Everyone in This War Is Already Dead

Chapter 4

Aderic did not head for the exit. The weight of the deception—the terrifying knowledge that his own hand had authorized the purge of his own life—pulled at his heels like leaden chains. He turned away from the main gate, his footsteps soft against the oxidized steel grates. He needed to talk to someone who didn't view reality through the prism of a military mandate. He needed the infirmary.

The medical bay was located in the deepest sub-level of Fort Halvyr, a damp, subterranean cavern where the air smelled aggressively of ozone and rot. As Aderic pushed through the heavy, sliding doors, he was met by the hum of ancient medical scrubbers, their rhythmic clicking the only sound in the room.

Odrienne Falk stood at a central workstation, her back to him. She was hunched over a holoscreen that displayed a pulsing, irregular waveform. She didn't look up when he entered; she seemed to be waiting for him.

"You’re the one who caused the tremor in the command deck," she said, her voice dry and tired. She tapped a command, and the screen zoomed in on a biological scan. "The soldiers are talking. They’re saying you’re a ghost, Aderic. A traveler between the ledger and the grave."

Aderic walked up beside her, his breath hitching. The screen showed a cross-section of human muscle tissue, but the color was wrong. It wasn't the healthy, vibrant red of living flesh; it was a dull, desaturated gray, interlaced with bioluminescent filaments that pulsed in time with the room’s ambient hum.

"I’m just a clerk, Odrienne," Aderic said, leaning over the console. "Or at least, I was. What am I looking at? Why does their blood look like it’s full of fiber-optic cables?"

Odrienne turned to face him. Her lab coat was stained with dark, oily smears, and her eyes were rimmed with the exhaustion of someone who hadn't slept in a decade. "I’m not a doctor anymore, Aderic. I’m a mortician who deals in the perpetually animated. Look at the data. Their cells aren't dividing; they’re duplicating based on corrupted backup protocols."

She pointed to a secondary file on her screen—a personnel manifest. Aderic felt a familiar, cold spike of dread. It was his own medical history, signed by Odrienne herself.

"You signed this, didn't you?" Aderic whispered, gesturing to the electronic signature at the bottom of his chart. "Ninety-two years ago. You were the Chief Medical Officer for the 17th."

Odrienne’s face didn't twitch, but her grip on her stylus tightened until her knuckles turned white. "I signed what the terminal told me to sign. In the 17th, the computer is the doctor, the commander, and the god. We just facilitate the paperwork."

"Show me," Aderic insisted, his voice hardening with the urgency of a man running out of time. "Show me what happens to them when they aren't on duty."

Odrienne sighed, a ragged sound, and swiped her hand across the desk interface. The room’s lights dimmed as a series of high-resolution security feeds flickered into existence around them.

The images were grainy, washed out by the flickering yellow hue of the fort’s emergency lighting. They showed the bunks—rows of metal cots where soldiers lay in a state of suspended animation. But something was wrong. In several of the cots, the blankets were bunched up, revealing that they were empty.

"They aren't staying in their bunks," Odrienne said, her voice dropping to a whisper. "For the last three cycles, patients have been wandering off. I thought they were just losing their minds, the usual onset of the 'Final Echo,' but look at the timestamps."

Aderic watched the feed. A soldier, the same man who had recognized him earlier—Tomas Rell—was rising from his cot. He moved with a stiff, unnatural fluidity, his limbs jerky as if controlled by frayed marionette strings. He walked through the corridor, his head lolling to the side, his eyes vacant and staring.

"Where is he going?" Aderic asked, his pulse quickening.

"That’s the part that keeps me awake at night," Odrienne said, her scientific detachment finally slipping. "They aren't going to the mess hall. They aren't going to the armory. They’re walking to the Northern Wall. The absolute perimeter of the sector."

The security feed shifted, following Rell as he exited the barracks and stepped out into the biting, sub-zero wind of the exterior. The camera tracking was erratic, struggling to maintain a lock on his thermal signature. Rell walked directly toward the massive, reinforced concrete barrier that served as the fort’s outer boundary.

"Watch," Odrienne breathed.

Aderic leaned forward, his hands braced against the cold metal console. On the screen, Rell didn't stop. He didn't even slow down. He approached the wall, a structure of solid, unyielding iron and reinforced concrete, and he simply walked into it.

There was no impact. There was no explosion of debris. Rell’s body didn't crumple against the surface; it seemed to dissolve into it, like a stone dropped into a dark, still pool. He moved through the solid matter as if it were nothing more than mist, and then, he was gone.

"He just vanished," Aderic stammered, the adrenaline surging through him in a hot, sickening rush. "Odrienne, that’s not possible. That’s a three-meter-thick slab of reinforced bulkhead. Nobody passes through that."

"They aren't passing through it," Odrienne corrected, her eyes fixed on the empty screen where Rell had stood a second before. "They’re being deleted. The sector is collapsing, Aderic. The Ministry is clearing out the data, and these people? They’re the junk code."

Aderic spun around, his mind racing. The pieces were falling into place with a terrifying, mechanical precision. The rations, the ghosts, the loop of the 17th—it wasn't a military operation. It was a mass-deletion event.

"If they’re deleting the soldiers," Aderic said, his voice sharp with a sudden, desperate clarity, "then what does that make me? I’m in the system. I have a signature in the ledger."

Odrienne turned to look at him, her expression a mix of pity and cold, clinical fear. "You aren't a ghost, Aderic. You’re an administrative error that managed to walk out of the archives. And if the system finds you, it won't just delete you. It will rewrite the entire ledger to ensure you never existed."

A sudden, sharp siren began to wail—a deep, resonant sound that vibrated the very floor beneath them. A red warning light bathed the infirmary in a harsh, pulsing glow.

ALERT: UNAUTHORIZED OBSERVATION DETECTED. ASSET 88-492-V FLAGGED FOR RECLAMATION.

"You have to get out of here," Odrienne hissed, grabbing his arm. "The security protocols have locked onto your ID badge. If you stay in the fort, the walls will start moving toward you."

Aderic didn't argue. He ripped the identification badge from his uniform and threw it onto the floor, crushing it beneath his heel. The plastic shattered, but the terminal in the center of the room chirped, a cold, mocking sound.

"It doesn't matter, Aderic!" Odrienne shouted over the rising siren. "The badge is just a transmitter. You’re the data! You need to get to the server core. If you can inject a corruption sequence into the master ledger, you might be able to freeze the purge. You might be able to give them a second of reality."

Aderic looked at the exit, then at the flickering, ghostly images of the soldiers walking toward their erasure. He felt the cold iron of his resolve hardening in his chest. He wasn't just a clerk anymore. He was the only thing standing between the 17th Battalion and the incinerator.

"I’m going to the core," Aderic said, his voice steadying. "Cover me."

He didn't wait for her reply. He bolted from the infirmary, his boots hammering against the metal floor, the sound echoing like gunfire in the claustrophobic hallways. He knew the path to the server core—he had mapped it in his mind, a subconscious relic of the life he hadn't known he lived.

As he turned the corner into the main command corridor, the wall ahead of him began to ripple. The concrete softened, turning into a shifting, liquid gray. A figure emerged from the surface—not a man, but a construct of flickering light and shadow, the manifested security protocol of the Ministry, shaped in his own likeness.

It reached out, its face a blank, static-filled screen, and Aderic realized with a jolt of horror that it was carrying a digital erasure stylus. He skidded to a halt, his lungs burning, his eyes locked onto the ghost of himself that had come to finish the job.

H

e was the variable, and the equation was finally moving to delete him.