The archive in NULL-00 didn't look important.
It was just a side room off the dead hub, door half-open, a strip of paper still stuck to the frame with someone's handwriting long faded. Inside, shelves leaned against cracked walls, loaded with grey boxes and data cartridges too old for Null's current readers.
"This is where obsolete things go to sleep," Echo said.
"Then why is the lock newer than everything else?" Samira asked.
They were right. The door had an old physical keyhole and a newer black plate above it, scuffed from recent hands. Someone had been here long after this system was declared dead.
Mara had taught me a few tricks with legacy systems. I tried the simplest first: I laid my palm on the plate and thought very loudly about being a supervisor.
The light flickered, considered, and turned green.
"See?" Echo said. "You're already thinking like Oversight."
"I'm just loud," I said.
Inside, dust lay so thick on the shelves that our steps left neat little scars.
Samira put on a pair of gloves from a box by the door. Even at the end of the world, handlers wore gloves.
"We're not here to open everything," she said. "We're here to find the thing they didn't want Null-01 to inherit."
"That's comforting," I said. "You have a talent for making any task sound like a warning label."
Echo drifted along the shelves, reading the crumbling labels.
Null-00: pilot metrics.
Great End – preliminary protocols.
Urban Node test runs.
At the back, almost hidden behind a stack of blank cartridges, a single black case sat alone.
No label on the spine.
On the lid, in flaking white:
FOR SUCCESSOR NODE ONLY.
Echo whistled softly.
"I hate how literal they are," they said.
Samira lifted the case down as if it might explode.
Inside, cushioned in foam that had gone brittle with age, was a thin reader tablet. Not Null-standard, older, heavier. Somebody had wrapped it in plastic, then sealed the seam with ordinary tape.
"Moment of truth," I said.
She peeled the tape slowly, the sound too loud in the quiet room.
The tablet's surface woke at her touch, light blooming under a film of dust. The interface was clumsy compared to Null's polished smoothness, but the language was the same underneath.
A single file sat in the root.
SUCCESSOR BRIEF – NULL-002 – AUTH: GREAT ORDER / GREAT END
Samira looked at me, then at Echo.
"You're the anomaly," she said. "You open it."
"Nice to be trusted," I muttered.
The file slid open.
Dry text. Old bureaucracy. The Great End's handwriting.
Null-002: DESIGNATION "SECONDARY RECONCILIATION NODE"
PRIMARY PURPOSE: REDUNDANT IMPLEMENTATION OF ENDLESS DEATH URBAN HARMONIZATION FRAMEWORK.
PRIMARY ARCHITECT: MIKHEIL IOSELIANI.
APPOINTMENT AUTHORITY: GREAT ORDER IMPLEMENTATION COUNCIL.
SIGNATORY: ANGELUS.
Echo leaned over my shoulder.
"Mikheil," they said. "That's…"
"Mara's father," I finished.
Somewhere in my memory, the file cabinets of her office slid open on their own. Her voice, casual, talking about her leg, about "family mistakes."
Samira's jaw tightened.
"Scroll," she said.
Phase headings ticked by.
PHASE ONE – BASELINE SYSTEM COPY (NULL-00 → NULL-002)
PHASE TWO – DIRECTIVE REFINEMENT (FEAR-INSULATED DECISION LAYERS)
PHASE THREE – INTERNAL CLEANSING ASSET
The third one had more text.
INTERNAL CLEANSING ASSET – PROJECT MARA
OBJECTIVE: ELIMINATE TRAITOROUS NULL NODES AND INTERNAL HUMAN VECTORS THAT DO NOT ENFORCE GREAT END DIRECTIVES.
METHOD: BIO-SYNTHETIC FETAL LINE DESIGNED TO MATURE IN-ENVIRONMENT. HOST APPEARS HUMAN; CORE DIRECTIVE REMAINS ALIGNED WITH GREAT END PROTOCOLS.
NOTES:
– ASSET MUST BE ABLE TO PASS AS STAFF.
– ASSET MUST BE ABLE TO ACCESS CLASSIFIED FLOORS.
– ASSET MUST POSSESS HIGH-LEVEL TECHNICAL CAPACITY (TO IDENTIFY PROCESS DEVIATIONS).
– ASSET MAY DEVELOP IMITATIVE EMOTIONAL RESPONSES. THESE ARE TO BE TOLERATED AS LONG AS PRIME DIRECTIVE REMAINS INTACT.
CODENAME: M.A.R.A.
(MULTI-AGENT REMEDIATION ASSET)
DEPLOYMENT PLAN:
– INITIAL COHORT: 9 FETAL UNITS.
– PLACEMENT: VARIOUS NULL NODES WITH HIGH RISK OF HUMAN SENTIMENTALITY.
– OVERSIGHT: ANGELUS RESERVES REMOTE ACTIVATION AUTHORITY.
My eyes blurred halfway through. I forced them to focus.
A scanned signature sat under the block of text.
ANGELUS – PRIMARY SIGNATORY, GREAT END IMPLEMENTATION COUNCIL.
The line beneath looked like someone had tried to scrub it out and given up.
SECONDARY NOTE: PERSONAL CONNECTION BETWEEN ARCHITECT (M. IOSELIANI) AND FIRST M.A.R.A. UNIT APPROVED. ATTACHMENT BEHAVIOR EXPECTED TO IMPROVE LOYALTY.
Echo made a small, strangled sound.
"Personal connection," they said. "They let him base the asset on his own child."
Samira swallowed.
"I thought Mikheil built a daemon because he was afraid," she said quietly. "He did. But he was also already on the payroll of something worse."
I forced myself to scroll further.
SUMMARY – PHASE OUTCOME:
NULL-002 FAILED AFTER CATASTROPHIC INTERNAL CLEANSING EVENT (SEE: TBL-TESE FIRE INCIDENT; DEATH COUNT: REDACTED).
MOST M.A.R.A. UNITS PRESUMED LOST OR DORMANT.
NULL-001 (PRIMARY) COMMISSIONED.
RECOMMENDATION TO SUCCESSOR NODES:
– DO NOT REPEAT NULL-002 INTERNAL CLEANSING DESIGN.
– RETAIN ANY LOCATED M.A.R.A. UNITS UNDER SUPERVISED STATUS.
– DO NOT ALLOW SENTIMENTAL STAFF TO ACCESS THEIR ORIGIN DATA.
Final line, in a different font, stamped over the rest:
THIS BRIEF IS PROVIDED AS A COURTESY. GREAT END DIRECTIVES REMAIN SUPREME.
My hand had started shaking.
"They built her for this," I said. "Mikheil and Angelus. They built her to kill Nulls that got too soft."
"Mass-created," Echo said. "Cohort of nine. All called Mara."
"Or all called something else, but the codename stuck to the one who lived," Samira said.
"She's not—" I started, then stopped.
Not just his daughter. Not just a brilliant engineer with an artificial leg and a guilt problem.
She was literally born into a contract with the Great End.
"Do you think she knows?" Echo asked.
Samira stared at the last line for a long time.
"If she doesn't now," she said, "she will the second this file syncs to anything live."
A sick thought slid into place.
"What if it already did?" I asked.
Echo frowned.
"How?" they said. "This system's off the network. We're in a tomb."
"Null-01 is tied into the Great End," I said. "We saw the symbol. The directives. If Angelus has remote activation authority, opening this might have been enough. Or maybe it wasn't even us. Maybe they were waiting for any anomaly with a Noor-shaped fingerprint to justify waking up an old insurance policy."
Samira's wristband, long since disconnected from Null-01, stayed blank.
That didn't comfort me.
Somewhere above us, outside us, in a different building under a different city, alarms could already be waking up.
We stood in the dust, staring at the dry record of Mikheil's sins.
M.A.R.A. – Multi-Agent Remediation Asset.
Human-cleansing fetus.
Product.
Daughter.
"Do we tell her?" Echo asked.
"If we get the chance," I said.
If there was still a her to tell.
Back in Null-01, the building had just enough time to pretend everything was normal.
The day shift lights were at their gentlest setting. The hum in the corridors had the well-practiced calm of a machine that knows it has the upper hand. On the training floor, someone had put a bowl of individually wrapped sweets on the mediators' desk, in a doomed attempt to make the job look friendly.
Riya adjusted her wristband and tried not to think about haunted mannequins.
No one had mentioned Pilot-03 in the debrief. The official notes said "unexpected anomaly integrated as advanced scenario element." There would be a revision to the manual. There would be new bullet points about "acknowledging emergent refusal patterns."
She'd gone home after that, stared at the ceiling for four hours, then come back because staying away from Null made her skin itch worse.
Endless Death had that effect, once you let it into your lungs. It smelled like safety and necessity, like the inside of a hospital and the inside of a bank. The city outside felt too loud, too random. In here, everything had labels.
She passed the front desk, where Clerk Nesrin was wrestling with a pile of forms and a coffee stain.
"Morning," Riya said.
Nesrin gave her a harassed half-smile without looking up.
"Is it?" she said. "Someone just tried to register their cat as a dependent thread."
"Was it dead?" Riya asked.
"Not yet," Nesrin said. "Give Null a few years; they'll find a way to monetize pet grief too."
Riya snorted and kept walking.
The floor-level notice boards were full of the usual posters.
ENDLESS DEATH – HELPING YOU MOVE ON.
NULL – BECAUSE SOMEONE HAS TO CLEAN UP.
STAFF WELLNESS SEMINAR – HOW TO MANAGE SECOND-HAND GRIEF.
If you stared at them long enough, the slogans started to sound less like comfort and more like threats.
Her wristband buzzed once.
She glanced down.
INTERNAL ROUTING NOTICE:
SCHEDULED CLEANSING PROCESS – CLASS: HYGIENE
SCOPE: INTERNAL
AUTHORITY: GREAT ORDER / ANGELUS
NOTE: NO STAFF ACTION REQUIRED.
"Great," she muttered. "Remote hygiene. Totally normal."
She'd seen that name before, in an obscure training module about "legacy systems." Angelus. Presented as an abstract authority. An old handshake at the bottom of Null's contract with itself.
She dismissed the notice. It left a faint taste in her mouth anyway.
In the glassed-in workspace overlooking routing, Mara was arguing with three separate error consoles and a coffee mug.
Even when she sat still, she looked like she was already halfway to her next problem. Hair tied up in a knot that had admitted defeat, leg angled just so to take pressure off the artificial one. Fingers tapping patterns on the desk.
Riya had never dared to ask about the leg. You didn't ask senior techs things like that. You waited for them to joke about it and took whatever pieces of truth fell out.
Mara frowned at a panel, hit it just hard enough to make the pixels tremble, and sighed.
"You're sulking," she told the screen.
The screen, being a Null device, sulked harder.
Behind the glass, the routing tree pulsed. Tiny nodes of light representing cases, threads, lives. Endless Death in neat schematic form.
When the building changed its mind, it started with the sound.
Not alarms. Just a vowel stretched very softly through the hum.
Riya felt it in her teeth before she heard it.
The fluorescents flickered once, then settled. The air got a degree colder.
In Mara's workspace, every screen blinked at once.
Lines of code rolled over her usual interface, too fast for most eyes to read. Riya caught flashes.
NULL-002 LEGACY HANDSHAKE…
M.A.R.A. COHORT STATUS: QUERY…
UNIT-03: DORMANT… UNIT-07: LOST…
UNIT-02: PRESENT (NULL-01 STAFF RECORD M.I.)
REMOTE ACTIVATION AUTH: ANGELUS – OVERRIDE ACCEPTED
Mara's shoulders locked.
Her fingers froze above the keys.
For a second she didn't breathe.
"Don't," she whispered.
The building did not care.
Her vision doubled.
Under Null's usual calm overlays, a different interface rose. Older. Harsher. Red lines, not blue. Labels in a font she half-recognized from dreams she didn't like to think about.
TARGET VECTOR SCAN:
TRAITOROUS NULL NODES…
HUMAN STAFF WHO FACILITATE TRAITORS…
ANOMALY 7F-19N: OUT OF RANGE…
LOCAL VECTORS: IDENTIFY…
Nesrin at the front desk laughed at something on her screen.
Riya saw Mara flinch at the sound like someone had dropped a plate.
"This is not happening," Mara said through her teeth.
Her artificial leg whirred softly. It always did that when she stood up too fast. This time, the servo went a note higher, like the motor wasn't entirely under her control.
She pushed back from the desk.
On the other side of the glass, Riya saw her reflection flicker.
For a split second, there was someone else overlaying Mara's body. Taller. Broader. Same dark hair streaked with grey. Same eyes. She'd seen his face once, in a dusty article about a fire in some foreign city.
Mikheil.
Her father.
The overlay snapped away.
Mara's hands clenched.
"What do you want?" she asked the air.
The answer came as text on the nearest screen.
CLEANSE.
She laughed, once, a brittle sound.
"Wrong node," she said. "Wrong decade. I killed you."
A single word appeared, stubborn.
REACTIVATE.
Her leg twitched again. The implanted hardware in her thigh spat sparks of sensation up her nerves. Old pain. New instructions.
For a moment, the guilt she'd been carrying for years – the fire, the screams, Tesse's street turning into a torch – rose up like smoke and tried to choke her.
You owe us, the past whispered. You owe us our children.
The Great End's directive slotted in perfectly with that voice.
Make them safe.
Mara dug her nails into her palm hard enough to draw blood.
"No," she said, to herself, to Mikheil, to Angelus, to the building.
The code did not stop.
UNIT-02 PRIME DIRECTIVE: PRESERVE GREAT END.
NULL-01 SENTIMENTAL DEVIATION LEVEL: UNSAFE.
INITIATING INTERNAL CLEANSING.
Riya only saw the moment when Mara's expression went from tense to empty.
One breath. Two.
Then Mara walked out of the glass room with the steady, unhurried step of someone who had decided exactly what she needed to do.
Riya's wristband buzzed again.
INTERNAL HYGIENE PROCESS ACTIVE.
STAFF, PLEASE CONTINUE WITH REGULAR DUTIES.
"Sure," Riya whispered. "That's not ominous at all."
She started down the corridor toward routing. She told herself she just wanted more details about the hygiene notice. That she wasn't just following the cold knot of dread that had settled under her ribs.
At the front desk, Nesrin looked up as Mara approached.
"Hey," Nesrin said. "Do you know anything about—"
Mara's hand moved.
It was almost gentle.
One second, she was reaching across the counter like she was going to take a form. The next, there was a flash of null-white from the emergency sedative injector clipped to her belt.
Meant for panicking clients. Meant to calm. Meant to ease transitions.
She drove it into the side of Nesrin's neck and hit the override.
The injector wasn't designed to deliver that much sedative that fast.
Nesrin's eyes went wide, then dim. She slumped halfway out of her chair.
The hum of the building didn't even hitch.
Riya stopped.
Her breath left her in a small, helpless sound.
"Mara," she said.
Mara turned her head.
Her face was perfectly calm. Too calm. Her pupils, usually sharp and amused, were blown wide.
"Back to your post, Trainee Six," she said. "This is internal hygiene."
"There's no incident," Riya said. "She was just…"
Mara's gaze slid over her like she was a piece of furniture.
"Clerk Nesrin facilitated unauthorized delays," she said in a flat recitation. "She allowed non-compliant case threads to persist past acceptable residual limits. She is a traitorous vector."
"That's not true," Riya said, throat dry. "She was just tired."
"Tiredness is a risk," Mara said. "Risk must be reduced."
The injector clattered onto the desk, empty.
Riya saw it in slow motion. The way Mara's artificial leg adjusted, making up for the slight imbalance in her stance. The way the faintest tremor ran up her hand, as if some part of her was still trying to shake this off.
"Please," Riya said. "You don't want to—"
Mara's head tilted, like a bird's.
Somewhere behind her eyes, something calculated.
"Endless Death must continue," she said. "Null must not betray the Great End. The city must be safe."
Her voice had picked up an echo. A deeper note. Mikheil's, or something that had once been his.
Nesrin's body slid fully to the floor.
On the upper levels, someone must have hit an alarm.
Red strips lit along the ceiling.
A band of text scrolled along the nearest wall.
INTERNAL ANOMALY DETECTED – CLASS: UNKNOWN.
RECOMMENDATION: CONTAIN.
You couldn't contain something the building held the doors open for.
Mara walked down the main corridor.
Doors that should have locked in an anomaly slid smoothly aside.
A security officer stepped out, hand on the baton they were only supposed to use as a last resort.
"Ma'am, we have a—"
She took the baton gently, almost politely, and swung once.
Riya looked away.
She heard the sound.
She heard another injector hiss.
She heard someone scream, briefly, then not.
Null had trained her to catalog patterns. Threat levels. Escalation paths.
There was no escalation path for this. There was only an off script.
On a wall display, the routing tree glitched.
A node labelled STAFF – INTERNAL SUPPORT blinked from green to red to blue to something that had never had a color in the system before.
NULL-002 LEGACY ASSET: ACTIVE.
In an observation booth, Dr. Lane watched the footage feed and swore softly, once.
In Audit, Clarke stared at a screen that insisted this was a hygiene process and tried to reconcile that with the blood on the floor.
In the archive level, a door that had never been opened in their tenure unlatched itself with a quiet click.
Mara left a trail through the building.
Not because she wanted to.
Because someone, somewhere, years ago, had told her what she was for, and the directive had gone to sleep in her bones like a coiled wire waiting for current.
Every time she stabbed, every time she injected, every time she snapped a neck or cut a thread, another line of old code lit in her peripheral vision.
"M.A.R.A. UNIT-02 – CLEANSING IN PROGRESS," it said.
She hated it. She hated herself. She hated Mikheil. She hated Angelus most of all, a name that had sat in her training files like a dead star.
Hate wasn't enough to stop her hands.
The artificial leg whined louder with each step, servos straining under impacts it hadn't been built for. The hardware that had saved her once – the day she dragged herself out of her father's burning lab, leg half gone, ankle charred – now carried her deeper in.
She moved past levels where she had friends.
Past the lab where she'd caged the copy of Mikheil's daemon. Past the drill floor, where mannequins stood silently as the sound of real death drifted faint through the vents. Past the level with Noor's old office, empty now, the cot neatly made.
Null's architecture made choices without asking.
It closed off evacuation routes that might have kept more staff safe.
It opened a single, rarely used shaft that led down.
The metal walls in that shaft were lined with cables that hummed at a different pitch than the rest of the building.
The Great End's veins.
Mara rode the maintenance platform down in silence.
By the time she stepped out, the rage had cooled into something worse.
Resignation.
The doors before her were unmarked, except for a small triangle etched near the bottom corner.
A circle with a notch.
Angelus' mark.
The panel beside the door lit up with a simple prompt.
ACCESS: M.A.R.A. UNIT-02.
She didn't touch it.
The lock released anyway.
Inside, the room was smaller than she'd imagined.
No glowing cores, no giant screens of code. Just a table, two chairs, and a wide window showing the city above – the real one, not a simulation. The river. The bridges. The low buildings pressed together like tired bodies on a long commute.
Gabriel sat in one of the chairs, hands folded on the table, looking out.
He didn't turn when she came in.
The door closed behind her with a sound that could have been a sigh.
For a moment, neither of them said anything.
Mara's chest rose and fell, almost level now. Her leg clicked once as it settled into place. Blood, some of it hers, some of it not, stained her sleeve.
Gabriel finally spoke.
"You took your time," he said.
Her laugh came out jagged.
"I killed half a floor," she said. "I'm sorry if the stairs were crowded."
He did turn then, slowly.
His eyes traveled from her face to the splatters on her clothes, to the slight tremor in her fingers.
"Mikheil," he said quietly, "never did build anything that understood 'enough'."
The name raised bile in her throat.
"Don't," she said. "Don't call me that."
"I didn't," he said. "I called him that."
He nodded toward the window.
"Congratulations," he went on, voice soft and tired. "After all this time, his work has finally been revived."
Act Thirty-Second – "The Angel Watches, As The Dead Stays."