The DEBUG sigil on Kaelen's tablet wasn't just a label; it was an interface. A gateway to the Tier-1 Resource Access granted by Auditor-7. It presented him with stark, utilitarian menus: [SALVAGE REQUISITION], [ANOMALY LOG (READ-ONLY)], [NON-CRITICAL WORK ORDERS].
He felt like a junior technician who'd just been given the keys to the supply closet and a list of broken appliances to fix. It was terrifying and exhilarating in equal measure.
The salvage requisition system was a revelation. He could order specific components from Versity salvage depots—not the picked-over Null Quarter trash, but organized repositories of decommissioned tech from all districts. He had points, apparently—DEBUG Credits—allocated based on his "provisional" status. They weren't much, but they were real.
His first order was practical: a multi-spectral diagnostic probe (damaged, but repairable), a set of calibrated resonance crystals, and a cartography drone core that could be repurposed as a mobile sensor platform. He spent half his credits.
The anomaly log was a quiet horror show. Scrolling through it was like reading the medical chart of a dying giant. Hundreds of minor, persistent malfunctions across the Versity: power fluctuations in forgotten conduits, unstable environmental fields in storage vaults, data-stream corruptions in archival systems. Most were marked [PRIORITY: LOW] or [IMPACT: NEGLIGIBLE]. They were the aches and pains of an unimaginably vast organism, ignored because there were always bigger fires to fight—like the Silence consuming entire realities.
These were the bugs no one had time to fix. His new job description.
The first work order that pinged his attention wasn't from the log. It was a direct, personal message routed through his DEBUG sigil, but not from an auditor. The sender ID was [ENGINE OF GENESIS - MAINTENANCE SUB-DIRECTORATE KAPPA].
[REQUEST FOR CONSULTATION: MATTER RECYCLER THETA-12.]
[LOCATION: FOUNDATION VAULTS, SECTOR 7 (ADJACENT TO YOUR PREVIOUS NODE ACCESS).]
[ISSUE: PERSISTENT JAMS. CAUSE UNDIAGNOSED. CONVENTIONAL DIAGNOSTICS INCONCLUSIVE. SYSTEMS LOGS SHOW MINOR, UNEXPLAINED RESONANCE ANOMALIES PRECEDING EACH JAM. GIVEN YOUR DEMONSTRATED EXPERTISE WITH RESONANT SYSTEM FAILURES, YOUR INPUT IS REQUESTED. COMPENSATION IN DEBUG CREDITS OR ENGINE MATERIALS AVAILABLE.]
The Engine of Genesis was reaching out. Not the upper echelons, but the grimy under-workings. They had a broken recycler and their own techs couldn't figure out why. They'd heard of the "resonance fixer" from the Spire incident.
This was different. This was a request. Not an assignment from an auditor or a patron. A professional query.
He accepted, citing a time during the next low-activity cycle.
The entrance to the Engine of Genesis's lower vaults was through a massive, riveted airlock door that hissed open to reveal a world of industry. The air was warm, smelling of ozone, hot metal, and the strange, sweet scent of freshly synthesized matter. The space was cavernous, lit by the harsh blue-white glow of arc-welders and plasma torches. Conveyor belts the size of highways carried raw and processed materials into the gloom. In the distance, the deep, rhythmic thrum of the Genesis Core was a physical presence.
A drone—a floating platform with multiple manipulator arms—zipped up to him. [FOLLOW.] it displayed on a small screen, then sped off into a side tunnel.
The tunnel led to a smaller, but still vast, chamber housing Matter Recycler Theta-12. It was a monstrous assembly of crushers, molecular disassemblers, and elemental sorters, all currently silent and dark. A group of four beings in grease-stained overalls of copper-colored material were gathered around a open access panel, arguing. They were a mix: a humanoid with metallic skin and lens-covered eyes, a crystalline entity that shifted shapes as it spoke, a floating brain-creature surrounded by tool-tendrils, and a short, stocky being that looked carved from granite.
The drone deposited Kaelen at the edge of their circle. They turned. The metallic one, apparently the lead, scanned him with a visible laser grid from one eye.
"You are the DEBUG consultant? The resonance specialist?" Its voice was a synthesized buzz.
"Kaelen."
"I am Forgemaster Grint. This," he gestured at the silent mountain of machinery, "is the problem. Recycles standard composite debris from the lower vaults. Jams every 47 to 53 cycles. Not on any specific material. We've replaced the crusher bearings, the disassembler matrix, the sorter optics. We've run diagnostics on the power grid, the control logic, the structural integrity field. Everything reads nominal until the moment it jams. Then, it's like the entire process flow… seizes. Not mechanically. Energetically."
Kaelen approached the open panel. It revealed the primary disassembler chamber—a space where focused energy fields should have been tearing matter apart at the molecular level. Now it was dark, cold, and contained a half-processed lump of something that looked like melted glass and twisted rebar.
"Can you show me the resonance anomaly logs?" he asked.
The crystalline entity shifted, projecting a hologram from its core. Waveforms appeared, showing the recycler's normal operational resonance—a steady, complex hum of energies. Then, a timestamp. A tiny, almost imperceptible glitch in the waveform. A slight, shuddering dip in frequency across multiple bands. Ten seconds later, the waveform flatlined as the jam occurred.
"That glitch," Kaelen said. "It's not a spike. It's a loss. A draining. Something is briefly sucking a specific frequency out of the system, causing a cascading failure."
"Impossible," the brain-creature chimed in, its tool-tendrils twitching. "The recycler's resonance field is self-contained. Shielded. Nothing external should be able to interact with it so specifically."
"Unless the external factor is already inside the shielding," Kaelen said. He activated his Sonic Resonator Array and his upgraded Tri-Channel scanner. "Something that arrives with the feedstock."
He scanned the jammed material in the chamber. His instruments pinged immediately. Buried within the inert lump was a faint, but distinct, resonant signature. It was a quiet, absorbent frequency. A frequency that drank specific kinds of energy.
It was familiar. Not the pangalosome's stealth, nor the entropy's decay. This was something else. Something… hungry.
He pulled up the DEBUG anomaly log on his tablet, searching for similar signatures. He found a match, marked as a [MINOR NUISANCE] in the Celestial Peak's Root-Farm Silo 9: "Intermittent failure of nutrient-dispersion enchantments. Traces of anomalous energy-absorbent residue found."
Another, from the [Spire of Thaum's Low-Grade Mana Conduit G-42]: "Periodic pressure drops. Conduit walls show microscopic pitting, resonant scans indicate localized energy drain."
It was the same signature. A parasite. Not for flesh or spirit, but for process energy. It was infesting the Versity's utility systems, causing tiny, inexplicable failures.
"This isn't a mechanical fault," Kaelen announced to the waiting engineers. "It's an infestation. A resonant parasite. It hitches a ride in the feedstock—probably in bits of dead reality-stuff that haven't been fully sanitized. When it reaches an active energy field like your disassembler, it activates and feeds, sucking the resonance out of the system long enough to cause a cascading jam. Then it goes dormant again, looking like inert debris."
Forgemaster Grint's lenses whirred. "A parasite. For resonance. How do we kill it?"
"You don't kill a frequency. You disrupt it. Overwhelm it." Kaelen thought quickly. The parasite was a drain. To overwhelm it, you'd need a surge of the exact resonance it was trying to consume. But that would require knowing the recycler's operational frequency and flooding the chamber with it at the moment of infestation, which was impossible to predict.
Unless…
"You said it jams every 47 to 53 cycles? That's regular. It's following a feeding cycle. We can predict the next one." He checked his tablet's chronometer against the last jam log. "Next window opens in… six hours."
"Can you build something in six hours?" the granite-being rumbled, its first words sounding like stones grinding.
"I can try." Kaelen opened his salvage requisition menu. He needed components for a Resonance Surge Capacitor. Something that could store a massive charge of the recycler's specific operational frequency and release it all at once, in a burst designed to overload and shatter the parasitic resonance.
He spent his remaining DEBUG credits on a high-density crystal battery and a programmable frequency emitter. The Engine engineers, intrigued, provided him with a workbench and tools far superior to anything in the Null Quarter. For the next five hours, he worked in a state of flow, the engineers watching, occasionally offering technical insights about energy field harmonics that he translated into his own code.
He programmed the emitter with the recycler's precise operational frequency, then connected it to the battery via a relay that would only trigger when it detected the characteristic "drain" glitch of the parasite.
It was a resonant landmine.
An hour before the predicted window, they installed it. He placed the Surge Capacitor inside the disassembler chamber, magnetically clamped to the wall, its sensor pointed at the feedstock intake.
"Now we run it," Grint said.
They cleared the jam, closed the panel, and initiated a standard recycling cycle from a small test batch of inert matter. The great machine came to life with a deep roar. Crushers ground. Energy fields hummed. Conveyors rattled.
Kaelen watched his scanner, superimposed on the recycler's own diagnostic feed. The operational resonance waveform was a steady, powerful hum on his screen.
Forty-nine cycles into the run, the waveform shuddered.
The drain glitch appeared. The parasite, arriving with a new piece of feedstock, had activated and begun to feed.
The Surge Capacitor detected it instantly.
It discharged.
There was no explosion of light or sound. Instead, a focused, invisible tsunami of perfectly tuned resonant energy filled the disassembler chamber. On Kaelen's scanner, the parasitic drain signature didn't just vanish—it bloomed for a fraction of a second, overwhelmed by the energy it was trying to consume, and then shattered into harmless background noise.
The recycler's waveform stuttered, then stabilized. The machine didn't jam. It continued its cycle, processing the material smoothly.
The engineers watched their own monitors, then each other, then the humming, functioning machine.
"It… worked," the crystalline entity said, its form flickering in surprise.
Forgemaster Grint turned to Kaelen. "You diagnosed an unknown systemic parasite and engineered a countermeasure in six hours." It wasn't a question. It was a statement of stunned fact. "Our entire diagnostic division has been baffled by this for 200 cycles."
"You were looking for broken parts," Kaelen said, powering down his equipment. "The parts were fine. The problem was in the signal."
Grint processed this. Then he extended a metallic hand. A data-chip extruded from a port in his palm. "Your compensation. DEBUG Credits, as agreed. And a bonus: full schematics for the Surge Capacitor you just built, filed under your designation. The Engine values practical solutions. You have our attention."
Kaelen took the chip. It wasn't just payment. It was recognition. His tool was now part of the Engine's database.
As he was escorted back to the airlock, his tablet pinged with a flood of new messages. Not from the DEBUG log, but from other sub-directorates within the Engine, and similar low-level maintenance divisions in the Spire and even the Celestial Peak's auxiliary services. Word was spreading. The "resonance fixer" who solved problems no one else could diagnose.
He had a reputation. And a growing client list.
Back in Berth 42, exhausted but buzzing with a new kind of energy, he uploaded the Surge Capacitor schematic to his personal library. He reviewed the new messages. A stuck weather-control rune in the Peak's auxiliary gardens. A flickering memory-crystal in the Spire's archives. A misaligned gravity regulator in the Null Quarter's own neglected gymnasium.
Small problems. Insignificant in the grand scheme of the dying multiverse.
But to Kaelen, they were lines of code in the great program of the Apex Versity. And he was the only one with the compiler to fix them.
He was no longer just an error, a null, or a DEBUG tool for the auditors.
He was becoming the Provisional Engineer. The fixer of forgotten things. And in a universe racing toward silence, even the smallest working part was a act of defiance.
He selected the next work order. The flickering memory-crystal. It sounded like a corrupted file.
He knew what to do.