. Another memory.
She looked at Venn. He was watching her, his eyes wide. “Don’t,” he whispered. “They’ll kill you.”
“I’m already dead,” she said. And she let the gravity-skin loose.
The world went white.
Her apartment was a coffin of rusted metal and flickering neon. The walls wept condensation, and the single bulb above her desk buzzed like a trapped insect. She sat on a crate that used to hold protein paste, the shard balanced on her knee, and plugged it into a reader she’d stolen from a Guild scrapyard three years ago. The reader was older than she was, its screen cracked, its wires exposed. It hummed to life with a sound like a dying cat.
The shard’s data unfolded in jagged lines of code, then resolved into a face. A man, maybe fifty, with hollow cheeks and eyes that had seen too many equations. His hair was a shock of white, his jaw sharp enough to cut glass. Text scrolled beneath his image: *Dr. Aris Venn, PhD. Theoretical Gravity Dynamics. Disgraced. Status: Fugitive.*
Kaelen leaned back. The name meant nothing to her, but the word “disgraced” was a familiar perfume in Aetherfall. Every genius ended up either dead or running. Venn had chosen the latter.
She tapped the reader. More data spilled out—schematics, equations, a map of the city’s gravity grid with a single point marked in red. The point was in the outer slums, a sector called the Rot, where the artificial gravity was so weak you could jump three meters and feel like you were flying. The Rot was where people went to disappear.
The shard also contained a message. Audio. She played it.
A man’s voice, ragged, breathless. “If you’re hearing this, I’m already dead. Or I will be. Time is... complicated for me now. The room you found—that was my first success. And my first failure. The Guild knows. They’ve been hunting me for six months. They want my research. They want to fold gravity into a commodity, sell it like water. But folding isn’t a tool. It’s a wound. And wounds bleed.”
A pause. The sound of something heavy being dragged across a floor.
“Lyra Saito is the key. She volunteered. She has a disease—a genetic cascade that’s eating her from the inside. I folded her into a stable time-bubble. She’s alive. She’s safe. But the bubble is growing. Every day, it expands by a fraction of a millimeter. In a year, it will swallow this sector. In five, the entire city. I can’t stop it. I can only delay. Find me. I’m in the Rot. I’ll give you the rest. But hurry. The Guild is already at my door.”
The message ended.
Kaelen stared at the reader. Her left hand was numb. She looked down. The skin on her knuckles had turned a deep, bruised purple, and the veins beneath it glowed faintly, like embers in ash. The gravity-skin was spreading. She could feel it—a cold, crawling sensation under her dermis, like worms tunneling through her flesh. She flexed her fingers. They moved, but slowly, as if the bones were made of lead.
She had six months. Maybe less. The shard’s data confirmed what she already knew: the skin was eating her. Every time she used its power, she accelerated the process. The star’s death was becoming her own.
She needed a drink. But her credit chip was empty, and the bottle of synth-whiskey on her shelf was a lie—it was mostly industrial solvent and regret. She stood, her joints popping, and grabbed her coat. The leather was cracked, the lining torn, but it had deep pockets and a collar that hid her face. She needed to see Jinx.
Jinx operated out of a meat-market in the lower rings, a place called the Gut. It was a warehouse converted into a bazaar of flesh and chrome, where organ dealers and cybernetic surgeons plied their trade under flickering lights that buzzed with the frequency of a dying star. The air smelled of antiseptic, blood, and ozone. Kaelen walked through the crowd, her boots sticking to the floor, her hand resting on the grip of a kinetic pistol she’d never fired. The gravity-skin made her stronger than any weapon, but she liked the weight of it. It reminded her she was still human.
Jinx’s stall was in the back, behind a curtain of plastic strips that clattered like bones. Jinx herself was a woman of indeterminate age, her face a patchwork of synthetic skin and scar tissue, her eyes replaced with black glass orbs that reflected nothing. She was threading a needle through a slab of cloned liver when Kaelen pushed through the curtain.
“Voss.” Jinx didn’t look up. “You look worse than the last corpse I harvested. Sit down before you fall down.”
Kaelen sat on a stool that wobbled. “I need information.”
“You always do. And you never pay.” Jinx set down the needle and wiped her hands on a rag that was more blood than fabric. “What is it this time? A new kidney? A memory splice? I can get you a clean neural map for three thousand credits. Cash only.”
“I need to find a man named Aris Venn. Disgraced physicist. Hiding in the Rot.”
Jinx’s black eyes flickered. For a moment, Kaelen saw something like fear in them. Then it was gone. “Venn. You’ve been digging in deep shit, Voss. That man is a ghost. The Guild has been hunting him for months. They’ve killed three people who got too close. One of them was a friend of mine.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. She was an idiot. She thought she could sell Venn’s location to the highest bidder. The Guild found her first.” Jinx picked up a scalpel and turned it over in her hands. “Why do you want him?”
“I was hired to find a missing girl. Lyra Saito. Venn has her.”
Jinx’s hands stopped moving. “Lyra Saito. The billionaire’s daughter.” She set down the scalpel and leaned forward. “Voss, do you know what the Guild does to people who interfere with their operations? They don’t kill you. They fold you into a gravity loop. You spend eternity falling, never hitting the ground. Your body ages, but your mind stays sharp. Forever. I’ve seen it. It’s not pretty.”
“I’ve seen worse.”
“Have you?” Jinx gestured at Kaelen’s left hand. “That skin on your arm. It’s spreading. How long do you have?”
“Six months. Maybe less.”
“Then you’re a dead woman walking. Why not spend your last days drinking and fucking and forgetting? Why chase a ghost?”
Kaelen looked at her hands. The purple had spread to her wrist. She could feel the cold creeping up her forearm, a slow tide of nothing. “Because I made a promise. To an AI. To myself. I don’t know anymore. But I can’t stop. If I stop, I’ll have to think about what’s happening to me. And I don’t want to think about it.”
Jinx was silent for a long moment. Then she reached under her stall and pulled out a data slate. She tapped it, and a map appeared—the Rot, with a single building highlighted in red. “This is where Venn was last seen. Three days ago. A warehouse on the edge of the sector, near the gravity-farm. The Guild has it under surveillance. If you go in, you’ll be seen. And they will kill you.”
“I’m already dying. What’s the difference?”
Jinx handed her the slate. “The difference is that you can still choose how you die. Don’t let them choose for you.”
Kaelen took the slate. Her fingers brushed Jinx’s, and she felt the cold of the woman’s synthetic skin. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Just don’t get me involved. I have enough problems.”
Kaelen stood. The stool wobbled, then fell over. She didn’t pick it up. She pushed through the plastic curtain and walked back into the crowd, the slate heavy in her pocket. The Gut was louder now, the noise pressing against her skull like a physical weight. She needed air. She needed space. She needed to find Venn before the Guild did.
She stepped out of the warehouse into a narrow alley. The sky above was a patchwork of neon and steel, the rings of Aetherfall spinning in a slow, hypnotic dance. The gravity here was weak—maybe half a G—and she felt light, almost buoyant. She jumped, and her feet left the ground for a full second. The gravity-skin hummed in response, a low vibration that traveled up her spine.
She landed softly. Her left hand was completely numb now. She looked at it. The purple had reached her elbow, and the veins were glowing brighter, a sickly green that pulsed with her heartbeat. She could feel the skin moving, shifting, adapting. It was alive. And it was hungry.
She walked. The Rot was a maze of rusted catwalks and crumbling buildings, where the poor huddled in the shadows and the weak were prey. She passed a group of children playing with a dead rat, their laughter hollow and sharp. She passed a woman selling her body for a meal, her eyes empty, her skin covered in sores. She passed a man who was screaming at the sky, his voice cracking, his fists shaking. No one looked at her. No one cared.
The warehouse was a squat, ugly building of corrugated metal, its roof caved in, its walls covered in graffiti. The red mark on the slate blinked as she approached. She stopped at the entrance, a gaping hole where a door used to be. Inside, it was dark. She could hear something—a rhythmic thumping, like a heartbeat. Or a machine.
She stepped inside.
The air was thick with dust. Her boots crunched on broken glass. The thumping grew louder, more insistent. She followed it, her hand on her pistol, her gravity-skin humming. The warehouse was empty, save for a single object in the center: a metal chair, bolted to the floor. And in the chair, a man.
He was tied down, his wrists and ankles bound with cable. His head was slumped forward, his white hair matted with blood. His chest rose and fell in shallow breaths. He was alive.
Kaelen approached slowly. “Dr. Venn?”
He lifted his head. His eyes were glassy, unfocused. But when he saw her, something flickered in them. Recognition. Or fear. “You’re... not Guild.”
“No. I’m here to find Lyra Saito.”
He laughed, a wet, broken sound. “Lyra. She’s safe. For now. But the bubble... it’s growing. I can’t stop it. I need... I need to finish the equation.”
“The Guild is coming. We need to move.”
“No.” He shook his head. “They’re already here. They’ve been watching. They let you in. They want to see where I lead you.”
Kaelen’s blood went cold. She turned. The entrance was blocked by three figures in black armor, their helmets sleek, their rifles trained on her. The Guild. They’d been waiting.
The lead figure stepped forward. A woman’s voice, distorted by a speaker. “Kaelen Voss. Ex-detective. Current status: terminal. You’re a dead woman walking. Hand over the physicist, and we’ll let you die in peace.”
Kaelen’s left hand throbbed. The skin was crawling, spreading, reaching. She could feel the gravity in the room, the mass of the rifles, the weight of the armor. She could crush them. She could fold them into a ball of meat and metal. But it would cost her. Another week. Another memory.
She looked at Venn. He was watching her, his eyes wide. “Don’t,” he whispered. “They’ll kill you.”
“I’m already dead,” she said. And she let the gravity-skin loose.
The world went white.