NULL AND RISING

  Book One: Sovereign Embryo

  Chapter 8: Benny Asks Questions

  Monday at NetCore had a specific gravity to it that Tuesday did not.

  Monday was the day the week reasserted itself — the accumulated distance of the weekend collapsing back into the fluorescent reality of the office, the tickets, the headset, the view of Torgauer Stra?e from the window. Most people Igor had worked with over the years experienced this as a minor recurring loss. Markus expressed it through the clock-glance. Jana expressed it through a particular efficiency of movement in the first hour, as if speed could outrun the feeling. Benny expressed it by arriving slightly later than his contracted start time and compensating through the day in ways that balanced out mathematically and satisfied no one emotionally.

  Igor did not experience Mondays as a loss. He experienced them as a return to a known quantity, which was different. The weekend was less structured, which meant more space for the thoughts he did not particularly want more space for. The office was constraining in the way of all offices but the constraint had a use — it kept him in a defined channel, which was, on balance, preferable to the open water.

  He processed nine tickets before Benny appeared at his desk at 10:40.

  Benny looked better than he had on Friday — the compressed worry had relaxed somewhat, the colour returned to his face. He sat on the edge of the desk, which meant the situation had normalised enough that the desk-sitting had resumed.

  "Her brother is home," he said.

  "Good."

  "They still don't know what caused it. The doctors are calling it an isolated episode. No structural damage, no prior indicators." He paused. "They also said they've seen six similar cases in Hannover in the past week. Same profile — healthy, young, no history. Just — " he made a gesture that meant went down without explanation.

  Igor looked at him. "Six."

  "Six that were reported. Could be more." Benny pulled at a loose thread on his sleeve, a nervous habit Igor had catalogued. "The doctors aren't connecting it publicly to the signal thing. But one of the nurses told Lena's family, off the record, that the timing—" He stopped.

  "The timing corresponds," Igor said.

  "Yes."

  They sat with this for a moment. Igor thought about it with the systematic attention he gave to things that needed thinking about — six cases in one city, signal count now in the dozens of cities globally, animals behaving as though receiving a transmission that human sensory equipment was not calibrated for. He did not catastrophize. He simply added the data point to the accumulation.

  "He's home and he's fine," Igor said. "That's what matters right now."

  Benny nodded. "Yeah." He exhaled. "Yeah, okay." He glanced at Igor's screen. "You're on ticket nine already?"

  "Eleven."

  "It's 10:40."

  "I know."

  Benny shook his head with the mild admiration of someone who found efficiency slightly alien. "Can I ask you something?"

  "You're going to regardless."

  "Fair." He settled on the desk properly, which meant the question was not a small one. "How do you do that? The — staying calm thing. Not just now, with the Lena situation. Just generally. You're always — " he searched for the word. "Level. You're always level."

  Igor considered how to answer this honestly without it being a longer conversation than either of them had time for. "I don't know that I'm calm," he said. "I just don't perform the alternative."

  Benny frowned. "What does that mean?"

  "It means the feelings are there. I just don't find it useful to show them before there's something to do about whatever caused them." He paused. "Usually by the time there's something to do, the feeling has settled into something more workable."

  Benny thought about this. "That sounds exhausting."

  "It's less exhausting than the other way."

  "How do you know? You've never done the other way."

  Igor looked at him. This was, he acknowledged privately, a reasonable point. "I've observed the other way."

  Benny laughed — short, genuine, the laugh of someone who had not expected to laugh that morning and was slightly relieved by the fact of it. "Okay. Fair." He got off the desk. "Igor."

  "Yes."

  "Thanks. For Friday. The don't-connect-things thing." He paused. "I know you told me you can't actually do it. But it helped anyway."

  Igor nodded. Benny went back to his desk.

  Igor returned to his tickets.

  At noon he ate at the window. Torgauer Stra?e, the usual commerce. He was on his second slice when Jana appeared beside him — not at his desk, which was the formal configuration, but beside him at the window, which was the configuration of someone who wanted a conversation that was not a work conversation. Jana did this occasionally, and when she did it Igor generally let it happen because Jana was not a bad person and occasionally had things to say that were worth hearing.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  "The signals," she said. She was looking out the window rather than at him, which made it easier.

  "Yes."

  "My husband thinks it's government testing. Some kind of frequency experiment." She paused. "I don't think it's that."

  "No," Igor agreed.

  "What do you think it is?"

  He ate his bread for a moment. "I think it's something we don't have a category for yet. Which is uncomfortable, but it doesn't mean it's dangerous. It just means it's new."

  Jana was quiet for a moment. "My daughter asked me this morning if she should be scared." She said this carefully, the way parents said things about their children to non-parents — with a slight awareness that the context might not translate. "She's nine."

  "What did you tell her?"

  "I said no." She paused. "I said we don't know what it is yet so there's nothing specific to be scared of." She looked at him sideways. "Was that the right thing to say?"

  "I don't know," Igor said. "I don't have children." A pause. "But it sounds accurate. And accurate is usually better than comfortable, even with nine-year-olds."

  Jana nodded slowly. "She asked me what would happen if it turned out to be something bad."

  "What did you say?"

  "I said we'd deal with it." She looked out the window. "I don't know if that's true."

  "Probably not," Igor said. "But it's the right answer anyway."

  Jana looked at him, slightly startled, and then — unexpectedly — smiled. Not the professional smile she deployed at contractual intervals but a different one, shorter and more real. She went back to her desk. Igor finished his bread.

  The afternoon passed. At 3:15, Benny sent a message in the office Slack that was addressed to the room rather than to Igor specifically but which Igor recognised as being, in some indirect way, for him: Signal count update since this morning — 89 cities. Up from 71 on Saturday. The rate of increase is accelerating.

  Below it, a link to a university research aggregator that was compiling reported instances globally.

  Igor opened the link. The map was dotted in the way of a disease spread visualisation — initially clustered, now increasingly distributed, the clusters growing and the spaces between them shrinking. He looked at it for thirty seconds, noted the distribution pattern, closed the tab.

  Eighty-nine cities.

  He thought about what acceleration meant in this context. The signal had been present for a week at a relatively stable count, and then in the past seventy-two hours had nearly doubled. Either more cities were experiencing it or more cities were reporting what they had already been experiencing. Either way, the threshold of anomalous was giving way to something that didn't yet have a name.

  Markus, who had apparently been reading the same Slack message, said: "Probably weather."

  Nobody responded to this.

  He left at 5:31 and walked to the tram stop in the early dark of November. The pressure in his ears was present again — consistent now, a daily companion he had stopped attributing to weather or stress. It was what it was. He noted it and filed it.

  On the tram he stood in the aisle and, unusually, looked at his phone.

  He had, without meaning to, opened Luka's Instagram. The most recent post was from yesterday — a training ground video, thirty seconds, Rijeka's facilities, Luka in the background doing finishing drills with the focused economy of someone for whom this was as natural as breathing. A hundred thousand likes. The comments were mostly in Croatian and German and English, a mix of admiration and transfer speculation and the particular aggressive hope of fans who wanted a specific outcome and were directing it at the player as if intensity of desire constituted a form of communication.

  Igor watched the thirty seconds. Then watched it again.

  He put his phone in his pocket.

  He thought about what he had said to Jana: accurate is usually better than comfortable. He tried to apply this to himself, which was harder than applying it to others. The accurate version of what he was doing — watching Luka's training footage on a Monday evening on the tram home — was that he was maintaining contact with the benchmark. Keeping the gap in focus. The comfortable version was that he simply found it interesting from a technical standpoint, which was also true but was not the complete account.

  The accurate account was: he had wanted what Luka had. He had not got it. He had built a life from what was available instead, and the life was functional and sufficient and sometimes, in moments like yesterday on the run along the canal or in the second goal against Borsdorf, something more than sufficient. But the wanting had not left. It had changed shape — compressed, quieter, less jagged than it had been at nineteen. But it was still there.

  He was fine with it being there. It was more honest than pretending otherwise.

  The tram stopped. He got off. He walked home.

  Teddy was in the hallway.

  "Eighty-nine cities," Igor said, by way of greeting.

  Teddy turned and walked to the kitchen. Igor followed, fed him, made tea. He stood at the window while the tea steeped and looked at the courtyard and thought about nothing specific — just the accumulation of the day, setting it down.

  After dinner he sat on the couch with the LitRPG novel and finished it.

  The ending was, as endings in the genre tended to be, a threshold — the protagonist standing at the door of the next arc, stronger than he had been, clearer about what he was, the world around him reorganised by the events of the book into a new configuration. The final line was: He did not know what came next. He had stopped needing to.

  Igor closed the book. Sat with it for a moment.

  He put it on the stack of finished books beside the couch. He reached to the shelf behind the stack — he kept three or four unread books there, a small buffer against the anxiety of running out — and selected the next one. Another LitRPG. A different series, different protagonist, different System. Same essential architecture: a person at zero, a world that changes the rules, the question of what they are capable of when the old constraints are removed.

  He had read three hundred of these. He was aware of what this said about him. He had decided it said: he finds the question interesting. Which was, he thought, not the worst thing to say about a person.

  He read for an hour. At 10:30 he set the alarm for 7:15 and lay down.

  Two days until Wednesday.

  The pressure was present and steady. The city outside was quiet. Teddy was at the window, doing what he had been doing all week — facing the direction that contained the thing Igor couldn't see or hear but that Teddy, apparently, could.

  Igor closed his eyes.

  He thought: whatever it is, I'll deal with it.

  Not a brave thought. Just a factual one. The same thought he had applied to every other thing in his life that had arrived without asking permission — the scouts, the rejection, the six months of failed trials, the dishwasher shift, the language course, the flat on Brüderstra?e. Things arrived. You dealt with them. The dealing was the only part you controlled.

  He went to sleep.

  Outside, in eighty-nine cities, the hum built toward something that had always been coming — patient, indifferent to calendars, but if it had been aware of calendars it would have said: two more days.

  — ? —