Maybe Better To Start Like This

Prologue: Inherited Thesis

"I am so ill now and I..."

Click.

The recording had always ended there, cutting off mid-breath like a scream swallowed by static. Nikki stared at the console's single glowing prompt: INITIATE TRANSFERENCE PROTOCOL?

(Y/N)

Twenty-five years of silence pressed against her back. The empty house. The canned goods lined up like tombstones. The libraries full of ink-and-paper ghosts whispering about a world burdened by the "tyranny of knowledge."

Her sister's voice had been her thesis. Her parents were the primary sources she'd come to interview.

She pressed Y.

The world didn't fade. It shattered.

Chapter 1: The Sound of a Crowd

The noise hit her like a physical blow—a pressure wave that slammed into her chest and made her teeth ache. Nikki found herself on her hands and knees on gritty stone, the world a kaleidoscope of fractured motion.

Something warm and wet was trickling from her nose.

She touched her face. Her fingers came away red.

That's not supposed to happen this fast.

A car horn shrieked, followed by what sounded like the mechanical death-screams of tortured rubber. Beneath it all, some great subterranean beast groaned through the planet's bowels. Her mind, grasping for clinical detachment, labeled it: subway—as useful as naming the species of shark currently eating you.

She scrambled backward until her spine hit brick. The wall was her only anchor in a world that had become violent, churning fluid.

Analyze, commanded the voice in her head, the disciplined echo of twenty-five years of solitude.

Deconstruct the data.

Observation One: Auditory stimuli exceeding all researched parameters. A businessman was shouting into a small rectangular device about yogurt futures while consuming what appeared to be a sandwich made entirely of bacon.

Observation Two: The air itself was an antagonist—thick with the charred-meat perfume of street carts, the acrid sweetness of hot metal, and an underlying note of decay that suggested the entire population was either actively rotting or had catastrophically poor sanitation protocols.

Observation Three: The bipedal traffic operated on a principle of near-collision, a Brownian motion of staggering inefficiency.

The analysis collapsed under its own futility. This wasn't a system to be studied. It was entropy with a subway pass.

A specimen in a sweat-stained suit, radiating a personal olfactory field of stale coffee and existential despair, clipped her shoulder. The impact spun her halfway around. He flowed past without acknowledgment, his eyes fixed on some middle-distance salvation with the vacant intensity of a religious zealot.

She wasn't a person to him. She was a glitch in his GPS.

This was the world her parents had fled. The realization hit her with crystalline clarity. Not the "tyranny of knowledge"—the tyranny of a billion tiny collisions, and she had no armor.

Another drop of blood hit the pavement with an obscene little splatter.

Then, cutting through the chaos: a wail.

A small girl, maybe four, stood staring at a pink scoop of ice cream melting on the grimy sidewalk. Her face was a perfect portrait of tragedy. Her mother knelt—not with anger, but with a sigh that seemed to hold a universe of weariness and love.

"It's okay, sweetie. We'll get another."

Nikki stared, transfixed. She'd read about this. The algorithm of comfort. A simple, closed loop of irrational love. And watching it, a hollow space inside her chest—a space she'd never known was there—began to ache with the force of a physical blow.

She was a scholar who had memorized the entire library on warmth but had never once felt the sun.

Find sanctuary, her survival instinct commanded. Find silence.

Across the roaring river of yellow cabs, majestic and imperturbable, stood a fortress of organized thought. Stone lions flanked massive columns. Banners bore the holy sigil: a figure reading a book.

The New York Public Library.

She had to reach it. The street was an equation of speed and mass she couldn't solve, but the natives understood it. They clustered at the curb, waiting for a pictographic command: red hand (halt), countdown numerals (transition imminent), white walking figure (proceed).

When the little white man appeared, the herd surged. Nikki plunged in with them, her bag—containing her only possessions, the tape player and a faded photograph—clutched against her chest.

She reached the other side and stumbled up the marble steps, collapsing against a column. The cool stone was a balm. She'd navigated chaos. She'd imposed her will upon entropy.

A triumphant smile touched her lips.

Then she felt the next drop of blood gathering at the tip of her nose, fat and heavy with the weight of quantum certainty.

Rapid cellular degradation, Elara's file had warned. Consistent with incomplete waveform collapse... she's fading fast.

The roar of the city receded. The library, her symbol of sanctuary, suddenly felt like a mausoleum. Her quest to find her parents had just become a race against her own disintegration.

And she was already losing.