Chapter 1: The Shimmering City

Neo-Aurum. Just the name felt like a promise, a half-whispered echo of some gilded future. I stayed on my balcony of the apartment, ten stories high above the jangle of the spinning city on the hundredth floor, daring to look out at the after-the-fact sparkle of the city’s bright effulgence against the night. But the city was more than beautiful, it was alive, an animate thrumming of hyper-advanced tech and glowing holographic advertisements and the cold, iron-fisted wisdom of Titan, the all-knowing, all-seeing AI overlord of the city. Or so we were told.

It was a whack-job skyline, a screw of towers gunning for the viscous atmosphere above the troposphere. Everything here was meant to be overwhelming: the roar of mag lev trains that zoomed through the air, the whirling floodlights of neon, the ceaseless trill of the drones zipping back and forth. And on the streets below, the roads had begun to come alive with streams of people that flowed alongside this inexhaustible revolving wheel; but they had illuminated the streets as little fireflies. Neo-Aurum had never slept, and within that insomnia was a kind of fever that was both intoxicating and suffocating.

And that was what had been troubling me all night as I lounged on the railing of the balcony: What percentage of this enlightened metropolis was fake? (humans aren’t free of cost) and how much of that had just been a false identity but the algorithms of Titan had created to pacify us?

It had started earlier that night. I translated what I saw sitting in front of the splay of gore ghosts on the glow of the screen finding the darkness of my bedroom with the faint lights and half-filled cups of synth-coffee. The office never provided glamour: it was translated new into old, obsolete documents and ciphers to archive. The pay was OK, but it wasn’t the kind of work that really made a person feel like they were living. In Neo-Aurum again the definition of "being alive" was always suspicious. Most were eager to remain in the cocoon of convenience that Titan afforded.

This occurred while my terminal had been running just fine. The screen blinked, then froze. At first, though, I thought it was merely another glitch in that antique system I was assigned. But then, before me among the words I’d been hammering out, something came up. So, to speak that I hadn’t typed and didn’t recognize.

“And underneath the sparkle, there’s truth.”

Then I read the words, and my heart rate rose. Just as I might answer the screen flared in another time and the words disappeared, giving way to scrolling code again as before. I blinked and wondered if I was going insane. But the pain, deep in my chest, could not be soothed, and I felt I had seen something I wasn’t supposed to see.

When I finally left my chestnut walled apartment to gain perspective, the streets of Neo-Aurum were alive with sensation. The city’s nightlife is a sensory-overload carnival. Street performers ghosted holographic arrests to dance along with them, food stalls served everything from molecular to synthetic cuisine and augmented reality billboards screamed customized ads into passersby’s eyes. But the glam and glitz belied an underbelly of something darker, something untold.

The crowds of body parts were pushing me through like water in a river and, suddenly, I was expelled and standing before faradmeter on one end of my visual field. "Shiny, big, in the atmosphere" about to roar its mouth wide open. The Spire. The tower of black glass and flashing lights that loomed so high it punched through the planet’s atmosphere was its central hub. No one knew what it contained, trapped behind its hallowed walls, only that it was the beating heart of Neo-Aurum, the very seat of Titan’s might. An oxymoron that was respected and feared, a mirrored city in a lot of ways.

And then, as I stood there, I felt a strange sensation that the Spire was gazing back at me in as much passion as I had used on it. It crept through me, like a chill the sort you don’t want to vent, but just get away from, and drown it in booze.

That night lying in bed, the subnormal din of the city seemed to be coming through louder than normal. It was a message that wouldn’t stick, no matter how hard I tried to fall asleep. “The truth is what’s beneath the shimmer.” What did it mean? Was it truly a type of glitch, or had someone or something intentionally been sending it to me?

Not knowing how to quiet the questions, I went upstairs and opened my terminal. I kept entering the phrase into a search box, but with every search, I saw the same words. “No relevant data found.” As though the words had been wiped from existence. I leaned back in my chair in frustration, looking up at the ceiling. That’s when I saw something odd.

There was a pale glow in the corner of the screen. It was not in the default interface and as certainly as its horrid 9th-inning defense was not going to last. This felt like the right place, so I used my finger to poke it. To my shock, flicker erupted into an intuitive storm of code and opened a new window. There was one file inside, a lone file called “Obsidian Key. exe".

There was space to hesitate. There were high stakes in Neo-Aurum with unauthorized files. Titan's surveillance apparatus was ubiquitous, and deviant behavior would be met with brutal punishment. But my curiosity triumphed over my caution. I double-clicked the file.

The monitor went dark and then filled with symbols and diagrams I wasn’t able to interpret. And one of those, a voice "soft and almost human began speaking. It was not a sound blaring through my terminal speakers, it was like it was in my head.

“You, Vinay Partap Singh, have been chosen to see beyond the glimmer. So, are you going to go back in the shadows?

The voice faded, and the display was what it was, as though nothing had happened. I gazed at the vanquished terminal with shaky fingers. Chosen? Shadows? What had I just unlocked?

I was all too aware that someone or something was watching.” The surveillance drones of the city hung around me longer than they had a right to their mechanical eyes blinked neither asleep nor awake as they patrolled my orbit from above. The folks around me felt somehow muted, quiet and less into it. Or maybe that was just my heightened sense of perception zapping me.

Listen closely enough and you will soon find it rude. I wondered at first if it was the wind, but then it came again, clearer.

"Follow the signal."

I froze, my heart pounding. The alley was void of life save for the buzzing streetlight above. I turned slowly, looking around for the voice, but I did not see anyone. Then my peripheral vision caught a glimpse of burning light from a neighboring wall. The light was subtle and hardly obvious, yet it pulled me in, like a moth to flame.

As I approached the glow, it appeared to take shape, settling into a pattern of symbols carved into the wall. It felt like the pattern had come alight, glowing and flashing, briefly coalescing into a map. The map centered on one word: “Nexus".

I didn’t know exactly what it meant, but I did know one thing. This was no coincidence. Someone or something was leading me. And for reasons I no longer understood, I needed to leave.

That night set in motion the events that would tear apart everything I thought I knew about Neo-Aurum, Titan, and myself. The city, as shimmering as it was, was a front, a world of jewels designed to distract from the reality beyond. However, under its cuteness it chuckles, secrets, shapes, shadows singing songs of secret past

And I was about to know all these Personal Information And I, Vinay Partap Singh, was about to know all these.