NULL AND RISING

  Book One: Sovereign Embryo

  Chapter Ten: The Last Normal Night

  * * *

  He made coffee at 7:03 and stood at the kitchen window and drank it in the dark.

  Wednesday morning. The alarm had not gone off yet — he had woken again before it, this time at 6:47, and had lain in the dark for sixteen minutes listening to the pressure in his ears and the city outside and Teddy's breathing and had decided at some point between 6:55 and 7:00 that lying there was less useful than being upright with coffee.

  The courtyard was still dark. The city was still. The television-watcher's window opposite was dark as it always was at this hour, the building a grid of unlit rectangles, everyone still inside their last hour of ordinary sleep.

  He thought about the word ordinary.

  It had been, by any external measure, an ordinary week. He had gone to work. He had processed tickets. He had eaten bread at the window and ridden the tram and fed the cat and called his mother and played football on Saturday and read at night. These were the components of his life and they had all been present and functional. But the atmosphere in which they occurred had been changing — slowly, then faster, the way temperature changed before weather, the way pressure changed before altitude. The ordinary things had been happening inside something that was not ordinary. And this morning, standing at the kitchen window with his coffee in the dark, he could feel that the something had become large enough that the ordinary things were going to stop fitting inside it.

  He could not have explained this to anyone. It was not a thought exactly. It was a physical fact, registered the way the spike yesterday morning had been registered — in the body first, the mind catching up after.

  Teddy appeared in the kitchen doorway.

  Not his usual morning appearance — the expectant positioning near the empty bowl, the patience of a creature who has decided that dignity requires not rushing a meal even when you want to. This was different. Teddy stood in the doorway and looked at Igor with the evaluative look, sustained, unblinking, and then walked to the window and sat beside Igor's feet and looked out at the courtyard.

  Alongside him, not at the bowl.

  Igor looked down at the cat. In the dark of the kitchen, Teddy's copper-green eyes caught the ambient light from outside and held it.

  "I know," Igor said.

  He finished his coffee. He fed Teddy — Teddy ate quickly, which was unusual, with the efficiency of an animal clearing a task — and then went back to the window. Igor washed the cup and stood beside him and they both looked at the courtyard for a while, man and cat in the dark kitchen, the last ordinary morning doing its ordinary dark thing outside.

  * * *

  He showered. He dressed. He made the bread — ham, mustard, dark bread, the same as every day, the ritual of it deliberate this morning in a way it usually wasn't. He wrapped it. He put it in his bag.

  He stood at the door with his jacket on.

  He looked at the flat — a full survey, the kind he didn't usually do before leaving for work. The couch with the stack of finished books beside it. The notebook on the table, closed. The window where Teddy had spent the week watching something arrive. The kitchen with its functional plainness, the camp stove he had never needed to use because the gas had always worked, the bottled water and the energy bars and the first-aid kit he had bought last night still in the plastic bag beside the counter.

  He thought: I might not come back to this tonight. Not because he expected to die. Because he expected things to change, and when things changed this much this fast the specific configuration of the flat — the books, the notebook, the window — might become a different kind of place than it currently was.

  He was not sentimental about this. He simply looked at it clearly, the way he looked at most things.

  "I'll be back," he said. To Teddy, to the flat, to himself — he was not sure to which of these.

  Teddy sat on the windowsill and watched him leave.

  * * *

  The tram was fuller than usual for a Wednesday morning. People who did not normally take this tram, or who normally took it later — a disruption to usual patterns, the city's population redistributing itself slightly in response to an anxiety that had no specific address. He stood in the aisle and held the bar and looked at the faces around him.

  The phones were out. Not unusual — phones were always out on the tram. But the quality of attention was different. People were not scrolling. They were reading, specifically, with the focused intensity of people following something developing in real time. A woman near him had the university aggregator open — the map he recognized, the dots. She was zoomed into Europe. He could not see the count from this angle.

  He had checked it before leaving: 201 cities.

  The pressure in his ears was present and steady, a bass note that had been building all week and was now simply part of how the world felt. He had stopped checking for it separately. It was just there, the way background traffic was there.

  The tram went through the underpass near Hauptbahnhof. The lights flickered — not the two-second instability of yesterday afternoon, but a full half-second of darkness. People looked up. Nobody spoke. The lights came back. The tram continued.

  At the next stop a man did not get on who had been waiting on the platform. He stood there as the doors opened and did not move and the doors closed again and the tram pulled away and Igor watched him through the window — standing on the platform, looking at something above the tram line, perfectly still.

  Igor followed the man's eyeline. Grey sky. Nothing to see.

  He faced forward.

  * * *

  NetCore at 8:07. The office had the quality of a room that had been waiting.

  Markus was at his desk but not working — his screen was on but the ticket queue was untouched, which had never happened before in two years of arriving after Markus. He was reading something on his phone with the expression of a man who has spent his whole life explaining things with the nearest available terrestrial category and has encountered something that will not fit in any of them. His coffee was beside him, untouched, which meant he had made it on autopilot and forgotten it, which meant he was not fully present in the room.

  Jana was not at her desk. Her bag was there, her jacket on the back of her chair, but she was not in the room. The bathroom, or the kitchen, or outside. Igor noted her absence without alarm.

  Benny was at his desk with his headphones on, working with a focused intensity that Igor recognised now as Benny's method for managing fear — the same headphones-on posture from the morning after Hannover. He looked up when Igor came in, registered him, and took one headphone off.

  "201," he said.

  "I saw."

  "The Stockholm institute published again. Third paper in a week. They're not using the word unprecedented anymore." He paused. "They've stopped using qualifiers entirely. The new paper just describes what it is without trying to frame it." He looked at his screen. "That's either very scientific or very scared."

  "Both," Igor said. He sat down. He looked at his ticket queue. Eleven new overnight. He opened the first one and read it and understood it and began to process it, the familiar mechanism engaging.

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  Benny watched him for a moment. "You're doing tickets."

  "Yes."

  "How."

  "The same way as yesterday." A pause. "The tickets are real and they need doing. Everything else is also real and there's still nothing to do about it this morning."

  Benny looked at him with the expression of someone trying to decide if this was wisdom or dissociation. He put his headphone back on.

  Igor processed three tickets. He was on the fourth when Jana came back into the room. She had the look of someone who had been somewhere private to feel something and had returned having felt it and recomposed. She sat at her desk. She looked at her screen. She looked at Igor.

  "My daughter's school called," she said. Not an announcement to the room — to Igor specifically, across the office. "They're asking parents whether to send children in today." She paused. "They're not closing. They're asking."

  "What are you going to do?" Igor said.

  "I already told them to keep her home." She straightened something on her desk that didn't need straightening. "My husband is there with her." A pause. "He still thinks it's government testing."

  Igor said nothing.

  "I know," Jana said, to his silence. "I know."

  She turned to her screen and began working. The two of them — Igor and Jana — working at their screens while Benny monitored the aggregator through one ear and Markus sat with his cold coffee and his untouched queue. The office on its last ordinary morning, each person handling it in the way of their character: Jana through structure, Benny through information, Markus through the effort of not updating, Igor through the next thing that needed doing.

  At 9:04 every screen on Earth went white.

  * * *

  It happened without warning and without sound.

  One moment: the office, the tickets, the ordinary Wednesday. The next: every screen in the room — monitors, phones, the small display on the printer, the digital clock on the wall — simultaneously white. Not crashed, not flickering. White, clean, complete, as if every display in the world had agreed on a single colour at a single instant.

  Markus made a sound that was not a word.

  Jana pushed back from her desk.

  Benny pulled both headphones off.

  Igor looked at his screen. White. He looked at his phone — he had left it on the desk beside the keyboard. White. The display on the printer across the room: white. The clock: white, the digits gone, just the white glow of a screen that had been given a single instruction and was executing it.

  He looked at the window. Outside, in the building across Torgauer Stra?e, every visible office window had the same white glow.

  The screens stayed white for eleven seconds. He counted.

  Then black. Every screen simultaneously black.

  Then text.

  His monitor, his phone, the printer display, the clock — all showing the same text simultaneously, each in German, each in the same clean sans-serif font that had no brand, no origin, no style that belonged to any company or system he recognised:

  SYSTEMINTEGRATION GESTARTET.

  TECHNOLOGIERESET: AKTIV.

  KANDIDATEN-BEWERTUNG: L?UFT.

  INTEGRATIONSSCHUTZSCHILD: AKTIV.

  And then the screens went dark. Not standby-dark — dead. The monitors, the phones, the printer display, the clock. All of them dark in the same instant with the finality of things that had been switched off from somewhere that was not in this room.

  The office lost its hum. The background electrical sound that was always present — the servers, the HVAC, the ventilation, the accumulated electronic presence of a modern office — simply ceased. The silence that replaced it was the deepest silence Igor had been in since childhood, since the field in Baranja on winter mornings before anyone else arrived.

  Then, not on any screen — there were no screens anymore — but in the visual field of every person in the room, floating at the edge of perception like something seen at the corner of the eye but present when you looked directly at it:

  Willkommen, Kandidat.

  Individuelle Bewertung l?uft. Integrationsperiode: 72 Stunden.

  Kandidaten unter 18 Jahren wurden zur Systemdungeon-Vorbereitung transferiert. Sie werden nach Ablauf der Integrationsperiode zurückgegeben.

  Kandidaten, die die Integration erfolgreich abschlie?en, erhalten vollst?ndige k?rperliche Restaurierung. Alle Vorerkrankungen, Behinderungen und chronischen Leiden werden behoben.

  Warnung: Kandidaten, die den Mindestschwellenwert nicht erreichen, werden in System-konforme Einheiten umgewandelt.

  Welcome, Candidate.

  Individual appraisal in progress. Integration period: 72 hours.

  Candidates under 18 have been transferred to System dungeon preparation. They will be returned upon integration completion.

  Candidates who successfully complete integration will receive full physical restoration. All pre-existing conditions, disabilities, and chronic illnesses will be resolved.

  Warning: Candidates who do not reach minimum threshold will be converted into System-compliant units.

  Jana made a sound.

  Benny said: "Oh."

  Markus sat very still with his hands flat on his desk and looked at the text that was not on any surface and said nothing at all.

  Igor read the text twice. Then he looked at his hands, then at the window. Outside, the white glow was gone from every window in the building opposite. Just glass. The street below was visible — people on Torgauer Stra?e who had stopped walking, who were standing on the pavement reading the same floating text in their own visual fields, some of them alone, some of them turning to each other, one of them sitting down on the kerb.

  A car drifted to a stop in the middle of the street. Not braked — the engine had simply stopped. Another car behind it stopped the same way. No collision. The engines had died before anything could collide.

  No horns. The cars had no power for horns.

  The trams on the distant main road: silent. The subsonic hum of the city that was always present beneath everything — traffic, infrastructure, the electrical grid — gone. Replaced by the specific silence of a city that has lost its mechanical self and not yet understood what it has become.

  Igor stood up.

  "Everyone stay here," he said. Not loudly. The room was quiet enough that normal volume was sufficient.

  They looked at him. All three of them — Jana, Benny, Markus — with the expressions of people who are very afraid and have decided, in the absence of any other available logic, to look at the person in the room who appears to not be.

  "Stay here," he said again. "Don't go into the street yet. Give it ten minutes."

  "What is it," Markus said. His voice had a quality Igor had not heard from him before — stripped of the eleven years of NetCore settlement, of the clock-glances and the terrestrial explanations. Just a man asking a question.

  Igor looked at him. He thought about the honest answer and the useful answer and found that in this instance they were the same answer.

  "It's a System integration," he said. "I don't know the full mechanics. But from everything I've read — " he paused, aware of how this sounded and deciding it didn't matter, " — from everything I've read, we have seventy-two hours before it's complete. We use them."

  Silence.

  Benny: "Use them how?"

  "Survive," he said. "And pay attention to whatever the interface is showing you. It's tracking something — individual appraisal, it said. What we do in the next seventy-two hours probably matters."

  "You knew about this," Jana said. Not accusing. Observing.

  "I read about something like it," Igor said. "In fiction. The details might be completely different."

  "But the broad shape—"

  "The broad shape looks similar." A pause. "Which means we treat the next three days as the most important three days of our lives and figure out the rules as we go."

  Outside, in the street below, someone started shouting. Then someone else. The sound of a city beginning to understand what had happened to it, the first ragged edge of panic finding its voice in the silence where the engines used to be.

  Igor looked at the emergency kit he had put in his bag that morning — not the full kit, but the essentials, the things he had packed while standing in the kitchen in the dark making a decision he hadn't examined directly. Water. Energy bars. The small first-aid kit. A knife he had put in last, almost as an afterthought, that he did not now think was an afterthought.

  He looked at the window.

  He looked at his team — Jana at her desk, Benny with his headphones around his neck, Markus with his hands flat on the desk and his cold coffee beside him, all of them watching Igor with the specific attention of people who have outsourced their next decision to someone who seems to have one.

  He thought: fair start.

  Every screen on Earth was dark. Every engine was silent. Every nuclear weapon had ceased to exist — he did not know this yet but he would learn it. Every digital system, every networked technology, every infrastructure that the world had spent two centuries building — gone, in eleven seconds, simultaneously, everywhere at once.

  And somewhere in his visual field, persistent and patient, the System interface waited. Not urgent. Not threatening. Simply present. Showing him what he was:

  Level 1. No Class. Individual Appraisal: IN PROGRESS.

  He had a fair start.

  For the first time in twenty-one years, everyone did.

  He moved toward the window to assess what was happening on the street below, and the Integration of Earth had begun, and the last ordinary morning was over, and Igor Milinovi? — twenty-eight, Croatian, 170cm, unremarkable, the best player on pitches nobody watched, the man who had built a small functional life from what was available and never stopped wanting more — opened his System interface for the first time and felt, underneath the fear and the noise from the street and the silence where the engines used to be, the specific and unfamiliar thing that the protagonist in the novel had felt.

  Hope.

  * * *

  * * *

  — ? —