INFINITY + 1 Chapter 13

 

Chapter 13

The last weekend of Fausto’s life began with the taste of blood and the weight of a ghost.

He sat at his desk in the abandoned hospital, the blue light of his Beta glasses painting his gaunt face in the dark. Before him, on the screen, was the alert he’d been waiting for—and dreading—for three years. The literary agency app, a sleek, predatory thing that lived in the corner of his vision, pulsed with a soft, golden urgency.

Opportunity: NBA Instructional Manual (Ghostwriting)

Client: League Office / “Championship Mindset” Imprint

Advance: $75,000 (negotiable)

Potential Follow-up: Authorized WNBA Hall of Fame Project

Status: AI Agent Standing By

Fausto’s heart did a clumsy, hopeful leap before crashing back into the pit of his stomach. Seventy-five thousand dollars. It was more money than he’d seen in a decade. It was a way out of the hospital. It was a way to maybe, just maybe, buy back a sliver of Rita’s respect, to be a father Stephen wouldn’t call “Gummy Bear” with that particular sneer.

His thumb hovered over the Accept Call glyph.

Then his eyes drifted to the other window, open behind the alert. It was his manuscript. The biography. Ramon Atila: The Man Who Drew Infinity. 872 pages. Eleven years of his life. A monument to a man the world had decided it didn’t need to remember. A love letter to a ghost who had, in a dream, told him to stop writing it.

The agency app pulsed again, more insistently. The AI Agent, a perky, algorithmically optimistic presence, materialized in a small pop-up. “Fausto! This is a fantastic match for your profile! The client is very excited. They’ve seen your sports blog from the 2050s! Ready to connect?”

Fausto stared at the biography. The cursor blinked at the end of the final chapter, the one where Ramon, old and at peace, watches the sunset from a Colombian farm. It was a lie, of course. Ramon had died in a Los Angeles hospital, surrounded by family who’d long since sold his soul to corporate branding. But it was a beautiful lie. The only beautiful thing Fausto had ever made.

He thought of the dream. The wooden bird. The pasture. Stop trying to be my guardian.

The AI Agent chirped. “Fausto? The window is closing in ten seconds. This is a premium opportunity.”

“Tell them,” Fausto said, his voice gravelly from disuse. “Tell them nobody gives a shit about Ramon Atila.”

The words hung in the air, ugly and final.

The AI Agent flickered, its smile freezing. “I… do not recommend that messaging. Would you like me to suggest a counter-proposal?”

“No,” Fausto said, and with a swipe of his hand, he dismissed the alert. The golden pulse vanished. The silence that followed was absolute, and heavier than the hospital’s concrete walls.

He killed the manuscript window, too. The screen went dark, reflecting only his own hollow eyes. He was free. He had chosen nothing over something, a ghost over a future. He felt like he might vomit.

From the adjacent room, the sound of Stephen’s VR game bled through the thin wall. The tinny, triumphant music of Bubble Boy: Lost in the Galaxy. A cheer, then Stephen’s voice, loud and mocking: “Suck it, alien scum!” He was talking to the game, but the venom felt personal, aimed at the whole disappointing universe, with Fausto as its chief ambassador.

Fausto stood up, his joints aching. He needed air. He needed to not be here.

He found Stephen lying on his bed, the VR headset covering his eyes, his body twitching as he guided his avatar through a field of cartoon coins. Fausto stood in the doorway, watching his son. The boy was eight, all sharp angles and simmering rage. He was different lately. Not just angry, but sad. A deep, quiet sadness that he covered with louder, more aggressive gaming. He’d stopped going to the virtual school modules. He slept until noon.

An opportunity. A tiny, fragile door cracked open in the fortress of Stephen’s resentment. Fausto could see it. He could say something. Hey. I’m here. I see you. It’s all fucked, isn’t it?

But the weight of his own choice—the $75,000 now swirling down the digital drain—crushed the impulse. How could he mend anything when he was the one who kept breaking it? How could he face Stephen’s eyes, which were so much like Rita’s, when he had just chosen a dead man over their lives?

Stephen must have sensed him. He paused the game, lifting the headset. His eyes were red-rimmed from the screen. “What.”

“Nothing,” Fausto mumbled. “Going out.”

Stephen’s lip curled. “To get more ice cream? Celebrating another bestseller?” The sarcasm was a lash.

Fausto flinched. “No. Just… need cigarettes. And wine.”

It was a lie. He didn’t smoke anymore. The wine was for a celebration that wouldn’t happen.

Stephen stared at him for a long second, the sadness breaking through the anger, just for a moment. It was a plea. A silent, desperate do something.

Fausto looked away. He couldn’t bear it. The boy’s need was a canyon, and Fausto had no rope, no bridge, only the empty pockets of a man who traded futures for elegies.

“Don’t wait up,” Fausto said, his voice barely audible.

He turned and walked away, down the spiraling labyrinth of corridors, past the empty operating theaters and rusted gurneys. Each step felt like a retreat from a battle he never had the courage to fight.

He emerged into the cool, damp night. A light rain was falling, misting the neon glow of the city. He climbed into his ancient, self-driving electric car. The engine whirred to life with a pathetic wheeze.

As the car pulled away from the crumbling hospital, Fausto didn’t look back at the window he knew Stephen was watching from. He tapped his glasses, and the screen lit up with the Joe Pogo Podcast archive. He selected an episode at random.

Jo Pogo’s voice, that grating mix of surfer drawl and faux-profundity, filled the cabin. “—and like, brah, we’re all just data in the end, you know? Copied, pasted, deleted. What’s even real, man?”

Fausto lit a cigarette—an old, crumpled one he found in the glove compartment. He took a long, shaky drag, the smoke mixing with the condensation on the windows.

He drove. Nowhere. Everywhere. Past the flickering sky-billboards selling ATILA Hormone Blockers, past the crowded refugee stacks of the Barrens, past the glittering, inaccessible towers of the corporate zones. He was a ghost in a machine, haunting the edges of a world that had no place for him.

He had given up the money. He had given up the chance. He had walked away from his son’s silent cry for help. For what? For the memory of a man who told him to let go? For the approval of a ghost?

The irony was a black hole in his chest. He had finally obeyed Ramon. He had stopped being the guardian. And in doing so, he had abandoned his post at the only gate that ever truly mattered.

The car navigated the rain-slicked streets autonomously. Fausto stared out at the blurred lights, the wooden bird from his dream a phantom weight in his empty hand. He was more depressed than he had ever been in his whole life. The depression wasn’t a sadness anymore; it was a climate. The air he breathed. The final, silent truth of Fausto Mendez.

He had chosen the infinite. And in that endless, echoing space, he had never felt more finite, more alone, more utterly, irrevocably lost.

The car drove on, carrying him deeper into the neon-drenched night, a solitary coffin sailing into the heart of a city that had already forgotten his name.

He needed a sign. Something to prove he hadn’t just thrown his life away for a hallucination. A confirmation, however small, that the choice he’d made—the ghost over the gold—meant something. He told the car to find a place to buy a lottery ticket.

It pulled up to an all-night bodega, its flickering sign advertising synth-meat skewers and VR-time rentals. The rain had eased to a drizzle. Inside, the air was thick with the smell of fried circuitry and stale incense. A bored-looking synth-clerk with chrome cheek implants stared into the middle distance, processing some internal feed.

Fausto approached the counter. “Lotto. Quick-Pick. The big one.”

The clerk’s eyes refocused with a faint whir. He tapped a screen, and a thin slip of polymer printed out. Fausto fumbled for credits, his hands still trembling.

The clerk took the money, his expression utterly blank. It was this indifference, this total lack of recognition, that broke the dam inside Fausto. He wasn’t a man who had just sacrificed everything for art. He was just another sad night-crawler, buying a dream for a few credits.

“You know,” Fausto heard himself say, his voice too loud in the quiet store. “It doesn’t matter if I win.”

The clerk blinked slowly.

“I play anyway,” Fausto continued, the words tumbling out now, fueled by a desperate need to be heard, to justify his own existence to this blank-faced machine. “Just like I wrote the Ramon Atila documentary. You know Ramon Atila? The artist? I wrote his biography. The definitive one. The publishing agency app rejected it. Forty-seven times. Forty-seven. But I kept writing it. I played that lottery, too. Because that’s what a man does. He plays the game. He writes the book. Even when the world says no. Even when the world says you’re nothing. You play anyway. That’s the point. That’s the whole… fucking… point.”

He was breathing heavily, his fists clenched on the counter. The clerk stared at him. There was no comprehension in his eyes, only a mild system alert for potential customer disturbance.

Fausto’s Beta glasses buzzed. An incoming call. Rita’s ID flashed. He’d forgotten. The NBA deal. Her connections. He’d promised to call.

The glasses switched to voicemail automatically. Rita’s voice, crisp and furious, filled his auditory feed. “Fausto. It’s Rita. I used every favor I had left to get you that NBA book deal. My contact at the League Office just pinged me. They said you dismissed the agent. You didn’t just reject it, you were… profane. What is wrong with you? Call me back. Or don’t. I don’t care anymore.”

The message ended. The silence in the bodega was absolute.

The clerk finally spoke, his voice a flat, synthesized monotone. “Your ticket, sir.”

Fausto looked at the little slip of polymer in the clerk’s hand. The numbers were meaningless. A dream for suckers. He took it, turned, and walked out into the night.

The rain had stopped. The city glistened under its own sickly glow. He got back in the car, but he didn’t tell it to go home. He couldn’t go back to the hospital. Not yet.

He drove to Hollywood. Not the glittering holobillboard version, but the old, crumbling bones of it. He parked near a decaying apartment complex from the last century, its stucco stained with water and graffiti. He got out and climbed the fire escape to the roof.

The city spread out below him, a vast circuit board of light and shadow. The air up here was cleaner, colder. He walked to the edge, the toes of his worn shoes overhanging the abyss.

He looked up at the sky, a muddy purple dome polluted by light. There were no stars. There hadn’t been stars in Los Angeles for fifty years.

“WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?” he screamed. The sound was raw, torn from the pit of his stomach. It echoed off the water tanks and satellite dishes, a tiny, pathetic noise swallowed by the city’s endless hum.

“WAS IT RIGHT?” he yelled, his throat shredding. “TELL ME IF IT WAS RIGHT! GIVE ME A SIGN! A FUCKING SIGN!”

He was crying now, hot, angry tears of frustration and loss. He was yelling at God. At Ramon. At the universe. At the indifferent algorithms that governed his life. He didn’t know. He just needed something, anything, to answer back.

For a long moment, there was nothing. Just the wind, and the distant thrum of the city.

Then, a sound. A mechanical whir, growing closer.

A police surveillance drone, a sleek black disc with a single red eye, cruised silently across the skyline a few hundred feet above him. It paused for a second, its lens rotating, scanning the rooftop. It registered one heat signature: a lone male, elevated position, shouting. It cross-referenced the biometrics. No match for wanted lists. Emotional distress levels: high. Threat assessment: low.

Its programming concluded: non-actionable anomaly. Log and continue patrol.

The drone’s red eye held him in its gaze for one cold, impersonal second. Then it turned and moved on, gliding smoothly toward a more interesting cluster of thermal signatures downtown.

Fausto watched it go, the last of his rage seeping out of him, leaving only a hollow, aching cold. He had screamed at the heavens, and the heavens had sent a drone. Not God. Not a ghost. A machine doing its job.

He sank to his knees on the gritty rooftop, the lottery ticket crumpled in his fist. The wooden bird was gone. The dream was over. The silence that answered him was the only truth left.

He was alone.

And tomorrow was another day.

•••

The last drink of Fausto Mendez's life was a watered-down whiskey that tasted like gasoline and regret. He hunched over the bar of The Severed Head, a dim neon cave carved into the base of a Barrens housing stack. The air was thick with synth-smoke and the low murmur of people trying to forget. Each sip was a sacrament of failure.

His Beta glasses lay on the sticky bartop, dark and silent. On their screen, ignored, a series of text threads glowed with a soft, accusing light.

From Stephen, an hour ago: where r u

Then, five minutes later: gummybear

Then: dad

And from Rita, a voice memo, its waveform a jagged mountain range of emotion. He hadn’t listened, but the automated transcript floated before his bleary eyes:

“Fausto. Stephen is… he’s not okay. He’s not gaming. He’s just sitting in the dark. I asked him what’s wrong and he said, ‘My dad is texting me.’ He meant you’re NOT texting him. He’s waiting. It’s more important that your son is texting you than whatever this… whatever you’re doing is. Call him. Please. I’m not mad. Just… call him.”

It was physical torture to do the right thing. To let the plea hang there in the digital ether, unanswered. To choose the burning numbness of the bar over the searing vulnerability of his son’s need. He took another swallow, the alcohol doing nothing to cauterize the wound.

“Rough night?”

The voice came from his right. A man, about his age, slid onto the neighboring stool. He had the worn, clever look of a New Yorker, sharp eyes taking in the room with amused detachment. He wore a jacket that had seen better decades but was worn with a defiant kind of pride.

“Rough life,” Fausto grunted, not looking up.

“Aren’t they all?” The man signaled the bartender for two of whatever Fausto was having. “Name’s Leo. Just in from the old NYC ruins. Place is a museum of bad decisions now. Figured I’d see what fresh hell the West Coast cooked up.”

They drank in silence for a moment. Then Leo said, “You’ve got the look.”

“What look?”

“The ‘I just chose the ghost over the gold’ look. The ‘I coulda been a contender’ sigh. It’s a classic.”

Fausto finally looked at him. There was no pity in Leo’s face, only a shared, weary recognition. “Something like that.”

They talked. It was easy, shockingly so. Leo was a talker, a storyteller. He spoke of New York not with nostalgia, but as a case study in collapse and stubborn survival. He had a theory about cities being living organisms, and the Barrens was its festering wound. He was clever, cynical, but not cruel. For the first time in years, Fausto didn’t feel like a museum piece. He felt seen.

Then Leo did something strange. He pointed to a couple arguing in a booth across the room. Without looking away from Fausto, he said, “She’s going to say she’s done with his shit, but she’ll take him back. He’s going to order another drink he can’t afford.”

A second later, the woman’s voice rose: “I’m done with your shit, Marco!” The man waved frantically at the bartender for another synth-ale.

Fausto stared. “Lucky guess.”

Leo smiled. “Watch.” He nodded subtly toward the door. A sanitation drone whirred past outside. “In three, two, one…”

A young man in a delivery uniform burst in, looking harried. “Anyone order a ‘Big Kahuna’ protein pizza to this address? The drone’s GPS glitched.”

The bartender groaned. “Over here, kid. Been waiting an hour.”

Fausto felt a chill that wasn’t from the bar’s overworked AC. “How did you…”

“I pay attention,” Leo said, his eyes twinkling. “Patterns. Micro-expressions. The way a person holds their glass when they’re about to lie. It’s not magic. It’s just… reading the bigger picture.” He leaned in, his voice dropping. “And the bigger picture, my friend, is that none of this matters.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the gold you turned down, the ghost you chased, the son you’re ignoring…” Leo spread his hands, encompassing the bar, the Barrens, the entire glittering, diseased city beyond. “In the grand scheme? A blip. A flicker. We’re all just data points in a simulation that’s probably buffering. The empires rise, the empires fall. The loves burn hot and turn to ash. The legacies get turned into hormone blockers for infants. It’s all just… noise.”

The words should have plunged Fausto deeper into despair. Instead, they were a liberation. A confirmation. It doesn’t matter. Ramon’s ghost, Rita’s fury, Stephen’s silent plea, the $75,000 swirling down the drain—it was all just noise in an indifferent cosmos. The weight on his chest lightened, replaced by a giddy, terrifying hollow-ness.

“You’re a psychic,” Fausto said, a slow smile spreading across his face. It felt alien on his muscles.

“I’m a realist with good eyes,” Leo corrected, but he winked. “And I’m celebrating tonight. Found a lead on a cache of pre-Collapse vinyl records. Real ones. In a locker near the old arts district. Could be worth a fortune to the right collector. Or we could just drink to the end of the world with the soundtrack of the past. What do you say? Stuck here listening to your own silence, or out there listening to the universe’s?”

Fausto looked at his dark glasses. At the unplayed message from Rita, the unanswered texts from Stephen. He saw the silent hospital room, the empty chair where a boy sat in the dark. That was a gravity well, a black hole of responsibility and pain.

Leo was offering escape velocity.

He tossed a few credits on the bar, leaving the glasses behind. “Let’s go celebrate.”

He followed Leo out into the neon-drenched night. The city’ hum was a symphony of meaningless data. The stars were invisible, but for the first time, Fausto didn’t care. He had chosen the infinite. And in its vast, uncaring embrace, he felt absolutely nothing, which was infinitely better than the pain.

The two men disappeared into the arterial glow of the city, a cool guy from New York and a man who had just walked away from his son, their laughter swallowed by the endless, indifferent noise.

The last weekend of Fausto Mendez’s life continued with a ghost and a voice that was not his own, echoing in the hollows of his skull. It was Leo’s voice, slick with a New York swagger, drowning out the sirens in his head.

“Carpe Diem, my man! Seize the day! You think the Romans were worried about tomorrow? Hell no! They were living! Right here, right now!” Leo raised his arms to the neon-soaked night, a street-corner prophet in a worn leather jacket. They were moving through a river of partygoers spilling from a holographic nightclub, their faces painted with spectral light. Leo paused, pointing a finger at a laughing woman in a shimmering dress. “You, darling! You’re going to trip on that grate! Watch your step!”

The woman, mid-laugh, glanced down, sidestepped a cracked heating vent, and shot Leo a look of startled gratitude. He winked.

Fausto, trailing a step behind, felt a familiar, pedantic itch. “Actually,” he said, his voice raspy from disuse, “that’s a misreading of Horace. Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero. It’s not ‘forget tomorrow.’ It’s ‘seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the next one.’ It’s about harvesting the moment because the future is uncertain, not ignoring the future entirely. I’m a writer, I… I know these things.”

Leo stopped. The fluid, celebratory energy around him solidified. He turned slowly. The playful glint in his eye was gone, replaced by a flat, unsettling intensity. The noise of the street seemed to recede.

“Are you calling me a liar, Fausto?”

The question hung in the air, sharp as a knife. It wasn’t angry, not exactly. It was probing. Clinical. For a second, Fausto saw not a cool guy from New York, but something else—a collector of rare moments, sizing up a specimen.

“No,” Fausto mumbled, the bravado draining from him. “No, I just… it’s a common misconception.”

The intensity vanished. Leo’s smile returned, brighter than before. He slung an arm around Fausto’s shoulders. “A writer! Of course you are! Details matter. I like that. Come on, let’s grab some cash from my room. The night’s young, and we’re not done celebrating my big score.”

Fausto was drawn to him, even as the creepiness of that momentary glare lingered. Leo knew things. He’d predicted the pizza delivery drone’s glitch in the bar, the couple’s reconciliation. It was uncanny. It made Fausto’s own life—a predictable slide of regret and frozen meals—feel impossibly dull. Here was a man who seemed to ride the chaos, not drown in it.

Leo’s hotel room was a capsule of curated grime in a once-luxury tower, now a flophouse for those clinging to the edges of the corporate zones. It smelled of stale synth-cologne and ozone. “Music producer,” Leo announced breezily, tapping a console. A frenetic, atonal beat filled the room—a sound like dying robots trying to sing.

“What… is that?” Fausto asked, wincing.

“The future, my friend! Alien funk! You gotta expand your horizons!” Leo laughed, digging through a sleek, hard-shell suitcase. Then he paused, pulling out a small, square photograph. “Ah, Stacy. Miss her.”

He handed the photo to Fausto. It was a Polaroid, the kind Fausto hadn’t seen since childhood. The colors were weirdly vibrant. A stunning woman with dark hair smiled in a bathroom mirror, completely nude. It was intimate, awkward. Fausto’s face flushed. He went to hand it back, but Leo was already showing another. This one had Leo in it too, naked beside her, grinning at the camera with that same invincible smile.

“Whoa,” Fausto said, thrusting the pictures back. “That’s… private, man.”

Leo looked genuinely surprised, then contrite. He took the photos gently. “Shit. Sorry. You’re right. That was rude. Old habits. She’s back in New York. We’re… open.” He tucked them away carefully. “It’s weird, right? The Polaroid? I like the tactility. In a world of clouds and feeds, you hold a memory in your hand.”

The weirdness of it—the outdated tech, the casual intimacy—was a barb that hooked in Fausto’s mind. This man was a series of contradictions: a street psychic, a music producer of alien sounds, a nostalgic with nude Polaroids.

“Anyway!” Leo clapped his hands, dispelling the awkwardness. He pulled a thick roll of corporate scrip from the suitcase. “Fuel for the fire. Let’s go.”

They hit three more bars, the conversation flowing on a river of expensive whiskey. Leo talked about New York’s collapse as a grand spectacle, about finding beauty in decay. He spoke of patterns, of the “bigger picture” where individual lives were just notes in a chaotic symphony. Each word was a balm on Fausto’s wounded soul. It doesn’t matter. The mantra was a liberation.

Finally, they stumbled out into a plaza dominated by a towering, pulsating hologram of a dancer. A neon sign thrummed: THE GENTLEMAN’S CLUB: GALACTICA.

Leo nudged Fausto, his grin lopsided. “One last stop. To prove I’m strictly into women. After those photos, I owe you that much.”

Fausto, drunk and unmoored, laughed. “You don’t have to prove anything.”

“I insist!” Leo declared, steering him toward the garish entrance. “It’s all part of the experience! The infinite, beautiful, meaningless experience!”

They were engulfed by the thumping bass and the scent of artificial cherries. Fausto’s head swam. He had walked away from his son’s silent plea for this. For a cool guy from New York, for alien funk, for nude Polaroids and a strip club at the end of the world.

As a synth-waiver in iridescent latex led them to a plush booth, Fausto looked at Leo, lit by the club’s epileptic glow. The man was a mystery, a sign, an escape hatch from his own life. And in that moment, the crushing weight of being Fausto Mendez—failed writer, failed father, failed guardian of a ghost—didn’t just lift.

It vanished entirely, replaced by the thrilling, terrifying, and absolutely nothing weight of the infinite.

•••

The sun was a sullen bruise, bleeding purple and orange into the haze above Runyon Canyon. Below, Los Angeles lay sprawled, a circuit board of smog and light, breathing its exhaust-laced sigh. The narcotic pill Leo had given him was hitting in waves, a warm, fuzzy static that made the edges of the world bleed. It was good. It was better than feeling.

Fausto stood slightly apart from the other two, his hands shoved deep in his pockets. The ghost of the sleazy motel room—the cheap perfume, the transactional silence, the hollow guilt—still clung to him like a bad smell. He’d called Rita from the curb. Straight to voicemail. He’d texted Stephen. Left on read. The pills and the booze were supposed to be a shovel to bury the shame, but they just made the hole deeper.

“Check this old-school tech, man. Pure analog.”

It was Del. The new guy. He’d appeared with Leo at the curb outside the motel like a magician’s assistant, holding the bottle of Grand Marnier that became their sunrise sacrament. He was quiet, wore mirrored sunglasses even in the pre-dawn gloom, and moved with a strange, fluid economy. Now, he was holding a bulky, plastic rectangle—a Polaroid camera, the kind Fausto hadn’t seen since he was a kid in his dad’s basement.

Del raised the camera, aimed it at the downtown skyline, and pressed the button. The mechanism whirred, groaned, and spat out a small, square card. He caught it, shook it gently, and tucked it into the breast pocket of his leather jacket without looking.

“Gotta capture the nick of time,” Del said, his voice a low, mellifluous rumble. He didn’t look at Fausto or Leo, just scanned the horizon. “The exact moment between ‘almost’ and ‘too late.’ That’s where nothing gets done. That’s where you live.”

“Deep,” Leo chuckled, taking a swig from the now-warm Grand Marnier bottle. “You hear that, Fausto? We’re living in the nick of time. Doing nothing. It’s an art form.”

Fausto forced a smile. The pill made it easy. Everything was soft, interesting, distant. His betrayal of Rita, Stephen’s silent judgment, the $75,000 he’d turned down for a ghost—it was all data on a screen, scrolling past too fast to read.

Del took another picture. Whirr-clunk. Tucked it away.

They stood there as the sun burned off the last of the night, the city revealing itself in all its tarnished glory. Del was a repository of odd, cool quips about entropy and the beauty of decay, about how true freedom was in the abandonment of consequence. Each word was a balm. Leo, the slick New Yorker, nodded along, the perfect hype man. Fausto felt himself being pulled into their orbit, into a world where his failures weren’t failures, but choices. Rebellions.

After a while, Del pulled the small stack of Polaroids from his pocket. He fanned them out like a tarot deck, squinting at each one in the strengthening light. He handed one to Fausto. “Look. The city dreaming.”

Fausto took it. The colors were weirdly saturated, the film development imperfect. The downtown towers stood sharp against the morning smog. And there, above them, in a blur of white and grey that could have been a cloud, a lens flare, a chemical smudge…

It looked like a mushroom cloud.

A perfect, blooming, ghostly mushroom cloud hovering over the Bank of America building.

Fausto’s breath hitched. The pleasant narcotic haze wavered. He blinked, hard, trying to force his eyes to focus. “What… what is that?”

Del leaned over, plucked the photo from his fingers, and studied it. He shrugged, a slow, effortless movement. “Development issue. Old film. Or maybe you’re just higher than the space station, my friend.” He grinned, a flash of white. “Either way, it’s a great shot. Apocalyptic chic.”

Leo snatched the photo, looked at it, and burst out laughing. “Dude! It’s the credit reel of your life! Fade to white! Boom!” He slapped Fausto on the back.

Fausto stared at the small square in Leo’s hand. The phantom cloud seemed to pulse. Was it the drugs? A trick of the light? A flaw in the cheap, ancient film?

Or was it a sign? A confirmation of the nihilistic freedom Leo and Del were selling? That nothing mattered, that it could all go up in a flash, that the only sane response was to stand on a hill and watch it burn with a bottle in your hand and a pill in your system.

Del took the photo back from Leo and slid it into Fausto’s jacket pocket. He patted it. “A souvenir. From the nick of time.”

Fausto’s hand went to his pocket. The photo felt warm. Or was that his skin?

He looked back at the real downtown, pristine and intact in the morning light. Then he looked at Leo and Del, two prophets of beautiful nothingness, smiling at him.

The guilt, the fear, the crushing weight of being Fausto Mendez—it was still there. But the pill and the ghostly mushroom cloud and the easy camaraderie created a buffer, a soundproof wall. Inside the wall, it was quiet. It was okay.

Maybe Del was right. Maybe this was the only place to live: in the nick of time, between almost and too late, doing nothing, watching the world from a safe distance, holding a picture of its destruction in your pocket.

He took the Grand Marnier bottle from Leo and drank. The sweetness was cloying, but the burn was real.

“Let’s get breakfast,” Leo said. “I know a place that does synth-eggs that’ll make you see God. Or at least a convincing hologram.”

They turned and began to walk back down the trail, leaving the city vista behind. Fausto didn’t look back. He kept his hand in his pocket, his fingers tracing the edges of the Polaroid.

He was part of the crew now. A cool guy from New York, a creepy-charismatic photographer, and a man who had just walked away from everything.

The last weekend of Fausto Mendez’s life continued, a bullet shot into the void, spinning end over end, headed nowhere beautiful.

•••

The three of them stood under a lamppost whose light had burned out years ago, on a crescent-shaped street lined with silent, fortress-like mansions. The air was heavy with the scent of night-blooming jasmine and money. It felt dead.

Fausto’s euphoria had curdled into a sour, metallic anxiety. The pill Leo had given him was a dying star, collapsing in on itself, leaving a cold, dense core of paranoia. He looked up. The sky wasn’t just dark. It was a vast, bruised purple dome, the light pollution from the city giving it a sickly, internal glow, like the skin of a rotten fruit. No stars. No moon. Just this endless, hellish ceiling pressing down. He couldn’t stop looking at it. It felt like a lid.

“This is it,” Leo announced, his voice unnaturally calm. He and Del had stopped walking. They were both staring at the lenses over their eyes, their fingers making minute, tapping motions in the air.

“What is it?” Fausto’s voice came out sharper than he intended. “A dead-end street with a broken lamp? You said we were celebrating. You said we were going to see something. This is nothing.”

“Patience, my man,” Del said, not looking at him. He was rotating his wrist, as if adjusting a dial only he could see. “The most important places look like nothing. That’s the point. The cracks in the world don’t advertise.”

“Seal the fault lines,” Leo murmured, echoing the phrase they’d been repeating like a mantra for the last hour. “Stabilize the substrate. You can’t have a proper party on a shaking floor.”

Fausto’s stomach turned. He was shivering, though the night was warm. The creepiness he’d felt in flashes before was now a constant, humming presence. These weren’t just cool guys with good stories. They were… collectors. Tour guides of decay. And he was their latest specimen.

“I want to go home,” Fausto said, but it was a whisper, devoid of conviction. Home was the abandoned hospital. Home was Stephen’s silent judgment and Rita’s final, furious voicemail. Home was the ghost of a life he’d already left in a puddle of vomit and regret. He had nowhere to go.

“Home is a construct,” Del said, finally lowering his hand. He reached into his leather jacket and pulled out the Polaroid camera. “The only real home is the moment between breaths. The nick of time. You ready for your close-up, Fausto?”

“My what?”

Before he could react, Del raised the camera. The flash was a silent, shocking burst of white in the dark street. Fausto flinched, blinded.

The camera whirred, groaned, and spat out the familiar square card. Del caught it, gave it a practiced shake, and then held it up, studying the emerging image.

Leo leaned over his shoulder. A slow smile spread across his face.

“Perfect,” Leo breathed. “Just perfect.”

He took the photo from Del and handed it to Fausto. “A star is born, ladies and gentleman.”

Fausto took the Polaroid. The colors were already swimming into view, weirdly saturated. It was a picture of him, standing under the dead lamppost, his face pale and slack in the flash’s glare, his eyes wide with a confusion that looked, in the photo, like profound terror. Behind him, the immaculate hedge of a mansion was just a black wall. Above him, the hellish sky was a smear of chemical purple.

But that wasn’t what made his blood run cold.

In the photo, just behind his own shoulder, a faint, translucent figure seemed to be standing. It was hazy, but the outline was unmistakable—the shaved head, the black beard, the posture of casual ownership. Ramon Atila. Or a cheap chemical ghost of him, bleeding through the layers of the film.

Fausto’s hand began to tremble. The last of the high evaporated, leaving a clear, crystalline terror.

“What is this?” he demanded, his voice cracking. “What the fuck is this?”

“Development issue,” Del said, repeating his line from the hilltop, but his tone was different now—flat, final. “Old film. Or maybe you’re just haunted. Either way, it’s a great shot. Your debut.”

Leo took the photo back, slipping it into his own pocket. “The fault line,” he said, his eyes locking onto Fausto’s. There was no playfulness left in them. Only a cold, assessing clarity. “You’re standing right on it, Fausto. The crack between what was and what’s coming. Between a ghost and a future. We’re here to seal it. With you as the cornerstone.”

Fausto took a step back. “You’re not music producers.”

“We’re stabilizers,” Del corrected.

“Realists,” Leo added. “The world’s a story that’s coming apart at the seams. Too many threads, too many contradictory endings. It needs an editor. We find the loose ends, the characters who don’t fit their narratives anymore… and we give them a new role. A final one.”

The pieces, jagged and horrible, clicked into place in Fausto’s mind. The uncanny predictions. The nihilistic charm. The way they’d appeared exactly when he had chosen nothing over everything. They weren’t saviors. They were janitors for a broken reality. And he was the mess they’d been sent to clean up.

“You targeted me,” Fausto whispered.

“We observed a paradox,” Leo said. “A man who chooses a ghost over his own son creates a tear in the moral fabric. That kind of dissonance has to be resolved. Smoothed over. We’re just helping the narrative reach its logical conclusion.”

“Which is what?” Fausto’s heart was a frantic drum against his ribs. He looked from Leo to Del. They were blocking the path back the way they came.

Del’s mirrored sunglasses reflected the twin, tiny images of Fausto’s terrified face. “The conclusion,” he said, “is always the same. The star burns out. The story ends. The fault line is sealed. Quietly.”

Leo took a step forward, his hand outstretched, not in threat, but in an offer that was infinitely worse. “Come on, Fausto. It doesn’t have to be ugly. Think of it as your masterpiece. The final edit. You walk into the infinite with us, and the noise… all the noise of your life… just stops. Isn’t that what you wanted? When you screamed at the sky?”

Fausto looked up again at the hellish purple dome. No drone would come this time. No sign. Just this awful, perfect silence, and two men who spoke of eternity like it was a vacant lot they owned.

He had run from his son’s silent plea. He had run from his wife’s fury. He had run from the ghost of a great-grandfather who told him to let go.

There was nowhere left to run.

Except forward.

Into the fault line.

He looked at Leo’s waiting hand. He thought of the wooden bird, warm in his palm in a dream that already felt like someone else’s life. He thought of Stephen, sitting in the dark, texting a ghost.

Dad.

The word was a bullet in his soul.

Fausto Mendez took a deep, shuddering breath of the jasmine-scented air. He did not take Leo’s hand.

“No,” he said.

And then he turned, and he ran.

Not back toward the city. Not toward any safety he knew. He ran straight into the dark heart of a Beverly Hills he didn’t recognize, his feet slapping against the pristine pavement, the echo of his own panic the only sound in the world.

Behind him, he heard no pursuit. Just Del’s low, melodic voice, already fading with distance.

“See you in the nick of time, Fausto.”

And then, the click of another Polaroid.

Whirr. Clunk.

•••

Fausto wakes up on Sunday morning. The sky is red. He remembers the saying: Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning. This means it’s going to rain. It immediately does.

He gets a tragic message from his wife. One where she displays the empty hole that used to be her soul. She is tired of leaving him. Praying one day he won’t disappoint her.

Fausto. It’s done. I can’t do this anymore. I pray for you. I pray for the man you could be, somewhere, under all the ghosts and the ice cream and the self-pity. But I’m done waiting for him to show up. Don’t call.

Fausto looks around. He seems to be in his storage room in the abandoned hospital that used to be a nurse’s lunch room. The air smells of mildew and the ghost of disinfectant. The wooden bird is in his hand, its crude wings digging into his palm. The rain drums a steady, miserable tattoo on the boarded-up window.

He feels nothing. The message should be a knife to the heart. It should be the final, confirming crash of everything he’s ever feared. But after the dream, after the pasture, after the wooden bird and the kind eyes of a ghost who told him to stop guarding a legacy… the message just feels like weather. Another atmospheric disturbance. A red sky.

He stands, his body stiff, and walks to the grimy window. He can just make out the world through a crack in the plywood: the slick, grey streets, the hunched figures hurrying under neon umbrellas, the relentless, weeping sky. A warning.

Sailor’s warning.

He’s been sinking for years. This is just the sky agreeing.

His glasses buzz. A notification from his publishing app. It’s the alert he dismissed days ago, the one for the NBA ghostwriting manual. It’s been re-sent by the automated system.Opportunity expires in 24 hours.

He swipes it away. The ghost of $75,000. The ghost of a future. Gone.

Another buzz. Stephen. Not a text. A live call.

Fausto’s breath catches. He accepts.

For a long moment, there’s just staticky silence. Then, Stephen’s voice, small and hollow, stripped of all its usual sneering armor.

“Dad?”

“Stephen. I’m here.”

“Are you coming home?”

The question is a simple, devastating thing. Home. The abandoned hospital? The storage room? The space between Rita’s disappointment and his own failure?

“I… I am home, buddy.”

“No.” Stephen’s voice cracks. “Home-home. With me and Mom. Before… before you left.”

Fausto closes his eyes. The rain sounds like static. “Stephen, I…”

“You promised you’d take me to the Griffith Observatory. You said we’d look at the stars through the big telescope. You said the city lights didn’t matter, we’d see them anyway.” A wet sniffle. “You promised.”

The memory is a physical ache. A year ago. A lifetime ago. He’d been trying. He’d bought the tickets. Then the call from the literary agency about the Ramon documentary falling through again, the despair, the dive into the freezer for solace… He’d forgotten. He’d broken the promise.

“I’m sorry,” Fausto whispers, the words utterly inadequate. “I got… lost.”

“Everyone gets lost,” Stephen says, with a wisdom far beyond his eight years. “Mom says you just have to want to be found.”

The line goes quiet again. Fausto can hear the faint, tinny music of Bubble Boy in the background.

“I gotta go,” Stephen mumbles. “Bubble Boy’s about to fight the final boss.”

“Stephen, wait—”

“Bye, Dad.”

The call ends.

Fausto stands in the grey half-light of the storage room, the rain his only companion. He looks at the wooden bird. Stop trying to be my guardian.

He had thought the dream meant abandoning the biography, the legacy, the fight. But what if it meant something simpler? What if the legacy wasn’t Ramon’s story, but his own? What if the fence wasn’t the publishing industry or his own inadequacy, but this room, this despair, this endless, looping failure to show up?

The sky is red. A warning.

He puts the wooden bird in his pocket. He picks up his Beta glasses but doesn’t put them on. He leaves them on the desk, next to the melted ice cream tub and the silent, accusing phone.

He walks out of the storage room, down the spiraling corridors of the dead hospital, past the rusted gurneys and shattered tiles. He doesn’t know where he’s going. To find a car. To find the Griffith Observatory, even though it’s daytime and raining. To find his son.

He emerges into the downpour. The rain soaks him instantly, plastering his hair to his skull, dripping into his eyes. It feels clean.

He starts walking. The city is a watercolor of grey and neon, smeared by the rain. He has no umbrella. He has no plan. He has a wooden bird in his pocket and a broken promise in his heart.

The last morning of Fausto Mendez’s life began with a red sky and a warning. It is Sunday morning. The rain is falling. And for the first time in a long time, he is moving. Not away from something, but into the storm. Toward a promise he should have kept. Toward a boy waiting in the dark, playing a game about a lost alien, hoping his dad remembers how to come home.

The passage ends there.

ATILA