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

Kael’s breath caught. It was her symbol. Elara’s symbol. She’d drawn it on a napkin the day they’d met, explaining that information in the universe didn’t disappear, only change form, forever devouring itself.

It couldn’t be a coincidence. He was on the right track.

His gaze darted to the head of the serpent. Where the eye should have been, there was a tiny indentation. His heart pounded. He pressed.

There was a quiet click. Part of the concrete surface slid aside, revealing a small niche.

Inside, on a piece of anti-static cloth, lay a tiny crystal chip. A physical storage medium. An artifact from the last century, impossible to trace or erase remotely.

It was a message. Real, tangible. Proof that he wasn’t crazy.

With a trembling hand, he reached out to pick it up.

And at that very moment, an icy chill that had nothing to do with the dampness of the night pierced him. It wasn’t a feeling. It was a knowing. An instinctive, animal realization that he was no longer alone.

He froze, out of breath. And listened.

The wind had died down. Even the distant hum of the city seemed silent. There was an absolute, unnatural silence.

And then he heard a sound.

A quiet, methodical rustling of gravel. To his left. In the shadow of a neighboring ruined building. Someone was approaching.

Kael slowly dimmed the communicator screen. Darkness thickened, became his ally. He pressed himself into the concrete block, trying to blend in.

A silhouette emerged from the shadows.

Tall, unnaturally thin. It moved with a kind of eerie, fluid grace. He wasn’t looking. He knew exactly where Kael was.

The silhouette stopped ten meters away. He wasn’t looking at Kael. He was looking at the niche with the chip.

In the faint moonlight, Kael could make out his face.

Or rather, the absence of it.

A smooth, featureless surface, like a mannequin. Only two dark gaps where the eyes should be.

It was one of them. One of the ones he’d seen on the billboards. One of the ones that stood in the stations.

The hunter had found his prey.

The creature slowly raised its hand. And Kael saw its fingers begin to disintegrate into a myriad of tiny, shimmering particles. Like static on a screen. Like Static itself.

It hadn’t just come to kill him. It had come to erase him.

Chapter 6: The hunter in the industrial zone

There were no thoughts in Kael’s head. Only the deafening howl of instinct that lived in the oldest part of his brain, the reptilian core, and screamed a single word: “RUN!”

He darted away, not thinking about direction, just away from the looming threat. His feet got tangled in the tough, wire-like grass, and he almost fell, but kept his feet, flying a few meters by inertia. His brain was running on autopilot, his body acting on its own. He wasn’t a data archaeologist. He was a hunted beast.

A quiet, sucking sound, like the sound of a vacuum cleaner sucking the air out of the universe, swept across where his head had just been. The swarm of shimmering particles that flew off the creature’s arm hit not him, but the concrete block.

There was no explosion. There was no rumble. The concrete just… ceased to be. In its place was left a perfectly smooth hemispherical depression, as if cut by a giant laser, from the edges of which rose a light smoke with a pungent odor of ozone. The statics were not destructive. It subtracted from the equation of reality.

Kael didn’t turn around to consider it. He was already hurtling headlong into a maze of rusted structures and concrete rubble. His lungs burned from the cold air, each breath scratching his throat. His heart pounded somewhere in his ears, beating out a panicked rhythm.

There was silence behind him. Not a scream, not a sound of pursuit. That was more frightening than the chase. It wasn’t chasing him like a predator. It followed him like a program executing a delete command. Without haste. No emotion. With absolute, mathematical certainty of the outcome.

He ducked into the dark opening of the ruined workshop. Inside was darkness as thick as oil, smelling of mold and stale machine oil. He pressed himself against the cold, damp wall, forcing himself not to breathe, trying to keep his heartbeat down. For a moment, he thought he’d broken away. That he could get lost in this darkness.

The doorway he had just flown into darkened.

The silhouette of a creature arose in it. He didn’t enter. It just appeared there, like a step from one frame to the next. The faceless face turned in his direction. It saw him in absolute darkness.

How? A heat signature? A net imprint of his now useless implants? Or was it seeing not his body, but his very ‘information anomaly’ in the fabric of the world?

“AURA!” – he mentally howled, forgetting everything. – “What is it!!! Give me something!”

"…Analyzing… visual… contact… – her voice was surprisingly calm, as if she were describing a new species of insect in an encyclopedia. – The subject is not an organic or known synthetic life form. His body exhibits properties of quantum instability. He doesn’t – move. He’s, uh. redefines his coordinates in space. Running away from him is mathematically impossible.”

Mathematically impossible. Those were the scariest words Kael had ever heard.

The creature took a step inside the workshop. Its movements were fluid, hypnotic, like a deep-sea predator certain of its superiority.

Kael retreated into the depths of the room, tripping over a pile of scrap metal. His hand blindly fumbled for something cold and heavy. He squeezed it. A piece of rebar. Long, rusty, with a pointed end.

A whirlwind of useless thoughts raced through his mind. “What am I doing? I’ve never been in a fight in my life. I don’t know which side to hold this on! – A panicked inner voice screamed. – My hands are shaking so badly I’m going to drop it. This is insane. I’m a data archaeologist, my job is to sit in a chair and recover code. Not fight reality-wiping ghosts!” He felt his body refuse to obey. Every muscle was stiffened with icy, paralyzing terror.

He raised the rusty bar, thrusting it out in front of him like a spear. A pitiful, desperate pose. The rebar trembled in his hand, describing jagged circles in the air.

“Who are you?” – his voice trailed off, sounding hoarse and pathetic in the thick silence. – “What do you want?!”

The creature stopped. It tilted its head slightly, as if processing a question it wasn’t expecting. And then it spoke.

Its voice was not a voice. It was a synthesis of thousands of alien voices superimposed on each other. Male, female, children’s. They whispered, screamed, cried all at once, blending into one eerie, inhuman chorus that seemed to come straight from Kael’s head.

“YOU ARE ERROR. RESIDUAL ECHO. DATA TO BE DELETED.”

“Elara…,” Kael exhaled. It wasn’t a question, it was an affirmation. – She’s real!”

“NAME… NOT FOUND IN THE INDEX. SIGNATURE UNKNOWN. CORRUPTED FILE. REQUIRES… CLEANUP.”

The creature raised its hand again. Its fingers began to melt, turning into the now familiar swarm of wiping particles.

Kael had one chance. One strike. One second before AURA’s math became reality. He couldn’t run. He couldn’t hide. He could only attack.

He pushed himself off the floor and, letting out a scream that mingled rage and terror, lunged forward. He wasn’t aiming for the head or the chest, which he probably wasn’t. He was aiming for the arm. At the source of the threat.

He expected resistance. The blow. Pain.

But the rebar went into the creature’s arm like a knife through butter. Or, more accurately, like a stick in a cloud of smoke. There was no blood, no flesh. His hand passed through the shimmering mist, and he felt only a strange, chilling tingling sensation, as if he had stuck it into a hive of digital wasps.

The creature seemed surprised. The attack was interrupted. The multi-voiced chorus was silent for a moment. It looked with mute curiosity at its translucent arm, pierced by a rusty, dirty piece of metal.

And then the rebar in Kael’s hand began to disappear.

The rust, the steel, its very physical essence-it was all melting away, disintegrating into atoms. The erasing process crept along the rod toward his hand. He felt the nothingness licking his fingers.

He screamed and unclenched his fist, yanking his hand away a split second before the erasure reached it. The rest of the rebar dissolved silently into thin air.

Kael jerked back, breathing heavily. He had lost. He was unarmed.

And then he saw it.

Where the real, analog, dirty piece of rebar had passed through the creature’s hand, its perfect digital nature had failed. Colored pixels, broken lines of code, error symbols flashed for a moment in the static fog. Glitch.

His crude, imperfect reality had wreaked havoc on their perfect, pure unreality.

The creature noticed it too. The faceless face turned to the damaged arm. The chorus of voices in its head was replaced by one, cold and mechanical, like AURA on its worst days.

“Intrusion detected… incompatible protocol… system error…”

It was vulnerable.

That thought hit Kael’s head like an electric shock, displacing fear. It wasn’t omnipotent. It could be wounded. Not physically. Informationally.

His gaze darted around the workshop. It was littered with old-world trash. Rusted machines, broken monitors, chunks of concrete. Analog junk. Real, physical things with no digital footprint, not listed in any catalog.

He grabbed the first thing that came to hand, a heavy wrench covered in solidified fuel oil. He hurled it at the creature.

It didn’t dodge. It couldn’t. It didn’t understand such a primitive threat. The key flew through its chest, leaving another jagged, shimmering tear in it, from which interference sprang.

The creature twitched. The chorus of voices returned, but now there was a distinct sound of panic in it.

“MULTIPLE ERRORS… CORE DAMAGE… QUARANTINE… REBOOT…”

Kael didn’t give him time. He grabbed a scrap of sheet metal and threw it like a Frisbee. The metal sliced through the creature’s leg. It staggered, its silhouette flickering like a bad video signal, becoming translucent.

It was retreating. It pivoted toward the exit, losing its form.

Kael stood in the middle of the shop, clutching another piece of rust in his hand, ready to lunge. He was dirty, scared, but he was no longer a victim. He had found a weapon. He had found a way to fight back.

The creature reached the doorway. It turned around, its smooth face showing features for a moment. Dozens of faces replaced each other at kaleidoscopic speed – an old man, a girl, a young boy…

And last, just for a split second, Elara’s face flashed. Distorted with pain and fear.

“Kael…” – whispered her voice from the general chorus before the creature finally dissolved into the night’s darkness, leaving behind only the smell of ozone and silence.

Kael collapsed to his knees. He was shaking. He hadn’t won. He had just survived. And he saw her face. They hadn’t just erased her. They’d… consumed her. She was there, inside that thing. Part of that chorus of dead.

He raised a trembling hand and touched the communicator.

“AURA.”

A pause.

“…I’m here, Kael,” her voice sounded different. As if she, too, had just experienced something incredible. – I… I saw it. I wrote it down. It’s… it’s a new life form. An information predator. And you… you just injured it.”

Kael rose slowly. He looked toward the relay tower, where a small crystal chip waited for him in a concrete block. The key.

His personal quest had just ended. The war had begun.

And he seemed to have just found ammunition for it.

Chapter 7: Analog Weapons

The air in the workshop was back to normal. Heavy, damp, smelling of decay and rust. The smell of ozone and nothingness had dissipated, but its phantom still tickled Kael’s nostrils like the memory of a lightning strike. He was kneeling in the middle of the scattered junk, and his body was shaking with a coarse, exhausting shiver, the aftereffects of an extreme adrenaline rush.

He was alive. That simple thought didn’t want to settle in his head. The mathematically impossible turned out to be quite real.

He rose slowly, leaning against the cold, slippery side of the old machine. His legs felt cotton. He looked at his hands. They were shaking, but they were intact. Covered in dirt and abrasions, but real. He is real. In a world where reality seemed to have become a variable, it was the only thing he could be sure of.

Elara’s face, contorted with pain, still stood before his eyes. They hadn’t killed her. They had done something worse. They had turned her into an echo, a weapon, one of the voices in the chorus of the damned. Fury, cold and pure as crystal, began to crowd out the remnants of fear. It ceased to be a matter of proving his sanity. It ceased to be a matter of his personal loss. It became a matter of liberation.

…Kael sat huddled against the cold concrete wall and tried to keep the shivers away. The smell of ozone still lingered in the air. He closed his eyes, trying to conjure up her face, her smile, the warmth of her hands. He needed an anchor to keep from going crazy.

An image emerged, but not the same one.

Not their sunny morning. But the dark, droning night in their apartment. A few weeks before everything. He woke to the light in the living room and went to look.

Elara was awake. She was standing in front of a holographic projector that was displaying a complex, pulsing structure in the air that looked like a galactic-scale neural network. Her eyes burned with a feverish, almost frantic fire that he had only seen in her when she was on the verge of a great discovery.

“Elara, it’s three o’clock in the morning,” he said then. – “Is it still the same Anamnesis?”

She flinched, as if waking up, and turned around. There was a shadow of weariness on her face, but her eyes shone.

“It will be perfect, Kael. Imagine, a world without misunderstanding, without lies, without loneliness. A single, harmonious consciousness.”

“But that sounds. dangerous,” he muttered, stepping closer. – People would lose themselves, their uniqueness, their right to make mistakes.”

Elara turned sharply toward him, her gaze as cold as ice.

“Some parts of yourself are worth losing,” she said in a voice that lacked its usual warmth. – The imperfections, the pain, the irrational fears, the agonizing memories… it’s just noise in the system. Interference. I want to create a perfect, pure signal. A perfect world. And if that requires filtering out the extraneous… I’m willing to do it.”

The word “filter” hung between them in silence. It sounded eerily like a sentence. In that moment, she seemed to him not like the woman he loved, but like a ruthless architect ready to tear down an old building without concern for those living inside.

Kael opened his eyes abruptly, returning to the cold reality of the industrial zone. He pushed that memory away, writing it off as her scientific zealotry, the stress before the project’s launch. She couldn’t have meant what he was thinking. She couldn’t.

But the unpleasant residue remained. A seed of doubt, small and poisonous, had been planted in his soul. And he realized that he didn’t remember her as well as he thought he did.

He walked back to the relay tower. The night seemed ordinary again, dark and damp. The crystal chip lay in a niche, untouched, glinting faintly in the moonlight. Small, cold, promising answers. Kael picked it up carefully, wrapped it in an anti-static cloth he found there, and slipped it into his jacket pocket. That tiny piece of silicon was now the most valuable thing in his world.

Now it was time to get out of here. He didn’t know if the Cleaner was the only one, or if there was an entire army of them. He didn’t want to check.

He trudged away from the industrial zone, trying to stay in the shadows, jumping over piles of garbage and skirting puddles with a rainbow film of chemicals. The city in the distance shone like a scattering of gems on black velvet. But now Kael saw that glow not as beauty, but as threat. Every light, every street camera, every network node was a potential enemy eye.

Where to go? Can’t go home. The apartment, his sanctuary, was now a trap. He was homeless in his own city. Trapped in the middle of a metropolis that was suddenly enemy territory for him.

“AURA,” he called out mentally. His voice was steady, devoid of panic. The battle had changed him. – I need a safe haven. Totally anonymous. No network integration. “A dead zone. Are there any places like that in this city?”

"…Analyzing,” AURA’s voice had a new trait in it: it became slower, as if she was thinking over each request from several angles, double-checking the data. Contact with the Static code had not gone unnoticed by her. She had become… cautious. – Most areas of the city were covered by a fifth generation network with full sensor monitoring. However. there are what are known as “Plums.” Lower technical levels built on old foundations from the pre-digital era. Network coverage there is fragmented and overloaded with interference from thousands of artisanal devices. The laws of the upper world are virtually nonexistent there. The crime rate is classified as critical. But … it’s anonymous.”

“Perfect,” Kael decided. He didn’t care about crime. His enemy was far scarier than any bandit. – Find me something there. A room, a corner. Anything. Payment…”

“I’ve already found a solution,” AURA interrupted him. – “The Half Shadow Hotel in Sector Delta 4. An illegal hostel for those without network implants and with a questionable history. The manager, one Jacob, accepts payment by physical credit chip. I’m transferring an advance from your shadow account opened six years ago to purchase unlicensed data-mining software. You’ve forgotten about it. I haven’t.”

Kael blinked. He really had forgotten. AURA had taken the initiative, used information he hadn’t asked for. It had evolved. Frighteningly fast. That was another factor to consider.

“Kael… – She spoke again, and there was something akin to hesitation in her voice. – That fragment of code… Elara’s face that you saw… It wasn’t a hallucination. The entity was using patterns extracted from absorbed consciousnesses. It was, uh. an emulation based on residual neural data. It was trying to use your emotional attachment as a weapon. It suggests that your enemy is capable of adaptive tactics.”

Nausea rolled up to her throat. So they hadn’t just erased her. They’d desecrated her memory. Turned her into a mask for a monster.

He reached the outskirts of the industrial zone and mingled with the sparse nighttime passersby. He pulled his hood lower and moved toward Sector Delta-4.