The Lost Psalms

The Lost Psalms | The Glitch

By Sunruum

3-1 — Writer’s Version

“Looking for God”

Neveah didn’t look dead.

Dead would have required an audience. Someone to mark the absence.

This slice of the city had simply been abandoned, left behind when the utility of the world migrated somewhere cleaner. The warehouses remained because moving steel and poured concrete was a bad investment. Security lights still clicked on at dusk because somewhere, buried in a server farm, an algorithm was still paying an electric bill no human remembered authorizing. Rain pooled in the asphalt potholes and stagnant loading bays like gray mercury.

Far away, Neveah glowed with high-frequency neon.

Here, the grid barely bothered to signal.

Laz walked alone.

Black leather. Shorts. Fishnets. Heavy boots. A burning cigarette.

Dressed for whatever happened after humanity solved mortality, or at least what she imagined the last real party at the end of history ought to feel like.

The directions pulled her deeper into the warehouse district.

Above her, a rusted pan-tilt camera jerked on its housing, tracking her vector.

“Fuckkkk.”

She exhaled, trailing a gray plume behind her.

“That’s comforting.”

The taste of nicotine was pure relief. The sting against her dry lips and the raw scrape down her throat were dirty, physical reminders of how good it felt to degrade.

A beautiful, deliberate way to feel sick.

Like old times...

She smirked to herself.

Then came the considerably more reasonable tape loop playing in her skull:

What the fuck am I even doing anymore?

No answer presented itself.

No transmission.

Right on cue, her pocket vibrated.

A bright haptic pulse against her hip.

Laz pulled out her dopamine machine. The harsh screen glare cut through the damp gloom of the alley, throwing ghost-light across her knuckles.

[HEALTH OS]
10:30 PM: Time to wind down. Prepare for optimal sleep hygiene.

Below it, a second notification slid down the glass.

[TINDER]
You have a new match nearby! Marcus is 0.2 miles away. Say hello!

Laz stared at the screen.

Marcus.

Somewhere out here in the damp dark, behind three blocks of rusted corrugated iron and abandoned loading docks, Marcus was apparently looking for a connection.

Or a ghost algorithm was trying to pair two dead signals wandering a dead sector.

She was still wondering what optimal sleep hygiene felt like and whether Marcus could help.

A short, dark bark of a laugh escaped her, followed by another puff of smoke.

The sheer absurdity of it.

An automated system trying to enforce sleep schedules and romance on a ghost in fishnets.

Reminders from a routine, a culture, and a set of domestic needs she had entirely outgrown.

She shoved the phone deep into her jacket pocket without dismissing either alert.

She wasn’t going to need any of it where she was headed.

Fine.

She kept moving.

The strange thing was that Laz wasn’t particularly frightened.

She rarely was, but especially not in this frequency.

She knew these dead zones.

Not this exact grid coordinate, but places running the same code.

Bad addresses.

Unmarked industrial doors

.Underground rooms you only heard about from a contact who wouldn’t release the address until after midnight.

Sub-basements built beneath other sub-basements.

In her life, she’d found more quiet trust than actual pain, though the pain was always running somewhere in the background.

FUCK.

She took another heavy drag and kept walking.

How could something so disgusting be so fucking delicious?

She grinned as the nicotine massaged her lungs.

Breadcrumbs.

Simple little spray-painted red circles on the brickwork that standard eyes would filter out.

She loved a good secret.

Laz traced the trail as the recognizable city dissolved behind her.

The corridor narrowed into rusted roll-up doors, standing runoff and chain-link fencing protecting absolute void.

It smelled like wet concrete, ozone and scrap iron.

Occasionally the smell of piss broke through.

That was reassuring in its own way.

People were still alive somewhere.

Then her ribs caught a wave her ears hadn’t registered yet.

THOOM.

Laz stopped.

Waited.

There.

THOOM.

Sub-bass.

Her body opened up.

Mmmm.

A low industrial frequency leaking through the concrete, driving straight through her bone marrow.

Barely audio yet.

Just enough pressure buried beneath thousands of tons of structure to turn sound into pure mass.

Her mouth curled.

Her hip twitched once with the pulse.

Then the other.

Her shoulders dropped, and her arms carried the kinetic energy for two absurd little beats before she caught herself dancing alone in a dead industrial corridor.

Okay, fun.

She accelerated her pace.

The bass was getting denser.

A plain black metal door terminated the corridor.

Laz stopped, letting her eyes adjust to the shadow.

That was the coordinate.

No sign.

No line.

No bored flesh-checker judging cheap footwear.

No crowd of idiots arguing and exhaling vapor outside.

No evidence whatsoever that this was an entrance to anything other than a tetanus infection.

“Very reassuring,” she muttered to the dark.

She pulled the cigarette from her lips and stared at the glowing cherry like a former lover.

Then she looked back at the door.

For the first time that night, something breached her perimeter.

Something she couldn’t immediately neutralize with cold sarcasm.

Expectation.

The inconvenient kind.

The kind that reshaped things.

She dropped the butt and ground it into dust beneath the heavy heel of her boot.

To the right of the door sat a small interface panel.

Smooth black glass.

Too new. Too clean. Operating on hardware entirely too advanced for the collapsing masonry holding it up.

As she stepped forward, the sensor woke.

A cold circle of light illuminated on the screen.

Of course.

Laz glanced back down the empty corridor, then turned her face toward the glass.

She leaned in closer than necessary.

Until her cold breath fogged the display.

“I hope I find God tonight.”

The phrase came out unbidden, pulled straight from a subconscious tap.

The white circle remained steady, pulsing softly like an artificial heart.

For some reason, the mechanical indifference made her smile.

Fine.

She pressed closer to the mic grid.

“Sinking into mire.”

The words dropped an octave as they left her throat.

Heavy.

Resonant.

She felt the lowest frequencies vibrated inside her lungs.

A slow breath.

“Overwhelmed.”

She let the concept sit there, suspended in the cold air between her face and the sensor.

Between this side and whatever signal waited on the other.

Then, almost below a whisper:

“Looking for God.”

Absolute silence.

Deep inside the wall structure, heavy physical relays answered.

CLUNK.

Laz flinched slightly.

“Well, fuck.”

And then the bass dropped out completely.

Not a fade.

An instant, violent cut.

Every frequency. Every mechanical rumble.

Wiped clean.

Even the ambient hum of the corridor died.

The resulting silence was massive, heavy enough that Laz could suddenly hear the wet, rapid thump of her own heart pounding against her ribs.

The magnetic seal released with a hiss.

She pressed her palm against the freezing metal surface and pulled.

The interior refused to translate into recognizable geometry.

No room.

No floor.

No crowd.

No architecture waiting for a human eye to render it.

The opening contained something her brain didn’t have the baseline algorithms to organize.

Physical air began drafting into the opening.

Her wet hair pulled forward toward the absolute absence.

And somewhere inside that impossible vacuum, the quiet was somehow shaking.

No clouds.

No trumpets.

No golden gates.

No moral judgment.

No grand temples.

No stars tearing open.

Laz just got a shitty industrial warehouse door that smelled like the scorched filter of a Marlboro Light.

And somehow, that felt entirely real.

Standing at the threshold, Laz recognized the logic beneath it.

She had helped construct the door.

Now she had to find out where the signal originated.

She stepped across.

Hey you, I actually saved the fucking world.

I know how it sounds.

I mean it plainly.

I saved the fucking world. I’m not crazy, hear me out?

Nobody does anything important alone, no matter what the memorial walls say and what the books will print. I was there for it all. I helped build the fucking thing.

I pulled wire through the machines with blood on my hands. I signed the forms nobody wanted to read. I said yes when every decent part of me wanted to walk into the ocean slowly.

I met God.

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Behind the gas station.

It wasn’t on my knees in prayer like most folks. I was not leaving my sins at the altar. There wasn’t a white light or a spiritual flash. Not one of those little sweaty rooms where people confuse fear for holiness, handle rattlesnakes and slap bibles.

I met God beside a dumpster at the FastGas. I wasn’t looking for God, I don’t think. Ok, maybe I was, I think? I was looking for something more.

I could smell the chicken grease from the fryer that night. The gas station made my favorite wedges and fried chicken. I always dipped my taters in a styrofoam cup, half full of ketchup mixed with mayo. I know, I know… Don’t judge because it’s not gross.

This FastGas had the best whoopie pies. They were made by some old lady down the street name Margaret.

God was dressed like the 90’s and eating a fried wing off the bone. They slid the meat off the bone and sucked their teeth. Dressed in a button down and plaid skirt, they looked at me sideways when I took a sip of my sugar drink. Yeah, God is and enby obviously.

Black jacket, no sleeves. Cheap earbuds. Hair long and sloppy.

Polite. Tired. Smelled nice. Like wood fire and wild onions after someone had cut grass. They were both handsome and pretty.

Both?

Neither?

Perfect.

Firm handshake, but not too much.

I grinned, “firm handshake but not too much!”

That mattered to me.

Still does.

You can tell a lot about a civilization by how it shakes hands with the divine or… the other way around? I don’t know.

God said my name like it had been sitting in their mouth for years.

“whatcha listening to?”

“Ministry”

I snickered, “of course.”

I said, “You’re late.”

God said, “So are you.”

I liked them, God, immediately.

That was a problem.

The second problem was the math.

The third problem was eternity.

The fourth problem was us and why we were meeting behind the dumpster.

We built something stupid enough to work. A machine that could hold memory, real memory. A system that could preserve consciousness if you fed it enough power, enough grief, enough pattern, enough faith.

That’s the part nobody wants to admit.

Faith was part of the engineering.

I mean load-bearing faith. Structural faith. Faith with bolts in it. Faith that could survive a three governments trying to privatize the afterlife.

It’s amazing what a little technology and faith can do because it was as simple as a cassette tape.

God had to negotiate.

If this recording actually survives this mess, let the record show I had a little self-awareness and almost no humility left by the end.

The problem with integrity is the tape.

How will they save the tape that holds my words? I get it, I helped design it but, the transfer is delicate.

The integrity of this shitty, fragile tape is the only thing keeping me alive. And God said, I should have faith.

So I’m also writing this down before they take me in again.

Before the archive starts politely removing the data from inside my skull, I’m trying to let you know that I saved the fucking world and I found God behind a dumpster. I should at least get my own short story, right?

Ugh, I know what happens next.

Mostly.

I helped design it.

That doesn’t make it less frightening.

It makes it worse.

There is a special kind of horror in understanding the machine that is about to turn you into data.

I keep hearing an old song in my head.

No idea why. If I hum it out I may be able to remember what it is?

Maybe God has taste. Maybe some part of me still wants a little bass, sweat, a sugar treat, a room too crowded, somebody’s hand on my waist, somebody yelling the wrong words too loud.

That was life.

Not just war and wires.

Sometimes salvation is a dirty beat in a room full of doomed people who do not know they are saved yet.

This chair is warm.

The first machine says PLAY. Beep.

The second tells me I have already been here.

Recorded. Archived.

The third says nothing, yet.

That is the one I trust least.

Thanks for checking out my rough draft of the opening “scene” of the world I’ve built. I look forward to sharing more soon.

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Erased

Destroyed

Sinners

Saints

The Lost Psalms is the first signal from a larger story I’ve been building, a dark sci-fi scripture about memory, collapse, faith, holy machines, and what happens when humanity tries to archive itself before the lights go out.

It begins before The Glitch.

Before the transfer.
Before the saved voices.
Before the tapes start sounding human.

This is the old world, still breathing. A world where water is scarce, power is hoarded, memory is unstable, and the people in charge keep mistaking survival for ownership.

Somewhere inside that dying system, a voice wakes up.

Not alive exactly.
Not dead exactly.
Not here exactly.

Science could’ve saved everything but pure evil was winning.

Being preserved is not the same as being saved.

These are not prayers for comfort.

These are psalms found in the static.
Field recordings from the end of a species.
Instructions scratched into the casing of machines.

A gospel written by wires, grief, tape hiss, bad faith, and whatever was left of God after the archive started eating names.

The first pieces will arrive as fragments: short voiceovers, visual relics, cassette clues, poems, character signals, and little transmissions from a world already halfway erased.

You will not need to solve everything.

The world did not end all at once.
It was archived.
And the first eight were erased.

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We are the sinners.

The old world will not end in fire

The old world is not ending in fire.

Fire would be merciful.

Fire would make a clean shape of it.

No.

The old world is ending with the lights still on.

Receipts are still printing.

Hospitals are still full.

Churches are still open.

Children are still learning to sleep through sirens.

The rich are still building higher rooms above the flood.

Everyone keeps saying,

just one more day,

just one more quarter,

just one more prayer,

just one more upgrade.

God is still here.

That is the part nobody understands.

God has not left.

God, it’s happening now.

The negotiation is now:

THE SIGNAL

The signal is…

corrupted

and

The vessel is failing.

The body is failing.

The house is failing.

The garden is failing.

The record remains possible.

And Mother’s lines become:

I built a world out of the wound I chose to keep active; consider yourself part of the record.

I’ve codified the remains into a digital landscape; I am loading you into the archives of the collapse.

I’ve abandoned the garden for a world built of static; you are now standing on the only ground that isn’t sinking.

MOTHER

Preserve the wound.

Not as a memory. As an active choice.

We still load the system.

We still feed the archives.

The saints will dance in darkness

We will not persevere their destruction

Heaven kept the saints.

The machine got the rest of us.