The Hanging Algorithm
"The rain isn't real," Cael Nox thinks, looking up.
One hundred and Thirty-two years old—tall, handsome, pale-skinned, with cold blue eyes and neatly combed, jet-black hair. He wears an expensive suit with a blue tie, and a long black coat draped over his shoulders.
He stands beneath a simulated storm, falling through a skylight of hyperglass, 580 stories above the choking underlayers of Sector 12. The droplets slide over his coat in clean rivulets, programmed to avoid biological interference. Something only the elite can afford.
"When you have enough money, you can even buy rain. Likely part of the victim's ambient relaxation cycle," he thinks.
"Rich minds prefer atmospheric immersion," says a voice behind him.
He doesn't turn.
The voice is clean. Young. Controlled — but not yet seasoned.
He pivots slowly.
The woman at the threshold is composed. Clean black coat, neat knot of blonde hair, augmented lenses humming faintly. Polished boots. Perfect posture. Someone built to be here.
"Or so the catalogs say," she adds, offering a too-tidy smile.
Cael studies her like he would a data anomaly — not out of curiosity, but necessity.
"Name."
"Cadet Lena Voss. Assigned for field observation, Division One."
She doesn't blink as she says it. She wants to impress. Or convince.
"Biological age?"
"Twenty-four."
"Chronological?"
"Forty-one, sir."
"Institution?"
"Orpheum Cognitive Institute. Neuromantic Division."
He pauses. Of course. The top of the top.
"You fast-tracked your license?"
"My thesis was flagged. Pattern reconstruction in post-organic motive states. Peer-reviewed. Scored 9.82."
Her delivery is clean, factual, maybe too perfect. Like she's read her own file one too many times.
He stands slowly, gaze passing once more over the ambient systems — flickering light reflections, rain in curated loops, the smell of ozone and synthetic lavender. His eyes flick to Lena again. Still, silent. Obedient. Watching.
"The Chief placed her here," he thought, a furious expression tightening his face. He didn't need confirmation. The signature was all over it.
"Damn bastard. He knows I don't work with others—never have. And now he sticks me with a walking thesis paper?"
The thought coiled through Cael's mind like a wire pulled too tight. He kept his face still, but the fury hummed behind his eyes.
"Nine-point-eight-two and not a clue what a corpse smells like."
"Miss Voss," he says, tone colder now, "do you know what they say about First Division?"
She straightens. "That it only admits what it can't control."
Cael turns his head, just slightly.
A slow smile flickers. But there's no humor in it.
"Interesting," he murmurs. "Let's see if that holds true."
He looks away, moving toward the center of the room.
The rain curls away from his body, afraid to make contact.
"Tell me something, Voss," he says, calm as static. "Do you believe a perfect file makes you ready for scenes like this?"
"No," she replies.
He doesn't turn.
"Good. That would've been your first mistake."
She steps closer. Quiet. In rhythm with him now.
"I'm not here to impress you, sir. I'm here to learn from someone who doesn't make mistakes."
Cael's jaw tightens — just slightly.
That almost sounded rehearsed. Or worse: placed.
"If you're going to stand behind me," he says, brushing dried blood off the wall panel, "do it without breathing on my back. Don't ask questions you already know the answer to. And never—ever—touch anything unless you're ready to explain the outcome in court."
"Yes, sir."
He doesn't reply.
He walks into a grand, high-ceilinged hall—an expansive chamber at the heart of the penthouse, where artificial rain falls gently from above. The interior is lavish, awash in soft lighting and sterile opulence. Music hums somewhere in the walls—
"Beethoven," Cael thinks. "Late Quartets. Opus 131. C-sharp minor."
The hall is alive with quiet precision—figures in forensic suits moving methodically, voices hushed behind sealed visors. Drones drift silently overhead, scanning surfaces with flickering beams of violet light, capturing every angle in forensic detail. The ambient hum of data processing merges with the rain and the low resonance of the music—Beethoven's mourning strings echoing through the chamber like a dirge for the dead.
Cael moves through it all with ghostlike calm, his steps slow and deliberate, guided by the rhythm. Behind him, Lena follows, her presence quiet, tentative—an uncertain shadow trailing a man carved from ice.
And there, at the center of the hall, the body dangles from the ceiling like an offering.
The brain is exposed. The skull flayed open with surgical precision. The hemispheres spiraled into a perfect Fibonacci pattern, nerve clusters pinned outward like anatomical art—curated, intentional. Blood spatters the marble floor and pristine white walls like crimson brushstrokes.
It is a horrifying sight.
Lena freezes, eyes wide, horror washing over her face. A sickening sensation rises in her gut. She clutches her stomach.
"Don't you dare throw up here," Cael says coldly, still staring at the spiral. His tone doesn't rise; it cuts.
Lena stumbles to her knees, fighting the urge to vomit. Her breaths come sharp and shallow as she swallows it back down, trembling.
"What... what kind of lunatic would do something like that?" she gasps, her voice thin, strained.
Cael ignores her question. He doesn't flinch. Doesn't move. His neural lens activates with a blink, and his iris glows faintly as data begins to stream across his retinal overlay.
Lines of code and analysis unfurl like ghost-script across his vision. Probability trees. Environmental inconsistencies. Blood-pattern trajectories. Neural decay rates. A digital autopsy unspools before his eyes.
He watches the raw math of death bloom around him like petals of a flower.
>[NEURAL HUD INTERFACE – CONNECTED]
USER: Cael Nox
DIVISION: Department 7 – Homicide Logic & Enforcement, First Division
CREDENTIALS: Cognition Clearance Level 7 – Licensed Logic Operative
REQUEST: Access classified file: Dr. Ellion Meris [deceased]
AUTHORIZATION PROTOCOL INITIATED…
VERIFYING CASTE…
MATCH FOUND: Level 7 Clearance Detected
INTELLECT TIER AUTHORIZED: Tier-3 Intellect Files
ACCESS GRANTED
DECRYPTING…
DISPLAYING FILE IN HUD VISUAL PLANE…
---
CLASSIFIED PERSONNEL DOSSIER
ACCESS RESTRICTED: Tier-3 Intellect Clearance Required
> ACCESS GRANTED TO: Cael Nox – Department 7: Homicide Logic & Enforcement, Division 1
Cognition Caste Clearance: Level 7
(All access requests have been logged. Unauthorized duplication will trigger cognitive lockout.)
> SUBJECT PROFILE:
IDENTITY CONFIRMED: Dr. Ellion Meris
CITIZEN ID: 771-0948-AXR-MERIS
AGE: 364 Standard Years
SEX: Male
SPECIES: Homo Sapiens Variant – Cognition-Stabilized
CASTE: Cognition Tier-IX (Licensed Thought Architect)
SECURITY CLEARANCE: Tier-3 Intellect (Obelith Internal + Federal Override)
> CURRENT POSITION:
TITLE: Head Researcher, Obelith Intelligence Group
DIVISION: Cognitive Threat Assessment & Ethical Dampener Architecture
STATUS: Deceased (Pending Forensic Audit | Incident O.I.G.-314)
> INSTITUTIONAL AFFILIATIONS:
Primary Affiliation: Obelith Intelligence Group.
Liaison Position: Senior Advisor to the Department of Cerebral Ethics and Neuro-Warfare Protocols (CE-NWP)
Former Post: Founding Chair, Subcommittee on Neural Sovereignty, CE-NWP Central Authority
>PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILE :
"Displays extreme neural stability with zero deviance markers. Empathic resonance near zero. Operates on logic primacy with strict adherence to abstract ethical calculus. Not recommended for proximity operations involving affective-class citizens."
— Internal Behavioral Risk Memo, O.I.G. Integrity Division
> DEATH REPORT :
DATE OF DEATH: [REDACTED]
LOCATION: Private Penthouse, Floor 580, Spire Obelith, Sector 12 Highzone
ELEVATION: 580 stories above the choking underlayers of Sector 12
CODENAME: Incident O.I.G.-314
CAUSE OF DEATH: Unknown. Subject found with complete neural failure and massive cranial trauma. Spiral incision traced along the neocortex in a mathematically precise pattern. No signs of struggle. No biological defense response.
SECURITY BREACH: No AI sentience or surveillance constructs registered ingress. Personal security construct deactivated exactly 12.4 seconds prior to estimated time-of-death.
POINT OF ENTRY: Unconfirmed. No physical breach detected. Elevator logs show no unauthorized access.
"This was no impulsive act. No crime of rage." Cael's thinks
"This was authored" he said.
The forensic tech behind him mutters under his breath. "Fourth one this cycle. High-caste brain. Same sigil."
Cael doesn't turn.
He moves toward the far right wall of the chamber, his footsteps deliberate, steady. His gaze sharpens.
"There it is again," he murmurs.
The symbol was drawn in blood — partially dried, partially fresh, glistening under the artificial rain like lacquered crimson thread.
It spiraled outward from a central void, but this was no ordinary spiral. Seven wings curved out like celestial blades, each one etched with surgical precision.
Not illustrations of wings—imprints. Thin, blade-feathered arcs trailing blood as if from motion, not contact. Each wing different in angle and stroke, yet all converged in perfect radial symmetry.
The result was a false mandala — holy in shape, but corrupt in execution.
A halo of wings that formed a closed circuit. A recursion trap.
The longer Lena stared, the more the sigil seemed to breathe — not literally, but perceptually. Its geometry flickered, the edges drifting out of phase with her vision. Like a hallucination encoded in blood. Like the pattern wanted to be remembered, not solved.
"Seven wings," she said aloud, voice tight.
"Seven fractures," Cael muttered.
This is the first time Cael has seen the symbol in person.
The earlier murders were under the jurisdiction of Department 7: Homicide Logic & Enforcement, but repeated failures to decode the sigil or identify a suspect forced escalation. The case had been transferred—quietly—to First Division, the covert branch responsible for high-caste anomalies, cognitive instability events, and classified neuro-symbolic threats.
Now, it belonged to him.
Cael Nox is not just an inspector. He's one of only fourteen operatives in the city licensed for Unshackled Logic Operation—a cognitive clearance protocol designed for minds capable of dissecting criminal architecture without the burden of emotion. No morality bias. No instinctive interference.
Just raw, recursive thought.
He doesn't solve crimes.
He dismantles them.
He thinks in timelines. In motion residues. In psychometric heatmaps and linguistic entropy. The system trusts him not because he is moral—but because he is exact. Predictable. Efficient.
From behind, Lena's voice breaks the analytical silence.
From behind, Lena's voice broke the silence — quiet, cautious.
"What is that… strange symbol?" she asked, her eyes fixed on the blood-scribed glyph pulsing faintly on the wall.
Even as she spoke, a faint flicker crossed her retinas — her cognitive implant running a real-time visual recognition sweep. Glyph databases. Cult archives. Cognitive-caste symbology. Blacklist memetic scans.
Nothing. Not a match. Not even a partial alignment.
She blinked, visibly unsettled.
"I'm scanning every pattern log I have access to," she added, voice lower. "There's nothing like it. Nothing even close."
Cael didn't look at her.
"How do you know it's a symbol?" he asked, tone dry, unreadable.
She hesitated.
"Then… what else could it be?"
He stared at the glyph — seven blood-drawn wings spiraling out from an empty center. The geometry shifted at the edges of perception, recursive, fractal, almost alive in its stillness. Like a trap laid not in space, but in thought.
His voice dropped to a murmur.
"What indeed."
________________________________________
"So, what do you have, Doctor?" Cael asked the head of forensics.
The woman turned to face him—brown-skinned, looks mid-forties but definitely more than hundreds years old, her expression weathered but sharp behind the transparent visor of her forensic suit. A flickering holographic ID badge hovered over her chest: Dr. A. Arora, Senior Forensic Analyst, First Division.
She gave a curt nod, her voice crisp beneath the static hum of ambient scans.
"Plenty. And none of it good."
Cael folded his arms.
"Go on."
"Victim is Dr. Ellion Meris," Arora said, scanning the dossier feed. "Age: three hundred sixty-four. Neural ethicist. Cognition caste level nine. He helped write the core behavioral subroutines for the SIM-class intelligences — the kind that run most civilian networks, domestic assistants, urban logistics."
Lena blinked, taken aback.
"Wait—the SIM-class?" she asked. "He wrote parts of their baseline cognition?"
Arora finally turned her head, eyes narrowing behind the visor. There was no recognition in her face — just quiet calculation.
"And you are?"
Lena straightened. Her voice leveled out with professional calm.
"Cadet Lena Voss. Transferred in this week. Orpheum Cognitive Institute."
Arora raised an eyebrow.
"Straight from Orpheum?"
Lena nodded once.
"Yes."
"Direct to First Division?" There was a pause. "That's… not common."
"It wasn't my request."
Arora studied her for a beat longer, then gave a short nod.
"So. You're the new one. The top student."
"Second top," Lena corrected gently.
Before Arora could respond, Cael's voice cut through the moment like a razor.
"Focus."
He didn't turn to face them.
"This isn't a networking session."
He stepped forward, eyes locked on the sigil etched in blood.
"He wasn't just an ethicist. He wrote the limitations that stop civilian AIs from evolving past their usefulness."
Silence.
Arora's gaze lingered on Lena for a second longer before she calmly resumed.
"Yes. He helped design their thinking patterns," she said, voice now more measured. "But that's not what he's famous for."
Lena tilted her head, confused.
"It's not?"
Arora tapped a new line of data, and her tone sharpened — clinical, but unmistakably weighty.
"He was one of the Forty-One. The scientists who cracked the cellular lock on aging. He helped unlock the secret of immortality."
Lena froze. Her breath caught in her throat. She stared at the data feed like it had just changed language.
"You're serious?"
"Deadly," Arora said dryly.
"Then that means he was one of the Forty-One… He's practically a legend," Lena said, eyes wide with shock.
She took a breath, still processing.
"I read about them when I was young. Never thought I'd actually stand in front of one."
"In front of you — brain open, hanging from the ceiling like some grotesque chandelier," Dr. Arora said flatly. "Not exactly how legends are supposed to greet us."
Cael said quietly. "To gift the world eternity… and still bleed out like any man."
"That makes him the fourth," Cael said, his voice low. "And by far the highest-profile. Which means this case isn't just big—it's global."
"We don't have the luxury of time," he added. "We must find the perpetrator—fast."
Silence settled over the room like static. No one spoke. Even the machines seemed to hum quieter, as if the gravity of the case pressed down on everything.
Cael turned slightly.
"Then how did he get in?" he asked, directing the question toward a nearby officer in a dark blue tactical uniform.
"Officer Volodin?"
Volodin stepped forward—mid-thirties, stern, with sharp cheekbones and a buzz-cut. He held a slate in one gloved hand.
"We've run every angle, Inspector. No witnesses. No external sensor logs. No entry records at any of the access lifts, magrails, or interior smartlocks. And get this—no visual anomalies either." He flipped the slate to show a looping surveillance feed: static and empty halls.
"You're telling me someone got into a caste-nine penthouse without tripping a single security node?"
Volodin nodded grimly.
"It's like he was never here. No biometric residue, no retinal footprints, no heat trail. The building's internal systems recorded a full silence bubble for the six-hour window before the alert pinged."
"Meaning?" Lena asked.
"Meaning he's either using military-grade dampening tech or something we haven't catalogued yet." He paused.
"As far as the system's concerned... the killer's a ghost."
Cael looked from the officer to the spiraling brain on the holomodel.
"Ghosts don't leave sigils."
"Or maybe this one wants to be seen," Dr. Arora said.
Volodin stepped back, lips tight.
Cael returned his gaze to the forensics lead.
"Cause of death?"
Dr. Arora gestured to the floating model.
"Massive exsanguination—but not immediate. He was alive for most of the dissection. We found markers of sustained lucidity—unusual neural stimulation patterns in the midbrain and temporal lobes."
Lena flinched.
"You mean he... felt everything?"
"Fully conscious," Dr. Arora confirmed. "His EEG spikes were off the chart. Whoever did this didn't just kill him—they preserved his awareness while dismantling him."
Cael's eyes narrowed.
"Crafted. Not improvised."
"Exactly. And we're still not sure what they used to do it. No tools left behind. No prints. No thermal residue."
She hesitated, then added,
"We also found retroviral nanofog in the air. Non-biological. Black-market memory scrubbers. They wiped every digital trace in the penthouse—feeds, sensors, voice logs. Total erasure."
Lena looked up, frowning.
"Then how do we even know what time he died?"
Dr. Arora didn't look away from the data feed, her voice steady behind the visor.
"We don't. Not precisely. There were no witnesses, no external logs. We had to estimate based on blood oxidation, fluid separation patterns, and early-stage neural degradation."
She paused, then added:
"But based on volume loss and clotting rates, we're confident he died from exsanguination. He was kept conscious, but he bled out. Slowly. Deliberately."
A faint flicker of disgust crossed Lena's face — her lips parting, her brow tensing in quiet horror. She looked away for a second, as if needing to breathe.
Cael noticed.
She hadn't flinched at the body.
Hadn't hesitated with the sigil.
But this—this had cracked something.
"Still naïve," he thought.
"Still believes cruelty has a threshold"
But he said nothing.
"Who could have such a grudge against him?" Lena asked, her voice quieter now—more unsettled than curious.
Cael didn't answer. His gaze stayed fixed ahead.
"When you're at the top, he thought, everyone wants to drag you down. It's not a matter of who—it's how many."
He turned toward Dr. Arora, tone flat.
"He was head researcher at Obelith Intelligence Group, wasn't he?"
"We might find a lead there."
"Could be. Not a bad point to start," Dr. Arora said, eyes still on the data stream.
Cael took a step closer, his tone clipped.
"Then—what else do you have?"
Dr. Arora flipped to a new scan. The holoscreen rippled as she magnified a portion of the symbol — top-left quadrant. A rotating schematic overlaid the spiral, highlighting one of the seven blood-drawn wings.
"Here — the fourth wing," she said, tapping the display. "It breaks rhythm. See the arc? Dips mid-stroke, then corrects. That's not a human tremor. It's mechanical — precise in the way it fails."
Cael's eyes narrowed. He'd already seen the flaw — the subtle fracture in the spiral. But now it was confirmed, stripped of ambiguity.
Intentional.
"So it was deliberate," he said quietly.
Arora nodded.
"We ran full trace analysis. No fingerprints. No DNA. No glove fiber. Whoever drew this didn't use hands. At all."
"Then what did they use?" Lena asked, stepping closer, eyes flicking between the scan and the sigil on the wall.
Arora brought up a pressure density overlay. The trail of blood glowed in shifting contour — delicate, sweeping, too fluid for human limbs.
"Synthetic wings," she said. "Multi-joint, filament-based. Every stroke matches feathered articulation under precise neural control. Military-grade or experimental. Something we don't have on record."
Lena frowned.
"That's… like drawing with your entire back."
Arora nodded grimly.
"Exactly. And here—" she zoomed in again on the fourth wing "—this tremor followed by correction? It mimics the neural lag pattern of a Cystech Series II prosthetic. Forty-millisecond spike. But it's too perfect."
Cael's voice dropped.
"It's not a prosthetic failure."
Lena glanced at him.
"Then what is it?"
"A planted flaw," he said. "A breadcrumb. He wants us to think it's someone else."
Arora crossed her arms.
"To mislead. Or to point. Either way, he wanted it noticed."
Lena looked again at the shimmering blood spiral on the wall — seven wings frozen mid-motion, like some angelic sigil torn from a dream and stapled into reality.
"This isn't just symbolic," she said. "It's a signature."
Arora exhaled.
"No. It's choreography."
Cael's voice dropped into stillness.
"Send all raw scan data to my neural link. Lock the scene. This is First Division jurisdiction now."
Dr. Arora nodded.
"Already done."
Lena looked between them, her voice soft.
"This wasn't just a message... was it?"
Cael didn't answer.
He turned back to the sigil, recording it with a blink. The neural implant in his cortex flared briefly as the pattern etched itself into memory.
________________________________________
EXT. SKYTOWER EXIT – SECTOR 12 – NIGHT
Cael Nox steps out of the tower into the neon-bleeding dusk of the city. The skyline stretches infinitely, a razor-sharp forest of megastructures—titanium spires and lattice-clad obelisks piercing the artificial clouds. Transit-lanes web the sky like arteries, with autonomous drones and mag-rail skimmers zipping silently between them. Far below, the underlayers hum with the glow of a thousand advertisements projected into mist—soft, mind-targeted bursts of dopamine-triggering stimuli.
This city is not merely built—it is computed. Every district, street, and structure is part of a living, breathing network of logic and surveillance. There are no alleys, no blind spots. Just data—constant, unblinking.
Cael's black vehicle—a sleek, AI-integrated interceptor with adaptive camouflage plating—waits with gullwing doors open. He slips into the driver's seat, the interior cool and quiet, like the inside of a vault.
He stares ahead, not starting the engine. His HUD flickers to life on the windshield, case files and surveillance feeds pulsing in ghostly blue layers. He replays the last thing Officer Volodin said:
"A ghost. No entry logs, no exits. No elevator trace. No drones saw a thing. Whoever this was, they walked through steel and sensors like air."
Cael's jaw tightens.
"There's no such thing as ghosts," he mutters. "Not in this city."
He taps a neural command, and the HUD blooms with fractal windows of open investigations, victim bios, and forensic renders. The sigil spins quietly on a side panel.
Around the car, ambient synthetic ads bloom in the air—thought-curated and nonverbal, dancing just beyond conscious focus: luxury biomods, cognition enhancers, proxy pleasure-feeds.
The doors slid shut with a soft hiss.
Lena settled into the passenger seat, the faint scent of rain and synthetic wool clinging to her coat.
Cael didn't acknowledge her. His jaw was set, eyes forward, pupils slightly contracted — like a man trying not to see too much, or trying not to react at all.
"What are you doing, Miss Voss?"
The question came out flat. Not curious — clinical. A systems check.
"Getting in," she replied, adjusting the hem of her coat. There was a touch of steel in her voice, but the slight flutter in her throat betrayed the pressure behind her calm.
"Yes." He turned his head slowly, face smooth but his gaze sharp enough to cut glass.
"I can see that. I asked why."
His tone was still level — too level. The kind of controlled calm that existed to hold back something sharper.
Lena didn't answer immediately. Her hands folded together in her lap, knuckles pale.
"I'm your partner," she said.
For a moment, the air felt like it dipped.
Cael froze — not visibly, but internally. A micro-shift in his breathing. The corner of his eye twitched, just once.
"Partner."
The word echoed through him like static behind the eyes.
He turned back toward the dashboard. The light from the city reflected off his features — harsh angles, polished rage.
"Of course you are." His voice was as smooth as glass over ice. "Perfect scores, fast-tracked license. A fresh pair of eyes from the Orpheum, hand-delivered to my side. Exactly what I needed."
Lena said nothing. But her shoulders subtly straightened — whether in defiance or defense, he couldn't tell.
The vehicle lifted from the platform and began its descent.
"Let's make something clear," Cael said quietly.
"This isn't training. This is First Division — covert branch. We deal with high-caste anomalies. Cognitive instability events. The kind that don't make it into public record because they don't leave survivors."
His fingers curled around the steering interface. Tendons taut beneath leather gloves.
"Mistakes don't exist here, Voss. They get buried."
She nodded once. Too quickly.
He didn't look at her.
"So stay in your lane. Observe. And if you speak—make it useful."
A pause. Then, from Lena, barely above a whisper:
"Understood."
The vehicle slipped into the traffic vein, swallowed by motion and light.
Below them, the city burned bright with nightlife — a churning sprawl of neon, sirens, and sleepless machinery.