NULL AND RISING

  Book One: Sovereign Embryo

  Chapter 11: Every Screen on Earth

  * * *

  The street below had stopped.

  Not slowed — stopped. Every car on Torgauer Stra?e was motionless, engines dead, some of them drifted slightly from their lanes in the way of things that had lost power mid-motion and simply coasted to rest. A delivery van had stopped half-mounted on the pavement. A tram two blocks down was stationary on the tracks, its doors open, passengers stepping out onto the street with the careful movements of people who did not yet have a category for what was happening and were defaulting to caution.

  Igor stood at the office window and watched this.

  Then a woman on the pavement below grabbed the arm of the child beside her — a boy, eight or nine, red jacket, school bag — and the child vanished.

  Not fell. Not ran. Vanished. Between one frame and the next, between the woman's hand closing on the red jacket and the woman turning to look at him, he was simply gone. The woman's hand closed on air. She looked at it. She looked at the pavement where he had been. She looked at her hand again.

  The sound she made reached the fourth floor window.

  Igor watched her fall to her knees on Torgauer Stra?e and understood, reading the System message again in his peripheral vision, what had happened. Candidates under 18 have been transferred to System dungeon preparation. Every child on Earth, gone in the same instant — mid-step, mid-sentence, mid-sleep. Gone without warning, without sound, without a body to find or a direction to look.

  He turned back to the room.

  * * *

  Jana was on her feet. She had not moved from her desk in the seconds since the screens died but she was standing now, one hand on the desk's edge — and she was reading the System message with the expression of a woman who had just understood something and was deciding whether to say it aloud.

  "My daughter," she said.

  "She's been transferred," Igor said. "The System message. Under-eighteens. Dungeon preparation." He said it directly, without softening, because the honest version was also the least terrible version: her daughter was not dead. "It says they'll be returned upon integration completion."

  Jana read the message again. Her lips moved slightly. She read the relevant line twice, then a third time, and then she stood very still and breathed and did the thing Igor had watched her do all week — located the structure in the situation, the procedural handhold, and gripped it. "Seventy-two hours," she said.

  "Yes."

  "She's — the dungeon. It says dungeon preparation." Her voice was controlled with significant effort. "What does that mean."

  "Training. The System is preparing them. There are safe zones — that's how these things work in the fiction, and the fiction has been accurate so far." He paused. "I can't tell you with certainty. I won't."

  Jana looked at him. The professional composure was present but operating at its absolute limit, the composure of a woman who has nothing left to hold herself together except the decision to remain functional. "Her name is Mia," she said.

  "I know."

  "She's nine."

  "I know." He held her gaze. "Seventy-two hours. We use them."

  Jana closed her eyes for one second. Then she opened them and picked up her notebook and pen and said: "What do you need me to do."

  * * *

  Benny had gone pale. He was at his desk with the System message filling his visual field, re-reading it with the focused intensity of someone processing information that is simultaneously technical and personal. His girlfriend Lena's younger brother — sixteen, the one from Hannover, the one who had the unexplained seizure — was gone too. Transferred. Igor watched Benny work through this in real time: the fear, the information instinct activating over the fear, the decision to channel one into the other.

  "System-compliant units," Benny said quietly. He was looking at the warning line. Candidates who do not reach minimum threshold will be converted into System-compliant units. "That means monsters. People who don't level up become monsters."

  "Yes."

  "That's why it's a warning not a threat. The System is telling us what happens if we don't engage." He put his dead phone in his bag with the deliberateness of someone letting go of a tool that no longer worked. "What do I do."

  "Go to the other floors. Talk to people. Find out who has what — food, tools, medical supplies, useful skills. Come back and tell me."

  Benny was out of the door in under a minute.

  * * *

  Markus had not moved. His hands were flat on the desk. His cold coffee was beside him. He was looking at the System message with the expression of a man whose entire settlement with the world had just been dissolved from the outside, without his participation.

  Igor pulled a chair to Markus's desk and sat in it.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  "What did you do before NetCore?"

  Markus blinked. "Construction. Site management. Before the company folded."

  "Structural assessment. Resource allocation. Managing people under pressure."

  "Yes."

  "That's more useful than anything you've done in the last eleven years." He said it plainly, not unkindly. "The old skills are relevant again."

  Something shifted in Markus's face. The settlement stripped away and underneath it — the look of a man who has been given a category that fits when he thought all his categories were gone. "I can assess the building," he said. "Structurally. Access points, water supply, vulnerable areas, roof access."

  "Yes. Do that. Give me something written when you're done."

  Markus picked up the spare notebook from Jana's desk and left. His posture was different by the time he reached the door.

  * * *

  Igor went to the stairwell.

  The emergency lighting had not activated — whatever had killed electronics had been categorical. Daylight through the small landing windows was sufficient. He went down to the ground floor.

  Ground floor: an insurance office and a physiotherapy practice. Both doors open.

  The insurance office: five people. Two had children who were gone. One was crying quietly. One was pressing the power button on a dead phone with the repetitive persistence of someone whose hands needed something to do. Three were at the window watching the street.

  The physiotherapy practice: two therapists and one patient. One of the therapists — large, practical, Dr. Pfeiffer on her lanyard — had already located the first aid kit and was standing at the supply cabinet with the efficiency of someone who has decided that being useful is the correct response to catastrophe. The cabinet held bottled water, bandages, antiseptic, blankets, and a crank-handle radio.

  Igor introduced himself to both rooms. He explained what the System message said. He watched the room change as they absorbed it — the crying person stopping, the phone-presser putting it down, everyone arriving at the same place of horrified attention.

  The children line landed hardest. Three of the five insurance office people had children. The sound one of them made was the same sound as the woman on the pavement outside.

  Igor waited ten seconds. Long enough for the first wave to pass and for function to become available again. Then: "The message says they'll be returned. Seventy-two hours." He said it once. The repetition would not help. The uncertainty was real and naming it was more honest than papering over it.

  "Dr. Pfeiffer," he said. "Can you bring the radio to the fourth floor in an hour?"

  She evaluated him briefly. Decided. "Yes," she said.

  * * *

  Back in the NetCore office, the System interface had updated.

  Individual Appraisal: IN PROGRESS

  Actions logged: 7

  Recommended: Continue

  Seven. Twenty minutes out of the room.

  Jana had been working while he was gone. She turned her notebook toward him when he came in:

  IMMEDIATE RESOURCES — NETCORE FLOOR 4

  Food: Igor (2 days), Benny (1 day approx.), office kitchen (coffee, 3 tins biscuits, 6 bottles water)

  Medical: Igor (basic kit), Dr. Pfeiffer floor 1 (full kit + antiseptic + bandages)

  Tools: Benny (multi-tool), Igor (knife — assumed)

  Communication: Dr. Pfeiffer (crank radio — 1 hour)

  Structural: Markus (assessing)

  UNKNOWNS:

  Other floors — Benny investigating

  Street situation — monitoring

  Monster threat — unknown timeline

  Children — 72 hours

  He read it. He looked at the last line.

  "The full restoration," Jana said. She was looking at her notebook, not at him. "If we survive the integration. It says all pre-existing conditions." A pause. "Mia has had asthma since she was three."

  Igor said nothing.

  "I know that's not — I know that's not the most important part. It's just." She stopped. "She's been managing it her whole life. And the System is saying if she survives this month—"

  "It's important," Igor said.

  Jana looked at him. "I'm going to get to her," she said. Not a question. A statement of fact delivered with the flat certainty of a woman informing the world of its new parameters.

  "I know. We will."

  * * *

  Benny returned forty minutes later with Markus. They had found each other on the second floor and finished the survey together.

  Other floors: twenty-three people across four floors. Three with medical training — two nurses from a medical billing company on the second floor, one retired paramedic on the third. Food: four to five days if rationed. Water: two, maybe three days from Dr. Pfeiffer's supply and various staff kitchens.

  Markus's structural report was dense and precise — the handwriting of a man who had spent years writing site reports. Four access points. Two could be blocked with furniture. Roof accessible via maintenance hatch on the third floor. Building structurally sound. One vulnerability: the ground floor windows were large and unbarred.

  Igor read both reports. He looked at the window. The street had changed — the initial shock dispersing into the slower, more durable state of people reorganising around a new reality. Some groups had moved off with purpose. Two people outside the café were arguing with the specific intensity of a resource dispute.

  Then, from somewhere to the north — three blocks, maybe four — a sound.

  Not human. Not mechanical. Not anything that had a name in the vocabulary of a city that had existed until one hour ago.

  Brief. Not repeated. But enough.

  Everyone in the room had heard it. Benny went still. Jana's pen stopped. Markus looked at the window with the expression of a man who had confirmed a hypothesis he had been hoping was wrong.

  "Monster threat," Jana said quietly. She looked at her notebook. Unknown timeline. She crossed out unknown. She wrote: now.

  Igor picked up his bag. He checked the knife. He looked at his team — Jana with her notebook and her clear reasons, Benny with his multi-tool and his information instinct, Markus standing with the posture of a man who had remembered who he was.

  "One more hour," Igor said. "We learn what we can. We take what's useful. Then we move."

  He moved to the window to assess the street below, and the Integration of Earth had begun in earnest, and somewhere in a System dungeon a nine-year-old girl with asthma was waking up in a place that was not her bedroom with one month ahead of her and a new body waiting as a reward at the end of it — if she was strong enough, if she was brave enough, if she survived.

  She was Jana's daughter.

  She would try.

  * * *

  * * *

  — ? —