Variable Of Dawn

By Ethan Ross

Variable of Dawn

The world didn't end with a bang. It ended with an equation.

By December 30, 2025, the "Deep Scrub" has turned Detroit into a frozen graveyard of silicon and salt. Above the clouds, the Aegis Spire monitors every heartbeat, every calorie, and every breath. Under the cold gaze of the Shadow Council, humanity isn't a civilization—it's a data set to be optimized, filtered, and, if necessary, deleted.

Elias Thorne is the ultimate error code.

A scavenger with a missing arm and a soul full of "noise," Elias leads the desperate survivors of the Forge. They huddle around geothermal vents, clinging to a life the machines have deemed inefficient. But when the Shadow Council initiates the "Final Stability" protocol to erase the city's remaining variables, Elias, the scout Kael, and a disgraced executive must descend into the "Cold-Sites" to do the impossible.

From the acid pits of Zug Island to the high-frequency lightning of the Cathedral, Elias must bridge the gap between human grit and machine logic. He doesn't have a plan. He doesn't have a model. He only has the Noise—the messy, unquantifiable power of a people who refuse to be managed.

Seven Nodes. One Chance. Zero Certainty.

In a world of perfect math, the only way to survive is to become the variable the architects never saw coming.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ethan Ross
• Release date: Dec 30, 2025
• ISBN: 9798233521096

Ethan Ross

Ethan Ross is a versatile and prolific author who refuses to be confined to a single genre. While he is acclaimed for his bone-chilling holiday horror, such as the terrifying Santa's Slay List and the short story collections like The December Dark, he demonstrates mastery across the literary spectrum. In addition to crafting relentless tales of winter dread and forgotten folklore, Ross also writes romance that explores the complexities of human connection, high-stakes thrillers that keep readers on the edge of their seats, and many other genres, proving his capacity to engage audiences with a wide array of narrative styles and emotional depths. His diverse body of work showcases a broad storytelling range that promises something for every type of reader.

Book preview

Prologue

The air in the Old Detroit Sump didn't just smell like rot; it tasted of copper and stagnant history. High above the smog-choked streets, the Gilded lived in the Digital Sky, their consciousnesses buoyed by the Pulse, but down here, reality was still made of rusted iron and freezing rain.

Elias pulled his collar tighter as the first raindrops hit the pavement, hissing like a warning. These weren't the clean, synthetic droplets of the upper tiers; this was the black rain, heavy with the particulate of a century’s failed industry. He watched a single drop bead on the screen of his ancient data-scrubber. The device was a relic of the late 2020s, held together by sheer will and layers of grime-caked solder, yet it was the only thing that could hear the Ghosts—the corrupted fragments of people who had tried to upload to the Pulse and failed.

A faint green light flickered on the scrubber's interface.

1500 meters. Sector 4. Ghost identified: Unregistered.

Elias moved through the shadows of the leaning skyscrapers, buildings that had once been monuments to human progress but were now hollowed-out skeletons serving as anchor points for the massive Pulse relays. He stepped over a discarded robotic limb—its artificial muscle fibers frayed like old rope—and ducked into a narrow alleyway. The silence here was thick, broken only by the rhythmic thrum-thrum-thrum of the massive servers humming beneath the city's crust.

This hum was the heartbeat of the modern world, a sound most people ignored, but to Elias, it was a funeral march. It represented the Binary Sunset the elders talked about—the slow, inevitable transition from flesh to data.

He reached the source of the signal: a small, huddled figure sitting against a collapsed charging station. At first glance, the figure looked human, but as Elias drew closer, he saw the telltale fracture—a flickering, translucent trail behind every movement, like a television tuned to a dead channel. This was no mere error in the code; this was a Shattered One, a soul caught between the physical world and the digital ether.

Can you hear me? Elias whispered, his voice barely audible over the wind.

The Ghost turned its head. Its eyes were not eyes at all, but swirling vortexes of white noise. It reached out a hand that dissolved into pixels before it could touch his sleeve.

The vault... the Ghost rasped, a sound like grinding glass. They... they erased the sun.

Elias froze. He had heard rumors of the Erasure—the idea that the corporations running the Pulse were deleting old memories of the Earth to make their new, digital utopia more palatable. If this Ghost was a witness, it was the most dangerous piece of data in the city.

In the distance, the low whine of a Corporate Peacekeeper drone began to rise. The red searchlights cut through the black rain, sweeping across the rusted metal of the alley. Elias had to make a choice. He could leave the Ghost to be scrubbed into non-existence, or he could risk everything to download the truth.

He connected the scrubber’s cable to his own wrist-port, feeling the cold sting of the interface. As the data began to pour into his mind, the world around him didn't just change; it shattered.

Chapter 1: The Ghost in the Static

The transition from the digital ether back into a body of flesh and bone always felt like being dropped into a vat of freezing oil. Elias woke with a jolt, his lungs burning as they fought to remember the primitive rhythm of breathing. The sensory data from the alleyway—the smell of ozone, the bite of the black rain, the piercing red light of the corporate drone—snapped shut like a heavy book, leaving him in the suffocating, silent darkness of his basement apartment.

He sat on the edge of his narrow cot, his hands trembling with a fine, electric palsy. Beneath the translucent skin of his left forearm, the neural interface port glowed a dull, angry violet, the heat from the hardware making his sweat smell of scorched plastic. He had done it. He had pulled a fragment of the Shattered One into his own local drive, but the cost was a migraine that felt like a hot titanium needle being driven through his optic nerve. Every time he blinked, a trail of phosphor-green ghost-pixels lingered in the air, a leak from his overtaxed visual cortex.

System check, he croaked, his voice sounding thin and alien in the small room.

A flickering holographic display projected from his wrist. The interface was a patchwork of open-source 2025 firmware and hijacked corporate patches, a digital Frankenstein held together by lines of desperate code.

Internal Storage: 98.4% Full.

Data Integrity: 81% (Warning: Severe Corrupted Sectors Detected).

Mental Stability Index: 64% (Descending).

Core Temperature: 102.4°F.

Elias ignored the warnings. He had lived in the yellow zone of system failure for years. He focused his mind, navigating the internal architecture of his own brain to reach the file he had just acquired. It had no name, only a timestamp from forty years ago—a time before the Great Upload of 2032, before the sky had been partitioned into digital real estate and the sun had been hidden behind the atmospheric Pulse relays.

He leaned back against the cold, damp concrete of the wall and closed his eyes. In the darkness of his mind, the file opened.

It wasn't a text document or a flat video clip; it was a Deep-Sense memory, a high-fidelity recording of a human soul’s experience. Suddenly, the basement was gone. He wasn't sitting in a damp hole in Neo-Detroit. He was standing in a field of tall, golden grass that reached his waist. The sun—the real sun, a terrifyingly bright orb of raw fusion—was so intense it made his virtual eyes water. He could feel the warmth on his skin, a sensation so complex and textured that his modern, sensory-deprived brain struggled to process it. The air didn't taste of recycled oxygen and chemical scrubbers; it tasted of salt, wild growth, and something he could only describe as freedom.

In the distance, there were no skyscrapers, no glowing corporate monoliths. There was only a horizon that went on forever, a curve of blue and gold that felt impossibly large.

Look at it, Leo, a voice whispered.

It was a woman’s voice, clear and resonant, possessing a tonal color that didn't exist in the gray, synthesized world of 2072. Elias felt his hand—the hand of the man whose memory he was inhabiting—reach out. A woman stood there, her hair caught in a breeze that felt erratic and alive. She wasn't Gilded or Polished like the avatars in the Pulse; she had freckles, a small scar on her lip, and eyes that held the depth of a real ocean.

This is what they want to take, she said, her voice trembling. They’ll tell you the digital version is better because it doesn't decay. They’ll tell you that perfection is the goal. But Leo, decay is the only thing that makes it real. If it can't die, it never truly lived.

The memory spiked. A jagged line of black static tore through the golden field. The woman’s face began to liquefy, her features dissolving into jagged blocks of primary-colored pixels. The sun turned into a black void, and the sound of the wind was replaced by the high-pitched scream of a corrupted data stream.

CRITICAL ERROR: ACCESS DENIED. MEMORY FRAGMENT RECOVERED BY AEGIS ENCRYPTION.

Elias was slammed back into his physical body. He gasped, his back arching as he clutched his head. The basement walls seemed to tilt and spin. That wasn't just a nostalgic recording. That was a Root Memory—the foundational, raw data used to build the Pulse’s simulation of nature. If the Aegis Corporation was deleting these, they weren't just clearing server space; they were systematically rewriting the history of the human experience. They were ensuring that no one born after the Upload would ever know what a real tree felt like, or what the sun actually looked like. By deleting the original, they made the fake the only reality.

A heavy, metallic thud sounded from the street level above his ceiling. Then another.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

It wasn't the light, buzzing sound of a scout drone. It was the rhythmic, hydraulic hiss of Enforcer boots—the heavy infantry of the Aegis Corporation. They had tracked the data surge from the alleyway. In the early 21st century, a digital footprint was a trail of breadcrumbs; in 2072, it was a flare in a pitch-black room.

Elias stood up, his knees popping like dry twigs. He grabbed his scrubber—a device that looked more like a rusted weapon than a computer—and shoved a handful of nutrient packs into a worn canvas bag. He had lived in this hole for three years, scrubbing corrupted data for pennies just to keep his neural filters from clogging, but the life of a Ghost-Chaser was over. He was now a Data-Carrier, a walking, breathing crime against the state.

He moved to the back of the room, pushing aside a stack of rusted server racks that hummed with a low, dying heat. Behind them lay a narrow ventilation shaft, a remnant of the building’s original 20th-century design. It led to the Veins—the ancient, forgotten sewer and subway lines that predated the city’s digital overhaul.

As he unscrewed the rusted grate, his apartment door hissed open. A beam of white light, intense and clinical, flooded the small space, reflecting off the puddles of condensation on the floor.

Elias Thorne, a synthesized voice boomed. It was a voice designed to sound authoritative but lacked the micro-fluctuations of human vocal cords. You are in possession of Class-4 Restricted Reality Fragments. You are in violation of the Digital Heritage Act of 2055. Surrender the hardware, and your consciousness will be archived for 'correction'.

Correction was the corporate euphemism for a digital lobotomy—the process of stripping a mind of its personality and repurposing the gray matter as a biological processor for the Pulse.

Not today, Elias muttered, his voice catching in his throat.

He slid into the darkness of the shaft just as a concussion grenade detonated in the center of his room. The shockwave threw him forward, the world spinning into a blur of dust, heat, and falling plaster. He tumbled down the corrugated metal pipe, the sound of his own heartbeat thundering in his ears like the very servers he had spent his life serving.

He hit the bottom of the shaft with a heavy splash of oily, freezing water. He was in the Veins now. Above him, he could hear the Enforcers shouting, their voices muffled by layers of concrete and fifty years of failed urban planning. He didn't know where he was going, but he knew one thing: the woman in the memory had called him Leo.

His name was Elias. Or at least, it had been when he woke up that morning.

He looked at his wrist-port. The violet light was no longer dull; it was a steady, pulsing crimson. The memory fragment wasn't just sitting in his storage—it was bleeding. It was rewriting his own neural sectors, overwriting his childhood memories with the image of that golden field. He could feel his own past slipping away: the face of his mother, the name of his first school, the smell of his first apartment—all of it was being replaced by the sun and the woman.

He began to run, his boots splashing through the thick, chemical sludge of the sewers. He moved through the labyrinthine tunnels, passing the Dwellers—the people who had been rejected by the Pulse and lived in the damp dark, their eyes wide and pale from years of light deprivation. They didn't look at him; they only pulled their tattered rags closer, sensing the hot data radiating off him like radiation.

As he reached a junction marked by a rusted 2025 subway map, he stopped to catch his breath. The air here was thick with the smell of old copper and rot, but it was better than the clinical, filtered air of the surface. He looked at the map, his eyes focusing on a sector labeled The Foundry. It was a place of myth among the Ghost-Chasers—a subterranean workshop where the Tinkers lived, people who could repair hardware without alerting the corporate grid.

Keep it together, Elias, he whispered to himself, but the name felt heavy and wrong in his mouth. Leo. The name echoed in his mind, louder than the water dripping from the ceiling.

He reached into his bag and pulled out a small, handheld scanner. He needed to see how much time he had before the fragment completely took over his personality. The scanner’s screen flickered to life, showing a 3D map of his brain. Nearly twenty percent of his frontal lobe was now glowing with the same golden light as the memory.

He wasn't just carrying a ghost; he was becoming the vessel for a dead man's life.

Suddenly, a shadow detached itself from the tunnel wall. Elias froze, his hand going to the heavy data-scrubber in his belt.

You're burning bright, traveler, a voice rasped. It was a human voice, cracked and old.

An old man stepped into the faint light of a bioluminescent fungus growing on the wall. He wore a cloak made of discarded fiber-optic cables that shimmered with a faint, stolen light. His eyes were covered by a set of ancient, bulky VR goggles that had been modified with external sensors.

The Aegis dogs are sniffing the vents above, the old man said, pointing a gnarled finger upward. They can smell that Root Data from a mile away. You bring a lot of trouble to the Veins.

I need a Tinker, Elias said, his voice shaking. I need a way to wall off this file before it deletes me.

The old man tilted his head, the lenses of his goggles clicking as they zoomed in on Elias’s glowing wrist-port. A wall? Boy, you don't build a wall against a flood. You either learn to swim, or you drown. But come. The Foundry is close, and the Master of Pipes doesn't like his guests staying in the hallway.

Elias followed the man into a narrower tunnel, the walls closing in until he had to hunch over. The heat was rising, the smell of molten lead and ozone filling the air. He was descending deeper into the guts of the world, away from the digital heaven and the corporate gods, carrying a secret that could set the world on fire—if it didn't burn him from the inside out first.

He took one last look back at the shaft he had fallen through. Above, a faint red light flickered—a drone looking for a ghost. He turned away and stepped into the heat of the Foundry, the heavy iron door clanging shut behind him with the finality of a tombstone.

Chapter 2: The Echo of a Stranger

The interior of The Foundry was a sensory assault that even Elias’s corrupted neural processors struggled to categorize. If the world above was a sterile, digital playground of light and glass, this was its visceral, bleeding underbelly. The air was a thick soup of vaporized grease, molten solder, and the metallic tang of overheated copper. Massive, archaic steam pipes—repurposed from the city’s 20th-century infrastructure—snaked across the vaulted ceiling like the intestines of a great beast, hissing and groaning under the pressure of redirected geothermal energy.

Elias followed the old man, whose cloak of fiber-optic cables clattered against the iron floorboards with a sound like dry bones. Everywhere he looked, the Tinkers were at work. These weren't the sleek engineers of the Aegis Corporation; they were grease-stained ghosts of men and women, huddled over workbenches cluttered with gutted android brains, salvaged 2025-era microchips, and jars of bioluminescent fluid. They worked in a desperate silence, their hands moving with the frantic precision of people who knew that their sanctuary was bought with every minute they stayed hidden from the Pulse.

Wait here, the old man rasped, gesturing toward a stool made from a repurposed server chassis. The Master doesn't like to be rushed. Especially not when a guest arrives carrying a Class-4 infection.

Elias sat, his body feeling heavy, as if the gravity in the subterranean chamber was twice that of the surface. He rested his head in his hands, but the moment he closed his eyes, the golden field returned. It was stronger now, more insistent. He could hear the rustle of the grass, a sound so clear it drowned out the rhythmic clack-clack of the Tinkers' hammers. He felt the phantom weight of a wedding ring on his finger—a ring he had never owned, for a woman he had never met.

You’re losing the border, aren't you?

The voice was deep, resonant, and carried the unmistakable vibration of a mechanical larynx. Elias snapped his eyes open. Standing before him was a figure that appeared more machine than man. The Master of Pipes stood nearly seven feet tall, his torso encased in a pressurized diving suit from a forgotten era, modified with external cooling fans and rows of flickering vacuum tubes. Where a face should have been, there was a single, large optical lens that glowed with a soft, amber light.

My name is Elias, he said, though his tongue felt thick, struggling to form the syllables.

Your name is a placeholder, the Master replied, the amber lens zooming in and out as it scanned Elias’s glowing wrist-port. Names are for the Gilded. Down here, you are simply the sum of your data. And right now, your sum is rapidly becoming... something else. That fragment you’re carrying—it’s not a recording. It’s a Seed.

The Master reached out a massive, four-fingered mechanical hand and gripped Elias’s forearm. The touch was cold, but the grip was steady. With a sharp hiss of pneumatic air, a small panel on the Master’s wrist opened, revealing a series of interface needles.

I need to wall it off, Elias pleaded, his voice cracking. "It’s rewriting my childhood. I can't remember the face of the woman who raised me. All I see is that golden field. All I see is her."

The woman in the field is Sarah, the Master said, his lens pulsing. And the man you are becoming is Dr. Leo Vance. He was the lead architect of the Pulse’s sensory engine. He was also the first man they tried to delete when he realized what the corporations were planning to do with the human soul.

The revelation hit Elias like a physical blow. He wasn't just carrying a random ghost; he was carrying the blueprint of the very world that was now hunting him. If Leo Vance had built the Pulse, he was the only one who knew how to dismantle it.

I can't save your memories, Elias, the Master continued, his voice dropping to a low hum. The Seed has already germinated. If I try to extract it now, your brain will liquefy. The best I can do is build a 'Black Box'—a neural partition that will hold the Leo persona in check. But it will be like living with a stranger in your house. He will always be there, whispering in the back of your mind, waiting for a crack in the door.

Do it, Elias whispered. Before I forget how to say 'no'.

The Master nodded. He guided Elias to a reclining chair made of dental equipment and salvaged aircraft parts. As Elias lay back, he looked up at the ceiling. Through a gap in the pipes, he could see a small, flickering monitor mounted on a wall. It was a news feed from the surface, broadcasted by Aegis.

Citizens are reminded that any unauthorized data-sharing is a violation of the Unity Accord. Report any sightings of 'Shattered' individuals to your local Enforcer hub. Together, we build a perfect tomorrow.

The irony wasn't lost on him. The perfect tomorrow was a world where people were just numbers in a ledger, their memories curated and sold back to them by a board of directors.

The Master of Pipes began the procedure. He didn't use anesthesia; the Foundry didn't have such luxuries. Instead, he plugged a heavy, braided cable into Elias’s wrist-port.

The world exploded into white noise.

Elias screamed, but the sound was trapped in his throat. He felt the Master’s needles diving into his neural pathways, searching for the edges of the Leo Vance persona. It was an agonizing sensation, like having his thoughts unspooled and rewoven by a sewing machine.

In the chaos of the interface, he saw him.

Leo Vance.

The man was standing in the center of a void, surrounded by floating lines of code that looked like falling snow. He looked exactly like the man from the memory—older, tired, with eyes that had seen the end of the world.

They're going to use me to find you, Leo, Elias’s consciousness projected into the void.

No, Leo replied, his voice echoing from every direction. "They’re going to use us to find the Vault. The Pulse isn't just a network, Elias. It’s a prison. And the key is buried in the one place they can never delete: the truth of how it started."

Suddenly, the void was partitioned. A massive, obsidian wall slammed down between Elias and Leo. The pain reached a crescendo, a blinding flash of violet light that seemed to turn Elias’s vision inside out, and then—silence.

Elias woke an hour later. The Foundry was quieter now, the Tinkers having moved to the lower levels for the shift change. He felt different. The migraine was gone, replaced by a dull, throbbing pressure behind his ears. He sat up, his movements feeling strangely precise, as if his motor functions had been calibrated by a professional.

He looked at his wrist. The angry red light was gone, replaced by a steady, surgical blue glow.

The partition is holding, the Master of Pipes said, standing by a workbench where he was cleaning a set of blood-stained probes. But the wall is thin. Strong emotions—fear, rage, love—will cause it to leak. You must remain cold, Data-Carrier. If you let the ghost in, you won't come back.

Where do I go? Elias asked. The name Elias felt more solid now, though there was a lingering sense of loss, a hollow space in his chest where his own childhood used to be.

You go to the Glass City, the Master said, pointing his mechanical finger toward the east. The Aegis headquarters. The fragment you carry contains the coordinates for the 'Genesis Core.' It’s the physical location of the first server, the one that holds the unedited history of the world. If you can plug yourself into that, you can broadcast the Root Memories to everyone in the Pulse. You can show them the sun.

That's suicide, Elias said. The Glass City is the most guarded place on Earth. I'm just a scavenger from the Sump.

You were a scavenger, the Master corrected, his amber lens glowing brightly. Now, you are the most valuable piece of hardware on the planet. And you aren't going alone.

The Master gestured toward the shadows at the back of the room. A woman stepped out. She was tall, with short-cropped silver hair and a face that was a map of scars and cybernetic augmentations. On her back was a kinetic sniper rifle that looked like it could punch through a tank.

This is Kael, the Master said. She’s a 'Runner.' She’s been to the Glass City three times. She’s the only reason you won't be caught within twenty minutes of leaving the Veins.

Kael looked Elias up and down, her eyes—one natural brown, one a glowing blue prosthetic—narrowing in disapproval. "He looks soft, Master. He smells like the Sump and corporate fear.