The Man Who Wasn’t Real. Three unforgettable books in ONE

He waited for a response, “Elara Vance is in her office,” or “Her communicator signal has locked on to Sector Beta-3.” He waited for any ordinary, mundane response.

“Search complete,” AURA finally replied.

And in her perfectly even, synthesized voice, Kael heard something new for the first time in their ten years together. Something that had never been there, and could never be there.

A glitch. Not technical, but logical. The sound of a program producing a result that contradicted its own fundamental axiom.

“There is not, nor has there ever been, any record of a person named Elara Vance on the global network.”

The words weren’t a scream. They were silence. Emptiness. They fell into Kael’s mind like a stone into a bottomless well. He waited for an echo, but there was none.

“Error, AURA,” his mental voice was surprisingly calm. The voice of a man talking to a malfunctioning machine that had just given him live fish instead of coffee. – Repeat the scan. You misinterpreted the request. Use my personal identifiers. Marital status: Married. Spouse: Elara Vance, ID number 730-Gamma Epsilon. That can’t be off the grid.”

He called her number from memory without thinking. He remembered it better than his own. He’d entered it a thousand times: when applying for insurance, when buying tickets, when filling out tax returns.

The pause again. Kael could feel it physically now. He could feel AURA straining all its resources as it ran the query over and over, trying to find the error in its own calculations.

“Kael,” AURA’s voice returned, and now there was a distinct tinge of… confusion. As if the program had encountered an unsolvable paradox that threatened to cascade into failure. – I searched all available archives, including Red-level government databases and historical records up to digital zero. The identifier 730-Gamma-Epsilon is not and has never been assigned to any citizen. Your personal information on the global network and in my local files, which I have maintained since your activation, indicates marital status: single. This status has not changed since you registered in the system.”

Single.

The word didn’t fit in his head. It was foreign, impossible.

“Ah… what about…” he stuttered even in thought. – Our apartment? A rental agreement in two names. Our joint bills? Health insurance?”

“The lease for apartment 73—8B is in your name, Kael Vance. You have one bank account. Your health insurance covers one person. You do not have, nor have you ever had, any legal or financial ties to an entity named Elara Vance.”

AURA’s logic was impeccable. Her conclusions were undeniable. And that only made it scarier. If AURA was right, then… then who was the woman who slept in his bed this morning? Who drank his coffee? Who kissed him goodbye?

“Emergency session termination. Immediately,” he ordered, his voice as hard as ice hiding the simmering panic underneath.

“An interruption at this point could damage the Helios archive and cause instability in your neural interface. I recommend that you terminate the session using standard protocol…”

“Execute!”

The data world collapsed with a painful, mind-breaking crackle. Kael returned to his body with a scream.

Chapter 3: An empty frame and videotapes

He jerked back into his body with a scream.

The jerk was physically painful, as if his soul had been pulled from the warm water and hurled onto the ice. He ripped the helmet off his head, not waiting for the manipulators to release its retainers. The gel from the contacts ran down his neck, cold and sticky. He gulped greedily at the musty air of his office as if he had just surfaced from the great deep. His lungs burned, his heart beat a frantic, panicked rhythm.

He sat motionless for a few seconds, trying to regain consciousness. His gaze was unfocused. The room was floating.

“It was a dream,” he muttered. – A neural glitch. A hallucination caused by an anomalous data packet. Just… a glitch.”

He repeated it like a mantra, clinging to a rational explanation. He’s a data archaeologist. His job is to find logic in chaos. And right now, his own mind was the most chaotic archive he had to work with.

He rose slowly from his chair. His legs wouldn’t obey him. He leaned against the desk to keep from falling. His gaze slid around the room.

And froze.

There was her mug with the space cat, which he had brought from the kitchen this morning and forgotten to put away. It stood on the corner of his desk. Empty.

And next to it was her scarf. Long, knitted, a ridiculous purple color. She was always cold, even in their perfectly climate-controlled apartment. She’d thrown it on last night when they’d watched a movie. He remembered playing with his tassels.

Things. Real, physical things. They were here. So she was here. AURA made a mistake. The system had failed. It was the only logical explanation.

Relief rushed over him in a warm, intoxicating wave. He laughed. Quietly, with a hint of hysteria.

– AURA, you seem to owe me a full system diagnostic,” he said aloud, his voice hoarse. – You’re having serious problems accessing the data.

There was no response. He’d forgotten that AURA was part of his neural interface. Outside of the dive, it was silent.

He walked from the office to the living room. Everything was in its place. Their couch. The holographic projector. The stack of books on the coffee table-his sci-fi history book and her thick monographs on string theory.

Everything was okay. Everything was real.

His gaze fell to the wall above the couch.

Where their big wedding picture should have hung-the one of them goofing around in the neon rain in New Shanghai-now hung a painting.

Calm, impersonal, in blue-gray tones. An abstract landscape depicting either mountains or waves. A painting he was seeing for the first time in his life.

The wave of relief that had flooded him a moment ago receded, leaving behind an icy, scorched emptiness.

“No…” – he whispered.

He walked toward the wall like a sleepwalker. He touched the frame. Smooth, cold. Real. He ran his finger over the canvas. The rough texture of paint. This wasn’t a hologram. It was a physical painting.

He remembered them hanging that picture. They’d argued about whether it was level. Elara had brought a level, and they had spent half an hour moving it a millimeter left and right until it was perfect. He remembered even the nail hole in the wall.

He took down the painting.

The wall beneath it was perfectly smooth. Not a hole. Not a scratch.

Panic, cold and clammy that he’d been holding back, burst the dam. He rushed into the bedroom.

Her side of the bed was perfectly made, as if no one had slept on it. On the bedside table, where her tablet and the book on quantum mechanics she’d always read before bed, now stood a lone digital alarm clock. In the bathroom, only his deodorant and toothbrush were on the shelf. Her bottles, her creams, all the chaos he always grumbled about, were gone.

Her closet…

He froze in front of it, afraid to open it. He knew what he would see in there. Or, more accurately, what he wouldn’t see.

He jerked open the doors with a jerk.

His clothes. Just him. Rows of shirts. Suits. Old t-shirts. All hung neatly, with too many gaps. Where her dresses should have been, her ridiculous reindeer sweaters, that one OmniTech t-shirt – there was emptiness. It was like she’d never been here.

He slammed the doors shut and slid down them to the floor. He wrapped his arms around his head.

This isn’t just a glitch. This was an intrusion. Someone had broken into his home. Into his life. And methodically erased her footprints. Replacing them. Rewriting his reality.

But why? And how? It required resources that were only available to… a government? A mega-corporation?

He jumped up again. The study. He needed answers.

He sat back in his chair, putting his helmet back on.

– AURA! Activation!

The world went dark again.

– Surveillance footage of the apartment for the last twelve hours! – He ordered, barely making it into the Sea.

“Processing…” the image from the camera in the hallway appeared before his mental gaze. – Here’s the footage from this morning. 07:32”.

He himself appeared on the tape. He came out of the bedroom, dressed. Walked to the door. Stopped. Said into the void, “I’ll see you tonight. We’ll order Chinese noodles. Real noodles.” Then, with a nod, added: “Deal.” He smiled at the empty seat and walked out.

Kael stared at the screen, and his breath caught. On the tape, he was alone. He was talking to the air. He was kissing the air.

– Scroll back. Last night.

The footage flashes on the screen. There he was, coming home from work. Alone. Warming up a one-person dinner on the synthesizer. Alone. Sitting down to watch a movie. The couch next to him is empty. He laughs, turns around and says something to the empty seat, gesturing.

“This… this is impossible…” muttered Kael. – This is a fake. Someone edited the records. Someone erased it!”

“Analysis of the video stream reveals no traces of editing or digital tampering, Kael. The file metadata is intact. The hash sums match. These are the original recordings.”

He clutched his head.

Option A: He’d lost his mind. The most likely and most frightening. His overworked brain had created a perfect, detailed hallucination. He lived in a made-up world with a made-up wife. The AURA and cameras merely captured an objective reality in which he was hopelessly alone.

Option B: Conspiracy. An incredibly complex, pervasive conspiracy. Someone has kidnapped Elara and is erasing her not just from the network, but from the physical world. They’re not just deleting files. They’re rewriting the very fabric of reality. But that was… technologically impossible. It was magic.

You needed something that couldn’t be tampered with. Something off the grid. Outside his apartment. An external, analog confirmation.

Silas. The Forgotten Signal bar.

Their place. Their refuge from the digital world. Silas, who despised any implants and remembered the faces of all his customers. He remembers. He must remember. This is his last chance to prove to himself that he hasn’t lost his mind.

– End session,” he commanded.

He burst out of the chair without changing his clothes, in his homemade T-shirt and pants. He ran out of the apartment, ignoring the surprised look on his robot neighbor’s face as he watered the flowers in the hallway.

He didn’t bother to call the maglev. He ran to the old service elevators leading to the lower, pedestrian levels.

He ran through the streets, flooded with neon and rain, pushing passersby around. People looked at him like he was crazy. Maybe they were right. But he had one last hope. A small, dirty bar in Old Town that smelled like real wood and spilled beer. A place where digital ghosts had no power.

He stormed inside, making the bell above the door jingle. A familiar smell hit his nose.

Silas stood behind the counter, wiping a glass with the exact same motion he always did.

Kael collapsed into the chair in front of him, breathing heavily.

“Silas…” – he exhaled.

The old man raised his faded, tired eyes to him. There was nothing in them. No recognition, no surprise. Just the polite indifference of a bartender to a new, slightly deranged customer.

“Bad day, boy? – he screeched. – What’ll you drink to fix it?”

Kael’s last pillar cracked and collapsed into the abyss with a deafening clatter.

Chapter 4: The Forgotten Signal Bar

The world in the bar narrowed to Silas’s face. To his empty, indifferent eyes, in which Kael saw, as in a mirror, a reflection of his own terror. He was transparent. Invisible. A man who didn’t exist.

– No… no, you don’t understand,” his voice was quiet, broken. He was clinging to the last, already-drowned straw. – I’m Kael. We come here every Thursday. With Elara. My wife. She’s tall, blond hair… You always laughed that she orders your silliest cocktail. “Space Dust.” Pink, with food glitter.

He spoke, and the words seemed foreign to him, taken out of the context of someone else’s life. He was describing a ghost.

Silas stopped wiping the glass. He set it on the dark wood counter with a muffled, final clatter. The expression on his face changed. Indifference was replaced by wariness. The same kind that one looks at street lunatics mumbling something about government conspiracies and radio waves in their heads-a mixture of pity and apprehension.

– ‘Listen, son,’ he said, lowering his voice and leaning slightly across the counter. His breath smelled of cheap tobacco and coffee. – I don’t know what kind of games you’re playing. Maybe it’s some new kind of shenanigans from the upper levels. But I’ve never seen you before in my life. I don’t know any Elara. And I wouldn’t keep a cocktail with a stupid name like that in my establishment. I have a reputation.

He was being sincere. There were no lies in his eyes. There was a firm, unwavering, 100% certainty in what he was saying. And that was scarier than any lie. If he had lied, there would have been some hope that he had been forced. But he wasn’t lying. To him, to his reality, Elara did not exist.

Every word he spoke was a hammer driving nails into the coffin lid of Kael’s world.

– She was sitting right here! – Kael slammed his palm on the counter, causing several glasses to bounce. – She has a mole above her lip! You always said it was good luck! She laughed at your jokes about Senator Cross!

Several diners at neighboring tables turned around. Two burly harbor workers, an elderly couple who looked like tourists. Their gazes read the same thing-a mixture of curiosity and squeamishness. He was a glitch in their cozy, smoky evening.

– Quiet!” Silas hissed, his face tense. He looked back at the other customers as if apologizing. – Boy, you’re in obvious trouble. A big one. But this is not the place to solve them. Go to a shrink. Clean out your implants. Take a pill. Anything. But don’t come to me with this anymore. Do I make myself clear?

The humiliation burned Kael. He looked at the faces around him. No one sympathized with him. No one saw his pain. All they saw was a madman. A mistake that had to be corrected or ignored.

He rose slowly from the chair. His legs felt like cotton. He didn’t argue anymore. Something inside him had broken. Something important. Faith in his own sanity.

Maybe they were right.

Maybe he really is sick.

Maybe Elara is just a beautiful, detailed dream created by his lonely brain to keep from going insane. And his whole life is an empty apartment, talking to air and working in a digital crypt. Maybe this was his real, miserable reality.

He turned around and walked toward the exit. He didn’t see Silas wipe the sweat from his forehead in relief. He didn’t hear the quiet conversations resuming behind him. He was walking, staring at the floor, and there was a quiet, barely audible noise in his ears.

Like the static on an old radio. Like the hiss of an empty universe.

Static.

He stepped outside, into the cold jets of rain. The city had a life of its own. Flying cabs whizzed by, holographic ads screamed of happiness that could be bought. The world was real. He was the one who was the ghost.

He stood, framing his face to the rain, letting the cold water mix with the tears he could no longer hold back. He wasn’t crying for Elara. He was crying for himself. For his shattered mind.

He should have just given up. Call the clinic. Admit defeat. Forget her. Forget her.

Dzzzzzzzz…

His personal communicator on his wrist vibrated. Not a ringtone. Not a message tone. But a low, nervous, intermittent vibration he’d never felt before. An error signal. Or… something the system couldn’t recognize.

He raised his hand, expecting to see some sort of system diagnostic on the screen, caused by his unstable psycho-emotional state.

But there was nothing on the screen. It was pitch black.

And then, in the center of the screen, symbols began to appear. Not text. Not code. Ancient as the world, signs that seemed to have been burned into the display from the inside out.

They formed into a single word.

ΑΝΑΜΝΗΣΙΣ.

Anamnesis. An ancient Greek word. From Plato’s philosophy. Recollection. The awakening of the soul to the knowledge it possessed before birth. The word Elara spoke this morning. The name of her project.

The blood froze in Kael’s veins.

A second line appeared beneath the word. Not letters. A set of coordinates. A point in the most abandoned and dangerous sector of the city, the Gamma-7 industrial zone.

And then the screen went out again, becoming just black glass reflecting his own confused, wet face.

He stood in the middle of the street, rain dripping down his hair and cheeks. But he didn’t feel it. The cold had receded. It had been replaced by something else.

The fear was still there, still gripping his insides in an icy vise. But now it was joined by a spark of something else. A wild, desperate, crazy thought:

“What if it’s not me who’s crazy? What if the rest of the world is?”

He wasn’t alone.

Someone else remembered. Someone had heard him. And that someone had just thrown him a lifeline. Or a rock that would drag him to the bottom for good.

There was no difference anymore.

Kael lowered his hand. He no longer looked at the indifferent faces of passersby. He looked toward the industrial zone, to where a new, unknown dot now burned on his memory map.

He was no longer a victim of his madness. He had become an explorer.

And he was going to find the source of that signal. Or die trying to prove that his love was real.

He took the first step. Not toward home. Not toward the clinic.

But toward the Gamma 7 industrial zone. Into the darkness itself.

Chapter 5: The Anamnesis Message

The decision, made in a fit of desperation, felt different in the cold, sterile silence of the maglev. Kael sat huddled in the corner of the wagon, trying to quiet the shiver that still beat through his body. He was in wet clothes, no money, no ID, with only a set of coordinates in his memory. Any Security Corps patrol would have arrested him on the spot for vagrancy and inadequacy.

He stared at his reflection in the dark glass. A man on the edge. The same one he himself would have fumbled away from on the street a couple hours ago. A couple hours? It seemed like a lifetime. A life that had turned his world upside down.

He put his mind to work. Thinking like a data archaeologist. Systematize the facts, discarding emotion.

Fact #1: His memory of Elara is subjective. All objective data, from AURA’s records to Silas’ words, states that she did not exist.

Fact #2: There are unexplained physical changes in his surroundings. A photograph has disappeared, things in his closet. It can’t just be a hallucination. If he was just crazy, the world wouldn’t change along with his delusion.

Fact #3: There is an unknown force that can be tentatively called “Static”. It can not only change data in the global network, but also physical objects. And it does so without trace, leaving no digital seams.

Fact #4: There is a second, opposing force. The one that sent him the message. She operates covertly, using ciphers, dead zones, and keywords. She knows about Elara and her Anamnesis project.

The conclusion was one thing, as crazy as it may seem: he is not a madman haunted by ghosts. He found himself on the battlefield of two invisible titans. And he was, for some reason, important to both sides. He wasn’t just a witness. He was part of the equation.

The maglev carried silently down the overpass, and giant holographic advertisements floated by outside the window. Happy, smiling faces offered loans, vacations to lunar resorts, new implants to improve memory. The irony was almost palpable. Kael felt like he was looking at them through a column of water. This world was foreign to him.

And then he noticed it.

On one of the ads, where a smiling family was eating rainbow synthetic yogurt, the image distorted for a split second. The man’s face on the hologram became smooth, faceless, like a mannequin from the store. Then it went back to normal.

Kael froze. Random glitch in the projector? Interference in the network? Or…

He began to peer into the crowds at the stations they were passing through. Most of the people were ordinary – tired, hurried, tucked into their communicators, their faces illuminated by the bluish light of the screens. But occasionally he noticed them. People who stood unnaturally straight, like statues. People who stared into the void with unseeing eyes. People whose movements were too smooth, calibrated, devoid of petty human fidgeting.

They were here. Among ordinary people. Hiding in plain sight.

Or was he just imagining it? Paranoia is an insidious thing. It makes you see enemies in every shadow. He didn’t trust his memory anymore. How could he trust his eyes?

“AURA,” he called out mentally. – Are you still there?”

“…I’m always here, Kael,” her voice was steady, but there was something different in its intonation. It was as if she, too, had encountered something she couldn’t process, and was now running in power save mode, discarding all unnecessary emulations.

“Run a background diagnostic on my neural implants. Deep scan. Look for unauthorized protocols, hidden transmitters, backdoors, anything that shouldn’t be there.”

“Initiating. Estimated time is three minutes. Is the reason for the request related to your elevated stress levels?”

“Let’s just say I want to make sure my paranoia is my own paranoia and not a program installed by someone else,” he grinned bitterly.

He turned away to the window. The shining spires of the center were left behind. The landscape was growing bleaker and bleaker. The maglev was entering an industrial zone. The rusty hulks of factories stretched toward the dirty sky like the bony arms of drowned men. There were no bright advertisements here. There were no people here. Only the wind and the memory of former greatness. The perfect place to hide a secret.

“End station. Sector Gamma 7. Please leave the car.”

A soulless voice snapped him out of his musings. The doors hissed open. Kael stepped from the air-conditioned coolness of the car into the cold, damp air.

The place smelled of rust, chemicals, and hopelessness. The faint glow from his wrist communicator, on which he mentally mapped out the map, was the only source of light other than the distant, sickly moon peeking through the tattered clouds.

He walked along the cracked asphalt. Every step he took echoed with a resounding thud, which was immediately devoured by the oppressive silence. This was a graveyard. A graveyard of machines and ambition.

“…Diagnostics complete,” AURA’s voice echoed in his head. – Your implants are functioning normally. No unauthorized protocols or devices have been detected.”

Kael felt relieved. So he’s not a walking beacon. He wasn’t being tracked through his own head.

Immediately, an even greater fear gripped him. If they’re not tracking him through his implants, then their methods are far more advanced and all-pervasive. It means they can see him through the eyes of the city. Through the eyes of the cameras. Through the eyes of other people.

The coordinates led him to the foot of a giant relay tower. A rusty needle piercing the sky. It was once the nerve center of this industrial hive. Now it’s just a monument to itself.

At its base, among the weeds and broken concrete, lay a massive foundation block. The dot on the map pointed exactly at it.

Kael walked around it. Cold, wet stone. Nothing. He ran his hand over it, looking for a button, a crack, anything.

His fingers came across a scratch. He brought the communicator closer.

There was a symbol carved into the concrete. Ouroboros. A serpent devouring its own tail.