The rain never stopped in Sector 12.
Neon signs flickered like dying memories, reflecting off the chrome-tiled alleyways and synthetic puddles of dirty water. Detective Cal Rourke blinked against the blue static that burned across his cornea lens—a HUD glitch that had started moments after he awoke in his pod, a glass capsule submerged in murky fluid somewhere beneath the precinct archives.
The pod’s label was dated April 13, 2172.
The year outside was 2239.
He hadn’t aged a day.
As he staggered out of the cryo-chamber, drenched and coughing up fluid like bile, a siren sounded in the precinct above. Security bots didn’t recognize him. Officers stared. But the retinal scans confirmed:
Detective Cal Rourke.
Alive. Active. On duty.
There was just one problem.
The board.
Every unsolved case of the last 67 years—murders, disappearances, android revolts, illegal time-echo hacks, child memory extractions, every one was stamped with the name “Detective Rourke” under “Lead Assigned.”
“Must be a clerical error,” whispered the tech who handed him a cigarette. “Or maybe… you got plugged into the wrong simulation node. Some Truman-Loop shit.”
Rourke’s first steps back on the street felt like walking through his own obituary. Victims’ families stopped and stared, some with tears, others with fists. Androids malfunctioned in his presence. Drones scanned his face like he was a myth.
Then came the stalkers. Reporters. Conspiracy channels.
They called him “The Detective of Every Case.”
Some called him “The Fall Guy.”
But Rourke didn’t care about public opinion.
He wanted truth. And he wanted it now.
The city glitched.
It was subtle at first, a man he once arrested on murder charges served him coffee at a corner shop and said, “I thought you died in the flashfire.”
A building he remembered collapsing in 2201 stood perfectly intact.
A child he saved two decades ago was now the one hunting him with a badge and a gun.
Rourke realized he wasn’t just walking through the city.
He was walking through two overlapping realities, one where he had succeeded in solving every case, hailed as a hero... and one where he failed catastrophically, disappearing under suspicion.
The worlds were bleeding together.
And the seams were tearing.
An old hacker named Ezekiel 3 found him in the underhalls of the Memory Spire.
“You're a code fracture, Rourke. You were part of an abandoned pre-crime prototype. They stored you in cryo to test branching case outcomes across multiversal nodes. You weren’t meant to wake up.”
Rourke lit a cigarette. The static in his vision sharpened.
“They woke me anyway.”
Now the city wanted answers.
Old allies tried to erase him. Former enemies now protected him. A preacher AI confessed to orchestrating dozens of unsolved crimes because a future version of Rourke once whispered to it during a breakdown loop.
The Truman element? It was worse than surveillance.
People paid to watch Rourke’s life unfold like a noir opera.
They voted on which reality they preferred.
And the worst part?
Both versions of Rourke, the successful savior, the damned scapegoat, were starting to speak to him in his dreams. Giving him opposing instructions. Like twin ghosts fighting for one body.
It all led to the Case of the Missing Door.
A case he never remembered solving.
A case that supposedly ended the simulation... if opened.
Ezekiel’s dying words: “If you walk through that door, Cal... you end your story. Or you escape it. Depends which you believe.”
