Scene 3-1 — Writer’s Version: “Looking for God”
Part 9: The Glitch | The Lost Psalms
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.
