Night in Nova-Veridia didn't begin with the sunset, but with the city's contrast settings breaking down. The sky wasn't black; it was the unsettling, dark grey hue of a turned-off television screen. The rain falling on Communication Exchange Street didn't resemble water droplets from clouds. It was as if a colossal broadcast tower above had malfunctioned, raining liquefied parasites, particles of white noise, onto the city. Each drop hitting the asphalt didn't form a puddle, but subtly distorted the image of where it landed.
Detective Kaelen, field supervisor of Unit 404, shivered inside his trench coat with its collar turned up. The cigarette in his mouth had long gone out, but he continued to hold the wet filter between his lips; it was the only reflex that reminded him he was alive in moments when he forgot to breathe. As he passed under the yellow police tape in front of him, he felt that familiar, rusty acidity in his stomach. The tape didn't say "DO NOT ENTER"; in Nova-Veridia, no plastic tape could keep people away from disaster. That tape merely said, "Beyond this point, do not seek logic."
The crime scene was a public telephone booth, its windows shattered and covered in posters, standing like a graveyard of 90s analog technology. Kaelen resisted looking at the thing standing under the booth's pale yellow light, but professional deformation prevailed.
The victim was a telephone technician in his twenties. Or at least, he had been ten minutes ago. Now, he resembled a grotesque sculpture of flesh and plastic. The man's right hand wasn't stuck to the receiver; it had *fused* with it. Black, hard bakelite plastic had seeped into the pores of the man's skin, his finger bones melting and merging with the keypad's circuits. What were once fingers now looked like melted wax drippings between the "9" and "#" keys.
But the real horror was in the face. Or where the face should have been.
It was as if God had set the resolution settings to their lowest when creating this man. The technician's head wasn't made of flesh and blood, but of blurry, blocky pixels. There were no eyes, no nose, no mouth; just a constantly flickering distortion suspended in the air. There was no smell of blood. Instead, the air was dominated by the acrid scent of ozone, burnt copper, and overheated dust.
"What does forensics say?" Kaelen asked. His voice was rough, like sandpaper.
The young officer, his face as white as chalk, held his notepad with trembling hands. He answered, averting his eyes from the "thing." "They're calling it poisoning, sir. I mean, that's the assumption. But... when we tried to listen to his heart..." The officer swallowed. "We only hear static, chief. Like a radio that can't tune in."
Kaelen took a deep breath, filling his lungs with the city's damp, grey air. This wasn't the work of the regular homicide desk. This was where logic ended and "Static" began. He reached for his radio, turning the frequency dial to a forbidden range, one no one else used.
"Bring in the circus runaway," he said with a weary voice. "The curtain has risen."
QUOTE "Chaos is not a well, chaos is a ladder; but its steps are missing, and to climb it, you must defy gravity."
Ten minutes later, the pitch-black darkness at the end of the street was torn by a purple stain.
The Nameless Jester wasn't walking to the crime scene; he was skipping frames, like a video game character with a rendering error. He took a step, stumbled slightly, feigned falling, then slid across a puddle with a friction that defied the laws of physics. His Victorian-era circus costume cast a dull, unsettling glow on the wet asphalt. The permanent, painted expression of sorrow on his face was in a cruel battle with the unsettling, razor-sharp intelligence in his eyes.
He didn't pause when he reached Kaelen. No greeting, no nod. He headed directly towards the pixelated corpse.
One of the young officers, slow to grasp the situation, stepped forward. "Hey! That's a crime scene, you can't go in!" He reached out to place his hand on Jester's shoulder.
Jester didn't even look at the officer's outstretched wrist. He merely twitched his shoulder slightly, with the speed of a "glitch." His image distorted for a moment, the officer's hand grasped empty air, and the man stumbled forward under his own momentum.
"Calm down, Officer," Jester said. His voice was like a velvety melody from an old gramophone, but a metallic, cold undertone was hidden beneath it. "I'm just trying to get to my seat in the audience. The show is about to begin."
He pulled a half-eaten apple from his pocket, its skin starting to blacken. He took a large bite. "Hmm. Fresh corpse, stale apple. I adore the universe's sense of irony."
Kaelen, using the last vestiges of his patience, interjected. "Stop the show, clown. Tell me what caused this. How did this man end up like this?"
Jester tossed the apple back into his deep jacket pocket and leaned towards the "pixelated" corpse. The fake sad expression on his face didn't change an inch, but his hazel eyes narrowed like a microscope lens. In that moment, the grey filter over the world lifted for Jester
He wasn't seeing a corpse. He was seeing a data dump, a corrupted block of code.
*Tension angle of the receiver cable: 45 degrees. Vector deviation. This means he wasn't pulled back in fear, but pulled towards the system.*
*Melting pattern on the soles of his shoes: Not thermal heat, but high-frequency friction.*
*The crumpled note paper in the man's pocket: Not a lottery ticket, but coordinate data in decimal format.*
"You police," Jester said, tilting his head slightly, as if reading data from an invisible screen. "You always ask, 'Who did it?' You never ask, 'What version are we on?'"
Jester extended his gloved index finger towards the corpse's melted, blurry face.
Kaelen involuntarily shouted: "Don't touch it! It could be radiation!"
Jester chuckled. The sound was like marbles echoing in an empty corridor. "Radiation? Oh, Kaelen... Your imagination is very 1950s," he said. He plunged his finger into the blurry mass of flesh and, when he pulled it back, there was no blood on his fingertip, but a grey, shimmering residue of dust. Static residue.
Without hesitation, he brought his finger to his mouth and touched the dust to his tongue.
His face instantly grew serious. That cheerful, artificial mask cracked for a microscopic second. His pupils dilated.
"It tastes..." Jester whispered, as if talking to himself. His voice trembled for the first time. "It tastes like 1989. Like the end of the Cold War and the turning off of televisions."
Jester suddenly straightened up. The corpse was now merely a data packet that had lost its interest for him. He turned his attention to the rusty metal body of the telephone booth. From an inner pocket of his vest, he produced a silver spoon with an engraved handle. No one asked why he carried a spoon; when it came to Jester, the question "why" was an invalid operation.
He began to tap rhythmically on the side panel of the booth with the spoon's handle.
Tap. Tap-tap. Tap.
"What are you doing?" Kaelen asked, his hand going to the hilt of his weapon.
"Listening," Jester said, eyes closed. "This booth doesn't just work with coins, Detective. This man didn't dial the wrong number. He dialed the wrong *time*."
Jester inserted the spoon's handle into the narrow slot of the booth's receiver input and twisted it hard, as if unlocking an invisible lock.
At that moment, a sound ripped through the night. An ear-splitting sound emanating from the speakers, the cables, even the wet asphalt on the ground: **WHITE NOISE.**
The sound was so intense, it felt as if it had physical weight. All the officers simultaneously groaned, covering their ears with their hands. A thin trickle of blood began to seep from the young officer's nose. Kaelen gritted his teeth, the world spinning around him.
But Jester... Jester spread his arms wide, like an orchestra conductor. He threw his head back and swayed within that terrible, brain-melting static. For him, this sound wasn't noise, but a symphony. It was the sound of the universe's source code.
"Do you hear it, Kaelen?" he shouted over the noise, his voice containing a madness mixed with joy. "This man isn't dead. He's just been formatted! His brain was overloaded with data. Someone... Someone has learned to use 'Static' as a weapon. File compression error!"
He opened his eyes. In those hazel eyes now was a pure, icy rage. Because he recognized that frequency. It was the frequency that had destroyed his family years ago, shattering his mind and trapping him within this colorful freak costume.
The noise cut off as abruptly as it had begun. Silence descended upon the street like a blow heavier than the sound itself.
From the opened panel of the booth, Jester pulled out a burnt, smoking circuit board. On the board, etched into the melted plastic, a tiny, phosphorescent symbol glowed: **An hourglass with sand flowing upwards.**
Kaelen approached, looking at the card in Jester's hand. "The Syndicate," he spat. "Them again? They're trading in fear."
Jester flipped the circuit board between his fingers like a coin, then dropped it into his pocket. He put on his clown smile again. But this time, the smile wasn't a joke, but an open threat.
"No," Jester said, turning his back and beginning to walk into the darkness. "This isn't the Syndicate's work. They're merchants, not artists. Nor is this the work of an amateur hacker."
He stopped, turning his head slightly back. The rain had made the black tear paint on his face run a little further down, making his mask even more tragic.
"Someone left the door open, Detective. And something has escaped from inside. I think we'll be working overtime tonight."
Kaelen shouted after the receding purple silhouette in the rain. "Where are you going?"
"To make a phone call," Jester said. His voice echoed in the darkness, as if coming from multiple places at once. "But I won't be using a coin."
As Jester turned the street corner, the rhythm of his heart—or that deep void in his chest—had changed. He looked at his trembling hands. Beneath his skin, he could see a grey, static-filled parasite flowing through his veins instead of blood. His veins pulsed like a corrupted television broadcast.
*1989 hadn't returned,* he thought, gritting his teeth. *It had never left. It was just in standby mode.*
A colossal lightning bolt flashed over the city, but there was no thunder. No sound. Only the sky, for a moment, turned into a static-filled, grey screen, flickered, and then returned to that suffocating darkness.
The game had begun. And this time, not even cheat codes would save anyone.