NULL AND RISING

  Book One: Sovereign Embryo

  Chapter 2: NetCore Hosting GmbH

  He was three minutes early on Thursday, which Markus did not acknowledge, and four minutes late on Friday, which Markus did.

  The clock glance. The precise, practiced neutrality of it. Igor had catalogued this glance over two years and had concluded that Markus did not do it out of malice — Markus was not a malicious person, he was a tired one, which was different — but out of a need to register that the world was operating within known parameters. Igor arriving late was a known parameter. Igor arriving on time was slightly outside them and therefore did not require acknowledgment. This was not logic Markus had worked out consciously. It was just what happened.

  "Morgen," Igor said.

  "Morgen," Markus said.

  Igor sat down. The computer took its forty-five seconds. He used them to look out the window — grey again, though a different grey from Wednesday's, this one with a texture to it, the kind that meant rain before noon. He had been in Leipzig long enough to read the sky's register of greys with reasonable accuracy. When he first arrived he had found it oppressive, the colour of a city that had decided on one tone and committed to it. Now he found it neutral. The city was not asking anything of him. The grey was not personal.

  His inbox had eleven tickets. Two urgent. He opened the first.

  The morning had a quality to it that Igor noticed without being able to name. A slight wrongness in the ambient frequency of things — not loud, not dramatic, but present in the way that pressure before a storm was present, felt in the body before the mind caught up. He had noticed it on the tram. The woman across from him had been looking at her phone with an expression that didn't fit the content — too concentrated, slightly afraid, the expression of someone reading something that required re-reading. Two other people on the tram had the same expression. He had looked at his own phone. Nothing in his notifications that explained it. He had put the phone back in his pocket and watched Leipzig go past.

  At 10:20 Benny appeared at his desk again. This time he did not sit on it. He stood beside it, which was a different register of interruption — less comfortable, more urgent.

  "The signal thing," he said.

  "I remember the signal thing."

  "It's bigger now. More cities. And there's a second thing — animals. Like, zoo animals in Frankfurt went completely insane last night. All of them simultaneously at 3am. Keepers are saying they've never seen anything like it." He showed Igor his phone again. This time it was not Reddit but a news site — one of the ones with actual editors, which meant it had passed some threshold of credibility. The headline read: Unusual Behaviour Reported in Wildlife Across Europe — Scientists Seek Explanation.

  Igor read the first paragraph. Unusual behaviour. Simultaneously. Multiple species showing what animal behaviorists were calling acute disorientation. The word unprecedented appeared twice.

  "And the hum," Benny said. "My cousin in Hannover says he can feel it. Like standing next to a transformer but in your chest instead of your ears."

  Igor thought about the pressure on the tram Wednesday morning. And again this morning. He had attributed it to the weather twice now, which was the kind of thing you did until you couldn't anymore.

  "Has anyone given a technical explanation?" he said.

  "Geomagnetic, solar activity, HAARP conspiracy stuff — take your pick. The scientific consensus, if you can call it that, is essentially 'we don't know yet.'" Benny paused. "Which is not a thing scientists usually say publicly."

  "No," Igor agreed.

  Benny went back to his desk. Igor returned to his tickets. He processed seven of them between 10:20 and noon without thinking about what Benny had said, which was not the same as not thinking about it.

  Lunch. The same two slices of dark bread, the same mustard. He ate standing at the window again.

  Below on Torgauer Stra?e, a pigeon was sitting in the middle of the pavement not moving. People walked around it. Pigeons in Leipzig had, in Igor's experience, a relationship with spatial awareness that bordered on philosophical — they simply did not accept that their presence was inconvenient — but this one was not acting with the usual pigeon confidence. It was sitting very still, head slightly tilted, looking at something that was not there. A man in a delivery uniform crouched beside it, looked at it for a moment, then stood and walked on.

  Igor watched the pigeon until it eventually walked off on its own. He finished his bread.

  At 12:47 Jana came to his desk. Jana's visits to Igor's desk were infrequent and had a specific grammar: she approached with the particular walk of someone who had pre-composed what they were going to say and was now delivering it. She sat in the chair beside his desk, which was the chair intended for clients who needed support in person, which no client had ever needed because this was an IT hosting company in the twenty-first century.

  "Igor," she said.

  "Jana."

  "I wanted to check in. About your — " she glanced at something in her peripheral vision that wasn't there, which was what people did when they were about to reference something they found awkward. "Your contract renewal. It's coming up in February."

  "I know."

  "And I wanted to make sure you were — that you felt — " another pause, the pause of a woman performing concern she had been trained to perform but which was also, possibly, real. Jana was not a bad person either. She was, like Markus, a person who had found a way to exist in a structure and had adapted to its requirements. "We value your contribution to the team," she said. This was from a script. He could hear the edges of it.

  "Thank you," Igor said.

  "Is there anything you need? In terms of — development. Goals."

  He considered this. Development. Goals. He thought about what honest answers to these questions looked like, and then he thought about what useful answers looked like, and found that they occupied completely different territories.

  "I'm fine," he said.

  Jana nodded with the specific relief of someone who had not wanted a complicated answer. "Good. Great. Let me know if that changes."

  She went back to her desk. Igor looked at his screen. He had been at NetCore for four years. He was, by any reasonable measure, good at the job — fast, accurate, fluent enough in German now that the accent was the only thing that occasionally required repetition. He had been told he was valued approximately three times, always in the context of contract renewal, always with the specific warmth of someone who wanted to pay him the same amount they had been paying him.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  He was earning €1,850 a month net. He had checked what the same role paid in Munich last year: €2,400. He had not applied. He had thought about why he had not applied and had arrived at an answer that he didn't fully like: Leipzig was known. The flat was known. The tram routes were known. The grey was known. He had come here with nothing and built something small and functional and entirely unremarkable, and the distance between himself and the person who arrived with a sports bag and a dictionary app was made partly of work and partly of the specific comfort of knowing where everything was. He was not sure he was willing to pay the cost of exchanging that for a higher number on a payslip.

  This was, he recognized, not a thought that came from ambition.

  He returned to his tickets.

  At 2:15 the office internet went down.

  This happened occasionally — NetCore's offices were, with some irony, not immune to the connectivity issues that their clients paid them to solve — and the procedure was established: Benny went to the server room, Markus made coffee, Jana sent an email from her phone to the service provider, which took three minutes and accomplished nothing but made Jana feel that something was being done.

  Benny came back from the server room looking slightly odd.

  "It's not us," he said. He was talking to the room, which was unusual — Benny generally addressed specific people. "The external connection is just — gone. It's not an error, it's not a timeout. It's like something upstream stopped."

  "Provider outage," Markus said.

  "Maybe. But I checked the status page on my phone and their systems are showing green." He paused. "Also my phone's connection is slow. Really slow. Like 2010 slow."

  Igor took out his own phone. The signal bars were there but pages were loading with the resistance of something pushing through something else, images half-rendering, text appearing in disconnected fragments. He opened the news site Benny had shown him earlier and it took forty seconds to load three paragraphs.

  The three paragraphs, when they loaded, were about the signals. The hum. Now confirmed in thirty-one cities. Scientists were still saying we don't know. Governments were saying we are investigating. Neither of these statements, Igor thought, was the statement of a person who knew what was happening. They were the statements of people buying time while they tried to find out.

  He put his phone back in his pocket.

  The office felt different with no internet. Quieter, but not in a comfortable way — in the way of a room where something has been removed that you didn't notice was there until it wasn't. People turned to each other slightly more than usual. Markus made his coffee and brought one to Igor without asking, which had never happened before in two years of working beside each other. Igor took it. Neither of them said anything.

  "I'm sure it'll come back," Jana said, from her desk.

  Nobody agreed with this out loud, which was itself a kind of answer.

  At 3:40 the internet came back. Slowly at first — pages loading with the halting progress of a man who'd been running and had stopped to breathe — and then at normal speed, and then everything was as it had been. Markus made a comment about providers. Benny ran a diagnostic. Jana said something about productivity and then didn't finish the sentence.

  Igor worked until 5:31 and left.

  On the tram home he stood in the aisle and held the overhead bar and did not look at his phone. The tram was full — end of the working week, the specific density of a Friday evening, people carrying the accumulated weight of five days in their posture and their expressions. A woman with a grocery bag. Two students in conversation that had the rhythm of an argument that had been running for several days. A man in his sixties reading a physical newspaper, which Igor saw occasionally and always found slightly moving, the commitment of it.

  He thought about what Benny had said. Thirty-one cities now. Animals. The internet slowing to something it hadn't been for fifteen years.

  He thought about the pigeon on the pavement, sitting still, looking at something that wasn't there.

  He thought about his notebook entry from Wednesday night: I wonder if average is allowed to change. He had written it and meant it as a private accounting of his own limitations and frustrations. He had not meant it as a question about the world.

  He got off the tram. He walked the last two stops. The November air had a texture to it — not quite rain, not quite not rain, the city doing its suspended thing. He put his hands in his pockets and walked without hurrying.

  Teddy was not in the hallway when he opened the door.

  This was unusual enough that Igor paused. In two years, Teddy had been in the hallway when he arrived approximately ninety percent of the time. The other ten percent, Teddy was asleep on the bed and had calculated that the energy expenditure of relocating to the hallway was not worth the social capital of appearing to care. Igor had learned to read the percentage. This felt like something else.

  He found Teddy at the window in the other room. The same window, the same position he had been in earlier in the week — completely still, watching something in the courtyard below or in the middle distance or somewhere that Igor's eyes could not locate. His tail was not moving. His ears were forward. He had the posture of an animal receiving a signal.

  "Teddy," Igor said.

  Teddy did not turn.

  Igor put his bag down and came to stand beside him. He looked out the window. The courtyard was empty. The building opposite had its usual windows in their usual configurations. The sky was doing its grey thing. There was nothing there that Igor could see — nothing unusual, nothing that explained the quality of attention Teddy was giving to the middle distance.

  He stood there for a moment. Then he went to the kitchen and fed the cat, who did not come immediately, which had also never happened before.

  While the food sat in the bowl Igor made tea. He stood at the kitchen counter and looked at his phone. A message from his mother, sent at lunchtime: how are you, did you eat. He replied: fine, yes. This was their entire correspondence on most days and was, in its compression, a complete and honest account of things.

  He scrolled through the news. The signals story had grown through the day — it was no longer a science-and-nature item, it had migrated to front pages. Thirty-one cities had become, in the hours he'd been on the tram and walking, forty-four. The hum was now being reported in places that had nothing in common geographically — not clustered along fault lines, not associated with any known electromagnetic infrastructure. A physicist at the University of Vienna had given a statement that had been shared widely enough that Igor saw it in three separate places: We have no current framework that accounts for a signal of this distribution and frequency. I want to be honest that we are operating without precedent.

  Igor read this twice.

  He put his phone down. Teddy appeared in the kitchen doorway, ate his food methodically, and then went to the other room. Igor followed. He sat on the couch. He picked up his LitRPG novel. He read two pages and then stopped, not because the book was bad but because somewhere between the lines he kept finding the same thought surfacing: without precedent.

  He put the book down.

  He took out his notebook and opened to the page with Wednesday's entry. He read it: Average is not the same as stable. Average can still fall. I wonder if average is allowed to change.

  He sat with this for a moment. Then he wrote beneath it:

  Something is happening. I don't know what it is. I don't think anyone does.

  Whatever it is — it's equal. It's hitting everywhere at once.

  He paused. Added one more line, smaller than the others:

  Equal is new.

  He closed the notebook.

  Teddy jumped up beside him and sat looking at the window, though the curtain was closed now and there was nothing to see. His ears were still forward. His tail made one slow sweep and then stopped.

  "You can hear it, can't you," Igor said.

  Teddy said nothing, because Teddy was a cat and could not speak.

  But he did not look away from the window.

  Igor set his alarm for 7:15. He was asleep before 11pm, which was earlier than usual, as if his body had made a decision his mind had not caught up with yet: that tomorrow he would need the rest.

  Outside, in forty-four cities, the hum continued.

  And in the sky above Leipzig, and above every other city, and above the small village in Baranja where his mother's house stood with its cracked kitchen wall and its windows that didn't seal — in all of those skies simultaneously — something was measuring. Counting. Preparing.

  It would be ready by Wednesday.

  — ? —