Episode 010| The Primordial Rift Layer

Kaiyuan Year 1010 · Jan 1 · 10:50 · Frozen Northern Reach, Signal Marker S-17-R · Outside the Boundary

Lika had been crouching about eight minutes.

The wind still came in off the northwest, thirty-two knots, standard for the Frozen Northern Reach in early January. The thermal layer in his coat was already running at full load — minus fifty-two degrees fell outside the design range of this old model, and when he'd walked to this spot he'd heard the layer let out a low whine he'd never heard from it before. In eight minutes the whine hadn't stopped.

He didn't move. He was waiting.

---

Waiting for what, even he couldn't say at first.

After he'd crouched and said that line — "This isn't some thing appearing — it's something being taken away" — his tongue was still resting on the trailing sound of the words. And then his own throat, of its own accord, put out four more.

"The Primordial Rift Layer."

He heard himself. The wind didn't bury it this time, because he'd said it a little louder than before.

He stopped.

In the stretch he could remember — at least the seven hundred years he could reliably count — he had never, anywhere, seen those words: the Primordial Rift Layer.

He'd reindexed every public database on Spectra over the past eight months. He remembered it clearly. That string was not in them.

Yet those words had just come out of his throat like a mother tongue he'd spoken his whole life.

---

Lika braced one hand against the ground and adjusted his posture.

He opened the retinal interface, connected straight to QuarktoLabs' offline backup — the back door he'd used that night he'd never closed, so a direct reconnect was all it took — and entered a query:

> search --string "Primordial Rift Layer" --range global --depth max --include all_languages

In theory the command would run a full string match across every public database in Saint Tranya, the Badlands, and the Dawn Continent — plus the private archives he'd gathered under various aliases over the past eighty years.

The return:

[Match: 0]

---

Zero results.

Not the no such coordinate kind of zero that comes from deliberate deletion — a real one, the zero of a term no one had ever written across every database he could reach.

But he had just put it out of his own mouth.

He ran through a few possibilities in his head. First: he'd gone mad. Over a thousand-some years he knew the signs of a long-lived mind breaking down — he'd compiled the list himself — and this sign wasn't on that list. His thoughts right now were clear enough that he could simultaneously process the whine of the thermal layer, the wind speed, the felt temperature, the strings on the retinal interface, the four words he'd just said, and that absence with its precisely measured boundary. A mind coming apart couldn't do that.

Second: someone had just hacked his neural implant and pushed these four words into his throat. But his neural implant was a prototype he'd built with his own hands, and it had never once been hacked since the day he made it. And if someone had just hacked it, every neural-comm record of his past eight minutes would carry a trace — his own security module would have flagged it the moment he was typing that query. It hadn't.

Third —

He stopped.

---

The third he tried not to think about, but he had to.

The third was this: that the four words were something he himself had written down at some point in the past — written into some location in his own head he could no longer reach — and then set with a trigger condition; today the condition was met, and the four words ran out automatically.

Which is to say, the same logic as every L.K.S._Core record of the past eighty-five years — some past version of him had written something in, set a trigger, then left the present him not knowing.

---

"You're still in there." Lika said softly.

Not to the absence, not to CV-1A, not to whatever ringed him that he couldn't see — to his own head.

He didn't wait for a reply. He didn't get one. Over a thousand-some years he knew that when he talked at times like this, it was for himself to hear, not for the other him, because the other him doesn't speak.

---

He stood.

A thin layer of frost had built on the hem of his coat. He gave a shake and the frost fell off.

He took a second test ball from the right pocket of his coat. This one was twice the size of the first, the shell a reinforced alloy, three independent signal transmitters packed inside — he'd thrown it together in the CV-1A cabin before leaving Saint Tranya, never meaning to use it.

He'd changed his mind.

---

Lika held the ball in his hand and glanced at the absence.

This time he didn't roll it.

Gently — aiming at the boundary — he tossed the ball up at an angle.

It flew a short arc, its predicted landing point one meter above the center of the absence.

The instant the ball touched that invisible top surface directly above the absence —

the whole boundary flickered.

Not the ball vanishing. The boundary itself reacted.

The whole absence was as if someone had given it a light push on the shoulder.

---

The wind kept blowing.

Across the Ice-Shadow Trench, in a lab pod somewhere beneath Saint Tranya, Morpheus held his cup at his lips and did not drink.

【Ch. 010 End · Frozen Northern Reach S-17-R】