Herald from Nowhere

Geryon's Code Cycle | The Orphaned Earth | Chapter 2

Veliard Reed. December 23, 2144, Biostation #7, Antarctica

In my nightmare, I was plummeting again. The Earth was approaching rapidly and inevitably, like a monster’s greedy maw. I woke just before impact, my now-nonexistent heart pounding like a drum no one was playing. You’d think I’d outgrown that fear, the fear stitched to the meat I used to wear. But the memory of the crash still crawled into my dreams — bloated, alien, like a drowned body surfacing for the last silent scream.

I’d rather be dreaming of the Mars colonists, like I used to. Replaying history was cleaner than remembering meeting with Death.

In the daylight, I’m not afraid of flesh.
Not blood.
Not viscera.
How could I be afraid of what I used to be?

It’s like opening a system unit and shrieking at the wires. The horror doesn’t belong to the hardware. But night is different. Night reaches for the parts of you that still remember. That still haven’t been debugged. The places where no new chassis or clean operating system can quite reach.

Sometimes your subconscious taps you on the shoulder and says:
“Hey. Remember when you were soft? Stupid? Breakable?”

At dawn, I left the cottage to check how the pine seedlings of the Skadi variety were taking root. I cultivated them specially for planting in the thawed ground. After making sure that the trees were fine, I used some fertilizer to feed the weakest ones. Then I went for a walk around the biostation—the place which infected these barren lands with life.

The sunrises and sunsets of Antarctica never ceased to delight me. Looking at them was like listening to a well-written symphony: each time, you discovered something new; each time, you were impressed by the wonderful combination of light shades, the sharp silhouettes of purple mountains, the overflow of ice, and the crimson clouds of bizarre shapes.

Most of all, I loved it when the flaming disk, rising from behind the jagged horizon, fit the almost perfectly round hole of the Ring Mountain, making it look like a portal to Heaven.

I sat on a block of rock hanging over the cliff, Yanka beside me — the mutt gifted by my friends at the Winged Sun. Then a dot appeared inside the solar ring. Small at first. Growing.

Wings.

I zoomed in, five-fold, commanding the artificial eyes behind my irises. Out here, there’s only one kind of creature that flies like that — either a desmodus… or someone they’re watching.

Four years had passed since I’d handed over Nautilus — my family’s empire — to hired managers. Two since I’d been officially declared dead.

Some bastard leaked everything — the video of my brain being removed, the shell frozen like an artifact. They found my larval body in the Pasadena cryochamber, minus the spinal cord. And still, I didn’t win in court.

Even the residents of the Soul Depositories have rights now — can’t hold office, can’t vote, but they exist. I tried to prove I was one of them. Spoke in a live holo session. Answered every question honestly.

Didn’t matter.

My brainless larval shell—without the spinal cord—had been found by investigators in the refrigerator of our experimental center in Pasadena. I sorely regretted that I hadn’t sent them to the furnace right away.

To the rest of the world, I’m either a hoax, a devil, or a billionaire ghost who faked his death to dodge taxes.

I look human enough. The face. The hands. The hair. It passes.

In "basic mode," with my clothes on, I’m just a man — maybe a little too perfect, a little too still, more robust than I used to be. But no one suspects the truth unless they know what to look for.

The only way to reclaim even a sliver of my status is to return to the States, stand trial, and let them take samples from the living tissue of my brain.

But every advisor I trust has begged me not to.

Because if the Moon Cross cult doesn’t kill me, the Lindons will. They’ve been circling Nautilus for years, teeth bared, waiting to tear it apart.

That was another reason why I chose seclusion in Antarctica: the ravenous attention of the press to every step and sigh that I made after my mother’s death. Five years later during my transformation, when I had to disappear for a long time, my assistants and I concocted a whole show with fake faces and false evidence beforehand.

We staged it all — the breakdown, the addiction, the spiral. Fake faces. False footage. My double in a luxury hotel room chasing ghosts only he could see.

The press ate it up. From Alaska to Sydney, they ran headlines like:

“CEO Loses Mind After Matriarch’s Death”

“From Mars to Madness: The Tragedy of Reed’s Son”

I’ve never been to Mars, but let them. That circus gave me cover to do the unthinkable.

And now?

Now I sit at the edge of the world, drinking fire-colored sunrises with a dog, watching shadows cross the sky, wondering if anyone else still remembers my name.

Therefore, when I noticed the desmodus, my first thought was to stay out of its sight. I didn’t expect any packages or messages at this time. Heliopolis would have notified me about sending a drone. But the winged messenger could have also been sent by a few Nautilus employees loyal to me, including those who had left their posts after our company lost its independence.

I waited for the winged guest and stretched out my hand.

Flapping its membranous, glossy-black wings which reflected the sunlight, a small, nimble robot climbed onto my shoulder and frantically wheezed in the voice of Deadman.

This wretched song always triggered panic before I even knew why. Then came the other voice. The only one that ever mattered.

Whiskey.
Wilhelmina Keller.
My distant love.

Her tone was urgent. Measured. And final.

"Go underground," she said. "You have less than an hour."

She told me she might not survive. That I shouldn’t lose myself in grief when it happened.

Not if.
When.

I never inherited my mother’s honey badger spirit. Could’ve taken a lab chair at one of our underwater stations, but I couldn’t stomach life under a hundred meters of pressure, breathing the same stale air for years.

Biostation #7 stood as proof of my ambition — and my exile. Built from my own designs, with my own funding, it operated under the flag of the Winged Sun.

Technically, I had to join their organization just to get building rights in Antarctica. But after a while, it stopped feeling like a front. It felt like the right place. The right people.

It would be a lie to say I did it all for Whiskey. The idea had been germinating long before her. Since the day Moon Cross murdered my mother. Since they shattered my body and mind in equal measure. Since I realized they wouldn’t stop until they had nukes or spores or some other holy fire to burn humanity down — even if they had to be the smoke rising into the sky.

Though I doubt heaven is waiting for them. No one is.

Winged Sun took anyone with vision — scientists, builders, dreamers — as long as their work didn’t violate the code. Even before my transformation, I’d been sending them heliocoin donations with the same encrypted note:

“Miracles don’t happen by themselves.”

That phrase became my passcode when Whiskey finally invited me to join.

Later, when I’d earned enough trust to ask questions, Deputy Chair Jiang Mei told me that no one named Wilhelmina Keller had ever worked for them. Only one Wilhelmina had ever been on the Winged Sun roster — a woman named Heiss, long dead. A promising young mind, murdered by Geryon Lindon.

A tragedy like that can gather devotees. Fanatics.

So... was my Whiskey one of them?

I held onto the hope she was real. That I might meet her in Heliopolis one day. But before I could find out, I was forced to disappear. By the time I reached Antarctica, running for my life, Whiskey was no more online. No farewell. No contact. Nothing.

It took time to crack the drone’s security. Between meteorological sensor updates pinging through my neurochip and electromagnetic interference scrambling half the logs, progress was slow. But eventually, I got the readout.

The desmodus had been a security unit in Seven Winds — nothing exotic. Just aerial surveillance. Solar-powered, like most of its kind, with data logs full of ordinary things: terrain scans, boat traffic, routine observations.

But reprogramming it? Intercepting the drone mid-mission? That took a top-tier engineer. Especially if it was Lindon-built.

Something didn’t add up.

Outside, things were worsening.

The geomagnetic disturbance was spiking fast — dropping from minus fifty nanotesla to minus one hundred in an hour. External sensors glitched, figures flashing erratically.

Then the cameras died. One by one. Blacked out.

I cursed and flipped on the analog radio — something I built by hand, following a manual Whiskey once sent.

Through static and hiss, I caught fragments of conversation between the Winged Sun and a Soviet research vessel. The sailors were panicked. But the Winged Sun girl stayed calm — telling the captain to hug the shore, shield the electronics, do what he could. But civilian ships aren’t made for this.

Then another voice cut in — the Selena, an underwater Nautilus vessel. But soon came the screaming static. Then a monotone hiss. A white void. The sensors outside my station dropped off like dead flies.

Somewhere, planes were falling from the sky. Satellites burning up. Cities turning to chaos. Backup generators would keep the lights on for a while — but not long. If Whiskey’s warning was right, hundreds of thousands were already dead. Maybe millions.

I didn’t want to believe it. My mind rejected it.

It felt like a prank. A cruel, operatic trick.

I left the dismantled drone where it was and descended to the lower level — to the inner greenhouse.

Down there, the air smelled of soil and orchids. I’d cultivated species that no longer grew anywhere in the wild — vanilla, lady’s slipper, fragile herbs rescued from oblivion. I named my plants after characters in books, movies, comics. Each new bud was a tiny holiday. A victory against extinction.

Now, even basic care — trimming a branch, rotating a lamp, dropping earthworms into soil — felt sacred. Like I was the caretaker of a new Ark.

Later, I set the timer on the animal feeders, queued up some old dream films, and dropped into hibernation mode.

The robotic body helped with that — letting me simulate sleep, lower functions, coast in quiet. The system would wake me if oxygen dropped, or sugar, or pressure. Everything was checked. Animals safe. Systems nominal.

Just in case, I opened the holographic screen. Still hoping, somehow, that Winged Sun might send a weather update. But no data came. Zero.

---

I awoke and climbed upstairs, unlocking the passage into the house.

Theo was waiting for me. He must’ve slipped in through the cottage window while I slept, because now he stood in the center of the hall, meowing with righteous fury. I'd forgotten him outside.

For a moment, I was... relieved. Theo was alive. No obvious damage. Alert enough to complain. That meant something. If he could survive, maybe other complex organisms could too.

The cottage looked untouched — except the lights and thermostat were dead. The radiation levels were stable: 21 microroentgens per hour. Normal enough. Time to check the world.

Yanka and I headed to our usual observation spot, the bluff above the rails. You could normally see the highway from there — silver trains gliding over black sand like snakes, shuttles skipping along the route like beads on wire.

Now?

Nothing.

Ten-twenty came and went. That’s when the passenger train from Novolazarevskaya to Dumont-D’Urville should have curled past Ring Mountain.

Still nothing.

I flicked on the satellite comms, trying first Heliopolis, then — recklessly — Njord, the lab vessel that broke away from Nautilus just before the Lindons made their hostile move.

No signal.

The satellite was out of reach.

No adrenal glands, but my thoughts still twisted cold. The world had gone silent in a way I’d never known.

Ten. Eleven. Midday. No trains, no shuttles. As if everyone left this planet.

I reconfigured my frame for speed and took off running — down the switchback trail toward the railway. In animal form, I was agile — part jaguar, part machine. I cleared a four-meter chasm in one leap. Skimmed around cliff faces with bursts of feline momentum. As I ran, I spotted something: plants. New shoots, pushing between the stones.

The wind had carried the seeds far from my place. And they took root.

Over two hours later, I reached the fence lining the highway. A warning sign: HIGH VOLTAGE. But the familiar hum of electricity? Gone.

I vaulted over, landed softly on dead rails. Hit the emergency call button. Silence was everything I heard. I stood there for a long moment. Just me and silence. Then I made my choice. I wouldn’t head for Railtown empty-handed. Not without Ambrosia — my metabolic backup — and the food converter.

As I rushed home, my thoughts fixated on Whiskey.

Was she even real? AI or human — it didn’t matter. She’d warned me. Saved me. Without that message, my body would’ve collapsed in minutes. My brain would’ve choked without oxygen.

But what if she’d just been someone else’s puppet? Just a voice they dangled to keep me compliant? The thought hit harder than the collapse of the satellites.

Back at the station, Yanka barked wildly. It wasn’t joy. It was alarm. She led me to Theo, leaping nervously around my legs.

He was curled on the rug, trembling, soaked in sweat, his eyes glassy and dark. Foam at the mouth. Muscles twitching. I scooped him up, gently, and brought water. Fed it to him through a syringe, drop by drop. Tried to diagnose. Rule things out.

Not poisoning. Not injury. No toxins near the cottage. The greenhouse was sealed, and no venomous fauna lived nearby.

Then it hit me. It was the pulse. The electromagnetic wave that shattered everything.

It ruined. Triggered cellular collapse that took some time to evolve. A biological short circuit. If it did this to a cat... what was happening in Railtown?

The city was probably a graveyard by now. Or worse — a triage zone without power, without order. There was nothing I could do for them. Not yet. Not alone.

Here, at least, I could help someone.And someone might still call. I still believed that the Winged Sun would reach out. And that not everything we built was gone.

Miserable as a man in my past, I was feeling no less miserable as a cyborg with neither goal, nor human love. I was unable to save Theo. As I was rocking him gently into eternal sleep, my mind immersed in memories.

Veliard Reed. June 2136, Omniverse

The encounter that saved me from the Blackout came after my second birth — the one we engineered, not inherited.

It had taken years of research to get there.

By that point, I was bedridden in the most literal sense: my spine fused to an artificial cord, my brain tethered to sensors and new modules, my body unmoving while my mind ignited in forced evolution.

Total physical stillness and maximum cognitive strain was my must. To stimulate neural growth, I immersed myself in what worked best — high-tier quests in the Omniverse. My company’s crowning achievement. A sandbox where anyone with enough credits or luck could manifest their wildest selves.

I chose late 20th-century Tallinn as my setting. Civilized, but looser than my era. Messy. Sincere.

There, in a skinned-down identity, I lived as a freelance soldier — hunting terrorists in places abandoned by both god and finance. My goal was simple: earn enough to buy back my family's confiscated home. A classic underdog arc.

And on rare nights of peace, I’d duck into some smoky, cursed little dive bar. Drink, watch, listen. Trade nonsense with broken people like me. There’s clarity in stepping into someone else’s broken shoes.

One night, I ended up at a place called Abyss.It clung to the waterline like a barnacle — part of an old dock, forgotten by time and zoning laws. You could smell the fuel oil and salt before you even walked in. The crowd inside was tangled in chains, leather, corpse paint, and teenage defiance. Long hair. Heavy boots. Rings like knuckle-dusters. Everyone trying hard not to care.

The club hadn’t been touched since George Bush Sr. was still a thing. Neon flickered over torn fishing nets and horror-movie posters. Fake skulls leered from corners. Blue lights drained the color from everyone’s skin, like we were ghosts trapped between channels. A whale skeleton was hanging gloomily above the stage.

The place was grimy, loud, alive. The music? Black metal. Furious. Complex. Apocalyptic. The sound system was garbage — the kind of muddy distortion that made every band sound like they were playing from inside a trash compactor. But no one cared, not even me.

Lyrics were unintelligible. Growls instead of words. A wall of noise painted in blood. But there was something raw there. Something honest. The passion that my own era — with its polished AIs and algorithm-curated culture — had surgically removed.

And then she stepped on stage. The guitarist from Cryptids, one of only two women in the lineup. Her guitar looked like an arrowhead, sharp and angular. Her face was hidden behind ritualistic black-and-white paint, more mask than makeup. A metal spike gleamed under her lower lip. Hair like raven feathers, leather attire like armor.

The girl didn’t smile. She burned.

Every riff from her fingers sounded like a demon’s warning. Every movement radiated an energy I couldn’t parse — something ancient and utterly modern, all at once. She was otherworldly and terrifying.

Her left hand with its short black nails slid back and forth, while a frail young vocalist with blond hair—wearing the same coloring on his face—tore the space around him with a blood-freezing scream and roar. With such a voice, even harmless words shot into the air were perceived like a death sentence.

One of the songs was about the sun, which would grow to monstrous size, burn out all life on Earth, and cover it with a wave of fire. An unpleasant chill crept under my T-shirt and made me immediately take a sip from the glass: the guy was singing about the biggest fear of my childhood.

The boys also played the drums and the second guitar while a tall and painfully thin girl played the bass, but I remembered them poorly. These gloomy headbangers could have been old men and women whose parents and elder siblings still remembered the music in reality, or bored housewives who found relaxation in extreme music and gory images. Remembering this, I was not in a hurry to drool over the guitarist, but I continued to listen carefully. She must have spent a fortune on leveling up her guitar skill—or maybe even studied playing by herself, in the real world.

After the band concluded their set and began packing up their instruments, it was the girl who approached me. I initially assumed she had noticed my interest from the stage, although I couldn’t comprehend how she could perform complex solos while simultaneously observing someone in the audience.

Without waiting for permission, she reached for the glass containing the blazing amber whiskey at the bottom, swiftly taking a swig that left a smear of thick oil-black lipstick on the glass. While such a gesture might have seemed vulgar from anyone else, it carried an unexpected elegance coming from her.

“You haven’t been taught manners, have you?” I chuckled.

“I learn all by myself if I find it necessary. By the way, thank you: the booze is nice.”

“Everyone has booze. Why did you choose me?”

“First, you drink whiskey and I love it. Secondly, I thought you liked me. If I made a mistake, I’m sorry.”

With those words, she casually placed the glass back on the bar, rejoined her bandmates, and left without so much as a nod of goodbye. I shrugged in resignation, slowly emptied another glass, and made my way out of the club onto the dark, rainy quay, walking along the grumbling sea for half an hour. Throughout the entire walk, our brief conversation replayed in my head like a looped recording, each word echoing in the backdrop of the restless night.

Even at home, in a scruffy studio on the fourth floor of an old brick building where only a pet rat was waiting for me, thoughts about her haunted me like a small pebble caught in a shoe. Maybe it’s a sign I should at least have an online affair through all this.

The next evening, I returned to the Abyss and asked about the Cryptids, pretending to be a recording studio agent. However, the club manager Tarmo knew nearly nothing about the guitarist. He mostly kept in touch with the vocalist, who called himself Deadman. And Deadman was expected an hour later.

Preparing to wait, I turned to the exit and saw a lady coming from outside; a strong sea wind from the street gave her a push in the back and messed up her long hair. Finally, I saw the face. She was no longer wearing the corpse paint. But those blue eyes and the curve of her eyebrows were imprinted in my memory as in a photograph. The guitar was also with the girl—in a case over her shoulders.

“You’re lucky, Whiskey, a gentleman’s brought you a contract!” the manager said. He was a fat man with a face pierced in a dozen places. Either a low-level player or a non-player character. “Why are you here today?”

“Tarmo, are you joking?” the girl answered so sternly that the guy understood the purpose of her visit without explanation.

“I’ve been waiting for Deadman,” the man growled.

“Deadman had to disconnect. He asked me to collect the money.”

“Come with me!”

“Wait here!” Whiskey told me, and this time there was no playfulness in her voice. Together with the manager, they disappeared into the depths of the club. I ordered a dark beer at the bar. In the Omniverse, drinks act upon your mind almost the same way they do in the real life: the brain remembers its previous experience with alcohol and acts accordingly.

Whiskey returned in ten minutes. She took me by the sleeve and dragged me into the hall.

“So, who the heck are you? Are you stalking me?” she hissed.

“I’m Veliard,” I said, moving closer to the wall lamp. “Yesterday, you were the first to approach, and I wanted to ask if we could be friends. What’s the problem?”

“Psychos are! There was one here; he said he was a fan and followed me like a shadow. As a result, he almost killed me with a virus. I would have died for nothing,” the girl said bitterly.

“A virus?” I didn’t believe it. “You’re a big fish if a hacker hunts you.”

“I wouldn’t say so. We barely scraped up some money for the studio.”

“I don’t want you to face a threat like that alone. You might need someone by your side to stand against the psychos. But if my attention annoys you, let me just say that I’m glad to see your real face.”

“Poor naive boy,” she sneered. “Hoping to see someone's real face in the Omniverse!”

“Okay, I will bother you no more.” I sighed, stepping toward the exit.

“No, wait,” she said quietly but firmly. “We’ll talk on the way.”

“On the way where?”

“Let’s go to Deadman, I'm rehearsing in his garage tonight. It’s a long way, a little scary when I am alone.”

I chuckled. “Enjoy my company. How do you know I’m not a threat?”

“You know what the word ‘no’ actually means. I respect that.”

I held out my hand to Whiskey; the girl took it with some hesitation. Her fingers were surprisingly warm. Or did I just feel warm from the touch?

We did not go along the quay the rest of the way. We turned toward the city center and walked along a narrow street between warehouse buildings and fish taverns. The smell of fried fish was not created by the Omniverse: it appeared in the brain automatically.

“Is the guitar heavy?” I asked, trying to behave as gallantly as my poor experience with interacting with ladies allowed me to do.

“It’s a part of me,” the girl said with a warning glance. “Touching it is strictly forbidden.”

“Can you at least share where your skill comes from?”

“School.”

“Oh, really?” I was dumbfounded. Nearly all children and teenagers of the Omniverse were non-player characters. In fact, who would voluntarily become someone’s rightless property again? Some perverts, maybe.

“Ha-ha, I did not mean the school in the Omniverse. By the way, you can call me Wilhelmina.”

“Like Dracula’s lover?”

“At last, a bookworm in my company!”

“At last, someone who appreciates it!”