Chapter 8: The Trauma Engine

Chapter 8: The Trauma Engine

The Underside offered no comfort. It was a dimension built of echoes, and now, it echoed Lux’s pain. She was on her knees on the ground of shattered glass, her form a violent, glitching cascade of identities. One moment she was a willowy figure in a silver gown, the next a sharp-suited androgyne with hair like spun starlight, then a half-formed sketch of a woman whose features dissolved like ink in water. The memetic virus wasn't killing her; it was un-writing her, deleting the very concept of her from the inside out.

"It's... the syntax," she choked out, her voice a discordant chorus of static and her own melodic tones. "My... story... it's losing its grammar."

My immediate goal slammed into focus with brutal clarity: I had to save her. But this wasn't a wound I could bind or a poison I could suck out. The virus was a piece of the Reality Editor's own source code. It was a narrative weapon, and I was a detective, not a storyteller. I knelt beside her, the glowing Pez dispenser in my hand feeling like a useless, childish toy. Its simple joy was powerless against this complex, calculated negation.

The obstacle was the nature of the enemy itself. How do you fight an idea? How do you cure a disease that attacks the very language of existence? My Lítost, my trauma-sight, could feel the viral code pulsing within her, a cold, alien logic that was systematically dismantling the beautiful chaos of her being. It felt familiar. Terrifyingly familiar. The signature, that corrupted, spiraling symbol I had seen in Dapper Dan's final moments, was the same one now eating Lux alive.

And it was the same signature I had been running from my entire life.

It was a phantom itch in the back of my skull, a ghost in my own machine. The Underside had dredged it up, shaping the landscape into the factory from my past. It had been showing me the answer all along, screaming it at me in plumes of ashen regret. The key to understanding the virus wasn't in Lux; it was in me. The Editor had experimented before. Dapper Dan wasn't its first deletion.

The price of saving Lux was to finally face the memory I had walled off with years of cynicism and whiskey. I had to return to the source of my power and my pain, to the incident in Chicago. I had to stop being a visitor to my own haunting and become its examiner.

"Lux," I said, my voice tight. "Hold on. I have to go back."

She managed to focus one glitching, emerald eye on me. There was no witty retort, only a flicker of raw fear and a desperate, silent plea.

I closed my eyes. The action was deliberate, a conscious choice to drown. I let go of the present, of the broken glass desert and the wounded Fae beside me. I pushed past the mental scar tissue, the warning sirens in my head, and dove headfirst into the memory.

It wasn't a flashback. It was a full sensory immersion.

The biting Chicago wind, smelling of iron and impending snow. The cacophony of the factory district. And the specific, unique smell of my family's workshop: hot metal, ozone from the enchantment forges, and my father's pipe tobacco. The Vektors weren't just workers; we were artisans. We worked with memory-alloys and narrative filigree, crafting objects that held stories. We were an anachronism, an old-world craft in a new-world city. A small, fading story.

In my memory, I am twenty-two again, a prodigy investigator for the ABI, cocky and brilliant, visiting my family on a day off. My father is showing me a piece of polished silver he'd coaxed a snippet of a lullaby into. My mother is laughing, her hands covered in grease and glowing faintly with residual magic. They were happy. They were real.

Then, the whine. A high-frequency sound that wasn't sound, a pressure building in the center of the workshop. The ABI had flagged a minor reality fissure nearby, a common enough occurrence in the industrial zones. My memory, the story I told myself for years, was that it destabilized. A freak accident. A one-in-a-million catastrophe.

But this time, I wasn't just remembering. I was investigating.

I pushed past the tidal wave of grief that always swamped me at this point. I focused, using my Lítost not as a sensor for pain but as a forensic lens. I looked at the "fissure." It wasn't a wild tear of chaotic, multi-colored energy like every other fissure I had ever seen. It was a cold, controlled breach. A monochrome wound in reality, buzzing with black-and-white static. And inside the static, I saw them—churning, flickering logos for products that didn't exist, angry online comments given fleeting form, hashtags about outrage.

It was the Editor.

My breath hitched in the real world, a ragged gasp. The memory sharpened. I saw the dark stylus, the weapon of nonexistence, emerge from the static. It didn't lash out. It simply touched a central support beam of the workshop, a beam my grandfather had forged, one that held the story of our family's beginning.

The result wasn't an explosion of force. It was an explosion of nothing. The beam didn't break; it was deleted. And where it had been, for a single, horrifying frame of existence, the Editor’s signature burned itself into the air—the corrupted, spiraling icon. The structure, its narrative lynchpin erased, collapsed in on itself. Fire. Screams. Silence.

It wasn't an accident. It was an assassination. A deletion. My family hadn't been casualties of a natural disaster. They were a competing narrative that had been censored.

The surprise, the true horror, came a moment later in the memory. I saw myself, my younger self, being thrown clear by the initial implosion. I had always believed it was luck, a cruel twist of fate that let me live while they died. But now I saw it for what it was. It was intentional. I wasn't a survivor. I was a loose end, deliberately left untied.

The final, devastating truth slammed into me, rearranging my entire existence. The Editor didn't just want to erase my family. It wanted to create something from the void it left behind. It had planted the seed of that tragedy deep inside me, a memetic bomb of pure sorrow. And from that seed, my Lítost had bloomed—this terrible, beautiful curse, this ability to see and feel the stories and sorrows of the world.

It hadn't been a side effect. It had been the entire point of the exercise.

The Reality Editor hadn't just murdered my family; it had been grooming me. It had forged me into the perfect divining rod for fading stories. My grief, my all-consuming Lítost, was a beacon. Every time I felt the pang of a dying narrative, every time my soul resonated with a forgotten concept like Dapper Dan, I was unwittingly pointing the way for the Editor. I was its scout, its hunting dog. My pain was the power source for its search engine.

For six years, I had been the villain's unknowing accomplice. I wasn't just a haunted detective. I was the Trauma Engine.

I opened my eyes, wrenched back to the present of the Underside. The shattered glass landscape seemed to mock me. I looked at Lux, her body still flickering, a victim of the same cosmic vandal that had built its empire on the foundation of my broken heart. My guilt, my grief, my entire identity—it had all been a lie, a tool crafted by my greatest enemy.

A cold, diamond-hard fury replaced the grief. It was a feeling so pure and absolute it burned away the pain. The weeping was over.

The harvest is over.