NULL AND RISING

  Book One: Sovereign Embryo

  Chapter 1: Mittwoch

  The tram smelled like wet coats and someone's breakfast, and Igor Milinovi? was late.

  Not dramatically late. Not the kind of late that gets you called into Jana's office and made to sit across from her sympathetic face while she explained that punctuality was a form of respect for one's colleagues. Just late enough that he would have to take the stairs instead of waiting for the lift, late enough that Markus would glance at the clock above the door when Igor walked in — that particular glance that communicated nothing and everything about nine years of the same office, the same clock, the same small performance of noting that someone else had also failed to arrive on time.

  Igor stood in the aisle of the tram and held the overhead bar and looked at his phone.

  Luka had posted last night. Igor had not looked at it last night because he knew he would look at it in the morning, on the tram, which was somehow worse and also somehow necessary. The notification sat in his feed like a stone in a shoe — you could forget about it briefly but it was always there.

  He opened it.

  The video was forty-one seconds long. Luka in the tunnel before the match, kit on, headphones around his neck, head tilted back against the concrete wall with his eyes closed. The camera — professional, someone paid to follow him — caught the moment he opened them. Even through a phone screen, even through the flat rectangle of compressed video, you could see it: the quality. Whatever it was. The thing that had no clean name except it. Luka had it at nineteen and he had it now at twenty-seven and he would have it when he was forty, watching his own highlight reels from an armchair somewhere expensive, and it had cost him nothing because it was simply what he was.

  HNK Rijeka's top scorer for three consecutive seasons. Twelve goals in the first half of this one. The transfer rumours had started in October — Bayern München and Paris Saint-Germain were the names being mentioned, the latter in the kind of breathless italics that meant someone's agent had been talking to journalists. A decision before the end of the January window, the article said. A move to Germany described as likely.

  Igor locked the screen.

  The tram rocked over a join in the track. Outside: grey Leipzig morning, grey Leipzig sky, the particular grey of early November when the city had not yet decided if it was going to rain and was instead simply threatening to, indefinitely, as a policy position. A woman in a yellow jacket walked a dog. A delivery cyclist cut across the intersection without looking. The usual commerce of a Wednesday.

  He got off two stops early and walked the rest. He did this occasionally, not for the exercise — though the exercise was useful — but because walking through the city reminded him that it was a real place. That the distance between where he slept and where he spent the majority of his waking hours was a distance that a human body could actually cover, step by step, which was comforting in a way he could not fully articulate.

  Leipzig had grown on him. He had not expected it to. When he arrived at eighteen with a sports bag, a B0 German and the plan — the absolute conviction, the kind you can only maintain at eighteen — that he would find a club within a few months and never need anything else, the city had seemed large and grey and indifferent in equal measure. Which was fine. He had not come for warmth. He had come for football.

  He did not find a club.

  Not for lack of trying. Six months of trying, which at eighteen felt like a lifetime: trials at lower-division clubs in Leipzig and Halle and once, memorably, in Magdeburg, three hours by bus. He was good. Everyone agreed he was good. He had pace and technical discipline and a football brain that coaches occasionally called exceptional, which was a word that should have meant something but turned out to mean: exceptional for this level, which is not the level we are recruiting for. What they were recruiting for was either better than him or younger than him or German, preferably all three. The German clubs at any level worth playing for had pipelines, academies, relationships with agents. They did not recruit a Croatian eighteen-year-old who had arrived alone with a sports bag and a dictionary app on his phone.

  After six months he had two options. Go back to Osijek or get a job.

  He thought about going back. He thought about it seriously, for about a week, in the way you think about things you are not actually going to do but need to give proper consideration so that when you decide against them you can say you considered them. He thought about the village — a place in Baranja that had fewer than five hundred people now, probably fewer every year, the kind of place that does not make the news because nothing happens there and the people who grew up there either stay or leave and the ones who leave do not come back. He thought about his mother's house, the two-room place that had been old when he was born and was older now, the crack in the kitchen wall that had been there his whole life and had expanded each winter, the windows that did not fully seal. He thought about what he would do there. He thought about football — the local amateur leagues, patches of grass, weekend games, plastic trophies. He thought about what wages looked like in that part of Croatia. He converted them to euros because he had already started thinking in euros. The number was roughly half of what he could earn in Germany doing almost anything.

  He did not go back.

  He found a German course — intensive, three months, paid for by taking two jobs simultaneously, a dishwasher in a restaurant near the Hauptbahnhof and a weekend shift at a warehouse on the city's eastern edge. He worked and studied. His German went from B0 to functional to adequate to, over years, nearly correct. He still had an accent. He had stopped trying to lose it.

  The job at NetCore came after two years and a certificate and a realization that IT support required more German than football and also paid better. It was not what he had planned. It was what had happened instead, and he had learned to distinguish between these two things with the precision of someone for whom the distinction had mattered.

  The thing was: he had nothing to return to. This was the clean, unsentimentally held truth of it. His mother was managing — she worked, she was fine, she did not need him there. The house was what it was. Osijek was what it was. A city in Slavonia with a football culture and limited wages and the particular atmosphere of places that are not quite declining and not quite thriving, suspended in something that felt less like stability and more like waiting. He had grown up in that atmosphere. He was not hostile to it. He simply could not see, looking back at it from Leipzig, what returning would give him that leaving had not already cost.

  So he stayed. And the city took years to become a place he knew. And then one day he had been walking to the tram stop and had taken the long way without meaning to because the long way went past the park, and he understood that it had happened without him deciding to let it.

  He did not call it home. But it was the place he was.

  NetCore Hosting GmbH occupied the fourth floor of a building on Torgauer Stra?e that had been several other things before it was an office. The lift was, as predicted, occupied — a man from the second floor who Igor did not know, waiting with the patience of someone who had decided the lift was a principle — and Igor took the stairs.

  The office was open plan in the way of offices that had been told open plan meant something and had implemented it without further research. Twelve desks arranged in a grid, each with a monitor and a headset hook and a small plant that was either thriving or dying depending on whose desk it was. The plants near the window did well. The plants near Markus's desk had the look of things that had accepted their situation.

  Markus looked at the clock.

  "Morgen," Igor said.

  "Morgen," Markus said, and looked back at his screen.

  This was their relationship in its entirety, and Igor found it satisfactory. Markus was forty-five and had been at NetCore for eleven years and had, somewhere in those eleven years, made a settlement with the life he had. Igor did not know the terms of the settlement. He suspected they involved Markus not asking himself certain questions. He did not judge this. He simply noted it, the way he noted most things, as information about the shape of the world.

  He sat down. The computer took forty-five seconds to boot. He spent them looking at the small square of window visible between Markus's monitor and the partition, at the grey sky doing its Wednesday thing.

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  His inbox had fourteen new tickets since last night. Three were marked urgent, which in NetCore's ticket system meant a client had selected the urgent option rather than the standard option, which cost an additional twelve euros per month and entitled them to use the word urgent in the subject line. Igor had processed enough of these to know the actual urgency distribution: two in ten were things that needed addressing today, six in ten were things that could have waited, two in ten were complaints about things that were not NetCore's fault, written in all caps, occasionally in dialect.

  He opened the first one.

  The morning passed.

  At 11:15, Benny came and sat on the edge of Igor's desk in the way of a twenty-four-year-old who had not yet learned that desk-sitting was a transgression. Benny was an intern, which at NetCore meant he did IT support for the internal systems and ate lunch at his desk and asked questions that revealed he was, possibly, better at this than some of the people he was supposed to be learning from. Igor had not decided how he felt about Benny. The honest answer was that Benny was difficult to feel bad about, which made him suspicious.

  "Did you see the thing about the signals?" Benny said.

  "What signals."

  "The electromagnetic thing. Someone posted about it in the Slack — reports from seventeen cities. Some kind of pulse. Subsonic." He was already showing Igor his phone. A Reddit thread with thousands of upvotes and a title in that particular register of urgent-but-ironic that the internet had developed for things it didn't know what to do with. Something is happening and nobody will say what.

  "It's probably something," Igor said.

  "That's a very non-answer."

  "Most things are something. That's not the same as the something being interesting."

  Benny took his phone back, unperturbed. This was a quality of Benny's that Igor had noted: he did not take flat responses as dismissal. He metabolized them and continued. "The guy in the comments says it's geomagnetic. Solar event."

  "Okay."

  "You're not curious?"

  Igor considered. He was, in fact, mildly curious — not about the signals themselves but about the shape of the thing. Seventeen cities simultaneously. Subsonic, felt rather than heard. He had noticed something this morning on the tram. A pressure in his ears, brief, like the moment before a plane begins its descent. He had attributed it to the weather. He attributed most things to the weather in November.

  "A little," he said.

  Benny seemed satisfied with this. He got off the desk and went back to his workstation. Igor returned to his tickets.

  At 12:30 he ate lunch at his desk. Two slices of dark bread with ham and mustard, brought from home, cut and wrapped in the morning. He ate them standing at the window. Below: Torgauer Stra?e doing its lunch-hour thing. He watched it while he chewed.

  He thought about Luka for approximately thirty seconds.

  The fact was simple and had been simple for nine years. Luka Petrovi?, twenty-seven, was HNK Rijeka's best player and reportedly the subject of interest from two of the bigger clubs in European football. Igor Milinovi?, twenty-eight, played for SV Grün-Wei? Mockau in the Landesklasse Staffel 3 — the seventh division of German football — for two hundred and eighty euros a month, and was, by any objective measure, the best player on the pitch every time he played. This was true and useless in equal measure.

  They had grown up in the same place — a village in Baranja so small it barely registered on maps, the kind of place where the football pitch was also the only flat piece of land for three kilometers and the youth system meant one coach, one set of cones, and whoever showed up. They had traveled together to train with the Osijek academies, an hour each way by bus, because that was what you did if you were serious, if football was the thing you had decided it was going to be. Igor had been serious. He had been the first to arrive at every session and the last to leave and had been so consistent about this that it became a kind of joke, the kind coaches tell when they are proud of something they cannot fully explain.

  And Luka had the thing that training did not create. The thing scouts had words for that were not really words — presence, instinct, acceleration of decision. The milliseconds between seeing and doing, compressed in Luka to something that looked like prophecy.

  Igor had understood it at nineteen and he understood it now and understanding it had never made it hurt less. It had just made it more precise. You could not argue with a precise thing. You could only carry it.

  He threw away the bread wrapper and went back to his tickets.

  The afternoon passed the way afternoons passed.

  At 4:53 his phone buzzed with a message from Ana. She was in Kuala Lumpur — had been for seven months, a work placement that had extended once and was going to extend again. The message said: how is he?

  He knew without asking who he was. He texted back a photo: Teddy on the kitchen counter this morning, sitting next to the kettle with the particular stillness of a cat who knows he is not supposed to be there and has decided that stillness is a form of not being there.

  She replied with a heart emoji. Then, after a moment: he looks good.

  Igor looked at the message. Then put his phone back in his pocket and finished the last two tickets in his queue.

  He left at 5:31.

  The flat was on the third floor of a building on Brüderstra?e. The stairwell light on the second floor had been out for three weeks. He had reported it. He counted the stairs now out of habit.

  He heard Teddy before he opened the door — not a sound, more an awareness of displacement. When he turned the key Teddy was sitting in the hallway with the expression he always had: not pleased, not displeased, simply noting Igor's arrival as a fact of the world.

  "Hallo," Igor said.

  Teddy turned and walked toward the kitchen.

  Igor followed. He fed the cat — the good food, because the negotiation over food quality had ended early and conclusively in Teddy's favor — and while Teddy ate, Igor stood at the kitchen window and looked out at the back of the building across the courtyard. Someone on the second floor was watching television. The blue-white flicker.

  He made tea. He stood with it.

  He thought about home sometimes, the way you think about weather you grew up in. Not with longing exactly. With the specific texture of familiarity — the flat Baranja landscape that went on until it stopped, the fields in summer, the sound of a village at night which was mostly silence broken by dogs and distant tractors. His mother's house. The crack in the kitchen wall. The windows.

  His mother was fine. He sent money every month — not a lot, but more than he could have sent from Osijek. This was the arithmetic he had made his peace with: he was more useful to her as an absence with a bank transfer than he would have been as a presence with no work. The two of them understood this without discussing it. They were both practical people in the manner of people who have not had the option of being otherwise.

  He went to the other room. Teddy followed him, jumped on the couch, arranged himself precisely on top of the LitRPG novel Igor had left there — he was always doing this, had some radar for paper that Igor suspected was deliberate — and settled in with the serene confidence of a creature that considers occupation a form of ownership.

  Igor picked Teddy up and moved him. Teddy relocated to his lap. Igor opened to his page.

  He read for an hour. The protagonist in this book had just received a class the System had generated specifically for him because his classless feats were outside its standard parameters. The class description was incomplete. Two skills, both marked with question marks. The protagonist looked at the question marks and felt, the narration said, not afraid. Interested.

  Igor put the book down.

  He thought about the pressure in his ears that morning. Seventeen cities. He thought about Benny's face when he said it, the specific animation of a twenty-four-year-old who still found things genuinely surprising, who had not yet built the cognitive machinery that pre-emptively dampened things before they arrived.

  Igor had built that machinery young. You built it when surprise was expensive.

  He took out his notebook — not a diary, an accounting ledger for things that required tracking, observations and numbers and things that needed thinking about. He opened to the current page. He had written nothing in it for three days.

  He wrote:

  Average is not the same as stable. Average can still fall.

  He looked at it. Added, after a moment:

  I wonder if average is allowed to change.

  He closed the notebook.

  Teddy was watching him with the particular attention he occasionally deployed — not the default ambient cat awareness but something focused, as though he had decided Igor was worth studying. His eyes were copper-green in the lamp light. He had always seemed, to Igor, like a creature that understood more than he let on. This was probably projection. Cats projected well. They had the kind of face that accepted meaning you put into it.

  "What do you want from life, Teddy?" Igor asked.

  Teddy slow-blinked.

  "Smart answer."

  He set his alarm for 7:15. He turned off the lamp. He lay in the dark for a while, not sleeping, just existing in it — a thing he did and didn't have a name for.

  He thought about the pressure in his ears. Seventeen cities. He thought about what he had written: I wonder if average is allowed to change. He had been wondering this since he was nineteen years old and the scouts had come to the Osijek academy and looked at Luka, and then he had come to Germany at eighteen hoping football would answer it, and now he was twenty-eight and still wondering, which was either stubborn or stupid or possibly both.

  He thought this.

  He went to sleep.

  Outside, quietly, in seventeen cities simultaneously, the hum continued.

  — ? —