Chapter one
CHAPTER ONE
THE SENTENCE OF THE CODE
What was misfortune to Tobias?
A statistical error? Or perhaps the acceptance of an indifferent universe?
No.
It was, rather, the shadow of an abominable presence, an incessant and freezing wave crashing against the fragile cliffs of his sanity.
With every awakening, Tobias felt the weight of a cruel destiny: he felt like an actor forced to inhabit a character that did not reflect him. The life he lived was nothing more than a staging orchestrated by a sadistic consciousness, aimed at turning every existence into an infinite play, performed by unaware actors. Tobias’s misfortune was certainly a mocking free will: the freedom to choose how to fail.
This constant sequence of defeats had infused him with a fatalism and an intellectual rage that isolated him from a conceited humanity. Tobias Schwarz lived off a precarious job that barely served to pay the rent for his damp studio apartment. By trade, he was the night watchman of the municipal historical archives, a job chosen unconsciously to justify his solitude and for the possibility of living outside of time.
He had no contact with the public, but with tons of paper: every page was witness to a narrative he intuitively knew to be a lie—a false history concealing a true cosmic war. His safe haven, his only certainty, was the basement, a dark crypt with oppressive walls, steeped in the smell of mold and suspended time, where the section of apocryphal history and heretical manuscripts lay rotting: a warehouse of lost knowledge and forbidden truths.
The Diluted Soul and the Theater of Illusion
Working at night was his lifeline because it offered him the illusion of escaping control, as if the darkness could hide him; the real terror arrived when the shift ended, and he was forced out under the blinding sun of the ordinary. Often he tried to arrive at work early; he would sit behind his desk and, through the bars of the window, despite feeling as if in prison, he watched the sun set, especially on winter days. Then he waited for the night; observing the starry sky fascinated him. The light of the stars… that light was a heartbreaking memory for him.
In the deepest part of his self, he saw that light: it was something he perceived as belonging to "another," and confirming this, in certain moments, he remembered fragments of life that were not his own. Often a voice overlapped with his thinking: a sort of positive alien possession, yet obsessed with a fixed thought about the surrounding world, astonished at watching humanity toil in vain. What an irritating interference. Hard to drive away, too… damn it! Often, the reflections Tobias made belonged to "that one"... or so he believed.
He had his theories: there were the Empty Shells, human beings whose Ahrimanic bodies—to put it in Gnostic terms—moved by pure inertia, soul-less automatons devoted to consumption and reproduction; swallowed in an infinite karmic recycling, a serpent eating its own tail in an unconscious manner. And then there were the Souled Bodies… poor souls… and he felt he was one of them.
He had tried to express these considerations to someone, but he soon stopped. Too many times he had seen in others a look suspended between pity for a psychopath and the annoyance of someone who doesn't want to understand anything that might change their life. But his greatest sorrow was represented by those humans gifted with rare sparks of consciousness. He watched them struggle in the stubborn attempt to build beauty, justice, or love in a world that Tobias knew was simply useless.
They were shackled souls, condemned to waste their precious energy in the "infinite play" of reincarnation. Tobias empathically perceived their frustration and their tears of despair, and he suffered deeply for it.
Order as Lucid Madness and Insathomable Horror
That basement was his only den, the only refuge where he could impose his rules: his absolute order. He worked with worn white gloves, not to protect the volumes, but out of a mad obsession not to contaminate his perfect order, which he desperately sought to maintain. This obsession was his defense against the constant attack of invisible forces, his frustrated awareness's attempt to create a barrier against the negative opinion of the conditioned masses.
He often experienced moments of irrational fear, like panic attacks, perhaps linked to a memory of past trauma, but also to the idea that something was about to repeat itself… though he didn’t know what. He only knew that the cause of his unease was not his overdrawn bank account or his broken car.
It was his visions: sudden interruptions of reality, intrusions of something that did not belong to the "Here and now" and that left his "flesh vector" trembling. They were visions of a Coherent Chaos: a horror of divergent geometric tangles, figures that defied the laws of visual perception and inflicted unbearable mental pain. They were the Architects of the Game, entities of cold statistical calculation, whose language was the very scaffolding of reality.
A memory from when he was about six years old often surfaced in his mind, a trauma that had scarred him forever and that he could not erase. He would wake up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat, screaming: "They are coming!". Even at an early age, therefore, the hidden Entities populated his nightly nightmares.
Cosmic Insult and the Vertigo of Logic
Misfortune always hit him with surgical precision. Tobias felt as if he were inside a container that wasn't his; an animic spark chained in a biological organism assigned by God-knows-who. One day like any other, while deciding what to wear for work, he looked inside his old wardrobe. He saw his best suit: the stain was still there, on the famous jacket, never gone despite everything. It hadn't been an accident; it was the mark of a failure orchestrated by an invisible laugh.
He remembered that particular day. A competition for a janitor position in an elementary school, finally a permanent job. He had prepared carefully, wearing his best suit, bought second-hand at a local street market. As he walked, a pigeon hit him from above. A white, foul-smelling stain, right on the shoulder. He tried to remove it, doing more damage than ever. Then, acting indifferent, he looked at it and said to himself: "It doesn't show," and continued with resignation.
Arriving at the school, he had found firefighters and police.
"The competition is off, the boiler room exploded. The building is permanently condemned," the president of the examining board told him. The written and oral exams had been cancelled, his hopes shattered.
Trying to banish that depressing memory—one of many, unfortunately—Tobias left the house and took refuge in a bar for a boiling coffee. He remained staring into space with the cup in his hand for an indefinite time. It was a place he liked because it was family-run; he knew the owner who often, knowing his meager finances, offered him a few free coffees. Every event was a boulder, an arrow shot to destroy him according to an obscure design.
Sometimes he thought he was getting used to this way of life, especially because he saw others in his same condition: perhaps he was just someone who complained and that was it, who didn't see the beauty that God had made anyway. He had tried to think of Nature as part of creation, with its beautiful breathtaking landscapes, the beauty of the sea, the waterfalls… certainly, it wasn't all bad. But even the vision of animals as cuddly plush toys was swept away by the thought that a poor herbivore lived in terror of being mauled, while a carnivore had the embarrassment of riches in choosing whom to eat… a true horror.
Often, however, he pretended that all these absurd theories of manipulative Archons and beings who were always passive observers of what happened to others were true. The conclusion he reached disturbed him a bit: he could be one of the few who had understood, someone to be eliminated… the Cosmic Mafia… what a bizarre idea! Yet the thing that terrified him most was that if this reasoning was correct, sooner or later, they would eliminate him for good!
Suddenly he returned to reality, looked at the clock… he was still in time to get to work on time.
The Shock and the Shadow of the Blues
That night, in the archives, the hum of the neon lights was unbearable. An old electrical outlet next to the shelf of apocryphal history sparked dangerously, interrupting his sacred mission of bringing order. Putting things in place: a true obsession for him. It consisted of aligning the spines of the books in the wooden shelves of the archive: they had to stay ten centimeters and no more from the edge.
Tobias, annoyed by this bothersome interruption, took a screwdriver with a chipped handle from a desk drawer, determined to force those rebellious wires back into place. Everything out of place disturbed him! The instant the metal touched the exposed copper, reality decomposed. It wasn't a simple electric shock.
Through the delirium of the jolt, in a non-calculable time, Tobias perceived a misty intrusion of tall bluish and diaphanous beings, mysterious figures operating at the margins of human perception. Without a sound, these beings of cold light, through the electrical circuit, channeled an archaic signal into his body: like an impulse in cosmic Morse code, a technology forgotten for eons in the shape of an hourglass, which the Archons of the Game had stopped monitoring. Tobias was struck by a powerful anomalous energy, a gift from above that made him escape the prison of his oblivion, bringing forth a being that was dormant within him.
The Leap: The Eclipse of Kael
Time stopped for a fraction of a second: now Tobias's body was no longer in the basement, but in an Elsewhere where the exile of a strangely familiar being began: Kael… he felt this name as his own now. There was no roar, nor the clanking of chains; only the claustrophobic sensation of being enclosed in a small box and the horror of the permanent discomfort of a biological body.
Kael, who had once been Conscious Light, saw his punishment, the unjust sentence, and his fall. Tobias saw him forced into a narrow and dirty tunnel, then falling into a "flesh vector" made of blood, fragile bones, and animal needs: what a horror! Tobias saw the divine entity—now himself—chained to impossible geometries created by the ruthless Architects of the Game. He felt the unpleasant sensation Kael had for that biological shell that forced him to forget Eternity. In that flash of pain, a truth was screamed into his mind:
"Equilibrium is stasis, and stasis is death!"
The Awakening in the Fortress
The shock threw him onto the cold concrete floor. Tobias, chilled, reopened his eyes amidst the smell of ozone and wet dog. The blue figures had vanished, leaving a trail of unexpected joy in his mind. Was it all true? A silence like a tinnitus surrounded him like a wall. He was alone again in his underground fortress, but now the doors of perception were wide open like never before!
Something had changed in him. The hourglass-shaped birthmark on his neck, which he had since birth, pulsed like an animated tattoo, an echo of the shock he had received. Tobias Schwarz looked at his hands, still smelling of burnt hair: he felt something flowing through his body that had reignited the consciousness of an ancient being. He was no longer just Tobias. He began to remember.
Kael was his true name.
Tobias punched the time clock and left the library. He headed slowly toward home, observing the city no longer as a prison, but as an energy flow diagram to be sabotaged. He knew he had to find Leo and Lyra, his dear friends, whom he had considered different from everyone he had known and whom he had jokingly called Naufraghi. An action plan had finally appeared. He looked toward the expanse of infinite buildings, wedged like pins… as the sun rose. He closed his eyes and a crystalline thought appeared in his mind: the war had just begun.
