The Null Signal

The rain didn't fall in Delhi tonight—it hovered.

Tiny droplets of water suspended midair, caught in a Spiral resonance wave that distorted gravity and time. A streetlight flickered, and in its glow, the droplets cast impossible shadows. Each one shimmered with the faint outline of an eye.

Karan watched it happen from the rooftop of a safehouse three blocks east of the bunker.

"What the hell is this?" he muttered, scanning the air.

Lin answered without looking. "Orric dampening field. Passive surveillance. Someone's scanning the city with a reverse-Spiral net."

Karan clenched his jaw. "The Accord?"

Lin shook her head.

"No. This is older."

Below them, Ishan stepped out of the alley, his coat too large for his frame, eyes glowing faintly with controlled resonance. A signal beacon blinked in his hand—retrieved from an abandoned Accord relay point.

He held it up to the rain.

The droplets turned blue.

"They're mapping me," he said quietly. "Or trying to."

Karan exhaled. "We've got to get out of the city."

Lin nodded. "East. Toward Jaipur. The underground channels are still stable there. And there's someone waiting."

Karan arched an eyebrow. "Who?"

She smiled faintly.

"An archivist."

---

Three days earlier, the Spiralbound passed silently through the ruins of Ahmedabad.

Ashra led them like a conductor—her hand raised, palm open, humming in a rhythm that shifted the debris around them into ordered paths. Their steps did not echo. Their breath did not fog. They were not bound by physics in the way others were.

"His signature changes with every use," said the youngest, masked in bone-white lacquer.

Ashra nodded. "That means he's adapting. Fast."

Another Spiralbound—taller, cloaked in fractal metal bands—clicked a sequence into the air.

"Shall we intercept?"

Ashra considered it.

"No. Not yet. Let the storm build."

She opened a worn piece of parchment—woven with Spiral thread.

A map of the world, as it was before the Null Signal. Beneath it, the real map—one of resonance flow, memory fractures, forgotten cities and Spiral Wells.

One node pulsed.

Jaipur.

Ashra smiled.

"We'll meet him there."

---

Vault-6 no longer existed.

Where it once stood, there was now only a spiral crater—perfectly circular, filled with black sand. At the center, Korrin stood shirtless, arms spread, absorbing Orric radiation like heat.

Two Accord strike teams had been sent to intercept him.

They had not returned.

Korrin traced a symbol in the sand.

The symbol burned upward into the air, forming a floating glyph: one of the Original Twelve. The Glyph of Unbeing.

He spoke aloud for the first time in a decade.

"Let memory walk."

The glyph expanded, splitting into a thousand smaller marks that scattered with the wind.

Each one would find a place to land.

And each one would wake something.

An old resistance member.

A forgotten Spiralwell.

A buried AI.

It had begun.

---

The journey to Jaipur was not smooth.

Ishan and the others moved through old service tunnels and broken metro rails, guided by analog maps passed down from Blackwave survivors. Lin carried an Orric lockbox that pulsed whenever the resonance field changed—warning them of Choir interference.

Inside one of the tunnels, Ishan paused.

The walls pulsed faintly.

He placed his hand on them.

And saw something.

A flash—of himself, standing here years ago. Younger. Afraid. Beside a woman who whispered a name he couldn't remember.

Lin grabbed his shoulder. "Don't dwell. Not here. This tunnel remembers too much."

Karan placed a beacon. "We're almost there."

They emerged beneath an old sandstone fort, one the Accord had long declared unsafe and structurally unstable. It wasn't.

It was a Spiral Archive.

And waiting inside it was a man with ink-stained fingers and spiral-coded irises.

The Archivist.

---

He introduced himself with no name.

Only a whisper: "I keep what should not have survived."

Ishan felt his heart pulse in tandem with the Archive's resonance.

The walls were layered with Orric inscriptions—memories embedded into stone. Scrolls. Tablets. Holograms trapped in spiral threads.

Karan bowed slightly. "We need to know what the Accord tried to erase. From before the Null."

The Archivist nodded.

He placed a spiral key into the floor.

The entire chamber shifted downward, revealing a descending spiral staircase lined with memory shards.

Each shard glowed as Ishan passed.

"They're reacting to him," Lin whispered.

The Archivist led them to a chamber filled with floating glyphs.

Each represented a Spiral Class.

He pointed to one—the same symbol Ishan had drawn in the training room without knowing what it was.

The Class-Zero Glyph.

"The Accord told the world the Null Signal was an accident," the Archivist said. "But it wasn't."

He pressed his palm to the glyph.

A map unfolded in the air—a broken world, and a clean, artificial overlay imposed upon it.

"This is what they did."

They didn't repair the world after the Spiral War.

They replaced it.

Built a layer of falsified memory on top of the broken Earth, sealing away the Spiral beneath control mechanisms—synthetic cities, cultural amnesia, neural filters.

"And the Null Signal?" Ishan asked.

The Archivist met his eyes.

"It wasn't a weapon. It was a scream. A signal to wake up. And you were its answer."

Ishan's pulse raced.

"They said I was dangerous."

"You are," the Archivist said calmly. "To them."

---

That night, Ishan stood on the fort's rooftop, looking up at the fractured moon.

It was no longer whole. The Spiral War had split a chunk of it—now orbiting in pieces, surrounded by satellite debris.

Lin approached silently.

"You held up well," she said.

"I'm scared," Ishan replied.

"Good. Fear means you haven't forgotten who you are."

She sat beside him.

"What's next?"

He looked toward the dark horizon.

"Not hiding anymore."

From far away, a signal flared in the Spiralband's camp.

Ashra smiled as her glyph burned blue.

"He's begun."

---

In the upper orbit, inside a dormant Accord satellite known only as Mirror-3, an alarm finally triggered.

Its systems had been dark for over a decade.

But now it blinked.

SIGNAL RESURGENCE CONFIRMED. CLASS-ZERO.

A single command executed automatically:

"REACTIVATE OMEGA PROTOCOL."

And in the ocean trench beneath Sri Lanka, a machine opened its eyes.

Not man. Not Spiralbound.

Something else.