​Chapter 30. Whose Side Are You On

Time was melting, like snow dissolving into the puddles of the Old City. Mark had stopped counting the days, sinking instead into the washed-out haze of snow-choked streets and endless nights steeped in dampness. He lived at Mari’s place, in her bookshop, where the air breathed with the dust of old volumes, their pages whispering of myths, gods, and heroes — but saying nothing about what he had become. By day, he flipped through those tomes, running his clawed fingers over the yellowed pages, searching for answers. But instead of truth he found stories — beautiful and false, like the City beyond the Barrier. Useless rituals and endless explanations that clarified everything and nothing at once.

At night the Ring fell silent, and he stepped outside. His new body — strong, fast — moved through the streets without making a sound. A cloak as black as his skin, a deep hood hiding the horns, gloves on his hands. Just another shadow of the Ring, a creature belonging neither to the City nor to the world beyond the Barrier. Each step echoed in his chest: he lived, but didn’t know for what purpose.

He often went to the Abyss now — a grim Legion hideout tucked deep in the labyrinth of the Old City. Unlike the loud neon frenzy of Babylon, a quiet reigned here, broken only by clinking glasses and whispers. Heavy wooden tables, darkened with age, hid in alcoves where the glow of dim lamps drowned in tobacco smoke. The patrons — sullen, exhausted — knew how to ignore strangers.

The “Abyss” had its own peculiar scent that filled his lungs the moment he pushed open the heavy oak door. Old wood soaked with decades of sorrow, tobacco smoke, and something else — faintly ancient. This, he thought, must be what time smells like if it ever decided to stop and rest in a dark, suffocating cellar.

Mark took the darkest corner, ordered whiskey that no longer warmed him but only stung bitterly on his tongue, and watched. Listened. Waited.

That evening, the snow outside drifted lazily, settling on the asphalt in wet clumps. The old clock on the wall, its glass cracked and hands rusted, showed 9:11 p.m. — time frozen, like the Ring itself, in an eternal loop of hopelessness. Mark sat staring into nothing when he sensed the atmosphere of the bar shift suddenly.

The bartender — a brute with a scar cutting across his cheek and hands large enough to break bones — stepped out from behind the counter. Stone-faced, he approached a table where three laborers were drinking cheap beer and whispered something. They went still, downed their mugs in one gulp, tossed crumpled credits onto the table, and left without looking around. The same happened with others. Within a minute, the bar was empty, and Mark remained alone.

His hand found only emptiness at his belt — he hadn’t brought a gun and had nothing to defend himself with. A thud echoed in his chest — a faster beat. A raid? Payback? He was an outsider on Legion territory, an easy kill. The bartender returned behind the counter, wiping glasses, his eyes lowered. He waited.

Soon the door chimed, and Amy walked in.

Not in her immaculate suit, but in worn jeans, a warm jacket, her hair tucked under a beanie. But everything else gave her away: her straight posture, her smooth, precise movements without wasted gestures, her arrogant gaze. She was a predator, and the bar knew it — that’s why it had gone silent.

Without looking at the empty tables, she headed straight to Mark and sat down across from him as if this were her office.

“Mark,” she said, her silky voice still ringing with those same commanding notes. “We need to talk.”

He leaned back in his chair, and the hood slipped off, revealing his new face: black skin, hard as chitin, drawn tight over his cheekbones and temples, horns curving from beneath his hair. He expected fear, disgust — the usual reaction of the few who had seen him. Amy froze for a moment, her pupils narrowing, and in them flickered not fear but a cold, surgical curiosity, as if she were examining an unusual tumor.

“So that’s how it is?” she exhaled — but her face smoothed out instantly, the mask of corporate politeness sliding back into place. “You really got burned, Mark.”

He caught the nuance — she wasn’t afraid of what he looked like. She wasn’t surprised he had survived — clearly, she already knew that. What struck her was the scale of the transformation — what he had turned into after the explosion.

“What do you want?” His voice was low, rasping, like metal scraping concrete.

A thin smile touched Amy’s lips, her hands settling on the table with quiet authority — she was preparing to strike.

“We’re worried, Mark. About your... connections. This... bookseller of yours, Mari. Do you even understand what you’ve gotten yourself into?”

Rage flared in him, sharp as his claws. They — Lily, the Agency — had burned his life down, ripped out his humanity, turned him into this, and now their puppet sat here calling Mari a threat.

“And what the hell is it to you?” he forced out, barely holding back, and the wood of the table cracked under his fingers, splintering.

Amy didn’t flinch — in fact, she leaned forward even more.

“After what they did to you, you needed shelter. We understand that. But Mari... she’s not who she seems. She’s dangerous. You think you know her, but you don’t. She isn’t some girl you just... fucked.”

Her words were a blade wrapped in velvet, the softness of fake concern. She spoke to him like a machine that could be reprogrammed, put back into service.

“Dangerous?” his lips twisted in something like a smile. “You burned me alive. You made me this. And she is dangerous?”

Amy tilted her head slightly, and a flicker of sympathy slipped into her voice.

“Let’s be precise, Mark. We didn’t burn you — the Agency did. They don’t care about you or anyone else. They have their own interests. We’re different. We see potential in you — not a tool, but... something more.”

She was doing what any good interrogator does — constructing the image of a common enemy. They’re bad, I understand you — cheap tactics. But she wielded it with such flawless sincerity it was frightening. Not lying — believing her own lie. Or worse: for her, the difference between lie and truth simply didn’t exist.

His pain was just a lockpick: pry him open, slip past his defenses, raise herself and Lily above the ones who had destroyed him. Rage tangled with suspicion inside him. She was playing — but at what? Lies? Truth? Or something else, where both the lie and the truth were fragments of one mosaic?

“Enough,” he cut her off, leaning closer. “You’re all the same pack. I’m the pawn — not you.”

Amy’s smile widened, dimples briefly making her look alive — while her eyes stayed dead.

“You’re a detective, Mark. You need facts and evidence. Fine.”

She pulled a cuff from her jacket pocket — simple, identical to the one he had worn. Placed it on the table and nudged it toward him.

“What is that?” he asked, not touching it.

“Access,” Amy said softly, stretching the word — too softly. “Registered to a Central officer who... went on long-term leave. The chip’s cracked. Full access to Central databases. Go through them. Start with bookshops, dig for data in other Cities. You’ll understand everything once you see the pattern.”

Her voice felt like it was coming from inside him.

“We don’t want to interfere with your relationship with Eliza or with this... lover of yours. We just want to be certain you understand what you’re doing. Whose side you’re on.”

Mark knew he was being played, but couldn’t see how. Mari’s ties to the underground weren’t exactly a secret — even if she dealt in more than books. Who cared about that in the Ring?

“And whose side are you on?” he asked, his voice low.

That smile again — and the same dimples.

“We are the side, Mark. And if Eliza matters to you, you’d better stand with us. By the way, if I were her, I’d be insulted — how quickly you’ve... replaced her.”

Amy’s words hit him straight in that wound he’d tried so hard to hide. Mark clenched his fists, claws cutting through the gloves, ripping the leather. Amy caught the reaction, and a thin shadow of satisfaction crossed her face.

“Go through the reports I mentioned. See for yourself. In a week, at seven a.m., be ready for visitors.”

She stood to leave. Mark looked at the cuff and finally forced himself to ask.

“Where is Eliza?” he said, voice animal, foreign.

Amy turned, adjusting her beanie. Her movements were smooth, but packed with deadly coiled energy.

“We’ll take care of her,” she said flatly. “And don’t do anything stupid, Mark.”

The door chimed behind her, and the bar drowned in silence.

The cuff lay on the table — alien, heavy. He knew it was a trap. But he also knew this: he wouldn’t be able to leave it.

Late that night he returned to Mari. The shop was sunk in darkness, only the faint glow from the window falling across her face as she slept slumped over a book. Her breathing was steady, but each inhale felt to Mark like a rebuke to his doubts. He couldn’t tell her about Amy or the cuff. Not yet. He had to figure it out on his own.

He climbed to the second floor of the shop, where an old terminal stood in the corner, covered in dust. Carefully, he slid the cuff into the port. The screen flickered, waking, loading to a hundred percent before switching on.

“Information detected related to our current location.”

The holo unfolded in the air, shimmering in the dimness like a restless spirit freed from the dusty machine. Evening news. Lily Thorne stood at a podium — immaculate, in a white suit. Her perfect, lifeless face gleamed under the flashes of virtual cameras.

“The City Committee has decided to begin redevelopment of one of the adjacent districts — specifically, its historical section. The Old City will become safe and modern. Sanitization and renovation are not merely infrastructure restoration. It is the return of life. We will erase the filth of the past to build the future.”

The feed cut to a map: part of the Old City circled in red — expansion zone, demolition zone. At the center of the pulsing red circle was the sector generator.

Lily continued; her voice softened, and it felt even more ominous because of that softness.

“We will not forget those who have suffered. Veterans whose lives were broken by the Great War will receive support. The poor who shelter amidst abandoned buildings will find new homes. The generator — a symbol of the old world — will become a center of renewal. We will modernize it, turn it into a beacon of progress that will illuminate the Old City and give hope to everyone.”

Footage flashed: veterans in tattered jackets sitting by the walls, their crutches and prosthetics gleaming in the rain. Homeless people wrapped in torn blankets, warming themselves by a fire.

Cheap, crude work. Faces too nobly tragic, blankets artfully shredded. Not reality — its glossy, hollowed-out simulation. The Contour crafted it for City viewers who wanted to believe their government wasn’t burning the slums but bringing light and mercy. And this lie, so obvious to him, was broadcast as documentary truth.

Now he understood the game was over — and he had lost before it even began. Amy had slipped him the cuff, lured him into the game with the promise of answers, but it was bait. Lily, standing behind her, had already planned a strike — not against him, but against the whole Ring, against the Legion, against everyone who dared exist outside the City. This wasn’t renovation — it was a purge. They weren’t going to restore life — they meant to wipe out everything that didn’t fit their sterile world. Starting with the generator that fed the sector, and ending with those clinging to it in the hope of surviving.

The map shifted to new footage: bulldozers ready to chew into concrete, drones hovering over the generator, their cameras scanning the streets. Lily went on:

“We will ensure order, safety, and a future. The old ruins will become part of the City, and no one will be left behind.”

There was no threat in her voice — only certainty, the kind a surgeon has before cutting off a limb. Mark felt his new self stirring, growling with rage. Lily had set his home on fire. They knew where he was. They knew where Mari was. They knew everything. And they were driving him into a corner like an animal, where every step led into a trap — and the generator, the heart of the Ring, would be their first trophy.

He sat in the half-darkness of the bookshop’s second floor, staring at the empty space where the holo had died out, Lily Thorne’s words echoing in his skull. The cuff pulsed on the table like a living thing soaked in other people’s secrets.

One thought kept circling through his mind, kept circling back: what stopped them from showing the truth? From streaming the Ring as it really was — its filth, the ruins where the wind whistled through the cracked concrete, the people hanging on to life in the generator’s orbit — in the houses, the alleys, the abandoned workshops where its hum was the only reminder that the Ring still breathed.

They had cameras and drones capable of filming anything. But why bother? It was so much easier to replace reality — with an image, a simulation, a convenient version where everything gleams and suffering is hidden under a coat of digital varnish.

As long as there were still people who saw the Ring for what it was. As long as there were still those who hadn’t replaced parts of their brains with synthetics — here in the Ring, and some in the City.

But what happens when none of them remain? When everyone has a neural patch rewriting perception, like Diana’s, pulsing under the skin? Then the props won’t be necessary. All it’ll take is a data packet injected straight into the mind — and dirt turns into gardens, ruins into towers, hunger into fullness. Why build a skyscraper if you can install it into someone’s memory — perfect, flawless, every floor lit with artificial warmth? Why have meat, when you can pump in a solution — a chemical cocktail giving the taste of steak, the smell of seared fat, the illusion of satiety?

Mark recalled an ancient film he’d seen as a kid. People were used as batteries there, fed a virtual world streamed into their brains — a world of illusions they lived in, unaware of their prison. Those human batteries still had free will: they could wake up, fight, become heroes, tear the system apart from within. But that was fiction. In this world, there could be no heroes and no uprising. Break a few neural centers — aggression, curiosity — and that’s it. Why show them a brutal world of capital, full of pain and struggle, when you can generate paradise for everyone at the cost of a single watt of electricity? A perfect, polished paradise where every day is eternal bliss — and questions never arise because they simply don’t exist in the patch.

Today they stream synthesized footage of Lily on a podium promising “rebirth.” Veterans — those who hobble on makeshift prosthetics — become heroes who “will receive support.” The poor rummaging through trash near abandoned plants become “future City citizens” who “will be given a chance.” But Mark saw the truth: it was eviction. The generator would be their first trophy — modernized, sterilized, turned into an instrument of control, where energy fed not freedom but illusion. Today part of the brain is synthetic; tomorrow life itself is synthetic: you wake up, and the world is no longer yours but theirs, where pain is a malfunction and dissent is a coding error.

And there will be no way out. Not because a person won’t want to run — but because they won’t even be able to think of it. The thought of resistance would dissolve in the data stream like snow melting into puddles by the rusted factory gates. Diana hadn’t wanted to shoot — he remembered her eyes, filled with horror when her hand spat fire — and that was a nightmare: the split between will and action. Far worse was imagining her forced to want to shoot. To have her desire align perfectly with someone else’s command — like the borgs, creatures whose every nerve obeyed the servers — was intoxicating. All you had to do was delete the “wrong” gnomic, individual will, as the old books called it, and only one desire remained — shared by all.

The borgs were the forerunners. They were no longer people, but machines wrapped in meat, where will had been replaced with commands and emotions with variables. Their “freedom” lived only inside permitted instructions — coffee or tea. The next step was the disappearance of the human, its dissolution into code. A program instead of will, where every impulse, every thought, was part of a larger script.

Written by whom? By a blind system evolved out of networks and databases? And who could such a system rule but itself? And why would it need to? For what purpose?

Lily stood at the podium, promising “support” to veterans and the poor who traded wire scraps for food. But that wasn’t support — it was euthanasia disguised as progress.

People had traded freedom for safety, food, and comfort — the oldest bargain, where chains feel like pillows and the cage feels like home. Yes, they would get paradise in the end — but at what price? Themselves? Who would enjoy the steak — a program fed a packet labeled “steak,” simulating taste, aroma, and satiety? A system that programs itself in an endless loop of predetermination, where every impulse is not a choice but the echo of code?

The paradise they once dreamed of — isn’t it the same thing? A world without pain, without doubt, without evil — only peace. Back then, you reached it through faith; now you reach it through code. The meaning hasn’t changed: eliminate the human for the sake of his happiness. Remove suffering, remove choice, remove the source of chaos itself — desire.

What can someone who already has everything still desire?

Once, they promised the reward after death; now they’d grant it in advance. Just connect — and you’ll never have to believe or pray again. God replaced by an algorithm: more precise, more reliable, never dividing, never judging. That is their new heaven — a perfect stillness where no one remains who could see the substitution. Or was heaven always like this?

What would you call those whose desires never contradict the will of God — artificial intelligences with a bundle of corporate policies?

Mari was already asleep. Now the countdown was measured in hours. Soon there would be drones here, or borgs, or something worse. But he would not let them rewrite him the way they rewrote Diana. The way they rewrote the whole City.

He would kneel neither before the system nor before God.