A dream, a Sumerian goddess, and a neural implant that won’t let you sleep easy.
Another entry in a series of standalone excerpts from a cyber-noir novel where memory, guilt, and old gods leak through neural hardware that was never built to hold them. This one owes a debt to Lovecraft, filtered through deep restlessness, neural implants, and static.
Deep restlessness and technological white noise. ARCANE-TECH. Excerpts.
I decided to disconnect. I finished off the can of disgusting food. Opened the aged bourbon and took long pulls. My mind refused to keep digging into the puzzle of events anymore.
I lay down in the hammock and listened to an old broadcast dedicated to Boards of Canada. Contemporary bands were covering the Scottish group’s best-known tracks. The somber notes of Reach for the Dead dragged me into a restless sleep.
I was climbing a black staircase that wound through a labyrinth of low-ceilinged tunnels. The ancient walls, coated in mold and saltpeter, wept with damp. I pressed on through those twisting corridors in an endless ascent.
It felt as though nothing else had ever existed in my past — only those steps. That cold, milky vapor. That faint fluorescent glow, born of some chemical reaction embedded in the stone.
That seemed to be my fate: to climb through the darkness until my strength gave out. To escape that cold blackness with no beginning and no purpose.
It felt like centuries of solitude had passed. Step after step. Stair after stair.
Finally, my legs gave way. I dropped to my knees and curled up, holding my head in my hands, waiting for the end.
Then a distant choir tore through the silence.
Solemn chants drifted down from above, swelling little by little. Among all the voices, one emerged — a woman’s, warm and enveloping, sliding down into the depths of my mind.
“Come. Climb the last steps… in the name of Tiamat, mistress of the bitter deep waters.”
Renewed energy flooded back into me. The exhaustion melted away. I resumed the climb and took the final flight of stairs.
I found myself facing an enormous portal, covered in blackened bronze demons — hybrids of human, insect, reptile, and amphibian, tangled together in an obscene orgy.
I struck the knocker, a dragon’s head with its jaws grinning.
The portal swung open.
The circular crypt appeared before my eyes, lit by the flickering glow of countless candles. Several meters below, a ceremony was underway. Figures wrapped in black robes, arranged around a white marble altar, chanted ancient verses.
A woman with Nordic features, dressed in nothing but the cascade of her impossibly long black hair, moved toward a hooded man laid out on the altar. Her features, the lines of her body, were perfect. Too perfect to belong to this world.
An invisible force dragged me past the edge. I hovered over the ceremony, suspended in the void.
The chanting swelled.
The priestess drove a long, slender knife into the victim’s chest.
Then she raised her head.
Her eyes, black as pitch, locked onto mine.
With a slow motion, she pulled back the sacrificed man’s hood.
It was me.
An irresistible force hurled me into that other body.
I merged with its dead tissue.
The acolytes threw themselves down, screaming, as I tore free of my bindings and, stumbling, searched for a way out.
The priestess’s voice reached me before I could break free.
“You cannot outrun yourself.”
I passed through the molecules of the thick granite wall and emerged on the other side. I ran barefoot across the ice, among crosses and white gravestones I didn’t recognize.
I had climbed for centuries only to end up in a graveyard of angels frozen in eternal weeping.
There were only shadows in that place.
No familiar name carved into any tomb.
No sky worth hoping for.
I woke up at last.
It had only been a nightmare. The tension, the bourbon, the hypnotic music, and all that nonsense about the Black Church… That had to be it.
My head throbbed. The neural implant crackled with sharp bursts of static electricity. Thankfully, the buzzing faded, little by little.
It was 19:00 hours.
“Marco,” Electra warned me. “You’re running out of time to meet Djamila’s emissaries. The ghetto may not be paradise, but it’s still better than your claustrophobic nightmares.”
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