They ditched the paramedic sedan three miles outside the Tech District, leaving it under a bridge where the GPS signal was weak. Maya hotwired a 1998 sedan—a rusty beast with manual windows and, crucially, no onboard computer—and they drove until the city skyline was just a blur of light in the rearview mirror.
They ended up at the "Last Stop Motor Inn," a place that looked like it had been designed by an architect who hated happiness. The neon sign buzzed with a dying ZZZT, and the air smelled of wet asphalt and cheap tobacco.
It was perfect. It was a dead zone.
[LOCATION: ANALOG SHELTER]
[CONNECTIVITY: NONE]
[SAFE HOUSE STATUS: SECURE]
Inside Room 4, Caleb collapsed onto the lumpy mattress. He didn't take off his sunglasses. The headache from the "System Crash" was receding, but it had left behind a dull, throbbing ache that felt like a bruise on his actual brain.
Maya paced the small room. She had pushed the dresser in front of the door.
"He called you 'Null'," she said, stopping by the window to peek through the blinds. "Why?"
"It's a coding term," Caleb mumbled, staring at the water stains on the ceiling. "It means 'nothing.' Or 'invalid value.' It's what you get when the system looks for data that isn't there."
"And the... the place you went? The white room?"
"The Lobby," Caleb sat up, wincing as his fractured rib protested. "It's his workspace. A simulation. He pulls your consciousness in via the neural link so he can talk to you without leaving his chair."
Maya turned to face him. She looked exhausted, stripped of her usual armor of police procedure.
"You said he wants to 'optimize' reality. What does that mean, Caleb? Is he a terrorist? A cult leader?"
"He's a sysadmin," Caleb said grimly. "To him, poverty, crime, disease... they aren't tragedies. They're inefficiencies. Bugs. He's not trying to terrorize the city; he's trying to patch it. And the most efficient way to fix a buggy program is to delete the corrupted files."
"People," Maya whispered. "He's deleting people."
"Exactly."
Caleb reached for the notepad on the nightstand. His hands were shaking, but he needed to get this out before the memory faded.
"When I crashed his simulation," Caleb said, uncapping a cheap ballpoint pen, "his avatar glitched. The stock photo mask slipped. I saw his real face."
Maya moved closer. "You saw him? Who is it?"
"I don't know the name," Caleb said, sketching rapidly. He wasn't an artist, but the Overlay helped—it projected the lines onto the paper for him to trace. [ASSIST MODE: ACTIVE].
He drew a sharp jawline. Deep-set eyes. And a horrific, jagged scar running from the left temple down to the cheekbone—a scar that looked like a lightning bolt, or a circuit board burn.
"He's older," Caleb muttered. "Maybe fifties. Pale. He looks like he hasn't seen the sun in a decade."
He finished the sketch and tore the page off, handing it to Maya.
Maya stared at the drawing. Her eyes narrowed. She tilted her head, then walked over to the dim lamp to get a better look.
"I've seen this man," she said slowly.
Caleb froze. "Where?"
"In the cold case files," she said, her voice dropping. "From the Aether Dynamics incident. The 'containment breach' that bankrupted the company."
"Dr. Kasparov?" Caleb asked.
"No. Kasparov was the CEO. This guy..." She tapped the paper. "This is the Chief Engineer. The one who supposedly caused the accident. His name was Silas Vane."
The room went silent. The buzzing of the neon sign outside seemed to get louder.
Caleb felt the blood drain from his face.
"What did you say?" he whispered.
"Silas Vane," Maya repeated, looking at him with a mixture of confusion and sudden realization. "Caleb... Vane is your last name."
Caleb stood up. The room spun.
[CRITICAL ALERT]
[MEMORY FILE UNLOCKED]
[ACCESS: GRANTED]
For three years, Caleb had told everyone—told himself—that his condition was caused by a freelance hacking accident. A server explosion that fried his optics.
But as Maya said the name, the static in his head cleared.
He remembered a lab. He remembered a chair. He remembered a man with a scar shouting at him to "hold the connection."
"He's not just the Admin," Caleb said, his voice hollow. "He's my father."
Maya stepped back, her hand instinctively drifting toward her empty holster. "Your father? You said your father died in prison."
"That's what the file says," Caleb said, gripping the edge of the dresser. "That's what my file says. I... I rewrote it."
He looked at Maya, desperation in his eyes.
"I didn't hack a bank, Maya. I wasn't a con artist. I was the first test subject. I was 'Version 1.0.' That's why I see the Overlay. He put it there. He built the system on me."
"And then you ran away," Maya realized. "You changed your name. You hid in the criminal underworld."
"I tried to hide," Caleb corrected. "But you can't hide from the guy who wrote the source code."
He looked at the sketch of his father—the monster who wanted to delete the world to make it perfect.
"He didn't try to recruit me because I'm a hacker," Caleb said softly. "He wants me back because I'm the prototype. I have the root access he needs to finish the patch."
Maya looked at the drawing, then at Caleb. The suspicion in her eyes warred with empathy. Finally, she crumpled the paper and shoved it into her pocket.
"Okay," she said. "So it's a family dispute. A very loud, very deadly family dispute."
She grabbed her jacket.
"We need to find him. Physically. Before he reboots the server and purges the entire city."
"We know he's remote," Caleb said. "He wasn't in the Vertex Tower."
"No," Maya agreed. "But if he's 'The Admin,' he needs power. Massive power. More than a skyscraper."
She pulled a map from the glovebox of her jacket—an old, folded paper map of St. Lazarus. She spread it on the bed.
"Where in this city has enough juice to run a simulation of reality, but is off the grid enough to hide a madman?"
Caleb scanned the map. His Overlay flickered, highlighting power lines, substations, and data nodes. Most were commercial. Monitored.
But there was one spot. A black void on his map. A place where the data lines just... stopped.
"The Hydro-Plant," Caleb pointed to a massive structure on the river, marked CONDEMNED. "The Old Dam. It was shut down ten years ago for 'structural instability.'"
"It wasn't unstable," Maya realized. "It was taken offline. Privatized."
"By a shell company?" Caleb guessed.
"Probably." Maya folded the map. "It's a fortress. One way in, one way out. And if he's in there... he's sitting on top of a billion gallons of water and enough voltage to fry the eastern seaboard."
Caleb put his sunglasses back on. The world was still broken, but at least now he knew who broke it.
"Then let's go," Caleb said. "It's time to file a bug report."
[NEW QUEST: THE FINAL BOSS]
[LOCATION: THE DAM]
[DIFFICULTY: IMPOSSIBLE]