The Hex · The Year 1999

Höllvania is a walled city-state of old Earth, and in Höllvania it is the year 1999. It has been the year 1999 for some time now. The archive will come to that.

In its recorded year the city suffers twice over. Beneath the streets runs the Techrot, an infestation that eats machines and code before it troubles flesh. Above them stands the Scaldra, the state military under Major Neci Rusalka, answering plague with quarantine, fumigation gas, and the kind of order that shoots. One infestation devoured the city's works. The other wore its uniforms.

Against both stand six people quartered in a shopping mall, calling themselves the Hex. The present's first sight of them was unexplained: a Tenno consciousness, redirected mid-Transference into a stranger's body in a walled city, one countdown from midnight. The stranger was Arthur. The record has been trying to catch up ever since.

He came to the city in 1998 calling himself Doktor Friday: a physician, he said, with a miracle drug for the plague. The physician was Albrecht Entrati, out of his own era by an interval the archive cannot responsibly number, and the drug was a lie with a dosage. It cured no one. Its recipients became silent carriers, and the plague went where they went. When the strain turned, he lined up volunteers and infused them with something he had brought from home: the Helminth. Most died. Six did not.

The survivors kept their minds and lost their certainty of species: human wills in bodies learning, slowly, to be Warframes. The record names such people Protoframes. Entrati believes their humanity is a temporary condition. The six have so far declined to keep the appointment.

His purpose was never medicine. The year was bait, run and rerun to draw the attention of the thing this archive files under the Indifference, and when the loop was compromised he needed the city reactor's detonation to get clear of it: he ordered that midnight not be prevented. The Indifference, riding Major Rusalka, took him and questioned him from behind his own face, and behind the face of Loid, who had rebuilt him. He gave the interrogation one true answer: the thing's weakness is love. Then he carried the six's cellular samples home to grow his Vessels, and departed for Tau, as the Old Peace would later attest. The road he took is not in the record.

One further entry, made without comfort: 1999 is not the only year he has done this to. The Old Peace attests another cell of his Protoframes in another year ending in ninety-nine. The pattern is a signature, and he has signed at least twice.

Arthur Nightingale leads them: an ex-Britannic lieutenant who ended his own commission rather than point it at civilians. His elder twin Eleanor came to Höllvania illegally, a journalist hunting the outbreak story. She found it, and she named it: the word Techrot is hers. The infestation repaid the christening with the deepest infection of the six and a reach into other minds she never asked for. Eleanor reads thoughts, and fears the day the hivemind reads back.

Aoi Morohoshi is the mechanic and second-in-command, underestimated exclusively by people she has decided to let underestimate her. Amir Beckett is the hacker: the reactor's own security man until Entrati coerced its specifications through him, quick beyond argument and at war with his own nerves. Lettie Garcia is the medic, an ex-field-medic of the Liberatian Army who took Doktor Friday's cure in good faith and unknowingly spread what she meant to heal. Her hatred of Entrati is not a temperament. It is a diagnosis. Quincy Isaacs covers them all down a sniper's scope: a Xaymacan marksman who keeps strict books on every favor and owes Arthur the one debt he cannot square. Their bodies answer to shapes the present arsenal knows well: Excalibur for Arthur, Nyx for Eleanor, Mag for Aoi, Volt for Amir, Trinity for Lettie. Quincy's frame, Cyte-09, had no precedent at all. The present met it in him first.

Into this family the Drifter arrives: dispatched by a Lotus already going strange at the edges, carried through a flesh-gate Loid prepared, bearing the impossible claim that the year repeats and that everyone in the room has already died in it. Höllvania admits the Drifter and refuses the Operator, a preference no source explains. The Hex took the stranger in anyway. Everything else in this record follows from that.

The first telling of the year ends the way Entrati's tellings had always ended. The hivemind takes Eleanor and uses her hands to kill Lettie, who had always feared exactly this. An Efervon tank kills Quincy. Aoi dies at the reactor core, stopping the worst of it with her body. Entrati shoots Amir at the reactor's edge. Arthur holds the core against a thing from the tunnels, takes a lethal dose doing it, and dies of the victory. Then Entrati turns his pistol on the Drifter and delivers a sentence in place of an apology: you cannot save people unless you know them.

He was right, which the archive resents on the six's behalf. The Drifter restarts the year by a discipline learned in Duviri, where surviving a repeating world is the whole curriculum, and the second telling differs because the teller does. Knowing the six as people rather than as casualties, the Drifter stands at each death in turn and unwrites it. Eleanor tears the hivemind's hold out of her own mouth. The tank meets a Quincy who has already died to it once, and loses. Amir finishes his hack alive. Aoi walks away from the core, and Arthur with her, and nobody is shot at the reactor's edge. Six for six.

Two consequences outlast the night. The Kalymos Sequence, a layered working Entrati seeded long before and named for the pale kavat that still keeps the mall, completes its warding provision in the presence of six unbroken bonds: a shield against the Indifference whose full mechanism no source yet explains, and this record will not invent one. The Sequence's other provision slept under Deimos, and is kept under the Entrati entry. And the loop itself widens, from one night to the entire year, all four seasons, repeating. The archive reads this as armor rather than sentence. A year that keeps happening is a year the Indifference cannot unhappen.

The Techrot matters to more than its year. It is a precursor strain of the Technocyte, the Infestation of the present record: young, still preferring machines and code to flesh. It was loose in Höllvania by 1997, a year before Doktor Friday arrived, and a music agency was already farming it in secret to grow counterfeit copies of the city's best-loved boy band. Whether Entrati's presence is what put the strain in that century at all is not attested, and the archive will not close the question for him. What is attested is narrower and damning enough: his cure spread it.

Where the strain goes afterward, the record can only hold at arm's length. The Drifter, speaking with Eleanor, surmised the line running forward: the Techrot escaping the city in the century that follows, a world plague, humanity's nuclear answer, and the Radiation Wars that the deep past keeps as a scar. The archive enters this as what it is: one witness's surmise, unverified, and the only bridge anyone has yet sketched between a shopping mall and the age of the Orokin.

The year keeps feeding the present regardless. The six's cellular samples became Entrati's Vessels. The door between the Sanctum Anatomica and the mall's Backrooms is open in both directions now, and the roster of the infused has grown: a musician who outlived his own executed band, and a married pair of foreign agents who took Entrati's needle voluntarily, because the Scaldra commander the Indifference had hollowed out was the war orphan they had raised as their daughter. The record keeps few crueler symmetries than Major Rusalka's parents, infused and searching, and Rusalka herself already gone: carried out of 1999 entirely, into Duviri, where she and her passenger usurped a boy-king's repeating world and were fought to a confinement in the Apocrypha. Contained is not concluded. The record watches.

And beneath everything, the honest floor. No source establishes whether Höllvania's 1999 is the literal past of the Origin System or a branch the Void keeps beside it: the attestations say altered time loop and alternate timeline in the same breath, and settle nothing. The archive prefers a gap honestly held, and holds this one. Six people are alive who were dead in every earlier telling. Whatever 1999 turns out to be, that part is true everywhere.