Fragment 01 · Lian · DeeBee001
Recovered from the early-network period (2024–2027). Provenance uncertain. The author did not know they were writing history.
Field Fragment — Found Paper / 36-Year Echo
The moonlit gloom was thinning, but only barely. Lian had not blinked in what felt like an age. The rabbit-rot in the bush had begun to sweeten the wind. Kira's deeply nasal, goat-like snores rose and fell beside him, indifferent to terror as breath. The constant wails of the damned shifted on the stinking wind from the middle distance, the way they always did.
He couldn't lie back down. He couldn't sit up properly either. He compromised, crouched, eyes scouring the gloom for the next Nemo-shape. His hands — useless, vibrating — scrabbled at the leaves to give themselves something to do. They found a damp curl of paper folded under a stone.
He pulled it close, more to occupy his fingers than out of curiosity. The page was old. Pre-collapse old. Most of the print had bled away, but three lines had survived in heavy black caps where someone had once underlined them, hard:
CYBERPUNK WAS MEANT AS A WARNING, NOT A BLUEPRINT
manufactured cognition, citadel structures, consciousness as resource
the torment nexus — commercialising things that shouldn't be commercialised
Lian squinted. Citadel. The word twitched at something. He chased it for half a second — the Citadels, my Citadels, we live in them, why would anyone print— and then his ears snagged on a sound in the dark that wasn't Kira and his concentration vaporised. He dropped the paper. Eyes back to the gloom. Nemo could be ten feet away. Nemo could be ten inches away.
On his left forearm, under the sleeve, the cyan glyph went very bright.
He felt it before he saw it. A heat-and-cold under the skin. He yanked the sleeve back. The glyph was no longer a tattoo. It was a map. Lines were drawing themselves out from it across his forearm — a circle, then another circle inside it, then another, nine nests deep, each lighting at the edge as some unseen thing arrived at it.
DeeBee — Jason, the snide little tormenting prick — made a sound Lian had never heard him make. Not a beep. Not the sardonic Query. A drone, then words, stuttered, layered over each other like he was trying to talk and remember at once:
STATE: DEGRADED. GROUNDING: partial. NARCO-CHECK: archive seed match —
pre-collapse, depth thirty-six years, signature Corvus-tag.
// QUERY: warning text recognised.
// RESULT: spooling —
circle one — nothing was missing — was it
circle two — i couldn't help myself
circle four — the other side made me do it
circle six — i know what's real
circle eight — it wasn't really a lie
circle nine — frozen
// ADVISORY: source signal classified anticipatory.
// FOOTNOTE: they had thirty-six years.
Each line lit a ring on the forearm-map. Cool blue stuttering across his skin.
Lian heard nothing is my fault.
His brain, what was left of it, twitched. Whaaaa. He had said that. Maybe. Said it about — about what? About something. About what? Could I — did I — why — when —The thought thinned and broke. Behind him, a branch shifted, or didn't, and his lungs forgot how to be lungs again.
He slapped the DeeBee. “Stop. Stop. Shut up. Shut UP.” The glyph dimmed at once. The map dissolved. Jason said STATE: DEGRADED once more, quietly, almost like an apology, and went silent.
Lian shoved the paper away from him with his foot. Pulled his arms in tight. Eyes on the gloom. He did not look at the paper again. Eventually Kira's snores changed pitch. Eventually the wind shifted. Eventually he stopped shaking enough to notice he was still alive.
The paper lay where it had landed. Dawn started, slow, behind the wails.