NULL AND RISING

  Book One: Sovereign Embryo

  Chapter 9: Anomalies

  Tuesday was the last ordinary day.

  He did not know this when he woke. He knew it later, looking back, the way you know the last time you did something only after you have stopped doing it — retrospectively, with the specific clarity of hindsight that is useless in every practical sense but impossible to ignore.

  He woke at 6:58 again. The same seventeen minutes before the alarm. He lay in the dark and noted this with the mild interest of someone who has recorded the same anomaly enough times that it has graduated from anomaly to pattern, which raises a different set of questions. His body had been waking him early for a week. He did not know what it was preparing for.

  Teddy was not on the bed.

  This was unusual. He registered it before he was fully awake — the absence of the specific warm weight that had migrated to the adjacent pillow over six months and had been there every morning since. He sat up. The flat was quiet in the particular way of very early morning, the city not yet fully committed to the day. He listened for a moment.

  From the other room: nothing. But not the nothing of an empty room. The nothing of a room with something in it that was being very still.

  He got up.

  Teddy was at the window. The same window, the same position, the same orientation he had held for days — but something was different tonight. Igor stood in the doorway and looked at him and tried to identify what was different and after a moment understood: Teddy's fur was slightly raised. Not dramatically. Not the full-body response of a threatened cat. Just a faint elevation along the spine, the kind that happened below conscious feline decision-making, the body responding to a signal the mind had not yet categorised.

  Igor stood there for a moment. Then he went to the kitchen and made coffee.

  He did not call Teddy away from the window. Whatever Teddy was receiving, interrupting it seemed wrong in a way he couldn't articulate. He made his coffee and stood at the kitchen window instead, looking at the courtyard. 6:58am. Dark. The television-watcher's window was dark. All the windows were dark. The city was still.

  And then, very briefly — two seconds, perhaps three — the pressure in his ears spiked.

  Not the low-level constant presence he had been living with for a week. A spike — sudden, significant, the altitude-change sensation magnified to something that made him grip the counter's edge without meaning to. Then it receded. Back to the baseline. Back to the low steady hum that had become so familiar he had stopped registering it.

  He stood at the counter with his hand on its edge and breathed carefully and waited to see if it happened again.

  It did not.

  He released the counter. He drank his coffee. He noted the time: 7:03am. He noted the duration: approximately three seconds. He noted the intensity: significantly above baseline. He filed it.

  From the other room, Teddy made a sound — not a meow, not any sound Igor had a name for. Something low and brief and not repeated. Then silence.

  "I know," Igor said.

  He arrived at NetCore at 8:02. Markus glanced at the clock. Igor sat down.

  The office had a different quality this morning. He noticed it before he could name it — a thinness to the usual ambient noise, the way a room sounds when the people in it are listening for something rather than talking over it. Jana was at her desk but not working. She was looking at her phone with the expression Igor had seen on the tram passenger three weeks ago — too concentrated, slightly afraid, re-reading.

  Markus was making coffee at 8:05, which was forty minutes earlier than usual.

  Benny was not in yet.

  Igor opened his ticket queue. Fourteen new overnight. He processed the first three with the mechanical efficiency of someone doing a familiar thing while the part of his mind that did the thinking was engaged elsewhere. The spike that morning. Teddy's raised fur. The sound Teddy had made that had no name.

  At 8:34 Benny arrived. He did not sit on the desk. He pulled a chair directly to Igor's workstation and sat in it and turned his monitor so they could both see it and said: "Look at this."

  It was the university research aggregator he had found last week — the one compiling global signal reports. The map Igor had seen at 89 cities. He looked at the current count.

  141.

  "Since yesterday morning," Benny said. "That's — the doubling rate has accelerated again. It was doubling every four days, then every two, now it looks like every eighteen hours." He paused. "And it's not just count. The intensity is up. The Stockholm institute published an emergency addendum to their paper last night. They're using different language now."

  "What language."

  Benny pulled up the paper. It was dense and technical and Igor read the relevant section that Benny had highlighted: The signal demonstrates characteristics inconsistent with any known natural or anthropogenic source. Distribution analysis indicates simultaneous global presence rather than point-source propagation — meaning the signal is not moving from a source outward. It is simply present, everywhere at once, and increasing in amplitude.

  Igor read it twice.

  Everywhere at once.

  "Not moving from a source," he said.

  "Not a broadcast," Benny said. "Not anything being transmitted from somewhere. It's just — there. And getting louder." He was holding himself with the tension Igor recognised from the Hannover conversation — managing something in public space. But this was different from Hannover. Hannover had been personal, specific, one person he loved. This was not personal. This was the scale of something that did not have a personal register.

  "What are people saying?" Igor said.

  "Everyone is saying everything. Government statements, conspiracy theories, religious angles. The ones I find most interesting are the scientists who have stopped giving statements at all. Three separate research groups that were publishing updates daily went silent in the last twelve hours."

  "Why would they go silent?"

  "Because they found something and don't know how to say it. That's the only reason scientists go quiet." He paused. "Or they were told to."

  Igor thought about this. "Either way," he said, "the silence is information."

  Benny looked at him. "You know what it reminds me of?"

  "No."

  "The bit in the LitRPG books — " he stopped, slightly embarrassed, the embarrassment of someone raising a genre reference in a serious context. "You read them, right? You had one on your desk."

  "Yes."

  "The bit before the System arrives. The anomalies. The animals. The pressure. The part where everything is wrong in a way that doesn't have a name yet." He looked at Igor steadily. "I know that's — I know it sounds—"

  "I know what you mean," Igor said.

  Benny exhaled. "Right." He paused. "Right, okay." He seemed relieved to have said it and been understood rather than dismissed. "So what do we do?"

  "Today?"

  "Today."

  Igor looked at his ticket queue. "We work," he said. "There's nothing to do about it today. Tomorrow might be different."

  Benny looked at him for a long moment. Then he nodded, slowly, and pulled his chair back to his own desk, and put his headphones on, and began working.

  At 10:15, Jana called a brief all-hands.

  This happened rarely — four times in the two years Igor had been aware of Jana's all-hands frequency, each time in response to something structural: a company policy change, a client loss, once when the building management announced renovation work that would require temporary relocation. They were brief, structured, Jana in the front of the room with the body language of someone delivering information she has processed and packaged.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  Today she stood in the front of the room with the body language of someone who had processed the information and found that packaging it was not straightforward.

  "I wanted to check in with everyone," she said. "Given what's in the news. I know some of you may be — concerned. Or have family members who are concerned." She paused. "I don't have information beyond what's publicly available. But if anyone needs to — if there's a personal situation that requires—" She stopped. Found the end of the sentence. "My door is open."

  Silence.

  Markus said: "It's probably a natural phenomenon of some kind."

  Nobody agreed with this.

  Jana looked around the room. She looked, briefly, at Igor, which was the look of someone locating the one point of stability in a room that had become slightly unstable. Igor did not react. She found what she needed in the not-reacting and straightened slightly.

  "Alright," she said. "Let's get back to it."

  The all-hands lasted four minutes. Igor noted this. Jana usually prepared for six. She had cut it short because extending it would have required her to say more, and she did not have more to say that was true and useful simultaneously.

  He ate lunch at the window. Torgauer Stra?e, Tuesday commerce, the usual.

  Except not quite usual. He watched for three minutes before he identified what was different: the pace. People were moving differently — not faster exactly, but with a quality of intention that ordinary Tuesday lunch hour didn't have. The delivery cyclist who usually ran red lights was waiting at them. The woman with the grocery bag was walking at the pace of someone who had decided where she was going and wanted to be there. Two men outside the café across the street were not talking. They were standing with their coffees looking at the sky.

  Igor looked at the sky.

  Grey. Leipzig November grey. Nothing to see.

  He looked back down. The two men were still looking up.

  At 12:47 his phone buzzed. Not a message — a news alert from an app he had installed three days ago to track the signal reports. He had set the alert threshold at 150 cities. His phone was buzzing now.

  He opened it.

  153 cities.

  He closed the app and finished his bread.

  The afternoon had a compressed quality, as if time were moving at a slightly different rate than usual — not fast, not slow, but dense, each moment weighted with the accumulation of what the day had been building toward without arriving at. Igor processed seven tickets. Between the third and fourth he sat for thirty seconds doing nothing, which had not happened since he established the boring-first, interesting-last system four years ago.

  At 2:30 Benny sent a message to Igor directly rather than the office Slack: my girlfriend says her brother in Hannover says the hum is loud now. like actually audible. not just felt. she said he described it as — and I'm quoting — like a sound you've always been hearing but only just noticed.

  Igor read this. Typed back: Is he okay?

  Scared. But physically fine.

  Good.

  He put the phone down. He thought about the spike that morning — 7:03am, three seconds, significantly above baseline. He had not told anyone about that. He did not tell Benny now. There was nothing useful to add to it and the telling would only compound Benny's fear, which was already sufficiently compounded.

  He also thought about this: the brother in Hannover was hearing the hum now. Audible. But Igor, who had been feeling it in his ears for over a week, had not heard it. The pressure was there but not as sound. As something else.

  He filed this distinction without knowing what to do with it.

  At 4:15 the office lights flickered.

  Once. Two seconds of instability. Then steady again. Markus looked up at the ceiling. Jana's phone fell off her desk when she startled — she picked it up with the careful movement of someone pretending they had not startled. Benny went immediately to his monitor to check if anything had dropped.

  "Power surge," Markus said.

  Nobody agreed or disagreed.

  Igor looked at the time. 4:15pm. He thought about the pressure spike at 7:03am. Nine hours and twelve minutes between them. He did not know if the interval was meaningful. He filed it anyway.

  He worked until 5:31 and left.

  On the tram home he stood in the aisle and, for the first time in eight chapters of commuting, felt the pressure without having to notice it — it was strong enough now to be simply present rather than something he had to check for. A constant low pressure above the baseline, the note held at the edge of hearing. Not painful. But impossible to pretend wasn't there.

  The woman sitting nearest him was playing a game on her phone and did not seem to be experiencing anything unusual. The man across from her was reading. The group of students at the back were talking loudly about something. None of them showed any sign of what Igor was feeling.

  He thought about the brother in Hannover, hearing it audibly now. He thought about the spike at 7:03. He thought about the lights.

  He thought about everywhere at once. Not broadcasting from a source. Simply present. Getting louder.

  He got off the tram two stops early and walked.

  The evening was cold with the specific cold of a night that had decided on itself before dark — definitive, without the halfheartedness of the previous week's weather. He walked with his hands in his pockets and his breath visible and the pressure in his ears steady and present and, he now admitted to himself fully for the first time, not going away.

  He stopped in the small supermarket. He bought the usual groceries. He stood in the aisle for a moment and then, methodically, added to the basket: bottled water. Six litres. Two packs of energy bars, the dense kind. A first-aid kit he had been telling himself he would buy for two years. Batteries. A hand-cranked torch.

  He stood in the queue and looked at the basket and thought about what it said about his assessment of the situation.

  It said: by tomorrow, something may have changed that makes these things useful.

  He paid. He walked home.

  The flat was dark. Teddy was not in the hallway.

  He found him at the window again — same position, same orientation, the fur along his spine still slightly elevated. But there was something new: Teddy was making the sound again. Not constantly. In intervals. Every thirty seconds or so, the same low, brief, sourceless sound, directed at the window and whatever was beyond it.

  Igor put the shopping down. He went to the window and crouched beside Teddy and looked out.

  The courtyard: empty. The building opposite: lit windows, ordinary Tuesday evening. The sky above the buildings: dark now, the low cloud cover reflecting back Leipzig's ambient light in the amber-grey of the city at night.

  Nothing to see.

  He put his hand on Teddy's back. The raised fur was real under his palm — subtle, but real. Teddy did not startle at his touch. Did not look away from the window. Continued his intervals.

  They stayed like that for a while. Man and cat at the window. The city outside doing what it did. The pressure in Igor's ears steady and present and real.

  "Tomorrow," Igor said.

  Teddy was quiet for a moment. Then the sound again, low and brief.

  Igor took this as agreement.

  He cooked dinner. He ate it. He did not open his notebook — there was nothing new to account for, or rather, there was too much and none of it had resolved into sentences yet. He fed Teddy, who ate with unusual speed and returned immediately to the window.

  He tried to read. The new LitRPG, the early chapters, the pre-integration section where the protagonist was doing what Igor was doing now: watching the signs accumulate, counting down without knowing the number, preparing for something he couldn't name. He read thirty pages and absorbed approximately none of them.

  He put the book down.

  He sat in the quiet.

  At 9:17 his phone buzzed. A text from his mother — unusual, she called on Sundays and texted only when something was specific. The text said: the animals are strange tonight. the dogs are all howling. are you okay.

  He typed back: I'm okay. are you?

  Three minutes. Then: yes. I don't like this.

  I know. Lock the door tonight.

  A pause. Then: I always lock the door.

  I know.

  He put the phone down. He sat with the thought of his mother in the two-room house in Baranja with the cracked wall and the windows that didn't fully seal, with the dogs of the village all howling at once. She had lived alone there since his father left when Igor was six and she had managed it with the practical efficiency of a woman who had decided that circumstances were circumstances and the response to circumstances was function. She had never called it scary. She had said I don't like this, which from her was a significant statement.

  He went to the window. Teddy made space without being asked.

  They stood together at the window — the man and his cat — looking out at the courtyard and the building opposite and the amber-grey Leipzig sky, and the pressure in Igor's ears held steady and present, and somewhere in the building a door closed, and the tram ran on the distant main road, and the city breathed the way it always breathed, and it was a Tuesday night in November and everything was the same as it had always been and nothing was the same as it had ever been.

  His alarm was set for 7:15.

  He did not sleep for a long time.

  At 3:00am he woke without the alarm.

  He lay in the dark and did not move and listened.

  The pressure in his ears had changed. Not spiked — not the sharp event of the morning. Something different. It had deepened. Become more present. As if the note that had been held at the edge of hearing had moved, in the hours while he slept, from the edge to the center.

  Teddy was pressed against his side. Not the adjacent pillow — against him, contact, the full warm length of the cat's body against Igor's ribs. This had never happened before.

  Igor lay in the dark and breathed and felt the pressure and felt the cat and thought, with the clarity that sometimes came at 3am when everything else was stripped away:

  Tomorrow.

  Not dread. Not excitement. The clear, stripped-back awareness of a man who has spent his whole life preparing for things without knowing what the things would be, who has trained the preparation reflex until it is structural, who wakes at 3am in the dark the night before everything changes and feels, under the fear and the not-knowing and the pressure in his ears:

  Ready.

  Outside: 153 cities. Getting louder.

  The last ordinary night, not knowing it was the last.

  Seven hours until Wednesday.

  — ? —