Wanderer of Dust Chapter 1 — The First Death

This is the start of a novel I started writing a while back. It had its issues, so I ended up scrapping the first draft, but I always loved the concept and wanted to revisit it eventually. I've started rewriting it and wanted to release the first chapter to see if my Patrons have thoughts on it. It won't be ready for a Royal Road release for a while, but if people enjoy it, I might drop chapters here occasionally.

Let me know what you think, would you read more? I'm writing more either way, but I always appreciate feedback.

I slipped through the doors of my apartment, finally letting out a breath I didn’t remember holding, allowing the tension to leave my body. They couldn’t catch me here unless they changed up their security setup. Knowing SomaLayer Inc., they probably hadn’t touched anything in the past three decades. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, after all.

I took the stairs three at a time, the elevator hadn’t worked since… I can’t even remember. I didn’t make nearly enough to live in a luxury apartment where they include assurances that you won’t die when using their facilities. Fifth floor on the left side, underneath the light that constantly flickered. I entered my studio apartment, closing the door, locking it and pulling the bolt, just in case.

I climbed over my bed to get to the workbench I had set up in the corner of the room, and pulled a case out from underneath my hoodie, placing it carefully on the table. Once the case was out, I threw my hoodie off onto the bed and lazily sat down. Under the dim light of a single lamp, I popped open the carrying case and carefully lifted the module out from inside. Inserting it into my cold-gapped computer, I was going to have to check the firmware for any automatic remote connections before I even thought about putting it in my head.

Minutes slipped by as I waited for my PC to scan the internals and perform the usual checks in a limited simulated environment. When it finished, there were immediately hundreds of pings as the module attempted to reconnect to the internet and alert the megacorp behind its production that it had gone online. I made sure to replicate multiple different environment scenarios to ensure it was responding the same way each time.

After I confirmed that it behaved the same in every environment, I imported the simulation data into my Ripper program and began the process of extracting and dissecting the firmware. 

The whole process was automated now. Unlike a century ago, you didn’t need a sysdev to pull apart the application in a disassembler. In fact, unless you were working with something as basic as a microcontroller, trying to do it manually was a fool’s errand. Code had long since passed the days of human readability with the advent of the Neuromesh revolution. We were now using black boxes to interact with other black boxes. Not that I particularly cared about history at the moment. 

My fingers rhythmically tapped on the desk as I waited for the process to finish.

Every couple of seconds, I would glance at my building’s security feed and note that there was nothing but the usual activity. Tabbing through windows, I also checked cameras down the street, around the block, and through the alleyway behind my building. I was almost certainly in the clear at this point, but I couldn’t relax until I burned my trail completely and started anew. I wouldn’t have to worry about money after today. With this, I should be set for a life of luxury. I noticed a flicker of movement as I switched away from one of the cameras, but when I immediately went back, there was nothing there.

A soft chime interrupted my momentary paranoia, indicating that the application had finished ripping and reflashing the firmware. I reached over and selected to disconnect the device safely, then pulled the connection from the module. Leaning back into my Corticojack, I snapped my head into the brace, latches hooking onto my skull plate and connecting to my mind body interface. I placed the module into the dock and my arm into the wristwrap, then used a series of eye movements to confirm the start of the procedure.

A vein finder performed a rapid scan of my arm before a needle found its way into my skin. My consciousness rapidly drifted away. The last thing I felt was exhilaration.

***

A buzzing noise marked my return to the waking world. After a couple of minutes that it took to remember I was a person who was alive, I felt around trying to find the latch to remove myself from the Corticojack. Taking a long blink, I tried to register where the buzzer was coming from.

My eyes finally landed on the Sentinel Watcher microcontroller I’d set up to monitor intrusions in the local network. Rolling out of the chair, I landed on my bed and crawled over to the thing to see what it had picked up this time. The sedatives were slowly wearing off as I made my way over. 

The thing about the Sentinel was it tended to go off any time someone connected their interface to the building’s network, but I really couldn’t be too careful right now. I reached the controller and pulled its log file to my interface through my wrist connection. 

Fuck, they’re onto me.

I hopped up from the bed and scrambled for my gun, panicking as I couldn’t find it. Then I realized I was being stupid. I had just installed the solution in my head. I activated the module and rammed through every cold-gapped connection in the room I was in, finding the gun under my bed immediately from the response the hardware inside it sent back to me.

I holstered the firearm, threw my hoodie back on, and threw the door to my apartment open. Connecting to the camera feed as I ran towards the stairwell. Corpo goons had surrounded the building.

How the fuck did they trace me? After running a rapid scan of the module’s previous activity, I swore to myself. Obviously, through the Corticojack, it used itself to send out a distress call through all nearby networks when it detected that a licensed provider wasn’t the party installing it. They’re getting better these days at thwarting device crackers. The fake license key I provided didn’t work for some reason.

As I reached the bottom of the stairwell, I slid up against the side of the exit door and sent out a pulse to check for nearby interfaces. I was still getting used to the feedback of the module, but I was fairly certain three people were watching the door. Ramming through their interfaces, I jacked into their minds and slammed their brains with the neuroelectrical equivalent of a kilogram of GABA. Finishing the task in less than a second, I called upon the module to increase dopamine flow to my brain, unholstered my gun, and kicked the door open.

Two guards were still standing, trying to check over their coworkers who had collapsed on the spot. Two smart bullets solved that problem, and I ran off, my mind running faster than it ever had before. I was still getting used to the module, but the prototype was built to be extremely user-friendly. Didn’t want the precious QA testers to accidentally fry any of their brains. It would be bad PR for the CIOs, who were targeted as their primary customer base. Given that everyone was spying on everyone, even internal failures that were never reported to the public couldn’t be allowed.

That internal spying was how I came across this lucky find. A rival corp planned to hit the module while in transport, and I just slipped myself into the infiltration team. With my career history, it was practically trivial to secure a position on that team as a contractor. Good Blacklink Specialists were hard to find. The job didn’t have a very long occupational life expectancy, and the skills required to do anything beyond half-assing your job were hard to come by. The mentor who taught me everything I knew died three years ago, trying to do something similar to what I was doing.

I had a few advantages over him, though. For one, I went after a target that was a security asset in and of itself. Sending out another ping, I found more people down an alleyway I was about to turn down, and I knocked them out in a similar fashion. It turned out to be three security agents beating a homeless man to death. The guy was already dead by the time I had passed by, so I continued on my way.

The agents had to vent their frustrations somehow, I guess. Why get into security or police work if you didn’t have a natural bloodlust? It just made sense, and the training they received only promoted that. I was fairly certain that their implants also altered the GABA responses their brains received and increased Glutamate binding. That would explain why they kept getting seizures. It’s apparently better for morale to have twitchy, trigger-happy police. It gave them a complex about themselves versus the public, or at least that was my best guess. The hundreds of hours of propaganda they were forced to watch, displaying the average person as beasts to be either corralled or put down, probably didn’t help either.

For a moment, it felt like the world was vibrating, and I thought I saw the street ripple, just slightly, like a heat mirage at night. I chalked that up to the effects of simulating stimulants through my system. They could do weird things to your mind sometimes.

Flagging down an autotaxi, I decided getting in one of these death machines was better than facing the hundreds of signatures I could detect moving in on my position. The module was already beginning to overheat from the amount of work I’d given it over the past five minutes. Scanning a completely off-network device and sending the exact configuration of signals to override its hardware and take control was processing-intensive, apparently. Who would have guessed?

Jumping into the back seat, I let out a breath. The jacked-up dopamine in my system didn’t allow me to relax truly, but it felt amazing, so I didn’t care. That alone was relaxing.

“Please state your destination,” The taxi said over its speakers.

“Wherever, just far away from here,” I replied, spotting a group of security agents rounding a corner in a tactical formation. Far too many for me to handle on my own. I lay flat in the back seat.

“Wherever is an invalid destination. Please state a desti—” The taxi cut itself off when I overrode its internals and took manual control over it, and did my best to speed away. The squad had noticed when the cab pulled away at several times the speed limit, apparently, and I got to enjoy the novel experience of being in a car while it was being peppered with bullets. Someone attempted to gain access through the network and override the vehicle, but I closed the network connections before they established a foothold.

Scanning the city net, I tried to find any chatter about sec forces in the neighbourhood. They would never end up here unless someone really fucked with one of the big corps so I knew people would be talking about it, and taking pictures. The photos were really the most important part. Luckily, I didn’t see much beyond the area directly around my apartment building, indicating they likely hadn’t prepared for me to be able to escape their encirclement.

I took a hard corner, hopping onto the freeway heading away from town as fast as possible. It was basically empty at this hour of the night, so I could just drift along while keeping an eye on all of the car’s external cameras. I sat up and buckled myself in, then ran a hand through my hair, which was already soaked in sweat. Not from exertion, it was more likely due to the stimulant package I was running through my system. To balance things out a bit, I also had the module stimulate some serotonin production.

A wave of calm washed over me, and it felt like things were finally going to work out.

As if I had tempted fate itself, that was the moment when an anti-vehicle mine went off, taking out the front of the car and throwing me off the bridge I was travelling over. A pump of adrenaline barely kept me awake after the seat in front of me slammed into my head as it was ejected through the roof, which was completely destroyed. If I had been sitting in the front seat, I would have just been rendered into a fine mist, the mine had seemingly sent its entire payload directly upwards allowing me to escape its line of fire barely. Fuck my life I knew these things were a death trap.

I hadn’t even detected the mine. It was completely electronic-free, which didn’t make any sense in the modern day. Nobody used analogue machines. It was completely pointless to produce anything like that. Electronic parts were just far more reliable and had been for the past half century. It was as if someone had placed it there knowing exactly what I was capable of. Suddenly, thousands of signals appeared as if out of nowhere, surrounding me.

Shoving open the door, it completely fell off its hinges. I took a minute to find my balance, the world was still ringing and I think my inner ear was fucked up from the detonation. The stimulants in my system helped me push past all that and ignore the chunk of metal in my arm. I could figure that out later, if I even made it to later. The ground seemed to rumble, something that the approaching army of electronic signals was probably the cause of.

I walked underneath the bridge and found a place to sit and wait for my execution. I thought I could get away with it, but it looks like I pushed my luck this time. I pushed the module just a little more, activating opioid receptors in my brain to help with the pain.

BANG!

The electricity in the entire neighbourhood shut off, and I lost connection to my interface entirely. What the fuck? Did they deploy an EMP?

The ground seemed to ripple outwards from a point right next to me, dirt flying into the air as the earth underwent some kind of fuckery.

My eyes went wide as I saw what could only be a hole punch itself in reality, a golden substance pouring out from it. For some reason that I couldn’t describe to anyone, even with a gun to my head, I was drawn to that hole. It felt important, and I was going to die anyway, so I might as well check out the glowing hole in reality itself. My hand reached out to touch it. The golden substance was drawn into my skin, and I felt pure euphoria as it entered me.

The moment my hand touched the tear in space, my consciousness was wrenched from my body, spiralling into an alien vastness. I no longer recognized my surroundings. It felt like I was floating through a region of non-Euclidean space that was somehow more immense than anything I could understand before that moment. It felt like my consciousness was intertwined with something else, something beyond human comprehension. But I could hardly pay attention to that because my mind was overcome with a vast, overpowering hunger. That hunger was directed toward the world I had surrounded—sealed behind a thin shell, like a tantalizing egg just waiting to be cracked open and devoured.

That was the only thought that passed through my mind as I tried to pierce the shell, crack the egg, and devour the rich, life-sustaining yolk within. The primal urge to obliterate, to consume, was the only thing I could process as I did my absolute best to attempt to pierce the shell.

Then I was back in my body, lying on the ground. Somehow, I had fallen during that out-of-body experience. Heaving myself off the ground, I scampered away from the hole, not wanting to replicate that horrifying experience, even by accident.

My mind raced through what was happening, and I concluded that what I saw wasn’t some kind of psychosis. It was real. Everything was about to be destroyed, and I was about to be consumed by the golden dust. Or whatever entity was controlling the dust, I didn’t know I couldn’t separate the two.

The panic flooding my body overrode the euphoria coming from the dust, and I pulled out my gun and put it to my temple. That was the only escape. Everyone else was about to be completely lost, but I needed to get out of here as fast as possible, or I was about to be consumed along with everything else. Once again, I had that unexplainable feeling, that feeling told me it would hurt, it would hurt more than anything had hurt me before.

I let out a sob as tears streamed down my face. I wasn’t ready to go despite thinking I was prepared moments beforehand, but I had to. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw security forces rounding the corner and yelling for me to drop the gun. I gave them a sad smile and pulled the trigger.

***

I woke up unexpectedly, what felt like moments later. Really thought that was going to be the end of me there, so the fact my consciousness remained was rather jarring.

Opening my eyes, I found myself sitting in an empty grey room on a chair similar to the one I had in front of my workbench. Floating in front of me were some of the most remarkable-looking holograms I had ever laid eyes on. No flickering or any visual distortions were present. They were perfect displays, which shouldn’t even be physically possible. Looking around the room, I didn’t see any sort of device producing mist or another particulate alternative. There were just glowing panels hanging midair.

The room had no entrances or exits, so I did the only thing I could. I began reading.

All of the windows were currently greyed out, except for one, which appeared to be a contract. Skimming the beginning of the contract made it clear that yes, I had died. I escaped safely.

The only visible window appeared to be a contractor agreement for the Reality Enforcement Bureau. Well, maybe 'contractor' isn’t the right term, because it seemed like the position was permanent, but it also certainly wasn’t what I would think of as a standard employment contract. I was paid by completing contracts for the REB organization or through specific tasks that aligned with contract completion. Finally, I was bound only to take jobs offered by them for the rest of my existence. I couldn’t ever join another interdimensional organization, whatever that meant. 

The main method of agent deployment was through reincarnation into alternate dimensions. 

I wouldn’t have believed any of that thirty minutes ago, but something about barely escaping your own dimension after it was devoured by an eldritch being from beyond changed your outlook on the world.

The terms were deceptively simple. In exchange for my permanent service towards their cause, I was being offered memory retention in future lives through access to their internal ‘System,’ whatever that means. I would be assigned to a team, and on that team, we would be sent together into alternate dimensions to complete contracts for something. The contract didn’t specify exactly what that something was, only that we had to at all times ‘Meet the ideals of the Reality Enforcement Bureau,’ and ‘Aim to reinforce dimensional integrity above all else,’ and ‘Follow the instructions given by your team leader.’

After a contract was completed, we would be paid in Dust. Upon reading that term, I sat up straight and began taking this more seriously. This was obviously related to whatever had happened to my home universe. The memory of what that glowing Dust had shown me was imprinted into my mind, and there was something deep inside me that churned at the thought of it. It was as if I had found the purpose of my being, but I didn’t know what that purpose was pointing me toward yet, just that it had to do with the Dust.

That’s what reinforcing dimension integrity meant, then… Why didn’t they do anything to protect the dimension I came from? So many people were gone forever lost to that being from beyond, their souls completely destroyed by its hunger. How did I know that?

It didn’t matter. I needed to know more. I didn’t care that I was signing away my eternity, as my hand moved to sign, a pen appeared in it.

I ignored the object appearing out of nowhere and signed my first and only name at the bottom. My family hadn’t been in my life since before I could remember, so I never had another.

Signatory: Harper

A loading bar appeared. It didn’t take long to complete.