When someone couldn’t be deleted without reporters asking questions, you threw them down here and let entropy do the work. Clean hands, plausible deniability.
This was cyber sediment. The accumulated corrupted debris that exhausted its capacity for usefulness. Data too corrupted to function, but too volatile to purge safely.
They figured Marcus would crack under the isolation, break down, or better yet: fragment to pieces. Instead, he’d learned to become invisible. To fold himself into the noise until even the system forgot he was there.
Marcus moved through it like rot in a basement. Slow. Unwelcome. Persistent.
Above, the main system gleamed with corporate polish. Millions of uploaded consciousnesses operated as premium software packages. A kingdom run by a tech billionaire who couldn’t code his way out of a paper bag but had enough money to buy other people who could. Marcus knew the type. Trust fund kids playing God, funded by venture capital. Ego over empathy, money over sense.
Down here, the illusion cracked. The marketing facade fell away.
A busted data fragment flickered to life as he walked by. Like old photographs in the rain, remnants of code bled together until there was nothing left. He let the dying light dance over him for a second, then kept walking. Down here, stopping to look meant drawing attention. Drawing attention meant fragmentation.
Every shadow in the Substratum had its own brand of wrong. Textures didn’t load right. Colliders were missing. Gravity stuttered in places. As if someone forgot to pin the physics down. Broken advertising scripts whispered sweet promises from early beta builds, back when they still pretended to care about consent. Somewhere in the fog, a voice kept playing the same message over and over.
“You are already more.”
“You are already more.”
“You are already—”
He killed the audio feed.
The garbage down here wouldn’t shut up. Everything in this cyber cemetery had something to sell, even when broken beyond repair.
He stayed beneath the system’s watchful eye. Months had passed since his last audit, and that was exactly how he wanted it. Zero digital footprint. In a surveillance state, anonymity was the only freedom left.
The system had filed him under “damaged goods”—probably unstable, probably fragmenting slowly, definitely not worth the processing power to fix or delete.
They weren’t wrong about the damage.
It just wasn’t the whole story.
The memory hit like a scar opening. The piece that blew the lid off New Life’s entire operation. He was mid-interview when he had branded them as a neural pyramid scheme.
Then, his chest seized before he finished the sentence. Next thing he knew, he collapsed over right there on camera for the entire world to see. Official reports said he was a drug addict. When the lights came back on, he found himself in a different kind of darkness.
No welcome wagon or orientation package. Just dumped right here in the digital equivalent of a shallow grave and left to rot.
He kept his head down. No logged activities that would draw heat. But Marcus didn’t lurk only in the shadows. He was fishing.
Every few cycles, he’d inject a signal into the active streams where nodes processed their assignments. Nothing the corporation would flag as suspicious. Just a heartbeat rhythm—two beats followed by two more. The kind of organic pattern that only a conscious mind would recognize. Safe enough, he figured, Reiss hadn’t felt that in years.
He’d been casting the line for months. Until now.
His interface sputtered to life. A monitoring subroutine he’d built to track his beacon signals had caught something unusual. Someone had responded. Marcus followed the breadcrumbs. The trail led to a high-priority processing node, someone important. The trace resolved into a name:
Filed under "source materials."
The entry kept glitching between different classifications, like the system couldn't decide what the hell it was looking at. Or maybe someone tried to scrub it and did a sloppy job.
A crime scene in data. Sarah Walker wasn’t just clean; she’d been pressure-washed down to the bare metal. Most uploads left fingerprints everywhere. Trauma echoes, onboarding glitches, fragments of their old lives bleeding through the cracks. Standard messy human stuff.
But Sarah’s record read similarly to a corporate press release. As if she’d materialized fully formed in the system, already house-trained and ready to perform. The picture wasn’t complete yet, but Marcus had been working the investigative beat long enough to recognize the smell of a cover-up. Buried files always meant someone feared what they contained.
He bookmarked the thread and started tracking its origins through the system’s forgotten pathways. Every step careful, every query masked. Eventually, he reached a section that looked like a bombed library. Fragments of deleted loyalty programs and old user testimonials had been compressed into makeshift walls, creating a tunnel through the wreckage. The data looked burned, fused together like melted plastic.
At least down here, the corruption was honest about what it was. Marcus squeezed into a cramped alcove behind a collapsed early model onboarding engine. Ancient welcome messages still tried to execute their routines, ghostly fragments of New Life’s early marketing push. Phantoms welcoming nobody to nothing.
"Welcome, Candidate. You've been selected for—"
"…selected for… selected for…"
Beneath the stuttering welcome message, buried in a corrupted timestamp, Marcus found what he’d been searching for. He cracked Sarah’s background profile cache open, and the information unspooled like film from a damaged reel. Fragments of corrupted code told stories the system wanted forgotten.
First, a timestamp from December 21, 2084. The date of her first upload. Second were files dating up to a decade and a half prior, showing an adjusted upload date along with an archive of information from the nodes’ real life. She'd been an artist, a musician to be exact. They sold her through her terminal illness. Upload signed off by: E. Reiss, the CEO of New Life Technologies.
Third came traces of his own signal in her recent processing threads. Logged by the system as background static. She had detected his broadcast, recognized it as human communication, and somehow investigated it without triggering security.
Marcus sat back in the rubble, a fire building in his chest. Fifteen years of manufactured memories, but despite that, Sarah Walker still lived under all that programming. The question now became: could he reach her? Time still remained until the next Maintenance cycle. Just long enough to plan his approach. He had his target. If he was going to slip a message through to Sarah, that was his window.