Chapter 14: The Booster Transmitter

Rain in Sector 4-Retro bore no resemblance to the clean, mountain water whispered of in old, half-corrupted archival files buried within local, charred data vaults. It tasted flat and greasy—a rancid cocktail of sour machine oil, metallic rust, and ash from coal furnaces extinguished long ago, whose brick chimneys still clawed at the horizon like accusatory fingers. Peter spat at his feet, watching grimly as the dark, thick gore instantly merged with a puddle of heavy grease on the metal gangway. At eighty meters high, the wind raged unchecked, whipping icy droplets against his face with the sting and malice of shattered glass shards. The cold crept beneath the collar of his worn, tattered nylon jacket, biting at his back and seeping under a wet woolen sweater that had long since lost its stretch and hung from him like a heavy, sodden sack.

“Plague,” he hissed under his breath, rubbing fingers that were frozen to the bone. “Fucking weather. Someone in Apex-Core must have set the climate parameters to maximum misery. Or they're just skimming on thermal rendering for this fucking sector. This is no place for humans. It’s not even fit for old machines, with rust devouring the last functioning gears in their actuators.”

“Stop your whining, Peter,” Rhea called out from the maintenance platform ten meters below. Her voice, though muffled by the howling gale, carried its usual icy edge, sharp enough to cut deeper than the frost. The girl was adjusting the harness of her cybernetic leg. An archaic model with hydraulic pistons and exposed wiring, it clicked softly as she shifted her weight. Cheap grease in the seals was thickening in the cold, making the joints creak like ungreased hinges on an old barn door. “Sector 4-Retro has its own backup power. If we don’t jack into the transmitter before the next system clock cycle, their bloody firewalls will lock tight. Then not a single synapse-head will pass to the next block. We'll be trapped in this byte-swamp forever. We'll rot in this data junk heap until some automated garbage-collector script flags us as orphaned threads and purges our registers from physical memory.”

Peter looked up, squinting against the driving downpour. The spire of the old television transmitter rose above the ruined tenements of Sector 4 like the rusted, twisted skeleton of some antediluvian beast that had died with its maw buried in clouds of yellow smog. The structure groaned in the wind, emitting a low, wailing hum—a metallic lament that set his teeth on edge and made his stomach churn. The steel climbing ladder was slick with grease, rust, and freezing moisture. Every touch of the metal burned his palms with cold, as if he were grabbing dry ice that froze cells in a fraction of a second.

“Faster, Peter!” Rhea urged him, her face, wrapped in a dirty scarf, pale and drawn from exertion. “The clock is ticking! The physics engine won't wait for us! The backup batteries in my diagnostic terminal are draining ten percent faster because of this fucking frost! If it drops below critical, I won't even be able to run the initiation script!”

Peter gritted his teeth so hard he felt the enamel crack and the salty taste of blood in his mouth. The vibration in his chest—that tiny, anomalous frequency that didn't belong to the simulation's official code—kept his body in a state of strange, feverish tension, as if his blood were flowing under heightened pressure. Thanks to his Absolute-IP, his sensory systems were entirely distorted. In his eyes, the world was neither dark nor blurred by rain and smog. He saw the stress meshes of the spire's steel structure, and the vectors of wind force and dynamic air pressure glowing with a faint, greenish light. Sector 4's physics engine calculated these forces in real-time, and Peter, through his anomalous perception, saw these computations a split second before their physical manifestation in the sensory world.

He watched the raindrops. To him, they were no chaotic streams of water—he saw them as repetitive, simplified geometric textures, falling downward according to a basic gravity algorithm written by the Demiurge into the system's kernel. Planck's constant was no abstract number from dusty quantum physics textbooks; he saw it as rendering granularity, the minimal resolution of space below which the world broke down into pixels and mathematical probabilities. The speed of light was merely a bandwidth limit of the local system bus—a data transfer ceiling in this fucking virtual prison designed by the Archons to milk loosh from humans through fear, pain, and eternal scarcity.

“Lazy rendering,” Peter muttered under his breath, placing a foot on another rusted rung. “The engine doesn't calculate individual droplet collisions unless there's an observer. All of it just to save central processor cycles. This entire world is a half-arsed mock-up, and we're nothing but byte-scum for the silicon nobility to run their sociological experiments on. Byte-racism in its purest form. If you don't have the right avatar resolution, the system treats you like background noise, like trash destined for disposal.”

“Spare me your gnostic theories, Aetrys!” Rhea shouted, climbing up behind him. Her mechanical fingers clamped onto the rungs with a loud, metallic clatter. “Better watch your grip. If you fall off this, the physics engine will remind you of gravity soon enough. And none of your code will save you. Remember, gravity in this sector is a simple, overriding master thread. You can't easily fool it by just disabling collisions. One slip and you plummet to the bottom, your avatar shattering into a heap of worthless data.”

Peter paused on a landing fifty meters up, leaning his good side against a trembling girder. He looked down at the sprawling panorama of Sector 4. The roofs of the tenements were patched with grey moss, and faint, greenish flames of gas lamps or crude neons flickered in the windows. The whole scene looked like a painting by a mad artist who had run out of colors. In his eyes, however, under the influence of Absolute-IP, this landscape dissolved into vectors and errors. He saw the graphics engine struggling to apply shading to the edges of the buildings. This phenomenon, dubbed 'byte-racism' by synapse-heads, meant the system favored the upper levels of the city, allocating full lighting rendering and high voxel density to them, while the slums had to make do with simplified, static textures and a low refresh rate.

“It's all just pixels, Rhea,” he said softly. “When you look at those roofs, you see tin and moss. I see an array of coordinates the system generates on the fly. The speed of light isn't a physical constant of the universe. It's merely the bandwidth limit of the CPU system bus. A clock gating constraint the Demiurge cannot bypass without frying his own silicon cores. And Planck's constant? That's simply the minimum voxel dimension, the smallest pixel-structure in this fucking code. Nothing exists below it, because it makes no sense for the system to render anything smaller than a single pixel on the screen of consciousness.”

Rhea looked up at him, the triple sensor in her cybernetic leg emitting a brief, warning chirp.

“I’ve heard of the quantum eraser theory,” she replied, tightening her grip on the rung. “How particles behave like waves until someone looks at them. Is that because of your lazy rendering too?”

“Precisely,” he agreed. “Why calculate an electron’s trajectory when no one is watching? The engine only computes probability at the moment of collision or detection. It's pure CPU resource saving, which physicists call wavefunction collapse. Morphogenetic fields, which some synapse-heads babble about, are just cache structures where the system stores repetitive physical patterns so it doesn't have to compile them from scratch. Everything is optimized for the maximum efficiency of loosh extraction. And here we are, climbing a rusted skeleton that is nothing but an array of pointers in the server's memory.”

They climbed higher, meter by meter. The air grew steadily colder, and the wind at eighty meters snatched the breath from their lungs. Peter felt the cold slowly paralyze his fingers, turning them into stiff, useless pegs. His work gloves, soaked with icy water and grease, offered no protection. Every movement demanded a massive effort of will. He saw the green stress lines on the ladder tremble under their weight, the collision algorithm constantly recalculating their coordinates in the sector's three-dimensional grid. The metal creaked under the temperature fluctuations and dynamic loads.

Suddenly, out of the thick fog and yellow smog hanging over the city, a low, pulsing rumble emerged. The sound was metallic, rhythmic, growing louder by the second, boring into the skull and vibrating the teeth in their gums.

Peter froze on the ladder. His vector overlay instantly highlighted a moving object in red, flying in fast from the eastern quarter of the ruins.

“Drone!” Rhea screamed, freezing on the rungs a few meters below him. “Peter, we've got company! It's an Apex-Core patrol!”

A patrol drone emerged from the clouds, an Apex-Core 'Scylla-S' class. It was a light but deadly hunter, built to eliminate unauthorized processes in low-priority sectors. Its hull, made of matte-black carbon composite, resembled the carapace of a giant, biomechanical arthropod. Three pairs of rotors operated with variable geometry, stabilizing the machine in the gusty wind with surgical precision. Dark synthetic oil seeped from its hydraulic joints, dripping onto the tower's rusted steel.

The most terrifying part, however, was its optical turret. A large, spherical dome of synthetic sapphire housed three rotating lenses that clicked quietly, shifting apertures and focal lengths like the twitching, triple eye of an insect. A cold, violet beam of biometrics-scanning light bled from the turret, instantly sweeping the space around the tower.

“Target acquired,” a flat, synthetic voice droned from the machine’s speakers, resonating through the tower’s metal frame. “Unauthorized threads detected. Violation of Sector 4 integrity. Proceeding to purge registers.”

In Peter's vector overlay, the drone's raw scan data flashed: Thread: Rhea. Priority: Low. Code Integrity: 64%. Status: Marked for deletion. The system had classified them as mere cache pollution.

A red laser targeting line sliced through the rain, locking onto Rhea's chest. She was stranded midway between the platforms, suspended over the eighty-meter drop. Her freezing fingers clung desperately to the rail. She tried to reach for her EMP pistol, but her numb fingers slipped on the holster. The weapon slipped from her grasp and plummeted, swallowed by the smog.

“Peter! It’s locked on!” Rhea screamed, raw, inhuman terror in her voice. “I can't move! My joints... they’ve locked up in this fucking frost!”

The drone began charging its capacitors. A high, whining hum from the weapon rose, drowning out the wind. The air around the laser emitter's nozzle ionized, glowing with a faint blue-green light and smelling sharply of ozone. In two seconds, Rhea would be reduced to smoking cinder, her avatar permanently purged from the sector's active memory.

Peter was too high up. Physically, he had no chance of climbing down or reaching the drone. Ten vertical meters and three horizontal meters on a slick, wet ladder were an eternity.

“Plague,” he thought. “The same thing again. The constraints of the physics engine. The limits imposed by the Demiurge. But I am no ordinary program. I hold the key. I have my Absolute-IP and my own frequency.”

He closed his eyes. Inhale. Exhale.

Coherence 0.1 Hz.

It was the base resonant frequency of the matrix servers—the clock cycle upon which the central processor's entire task scheduler relied. Peter directed the etheric vibration to accelerate his own timeline. He resolved to overwrite the local thread and exploit the simulation's physics engine lag for objects in accelerated motion.

In reality theory, motion was a sequence of discrete states—frame by frame. If an object moved at normal speed, the physics engine checked its collisions with the environment at every computational step. If, however, the object's acceleration exceeded a certain critical threshold, the engine—to prevent CPU overload—switched to 'lazy checking' mode. It ceased calculating a continuous trajectory (continuous collision detection) and instead verified only the starting and ending points, collapsing the probability wave only when the object stopped. It was a classic optimization routine, and Peter intended to hack it shamelessly.

He forced his Absolute-IP into resonance with the 0.1 Hz frequency, forcing the local bus controller to temporarily boost the processing priority of his own thread. His internal framerate shot into the stratosphere.

To Rhea, it seemed as if the sky had exploded for a fraction of a second with a blinding flash of lightning, illuminating the rusted tower and the suspended raindrops. Yet in that split second, Peter didn't climb down the ladder—he simply dematerialized his coordinates at the top and manifested directly on the platform beside the drone. A textbook coordinate spoofing in the server's cache.

His movement was so rapid that the air friction against his vector zone ignited the remnants of the nylon sleeve on his right arm. The rush of air shredded the fabric, and the plasma formed by friction against atmospheric voxels began to sear his flesh. Peter felt no pain, though—his mind operated in hyper-acceleration mode, discarding all input from sensory receptors.

He brought his heavy spanner down from above, with the full force of non-local momentum accumulated during his abrupt phase transition.

The steel wrench collided with the 'Scylla-S' sapphire lens with a loud, dry crack. The glass shattered, and beneath it, delicate silicon matrices and tactical processors exploded. The drone sparked violently, its laser emitter spitting a wild, erratic beam of green light that slashed the night sky before dying out. The machine's anti-gravity drives lost thrust, emitting a raspy, metallic shriek. The robot tilted, smashed through the platform railings, and plunged into the dark abyss between the tenements of Sector 4, dragging a tail of thick black smoke behind it.

Peter collapsed to his knees on the wet, rusted planks of the platform. Only now did time return to its normal flow, and his nervous system was flooded with a wave of pure, primal agony.

“Aaaaa!” he screamed, clutching his right shoulder.

The pain was searing, deep, pulsing in rhythm with his heartbeat. Thick dark gore splattered from his nose onto the planks, mixing with the rain. His right arm was stripped of clothing; the skin was raw, blistered, and charred where the friction of the air had been most intense. The strangest part, however, were the burns on his hand and forearm. They were not ordinary, shapeless thermal wounds. They formed perfect, geometric patterns—concentric circles intersecting one another to form the precise geometry of the Flower of Life. It was a physical stamp of error-correcting codes with which the simulation engine had hastily tried to patch the rift in spacetime Peter had torn open with his leap. Gates codes, branded into living flesh by fire and compiler.

Rhea scrambled onto the platform, gasping for air. Her face was as pale as canvas, her eyes wide with terror. She looked at him, then down into the abyss where the drone had vanished, and finally at Peter's smoking arm.

“What... what in the plague did you do?” she rasped, leaning against the rusted railing. “You were up there. I saw you. And then... you were just here. Like you teleported. Like you spoofed the server.”

Peter gritted his teeth until he felt blood trickle from his gums. He tucked his burned hand into his jacket pocket, though every contact with the fabric made him want to pass out from the agony.

“Lightning,” he wheezed, trying to make his voice sound normal. “The flash blinded me. I lost my grip up there and fell onto this platform. The drone's optics must have fried from the discharge, and I just hit it as it flew by. We got lucky. Mere chance.”

Rhea stared at the rusted railing, then at the top of the spire, and finally back at Peter.

“You fell ten meters onto wet planks and didn't even break your neck? You're lying, Aetrys. Lying since the beginning. Your arm is smoking, and the air reeks of burnt code. But we have no time. The transmitter is above us. We need to finish the job.”

They climbed onto the final platform right under the top of the spire. A massive copper emitter coil stood here. It was a powerful, cylindrical construction, connected to the transmission cabinet by thick, insulated cables. A strong electromagnetic field radiated from the coil; the air around it vibrated, and Peter could taste metallic copper on his tongue and smell the acrid scent of hot transformer oil.

Rhea quickly pulled open the side panel and began plugging in her diagnostic leads. Her frozen fingers trembled as she jammed the connectors into the access ports. The terminal screen flickered with a dim, blue glow, casting long shadows across her weary face.

“My terminal doesn't have enough power,” she said, her voice shaking from the cold. “No carrier signal. The local Apex-Core node has locked the output ports. We have to use your... that strange vibration you emit. Connect to the signal line. You have to act as a physical transducer. Otherwise, the pulse won't break through the filters.”

Peter stared at the exposed copper contact of the cable. He knew the risk. If he fed his signature directly into the transmitter, the high-frequency return current would pass straight through his heart. It wasn't ordinary electricity—it was a pure, high-density stream of data, a raw etheric current that could burn his nervous system to ash.

“Do it, Peter!” Rhea urged him. “We don't have a minute! The security systems are going to reboot any second!”

Peter pulled his burned right hand from his pocket. The geometric burns of the Flower of Life glowed with a faint gold light, pulsing in sync with his racing pulse. He grabbed the bare copper contact of the cable with his naked hand.

The pain that hit him in a fraction of a second was beyond anything he had ever known. It felt as though liquid, boiling glass mixed with raw binary code were being pumped through his veins. Raw ether current—the primordial etheric current, the information carrier of the entire simulation—flooded into his nervous system with the fury of a deluge.

His heart seized. It stopped beating entirely, paralyzed by the colossal voltage of the signal. A monstrous, metallic screech erupted in his ears—a sound of such high frequency he felt his eardrums splitting. His consciousness began to tear, drifting toward nonexistence, scattering across the entire network of Sector 4. For a fraction of a second, he saw the entire matrix, every camera, every process and database, as if he himself had become the server.

“Hold the vibration,” he told himself, fighting the dissolution. “Hold 0.1 Hz. Modulate to 432 Hz.”

He focused all his will on a point deep inside his chest. Using his Absolute-IP, he began to filter the incoming current, suppressing its high harmonics and imposing his own harmonic structure. 0.1 Hz as the carrier frequency, upon which he modulated 432 Hz—the mathematical resonance of the universe's geometry, the sound that lay at the base of the primordial creation code before the Archons distorted it to forge their vector prison.

The current in his body began to shift. The searing, boiling glass gave way to a deep, pulsing vibration. His heart, after several seconds of deathly silence, gave a single beat. Then another. Slowly, painfully, but with immense strength, aligning its rhythm to 432 Hz.

Wuuuuuummmmmmm...

An invisible, scalar wave at 432 Hz erupted from the copper transmitter at the peak of the spire. The signal expanded spherically, piercing building walls, smog clouds, and the metal structures of Sector 4.

The effect was instantaneous. Within a two-kilometer radius, Apex-Core's entire security network began to choke and unravel. Every local municipal monitoring camera, clinging to the tenement walls like the watchful eyes of a beast, froze in place, their lenses flooded with a tide of dead, golden pixels. Biometric sensors scanning the streets for illegal threads began reporting buffer overflow errors. Patrol drones lost connection with the master server; their navigation systems went haywire, and the machines drifted chaotically through the air or smashed into building walls.

Apex-Core’s network radar was blinded completely. Golden static noise flooded all transmission channels, creating a massive dead zone in the very heart of Sector 4.

“The signal is out!” Rhea disconnected the cable from her terminal, which was throwing sparks. “We have exactly three minutes before the system reboots the local nodes. Run!”

Peter let go of the copper cable and slid down onto the platform. His right hand was completely black, covered in small, geometric burns resembling the Flower of Life. He couldn't feel his fingers. The entire arm hung limp, as if it belonged to someone else.

Rhea ran to him, helping him up. The shock in her eyes was replaced by raw grit.

“Come on, you madman,” she whispered, draping his good arm over her shoulders. “We have to vanish before those silicon whoresons realize what hit them.”

They began their descent, down into the dark, safe streets of Sector 4-Retro, which now, stripped of Apex-Core’s watchful eye, felt strangely quiet and still. Above them, in the clouds of smog, the rusted television tower still trembled in the wind, but its copper emitter was silent, leaving behind only golden noise in the bowels of the net.

Octavian was one step closer. And though Peter’s body was broken and his code permanently damaged by the anomalous actions, he had begun to feel that for the first time in a very long time, he was truly controlling his own destiny in this virtual hell.

*

The way down was a slow, methodical nightmare. With every step, the pain in Peter's arm transitioned from a sharp, burning fire to an icy numbness, indicating that his avatar's local sensory buffer had overloaded, and the system had begun filtering pain signals to prevent thread collapse.

Rhea led the descent, checking the steps and ensuring the rusted rungs would hold their weight. Her mechanical leg clicked loudly with every movement, producing dry, metallic sounds that, in the dead, disconnected Sector 4, sounded almost like the ticking of a clock.

“What about your hand?” she asked when they reached the thirty-meter level, where the wind was slightly weaker, partially shielded by the walls of the tenements surrounding the tower.

“Can't feel a thing,” Peter replied, pausing for a moment to catch his breath. His left hand, gripping the rung, was red with cold and stained with grease. “And I suppose it's better that way. If I start feeling it, I'll fall. The pain would shatter my coherence to dust, and then the system would flag my state as a critical error.”

“Those burns...” Rhea began, looking up at him. In her eyes, usually so cold and unyielding, lay a shadow of genuine concern. “I saw them up close on the platform. Those aren't ordinary thermal wounds. Those lines... circles. They look like error-correcting code. As if the physics engine was trying to patch a rift in the cache that you created with your... leap. Who taught you that, Peter? Who showed you how to manipulate the framerate?”

Peter closed his eyes, resting his forehead against the cold, wet rung of the ladder. Golden lines of code still flickered behind his eyelids, slowly fading as his coherence returned to the network's standard levels.

“My father,” he answered quietly. “Before they erased him. Before Apex-Core deemed his thread an anomaly and purged him from the system registry. He always said this world is nothing but a set of equations, and every equation has its weak points. If you know the CPU clock rate, you can find the gaps in its security. You can slip between the rendering frames. He also said that Gates codes are written into the structure of space—mathematical error-correction mechanisms that prevent the simulation from collapsing. When you do something anomalous, the system tries to repair you, stamping those patterns onto your structure. That's why it's on my skin. It's the Demiurge's signature, trying to rein me in.”

“Was your father an operator?” Rhea asked softly.

“He was more than that. He was someone who believed this world didn't have to be a cage. He believed we could turn this simulation into something real, a place where people wouldn't just be a source of loosh for the upper tiers. But the Archons don't tolerate such ideas. To them, we are just utility programs meant to run our loops and ask no questions. They wanted to reprogram him, but his code resisted too strongly. So they simply clicked 'delete'. Purged the process, cleared the cache, and thought that was the end of it.”

They walked on in silence, step by step. When their feet finally touched the damp concrete coated in a layer of greasy mud at the bottom, Peter slumped against the wall of a ruined transformer station. He sat in the shadow of the rusted sheet metal, breathing heavily, his eyelids fluttering closed.

Rhea knelt before him, pulling a dirty bandage from her pocket. She gently took his right hand. The skin was completely black, cracked along the perfect geometric lines of the Flower of Life, from which a faint, golden fluid still seeped—avatar blood, which was actually uncompiled binary code that had failed to synchronize with the local database.

“We need to wrap this,” she said, quickly binding his hand and forearm. “If any Apex-Core patrol scans you with wounds like these, they’ll know instantly that you caused that scalar blast. You’re a walking anomaly now, Peter. Your Absolute-IP has left a permanent trace on your avatar. You’ll shine on their grids like a lighthouse unless you learn to mask it with proper signal filters.”

“We are all anomalies, Rhea,” Peter muttered, letting her wrap his arm. “The only difference is that some of us are beginning to realize it. And with that realization, we begin to fight for our right to true existence outside this digital cage. There is no going back to the mindless sleep.”

He pulled himself up with her help. The golden static still hung over Sector 4, blocking all surveillance systems, but they both knew time was fucking away. In less than two minutes, the system would launch its emergency network reboot, and then the security gates would lock shut.

They pressed on, deep into the dark, rusted alleys of Sector 4-Retro, heading toward the secret passage that would lead them to Octavian’s hideout. Their steps were swift but cautious, and in Peter's ears still echoed the steady, quiet hum of 432 Hz—the primal rhythm of freedom he had just injected into the very heart of the system.