Tumblebyte: Boot Sequence

The Wastes don’t scream. They watch.

The sun, if it could still be called that, hung like a holed pixel in the yellowed sky. The air shimmered not from heat—but from distortion. Radiation. Scrap interference. Old signal ghosts.

Calder Rix sat atop a stuttering hoverbike that wheezed more than it hovered, a hybrid of saddle leather and scavenged cooling fans. The bike was half-tuning fork, half-animal. Beneath him, it pulsed in rhythmic vibrations, droning in syncopated binary tones that only cowboys and old programs could read.

Ahead, the town of Lornjack hovered on the edge of a mesa like a memory someone had tried to forget and partially overwritten. Buildings listed sideways, held up by rust and defiance. Neon sand had crusted along every seam. The town’s perimeter lights blinked in desperate Morse code—Calling what? Warning whom?

Calder pulled a cassette from the lining of his coat.

A worn label read: “SOFT QUIET // 48KB TRK” in cramped, smudged handwriting.

He held it in his palm for a long moment, letting the silence press against his thoughts. Then he clicked it into the recessed chamber of his weapon—a revolver carved from motherboard fragments, capped in nickel. The gun spat out a half-second of feedback, then purred.

He holstered it.

No rush. Gunslinger protocol.

He didn’t ride right in. He walked the final stretch, leading the hoverbike by loose reins. Dust kicked up around his boots in slow spirals. The wind was not wind. It was audio static—barren and low.

Somewhere to his left, a windchime made of keyboard keys jangled without melody.

The Jittered Chip, the saloon at the center of Lornjack, rose out of the dust like an unrendered dream. Its siding was glass from melted monitors. The faded sign flickered erratically:

> CHIP > CHIP > CHIP > JITTER > _ >

Calder stepped inside.

Instant silence.

Not the kind that welcomes, but the kind that holds its breath.

Four figures sat across three tables. One android leaned against the bar, ventilator steaming from the mouthlike slit in its faceplate.

Everyone looked up, sluggish and unsynced.

He stood in the threshold, letting their processors begin to understand his presence. That moment, that beat: the loading screen of violence. In some towns it took seconds. Lornjack took longer. Perhaps it had grown used to ghosts.

Finally someone chuckled.

“Still runnin’ with tape, huh?”

A beefy man with optical implants leaned forward, skin like scorched carbon. Laughter like a low reboot sound.

Calder didn’t answer. Didn’t need to.

He scanned the room: a jukebox in the corner glowing fading magenta. It pulsed, waiting to be touched. On its crown, a cracked speaker emitted the soft hum of a paused track. That sound—the loop—was the real heartbeat of the room.

Behind the bar, a woman in a cropped duster jacket and a hat built from 3D-printed bone gave him a nod. Her eyes flickered with a lagged refresh rate.

Cassette Mary.

First familiar face in a dozen miles of grid-silence.

Calder approached and said three words for the first time in days.

“I need data.”

A pause.

Mary blinked, her interface asking questions across the air—encrypted low-band, only Calder’s neural node could catch. Static scratched across their link like dry brush.

“You bring coin?”
“I bring questions.”
“That currency’s unstable here.”

Behind him, the android at the wall pushed off with a hydraulic hiss.

Deputy Dawes. Red-badge model. No mouth.

Whole face replaced with an interface grid glowing faint blue over polished steel. A floating voice emitted behind him—warm, sampled mid-western, uncannily casual:

“We frown on strangers speakin’ to the saloon’s motherboard without a license.”

Calder didn’t turn.

Instead, he pushed one gloved finger toward Mary’s console. It accepted his DNA—not willingly, but firmly—and blinked a red ACCEPTED.

Slowly, he unholstered the revolver.

It didn’t click. It whirred—like loading your favorite gun from a forgotten video game.

He pointed it at the floor between his boots.

“Not here for trouble.”

“Good,” the voice replied, tightening in tone, the warmth peeling away. “Because this town’s already crashed twice.”

Three long seconds passed.

Then the revolver heat-cycled back to idle. Calder re-holstered it.

Deputy Dawes shifted paradigms and returned to the wall.

Mary slid a black cartridge across the bar toward him. Unmarked. Ominous. Glowing.

“Rumors fly, Calder. Archive Below woke up last week. Screamed across the network like a god waking up too fast.”

Calder picked up the cartridge. He felt it hum like a live wire.

“That archive,” he said quietly, “has my daughter’s name in it.”

End Chapter One.