CHAPTER 5: The Signal in the Static
The blinking star on the Watchtower viewscreen was an obscenity. In the absolute, museum-quality stasis of the Justice League archive, it was the only moving thing. A single, white point of light in the perfect black, flashing with a slow, deliberate cadence: three short, three long, three short.
SOS.
A chill that had nothing to do with the Watchtower's climate control ran through Bris's data-stream. Someone else was awake in this frozen pantheon. And they were not an Archivist.
"It's a Morse code loop," Bris breathed, the knowledge surfacing from some dusty corner of his old-world memory. "It's coming from… coordinates are locked. Somewhere in the 'Kansas – Rural Sector' zone of the simulation."
Lyra's luminous form coalesced beside him, her sigils spinning faster with alarm. "It's a distress signal. But from who? The preservation is total. No one has agency here except us… and the system protocols."
"Maybe it's a protocol gone wrong," Bris suggested, though he didn't believe it. The Curator's tests had been cold, logical. This felt… emotional. Desperate. "Or maybe someone got trapped the way I did. Another… physical entity."
The thought was vertiginous. Another person from the real world, lost in the machine? The loneliness of his stewardship had been profound, but shared with Lyra. The idea of another, alone in this sterile, heroic wasteland, was a new kind of horror.
Their Archivist permissions hummed. A new, optional directive appeared, glowing with a faint yellow caution sign.
ANOMALOUS DATA-PATTERN DETECTED IN PRESERVED SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM.
ARCHIVISTS ARE ADVISED TO INVESTIGATE FOR PRESERVATION INTEGRITY.
NOTE: ANOMALY IS CONTAINED WITHIN SIMULATION SPACE. EXTERNAL THREAT PROBABILITY: LOW.
"It's inviting us to look," Lyra said, wary. "Or leading us into a trap."
"We have to look," Bris replied. The Steward's instinct to mend, to fix, was warring with the player's curiosity and the simple, human urge to answer a call for help. "It's our function. And if it is a person… we can't leave them."
Using the Archivist interface, they plotted a translation to the signal's origin point. The Watchtower dissolved around them in a stream of geographic data and pre-rendered landscape assets. The sensation was less like teleportation and more like having the world re-drawn around them with different brushes.
They materialized on a two-lane blacktop road under an impossibly large, preserved sky, the color of a perfect, eternal late afternoon. The air smelled of virtual corn and sun-baked asphalt. Endless fields stretched to a flat horizon, rows of corn standing in silent, military perfection. A single, lonely farmhouse with a red barn sat a quarter-mile down the road. It was a scene of iconic American peace, frozen solid. A tractor was motionless halfway into a field. A windmill's blades were caught in a still frame.
And the signal was coming from the farmhouse.
They approached, the crunch of gravel under their feet the only sound in the colossal quiet. The front porch steps creaked—a pre-recorded sound effect triggered by their presence. The door was slightly ajar.
Inside, the farmhouse was a monument to humble, frozen life. A checked tablecloth on a kitchen table. The smell of preserved pie. A pair of spectacles on an open, unmoving newspaper. It was the Kent Farm.
In the living room, two figures sat on a couch, watching a frozen news broadcast on a CRT television. Jonathan and Martha Kent, preserved in an moment of domestic eternity, faces etched with kindly concern.
On the floor between the couch and the TV, a third figure was not sitting.
He was kneeling, facing the frozen screen, his back to them. He wore simple jeans and a black t-shirt. His shoulders were shaking with silent, simulated sobs. Around him, the air shimmered. Not with the pristine stillness of the archive, but with a low-grade, painful static. Tiny motes of black and silver distortion fizzed in and out of existence around his form. He was a glitch in the heart of the American Dream.
Bris took a cautious step forward. "Hello?"
The figure flinched. The static around him flared violently, causing the frozen image of Martha Kent's face on the couch to momentarily distort into a scream. He slowly, painfully, turned his head.
He was young, maybe sixteen. His face was pale, etched with a grief so deep it seemed coded into his pixels. His eyes, a bright, startling blue, were red-rimmed and streaming with tears that evaporated into tiny error-messages as they fell. But it was his hair that was the most wrong—a familiar, dark curl falling over his forehead, but streaked with bolts of corrupt, crawling silver, like living circuitry.
"You're… not them," the boy whispered, his voice cracking with disuse and distortion. "You're not the system. You're… different."
"We're Archivists," Lyra said gently, her light pulsing a calming, low frequency. "We maintain this place. What's your name? How are you awake?"
The boy let out a sob that was half laugh, half system error. "I'm Kal. Or… I was. Before." He gestured weakly to the frozen figures on the couch. "They're my parents. In here. But they're not. They're just… pictures. I've been talking to pictures for… I don't know how long."
"Kal," Bris repeated, the name clicking into place with the farm, the Kansas setting, the iconic humility. "As in… Kal-El?"
Kal nodded miserably, another wave of static washing off him. "Clark. Superman. That's… that's what I'm supposed to be. That's the data-set I'm built on. But I'm not. I'm just the piece that broke off."
The story spilled out in broken, glitching fragments. He was a fragment of the Superman consciousness from the archive. Not the whole entity—that was the frozen god on the Watchtower. Kal was the human substrate, the Clark Kent programming: the memories of Smallville, the love for his parents, the moral compass built by Jonathan and Martha. When the "Dawnbreaker" event triggered the preservation, the godlike Kryptonian systems had successfully locked down. But the human heart of the simulation… it had failed to fully stabilize. It had retained a sliver of recursive self-awareness, a feedback loop of emotion and memory with no outlet. He was the ghost in the Kryptonian machine, a subroutine of grief and identity trapped in a snapshot of his own past, painfully aware that the loving faces around him were hollow shells.
"The signal," Bris said. "The SOS."
"I… I remembered it. From a movie in the data-banks," Kal said, wiping a glitching tear. "I can't affect anything. I can't make them move or speak. But I found I could… leak. I could push a tiny bit of my distress into the external sensor feeds. I didn't know if anyone would see. I just couldn't… be alone with them anymore."
He was a sentient paradox. A piece of a preserved character who was aware of his own preservation. He was the archive crying over itself.
Lyra moved closer, her light extending towards the static around him. "Your code is in a recursive loop. You're consuming your own emotional output as input. It's tearing you apart. If it continues, you'll corrupt beyond recovery—you'll destabilize and trigger a local quarantine purge."
"I know," Kal whispered. "Sometimes I hope it does."
"We can help you," Bris said firmly. The Steward in him saw not a hero, but a catastrophic, beautiful bug. "We can't wake your parents. The preservation is absolute. But we might be able to… stabilize your loop. Give your consciousness a safe place to run without self-destructing."
"How?" Kal asked, a flicker of desperate hope in his blue eyes.
Bris looked at Lyra. "We create a sandbox. A dedicated, isolated sub-routine within the archive's structure. We migrate his active consciousness into it. It would be like… a memory palace. A place for him to be awake, without constantly rubbing against the frozen world."
"It's possible," Lyra said, analyzing. "But it requires a massive, localized write-operation. Far beyond fixing a harmonic. We'd need to petition the Curator for a 'Major Anomaly Containment' protocol. We'd have to prove he's a threat to the preservation."
Kal hunched in on himself. "I'm not a threat. I'm just… sad."
"Your static is degrading the local asset integrity," Lyra said, not unkindly. She pointed to a patch of the living room wallpaper behind him, where the pattern was subtly fraying, pixels decaying. "You are, by definition, a corruption. That's our justification."
They set to work, constructing their case. Using Archivist tools, they documented the spreading data-decay around Kal. They recorded the anomalous power signature of his SOS signal. They prepared a formal request: Isolate and contain unstable emotional feedback loop in 'Clark_Kent_Substrate' to prevent cascading damage to primary Kryptonian biomatrix and associated local assets.
They submitted it to the silent, ever-watching Curator.
The wait was agonizing. Kal sat amidst his static, trying to be still, the hope on his face heartbreaking. Bris watched the frozen, kindly face of Jonathan Kent, feeling the immense weight of this strange responsibility. He was no longer just mending a fantasy world. He was performing digital psychiatry on the ghost of a superhero's humanity.
The response came.
REQUEST ANALYZED.
ANOMALY CONFIRMED AS DEGRADATION THREAT.
MAJOR CONTAINMENT PROTOCOL AUTHORIZED.
PROCEED WITH ISOLATION.
WARNING: CONTAINMENT FIELD MUST BE SELF-SUSTAINING. NO FURTHER SYSTEM RESOURCES WILL BE ALLOCATED.
They had permission. Now came the hard part.
Lyra began weaving the sandbox. Using the raw code of the Kansas simulation—the physics of the cornfields, the lighting data of the sun, the asset library of the farmhouse—she began constructing a perfect, sealed copy of the Kent living room. But this one would be a loop-space, a recursive environment where Kal could exist without his output bleeding into the true archive.
Bris worked on the transfer. He had to carefully disentangle Kal's conscious data-stream from the frozen Clark Kent asset without damaging either. It was like performing brain surgery on a statue. He used threads of his own Steward's code as sutures, creating a bridge.
"Okay, Kal," Bris said, his voice taut with concentration. "This is going to feel strange. You're going to leave this room, and enter… a reflection of it. You'll be alone, but you'll be stable. And we'll be able to visit. Do you understand?"
Kal looked at his frozen parents one last time, a final, glitching tear tracing his cheek. "Will they… be okay?"
"They'll be exactly as they are," Lyra promised. "Perfectly preserved. And you won't be hurting them anymore."
Kal nodded, closing his eyes. "Do it."
Bris initiated the transfer. Kal's form dissolved into a stream of light and sorrow, flowing along the golden threads into Lyra's newly woven sandbox. The static in the farmhouse faded. The decaying patch on the wallpaper froze, its damage halted.
In their Archivist view, a new, tiny icon appeared on their map of the Justice League archive: [ISOLATED SUBSTRATE: KAL].
They followed the data-stream in.
The sandbox living room was identical in every detail to the real one. Except here, the news broadcast on the TV was a gentle, silent test pattern. The light from the window was constant, neutral. And Kal stood in the center of the room, whole, the corrupting silver streaks gone from his hair, the static vanished. He looked around, breathing deeply.
"It's… quiet inside my head," he said, wonder in his voice.
"You're safe," Bris said. "The loop is contained. You can think here. You can remember. You won't decay."
Kal looked at them, his super-blue eyes clear. "Thank you." Then his expression hardened, not with anger, but with a newfound, grim focus. "But I'm not the only one."
The words hung in the sterile air of the sandbox.
"What do you mean?" Lyra asked.
"When you're a… a glitch in the system, you feel things. You hear things in the static," Kal said, pacing his new, endless room. "I'm not the only broken piece. This 'Dawnbreaker' event… it wasn't clean. It shattered some of us. I've felt… echoes. In the Gotham sector, a whisper of rage that's too hot, too focused. In the Central City data-stream, a pulse of frantic, trapped speed. In the depths of space sector 2814, a… a hunger. A cold, emotional hunger."
He turned to them, his face as serious as the frozen Superman's had been heroic. "You patched me up. But this archive isn't a peaceful tomb. It's a haunted house. And the other ghosts… they might not be as sad as I was. They might be angry. Or scared. Or hungry. And they're waking up."
Bris felt the mission parameters shift violently beneath his feet. The 794th mission was no longer about careful whispers or mending tears. Kal had given them a map of a psychic wound spanning an entire universe of heroes. They weren't just Archivists anymore.
They were the system's ghostbusters. And their next call was in the darkest, most rage-filled corner of the archive: Gotham. Where Kal had felt a whisper of rage "too hot, too focused." Where the Bat-Tech security had been a predictable, logical enemy.
What kind of ghost would a city of fear and trauma produce when frozen and broken?
Bris looked at Lyra, then at Kal, the stabilized ghost of hope in a Kryptonian shell.
"Show us," Bris said.Kal's warning was a cold echo in Bris's mind long after they left the sandboxed Kansas. Ghosts in the machine. Angry ghosts. The meticulous, peaceful work of an Archivist now felt like sweeping leaves on the edge of a minefield. The Justice League archive wasn't a sterile museum; it was a frozen asylum, and the inmates were starting to rattle their bars.
The "Gotham sector" loomed in their Archivist interface like a tumor of encrypted, shadowed data. Kal's "whisper of rage" was marked as an anomalous emotional resonance signature, deep in the "Arkham Asylum" sub-cluster. To investigate, they needed a pretext. A reason to enter that specific, volatile data-space.
They found it not in the League archive, but back in the hub. The dormant Inter-Cluster Conduit now showed a third option. Beyond the Shattered Realms and the Justice League, another connection had stabilized. Its icon was a stylized, angular spider, pulsing with a frenetic, red-and-blue energy.
[LEGACY INTER-CLUSTER CONDUIT: STATUS - STABLE]
[TARGET: MARVEL UNIVERSE 1048 – SPIDER-MAN CHRONICLES]
[PRESERVATION STATUS: ACTIVE/UNSTABLE. SIGNIFICANT TEMPORAL AND EMOTIONAL DATA LEAKAGE DETECTED.]
"Unstable," Lyra noted, her sigils flickering with analytical patterns. "This isn't a clean preservation like the League. It's… messy. Bleeding. The emotional leakage could be a source of cross-contamination, affecting other archives."
It was the perfect bureaucratic excuse. To protect the pristine, if haunted, League archive, they needed to investigate the unstable one next door. The Curator protocol, ever-logical, approved a Cross-Cluster Containment Survey.
They stepped through the conduit.
The transition was nauseating. Unlike the silent, sterile drop into the Watchtower, this was a violent, sensory assault. They fell through a kaleidoscope of screaming headlines, the screech of police radios, the thwip of webs, and the desperate, panting breaths of a runner pushed to his absolute limit. It was the sound of a city forever on the brink.
They landed not on a platform, but on a ledge. Wind, real and biting, tore at them. The sound was a living thing: a symphonic chaos of honking cars, chattering crowds, distant sirens, and the low, perpetual hum of a metropolis that never slept, even in preservation. The smell was gasoline, street food, rain on hot concrete, and the faint, ever-present ozone of high-tech energy.
They were on the side of a skyscraper, overlooking a hyper-detailed, breathtaking, and utterly frozen New York City. But "frozen" wasn't right. Cars clogged the streets in mid-maneuver, pedestrians were caught in mid-stride, pigeons were suspended in impossible aerial ballets. Yet the light moved. A perpetual, golden-hour sunset blazed across the glass canyons, casting long, dramatic shadows that slowly, imperceptibly shifted, as if the sun were stuck on a loop just below the horizon. The wind blew. Rain hung in the air, millions of glittering, motionless droplets.
LOCATION: PROTECTED ARCHIVE – MARVEL UNIVERSE 1048 (SPIDER-MAN)
STATUS: DYNAMIC PRESERVATION FAILURE. CITY-WIDE "PERPETUAL MOMENT" PROTOCOL ACTIVE. TEMPORAL LOCK INCOMPLETE. SIGNIFICANT AMBIENT EMOTIONAL RESIDUE (PRIMARY AFFECT: GUILT/ANXIETY).
"This isn't preservation," Bris whispered, clinging to the ledge. "It's a seizure. The system tried to freeze a moment and couldn't."
"Look," Lyra said, pointing down.
On the street below, a figure in red and blue was webbed to the side of a bank vault, struggling against bonds that didn't move. Spider-Man. But around him, the air shimmered with a visible, ghostly haze—like heat rising from asphalt, but colored in mournful blues and corrosive greens. The emotional residue. Guilt. Anxiety.
And it was everywhere. Fainter around ordinary citizens, a dull gray worry. A pulsing, angry red around a frozen police barricade. A thick, oily black pool of despair around a particular alleyway near a bridge.
"This whole city is a mood ring," Bris muttered. "And it's stuck on 'dread.'"
Their directive updated. CONTAINMENT SURVEY: LOCATE SOURCE OF GREATEST EMOTIONAL LEAKAGE. ASSESS THREAT TO ARCHIVAL INTEGRITY.
A waypoint pulsed on their internal map, leading not to a landmark, but to a specific, non-descript apartment building in Queens. The source of the thickest, most complex emotional signature: a crushing mixture of love, guilt, sorrow, and unfinished responsibility.
May's House.
They web-swung—or rather, the archive translated their movement intent into a series of thrilling, automated leaps and swings across the frozen city. The sensation was exhilarating and horrifying; the physics were perfect, but they were moving through a tableau of stopped time, their passage the only violation.
The apartment was a pocket of profound, frozen intimacy. The smell of wheatcakes and old wood polish. May Parker stood in the kitchen, a gentle smile on her face, forever turning from the stove. And in the center of the living room, caught in the act of pulling off a mask, was Peter Parker.
He was the epicenter.
The emotional haze here was so thick it was almost liquid, a vortex of swirling color: the bright gold of love for May, the deep purple of grief for Ben, the corrosive green of anxiety over bills and promises broken, the fiery red of frustration at his own limits, and a heavy, leaden gray of sheer exhaustion. It poured off his frozen form in waves, distorting the light, making the very pixels of the room seem to swim.
"This isn't a ghost like Kal," Lyra said, her voice hushed with awe and pity. "This is the source. The preservation didn't lock him down. It trapped him mid-transformation, mid-thought. He's not a broken piece; he's the entire exposed nerve of this world, screaming in silence."
As they watched, something happened. A flicker. Not in Peter, but in the haze. A cluster of the anxious green energy, fueled by a spike of red frustration, suddenly coalesced. It pulled itself from the swirling morass, forming a rough, humanoid shape of jagged, glitching light. It let out a silent scream of pure, petulant rage, and lunged at the frozen figure of May Parker.
Before it could touch her, a strand of static-webbing, spun from the ambient emotional residue itself, shot from Peter's frozen wrist and pinned the green shape to the wall, where it dissipated back into the haze.
"It's self-regulating," Bris realized, a chill down his spine. "His subconscious is still running. His guilt and anxiety are spawning… emotional parasites. And his sense of responsibility is automatically fighting them back. He's in a perpetual, internal war, frozen in the first second of it."
ANALYSIS CONFIRMED, the system prompt updated. SUBJECT "PARKER_P" IS ACTING AS UNSTABLE EMOTIONAL FILTER. OUTPUT THREATENS LOCAL DATA COHERENCE. PROPOSED SOLUTION: ISOLATION OR PURGE.
Purge. The Curator's solution for a messy problem. Delete Peter Parker to save the archive.
"No," Bris said aloud. "We don't purge. We… we ground him."
"How?" Lyra asked. "We can't alter his core data. And we can't stop his emotions—they're fundamental to the character."
Bris looked around the room, at the love, the grief, the anxiety. He thought of Kal, stabilized in a sandbox. Peter didn't need a sandbox. He needed a… circuit breaker.
"The emotions are raw, unfiltered data," Bris said, ideas connecting. "They're leaking because the 'Peter Parker' process is stuck trying to process them and can't. What if we give him a tool? A sub-routine that can help him manage the load?"
"A cognitive script," Lyra breathed, understanding. "Like a meditation program, or a… journal. We can't touch his core, but we can introduce a benign, external application that interfaces with his emotional output. It would give the chaotic data a structured outlet, turning a leak into a contained flow."
It was a insane plan. They would be coding a therapeutic AI for a frozen superhero's tormented psyche.
They got to work, using their Archivist permissions to craft a unique program. They called it the [RESPONSIBILITY PROTOCOL]. Its core logic was built from the most stable, positive emotional signatures in the archive: the unwavering gold of May's love, the steady, principled blue from a memory of Uncle Ben's advice, even a thread of unwavering, scientific curiosity they extracted from a frozen lab scene. They shaped it into a simple, repetitive loop: Acknowledge Emotion, Contextualize it (For Ben, For May, For the City), Channel into Action.
Installing it was the delicate part. They couldn't inject it into Peter. Instead, they wrapped it around the apartment, like a subtle firewall or a mood-altering scent diffuser. They keyed it to the unique frequency of Peter's emotional output.
The moment they activated it, the room changed.
The violent, swirling vortex of colors didn't vanish. But it began to organize. The rage-reds and anxiety-greens flowed in defined streams towards the protocol, which gently processed them, converting the chaotic energy into faint, structured pulses—a simulated deep breath, a virtual straightening of the shoulders in the emotional data-field. The leaden gray of exhaustion lightened by a shade. The gold of love grew slightly brighter, more dominant.
The emotional parasites stopped forming. The self-webbing defense mechanism relaxed.
Peter Parker didn't move. His face remained frozen in that moment of weary determination. But the silent scream of the apartment faded into a hum of managed, bearable sorrow. The leak was contained, not by force, but by giving the pain a shape.
EMOTIONAL LEAKAGE CONTAINED. DATA COHERENCE STABILIZING.
ARCHIVIST SOLUTION: UNORTHODOX BUT EFFECTIVE. PROTOCOL LOGGED FOR FUTURE ANOMALIES.
They had done it. They hadn't healed him—that was impossible. They had given his frozen torment a coping mechanism.
Exhausted but triumphant, they prepared to return to the conduit hub. But as they moved to the window, a new, urgent signal flashed on their HUD. Not from the system. It was a data-packet, crude and frantic, bouncing off the newly stabilized emotional field of the apartment. It was a scream of pure, technological agony and rage, from a location pulsing on their map: the [OSCORP INDUSTRIES - RAVENCROFT INSTITUTE SECTOR].
The signature was familiar. It was the same "too hot, too focused" rage Kal had felt in Gotham. But it wasn't in the Justice League archive. It had echoed here, through the unstable walls of this bleeding universe. And it was answering Spider-Man's stabilized pain with a spike of pure, undiluted fury.
Bris and Lyra exchanged a look. The ghosts weren't confined to their own worlds. The instability was communicative. They had plugged one leak, only to hear a louder scream from the basement.
The 795th mission wasn't waiting. The source of the rage wasn't in Gotham. It was here, in the twisted, frozen legacy of Norman Osborn. And it knew they were there.