Chapter 6: Division by Zero

Rain in Sector 4 never brought cleansing. It was a thick, acidic sludge, reeking of sulfur, ash, and the half-burnt coolant of the undercity reactors, a vile mixture that ate away at the paint of rusted chassis and left painful, yellowish blisters on the flesh of anyone who forgot to pull their battered hood low over their brow. Inside the old turbine assembly hall, where Crucible 2038 guttered and died in the glare of flickering, unstable holographic projections, the air was even worse. A stifling, greasy stench hung thick in the space, a rank brew of rancid synthetic grease, smoke from cheap, hand-rolled synth-tobacco, and the sour sweat of several hundred bodies packed tightly onto the galleries.

The final of the tournament in the Bottomless Depth had gathered the entire fauna of the city's gutters around the central podium. Institute cadets—smooth-shaven boys in gleaming jackets emblazoned with corporate logos, smelling of expensive soap and pure silicon—stood shoulder to shoulder with the common dregs of the Loop. There were synapse-heads, their faces scarred from implant operations, cheap, vibrating cortical stimulators pulsing constantly under the skin of their temples, and loosh-milkers. The latter, clad in filthy, sagging coats, slinked through the crowd, clutching electrodes and glass induction vials in their claw-like hands. They hunted for the free juice of fear, excitement, and desperation that they could suck from the roaring mob, condense, and sell on the black net-market as pure, distilled loosh—a drug for those who could no longer feel a fucking thing themselves.

Byte-racism hung heavy in the air, thick as the smog over the smelters of Sector 4. Organics, boasting of their pristine, untouched DNA code, spat ostentatiously at the feet of chromed cybrids. The cybrids, in turn, baring rusted steel jaw prosthetics and blinking artificial optical lenses, muttered curses under their breath about 'wetware' and 'meat-sacks' fit only for biomass to feed the reactors powering corporate zones.

Peter sat on the edge of his box, number four. A box that in this wretched world was called, simply, a coffin. It was an old VR-9 immersion capsule, stripped of its side panels. From its belly, gutted bundles of optical fibers and copper cables hung down to the concrete floor like entrails from a slaughtered hog. Fever ravaged him from within, heating his body to the very limits of biological endurance. Every breath burned in his lungs, and in his skull, just behind the eye sockets, a heavy, metallic hammer pounded away. The neurosensory jacks at the nape of his neck throbbed with a dull, stabbing ache. Without an Absolute-IP filter to protect him from synaptic overload, jacking into the Crucible net was like willingly pouring boiling coolant directly into his brain ventricles. But Peter knew he had no fucking choice.

“Look at these fucking odds,” Rhea said, drawing closer, her heavy, hobnailed boots scraping against the cracked concrete floor. Her face, half-hidden by a filthy woolen scarf to ward off the acid rain, was pale and drawn with worry. In her dark eyes flickered the same desperate determination Peter had seen in folk who decided to sell their own liver or a chunk of their cerebral cortex for a few megabytes of bandwidth. She pointed a finger at the flickering screen of the betting terminal, where numbers skipped every second. “Three to one against you, Peter. And that's only because some plastered synapse-head threw his last copper trash at your handle, likely by mistake. Everyone is backing Krom. To them, you’re already cold meat.”

“Because I’m not far from being a corpse, Rhea,” the boy croaked, without raising his head. With the back of his hand, he wiped the sweat running down his forehead right under the rubber seal of the neurosensory helmet he held on his knees. “But those three hundred credits... we need them. Without them, your brother won't survive till next week. His implants are rejecting the tissue, and without a stabilizing pack, his nervous system will simply dissolve into informational static. And my synapses... well, they're half-scorched anyway. One more cycle won't make a fucking difference. In this reality, we are nothing but a dataset marked for rapid deletion. Our existence is mere lazy rendering—the system only renders us when we're needed to do serf labor for Apex-Core. When no one’s looking, we are just dead possibilities in the cache.”

“Stop your fucking philosophy,” growled a low, harsh voice from the shadows behind the consoles.

It was Vesper. She stood leaning against a rusted support pillar, twirling an EMP pistol in her fingers as if it were a mere toy, rather than a piece of illegal, heavy scrap capable of frying electronics within a dozen paces. Vesper was a mercenary from the undercity, a girl with sharp features and eyes that had seen too many corpses to give a damn about anyone's poor health.

“If we drag you out of there with a brain like overcooked porridge, not even the worst butcher in Sector Zero will attempt to revive you,” Vesper continued, spitting on the ground. “And I have no intention of hauling your cooling carcass through the storm drains under drone fire. Focus. This Krom of yours... he’s no ordinary boy with a soldering iron. I’ve seen his hardware profile. He’s got more rare-earth metals in his spine than the three of us combined.”

“I know who I’m fighting,” Peter whispered, twirling an old copper implant-key in his fingers, which served as a physical focal point for his mind when entering states of coherence. “Krom thinks he controls everything because he’s got military tech. But he forgets one thing. This whole game, this Crucible, hell, our entire reality, is just a program. And every program has its limits. The speed of light is nothing but the maximum clock speed of the system bus of this emulator we're locked in. Planck's constant is simply the resolution of the rendering grid—the smallest possible pixel. If you drop below that threshold, physics ceases to function, and raw computational mechanics begin. Krom plays at modifying variables. I intend to strike at the processor itself.”

“Fine words,” Vesper sneered. “But Krom’s processor is cooled by freon, while your brain is cooled only by your own sweat. We’ll see whose architecture gives out first.”

From the other end of the podium came a loud, metallic grinding. The crowd around box number one began to part in fear and awe. Krom was approaching.

Krom no longer resembled a human. He was a cybrid after full neurological reconstruction—hardly anything of his former biological body remained but his face, and even that was horribly mutilated, rutted with thick grooves from neural ports and half-covered by a Zeiss-Cybernetics optical visor with three moving lenses that clicked softly as they adjusted focus to the twilight of the hall. When he walked, nothing could be heard but a low, cyclical hum that set the teeth of those standing nearby on edge. It was his freon rig—an illegally modified spinal cooling system that circulated in a closed loop of copper pipes woven directly between his vertebrae. Frost would gather on his back, melting and dripping onto the rusted sheet metal of the platform whenever he cranked up his coprocessor’s clock rate.

Yet it wasn't the cooling that made him a monster. Under his left shoulder blade, Krom had a black-market hardware injector implanted—a direct interface to the system bus, allowing him to modify the emulator’s RAM directly from his own motor cortex. Hardware injection. Krom didn't need to write scripts; he simply thought of changing the game’s code, and his modified tactical coprocessor injected data packets straight into the Crucible emulator's memory, bypassing all layers of software abstraction and network security.

Krom stopped by his capsule. He glared at Peter through his triple red Zeiss lens and spat onto the ground, a thick, metallic glob of saliva smelling of synthetic grease.

“Your organicReflex won't save you from my rig, boy,” Krom whispered. His voice was modulated, unnaturally low, stripped of any human tones, as though a broken transformer were buzzing inside him. “I’ve seen your previous bouts. Playing with phase shifts, looking for collision bugs. Cute. But in my ring, those are children’s games. I have direct access to the physical silicon of this machine. I'll make your avatar evaporate in the first second, before your flabby brain even registers the pain impulse. I'll inject code right into your synapses, my good sir. Your organic guts won't stand such a blow.”

“Save your spit, Krom,” Vesper spat back, flicking the safety off her EMP pistol with a loud, dry click. “We’ll see what tune you sing when that organicReflex kicks your chromed arse. And if you try to cheat too blatantly, this gun will burn those copper pipes right out of your spine.”

The cybrid let out a sound that was probably meant to be a laugh, though it sounded like metal shavings grinding in a broken gearbox. He slid into his capsule. The techs shut the lid at once, and a whitish, freezing plume of freon vapor hissed from the vents.

Peter took a deep breath. The air in the hall was stifling, but inside the coffin, nothing awaited him but claustrophobic darkness and the damp stench of previous users' sweat. He plugged the thick copper cables into the jacks at the nape of his neck. The pain was instant—an electrical discharge shot down his spine, blinding him for a fraction of a second.

“Jack in, Peter,” Rhea whispered through the intercom, her voice sounding as if it came from the bottom of a deep well. “Watch your back. Please.”

The lid dropped with a heavy, pneumatic hiss. Darkness. And then the monstrous squeal of the modulator, drilling into his brain like a dentist's drill.

“Crucible 2038 Tournament Final. Arena: Sector Zero. Player: Aetrys vs. Krom_66. Match start...”

Reality exploded before his eyes. But this was no clean, digital illusion of the sort the upper-sector players were accustomed to, where textures mimicked real marble and physics engines calculated the slightest breeze on virtual leaves. This was Sector Zero—the ultimate graveyard of code, the deepest layer of the emulator, where the Crucible engine could barely manage to render geometry. Peter stood on a platform suspended in an infinite, black void. Around him rose gigantic, monolithic data blocks, shedding cascades of green and orange binary digits.

Sector Zero had no textures. Everything here was a raw vector grid, glowing with a harsh, toxic neon in shades of venomous purple and cybernetic green. Every few seconds, the image tore and skewed horizontally (screen tearing)—hideous glitches momentarily exposing the deeper layers of the cache, where raw hexadecimal dumps and memory allocation errors flickered. The floor beneath his feet was unstable. The vector grid defining collision boundaries trembled and drifted apart, revealing the smallest pixel of reality—the Planck limit of this world, beyond which game physics ceased to exist, leaving only a chaos of undefined logical states.

Peter recalled a book on reality theory he had once read. “The stream of the universe has its own bandwidth limit—the speed of light is nothing but the maximum clock rate of the system bus (bus limit), and Planck's constant is merely the resolution of the rendering grid (resolution limits).” Looking at the flickering grid of Sector Zero, he saw it with his own eyes. Reality in this place was subject to lazy rendering (lazy rendering). The game engine did not calculate what lay outside the avatars' direct line of sight until a collapse of the probability wave occurred, forced by their gaze. Yet beneath this facade lay deeper structures—James Gates had once discovered error-correcting codes in the equations of superstring theory, identical to those used in web browsers. Here, those codes were visible as tiny, flickering blocks of glyphs at the margins of the vectors.

Krom materialized on the far side of the platform. Or rather, what was left of him. The cybrid had no regard for his avatar's integrity. Using his hardware injector, he had modified his model directly in the host's RAM. Standing before Peter was a three-meter-tall geometric monstrosity with a body made of sharp, black polygons, weeping red, unstable code. In his right limb pulsed a gargantuan, glitched plasma sword—a weapon that did not inflict ordinary in-game damage. Its strike carried signal interference directly to the player's synaptic port. A single blow could trigger paralysis, or even cardiac arrest in the physical world.

“Die, worm,” Krom's roar shook the vector map. The game engine couldn't keep pace with processing his voice, generating a hideous, distorted screech in Peter's headphones.

Krom lunged into the attack. At once, Peter understood what he was up against. This was no ordinary duel. Krom was employing frame-rate hacking. Thanks to his freon cooling and military-grade coprocessor, his avatar moved at a frame refresh rate far exceeding the emulator's standard tick rate. Krom was literally stuttering through frames—vanishing in one frame and reappearing in the next, several meters closer, skipping the physical trajectory of movement entirely. The game engine, trying to compensate for the latency, dropped data packets, rendering the cybrid's movements impossible to predict.

Peter immediately activated his 0.1 Hz coherence technique.

A slow, hypnotic pulse echoed in his temples: click... click... click...

This was no modification of the game code—Peter had neither the hardware nor the permissions for that. This was a modification of his own brain. By slowing his time perception to the very edge of his biological synapses' capability, Peter forced his mind to operate at extremely low frequencies. The world around him slowed down. The cascades of binary code falling from the monoliths turned into sluggishly dripping droplets of light. The glitches in the floor froze mid-step, exposing vector wireframes.

Even in this dilated world, Krom moved fast. His black avatar advanced, leaving afterimages of warped textures in his wake. The plasma sword was descending upon Peter from above.

Peter lunged to the side. He exploited a familiar loophole in the platform's collision engine—on the edge of the vector grid lay a phase shift lasting a mere few milliseconds, where the avatar's hitbox became intangible. He rolled right beneath the blade.

But Krom was ready.

“You think you’re clever?” Krom's voice, though dragged slow by Peter's coherence, still boomed with menace. “I know your phasing. I know every free byte on this fucking map!”

The cybrid activated a wallhack and a real-time coordinate modifier. The hitbox of his plasma sword suddenly bloated unnaturally, auto-adjusting to Peter's coordinates regardless of his phase shifts. The red blade grazed the shoulder of Aetrys’s avatar.

In the physical world, inside box number four, Peter's body arched violently. The sensation of pain was absolute, real—no simple electric impulse, but the feeling of white-hot iron rods being driven straight into his spinal cord. The capillaries in his ears ruptured, and warm blood began to trickle slowly into his ear canals. Vomit rose in his throat, choking him beneath the helmet.

The health bar of Aetrys's avatar on the screen plummeted to 15%. A red border began to pulse frantically, signaling a critical state. Another hit meant biological death—his overheated brain would simply shut down from neurogenic shock.

Peter lay in his capsule, fighting for every gasp of air. His lungs refused to work, and his heart hammered in his chest like mad, trying to pump blood through vessels constricted by spasm. One more hit, he thought with cold, terrifying certainty. One more, and the feedback loop will incinerate my thalamic nuclei.

“Your petty lag-hacks won't do you a lick of good, rat!” Krom roared, his vector avatar swelling before Peter’s eyes as he injected another batch of illegal code to modify model scaling. “I have direct access to this emulator’s physical memory! I control the variables! I can write a zero into your hit points, and no one will even notice when your heart stops beating in that wretched coffin!”

Krom raised his sword for the final blow. Peter lay on the vector floor of the arena, his avatar flickering red.

He knew he couldn't win this fight through traditional dodges or simple hitbox modifications. Krom controlled the memory read and write commands. If Peter tried to escape into phasing, Krom would simply overwrite his coordinates directly in the cache.

He had to force an error. Not some run-of-the-mill application crash—those were swiftly caught by the emulator's error-correction routines. He had to go deeper. Down to the very foundation upon which this entire virtual cathedral rested. Down to the physics of silicon, to the mathematics of the processor itself.

“All is number,” he recalled the Pythagorean tenets, which in the reality of Sector 4 took on a completely new, Gnostic meaning. The Archons who had constructed this simulation (which folk called the physical world) had made the very same blunders as the coders from Apex-Core. They had built the system on the foundations of binary mathematics, on the laws of formal logic, which began to crack at extreme values. The quantum eraser experiment showed that the past could be altered, so long as it remained unobserved. What if one forced the observer to perform a mathematically impossible operation?

Peter focused his entire consciousness on his avatar's combat register logs. He located the damage register, which the Crucible system calculated with every hit. This variable was divided by the opponent's armor value to determine the final hit point loss.

`FinalDamage = BaseDamage / ArmorValue`

In the architecture of the processor running the emulator, the ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit) performed division in a specific manner. The ALU possessed no innate, magical knowledge of division. Instead, the process was executed via a microcode loop that repeatedly subtracted the divisor from the dividend in the accumulator register until the remainder was less than the divisor. The number of subtractions performed was the quotient.

If Peter's armor were 2 and Krom's damage 10, the ALU would execute the loop five times:

`10 - 2 = 8`
`8 - 2 = 6`
`6 - 2 = 4`
`4 - 2 = 2`
`2 - 2 = 0`

End. Register state change, result: 5.

Peter jacked directly into this register using non-local code 3-6-9. Instead of modifying the armor value to a higher number—which Krom would have instantly detected and countered—Peter entered a value of 0.

Armor equal to zero. In the mathematics of the Crucible, that meant a total lack of protection. But at the hardware level, it meant something far more sinister.

In the fraction of a second when Krom brought down his sword to deal the final blow, Peter deliberately exposed his vector cleaver to collide with the opponent's blade. The game engine had to calculate the damage dealt.

The processor fetched Krom's damage value and attempted to divide it by Peter's armor rating. By zero.

The ALU began the subtraction loop:

`Damage - 0 = Damage`
`Damage - 0 = Damage`
`Damage - 0 = Damage`
`...`

The loop became infinite. Since subtracting zero did not reduce the value of the dividend in any way, the condition for ending the operation (`Remainder < Divisor`) could not be met for all eternity.

```
[ Krom's Damage ] ──► [ Division by Zero (Peter's Armor = 0) ]
│
[ Critical Arithmetic Exception ]
│
[ Buffer Overflow (Crash) ]
```

In the Crucible 2038 engine, written in ancient x86 assembly, the developers had skipped software-level handling of mathematical exceptions (divide-by-zero exception) to save resources. Instead, they relied on default hardware handling. However, in the host processor's architecture, trapping the ALU in an infinite loop led to the immediate consumption of all available clock cycles on the core. The processor entered a state of thread starvation, paralyzing the emulator's entire runtime environment.

At that very moment, the system attempted to trigger a hardware interrupt (hard interrupt, IRQ 0) of the highest priority to terminate the hung process. However, Krom's tactical coprocessor, wired directly into the emulator's system bus without any galvanic isolation, was not prepared for such a violent change in logical state.

The infinite loop in the ALU caused a massive buffer overflow (Buffer Overflow) of the coprocessor's registers. When the host processor violently attempted to reset the data bus, a massive voltage spike surged across the signal lines of Krom's coprocessor. In the inductors and capacitors of his illegal cooling system and synaptic interface, a massive counter-electromotive force (back-EMF feedback) was induced.

The lack of galvanic isolation meant this high voltage—a pure, destructive electrical impulse—struck directly into the cybrid's synaptic ports.

In the physical world, in the neighboring capsule, Krom suddenly arched with monstrous force. His body stiffened, and his fingers bent at unnatural angles, fingernails breaking against the coffin's metal walls. From his back, where the copper tubes of the freon cooling system had pulsed steadily until now, a sudden, piercing hiss erupted. One of the tubes ruptured with a loud bang, spraying icy white gas that instantly began to settle as frost on the capsule's rusted shell.

From Krom's ears, nose, and beneath his neural gaskets, dark, foamy blood spouted. The tactical coprocessor implanted beneath his left shoulder blade literally suffered a thermal explosion, melting his skin and muscle tissue. Throughout the turbine assembly hall, a sickening, awful stench of burnt flesh, molten plastic, and solder spread. The Zeiss optical visor on his face died, its three lenses cracking with a quiet snap, filling from within with dark bodily fluid.

His avatar on the Crucible arena vanished in a fraction of a second, disintegrating into geometric shards that disappeared into the black void of Sector Zero.

“Match concluded. Victory: Aetrys. Reason: Critical opponent error (Arithmetic Exception).”

Peter felt his neurosensory connection violently severed. Though he had escaped a direct hit from the back-EMF, the sheer shock of the sudden disconnect and register overflow caused a charge of pain to detonate inside his head.

Peter opened his eyes and violently shoved the lid of his box aside. He tumbled onto the factory's concrete floor, retching bile and blood. His whole body shook in convulsions, and his left eye was completely flooded with blood from ruptured capillaries.

The crowd around them froze in stunned silence, staring at the unconscious Krom, whose capsule billowed thick freon smoke, and then at Peter.

Rhea ran up to him, helping him stand.
“Peter... oh my God. You... you killed his processor.”

“The credits...” Peter wheezed, pointing at the monitor of the betting console.

The bookmaker, trembling with fear at what he had just witnessed, slotted Rhea's payment card into the terminal and authorized the payout.

“Transfer complete. Balance: 300.18 credits.”

In that same fraction of a second, a bright, flashing red sign flashed across all monitors in the factory hall:

“[SYSTEM ALERT: ROOT-EXPLOIT DETECTED IN SECTOR 4-RETRO]. [INITIALIZING ANOMALY LOCALIZATION PROCEDURE]. [KRAKEN-DAEMONS ACTIVE]”.

“Apex-Core detected the signature of a division by zero,” Rhea said, grabbing him by the arm and dragging him toward the dark stairs leading down to the sewers. “The Curators will be here in a minute. Vesper! You coming with us?”

Vesper, who stood by the exit, looked at the unconscious Krom, then at the bright red writing on the monitor, and finally at Peter, around whose hands golden, geometric glyphs still glowed.

“Those fucking suits are going to lock down the entire zone in a heartbeat,” Vesper growled, drawing her EMP pistol. “Lead the way, Rhea. And you, organic miracle worker, try not to pass out until we're clear of their radar.”

They fled into the darkness of the storm drains at the exact moment the monstrous, metallic roar of incoming Apex-Secure combat drones echoed above the factory.