The kid did not die. He just opted out of the physical world, leaving his jeans behind.
The asphalt was soft under my boots. It was July in Winnipeg, which meant the air tasted like car exhaust and inner-city hot garbage. I stood at the corner of Portage and Main, staring at a pile of clothes.
My jaw was tight. It had been tight for three days. The ache radiated up into my temples, a steady, boring pressure that made the bright summer sun feel like a personal attack. I crouched down.
The clothes were standard issue for a twenty-two-year-old in this part of the city. A black t-shirt, faded. Denim jeans, worn through at the left knee. A pair of off-brand canvas sneakers. They were empty. They had not been taken off. They had simply dropped to the pavement when the body inside them stopped existing.
Next to the jeans was a laptop. It was an Acer, silver plastic, covered in stickers for local bands that no longer played gigs. The plastic casing was warped. It had melted. The battery compartment was fused to the concrete.
"He did not run away," I said to the empty air.
My client was paying me a flat rate to find her brother. She thought he had joined a commune up north, or maybe skipped town to avoid his student loans. But I was looking at his shoes, and the laces were still tied in a double knot. You do not untie your shoes and walk out of them without breaking the knot. You just do not.
I touched the melted plastic of the laptop. It was still warm. Not from the sun. From the friction of a sudden, violent exit from reality.
"You are standing on my flyer," a voice said.
I blinked, my eyes adjusting to the glare bouncing off the bank towers. I looked up.
A girl was standing a few feet away. She looked like she was twenty, maybe twenty-one. She wore a green utility jacket despite the heat, and her hair was chopped short, dyed a harsh, chemical red. She held a stack of paper in her right hand.
But that was not what made my stomach turn over.
I could see the brick wall of the bank building right through her ribcage.
She was not a ghost. Not yet. But she was losing opacity. Her edges were blurred, vibrating slightly like a bad television signal. She pointed at my boots.
I looked down. Under the heel of my left boot was a piece of neon yellow paper. I lifted my foot.
"Rent strike," the girl said. Her voice was thin. It sounded like it was coming through a blown speaker. "You are stepping on the organizing material. It is hard enough to print these when the library cuts our printing quota."
"You are fading," I said.
She rolled her eyes. It was a very human gesture for someone who was fifty percent transparent. "Tell me something I do not know. Are you going to take a flyer or just stare at my sternum?"
I stood up. I reached out and took the neon yellow paper from her hand. My fingers brushed hers. It felt like touching cold static. A sharp, stinging numbness shot up my wrist.
"My name is Riel," I said. "I am a private investigator. The kid who was wearing these jeans. His name was Leo. Did you know him?"
"Leo," she said. She looked at the pile of clothes. She did not look surprised. She looked exhausted. "Yeah. He was supposed to bring the megaphone to the rally on Tuesday. He never showed up."
"He did not show up because he vanished," I said.
"He ghosted," she corrected me. "Capital G. It is happening to everyone."
She shoved the stack of flyers into her jacket pocket. The motion lacked weight. The fabric of her jacket seemed to clip through her hand for a fraction of a second, like a rendering error in a video game.
"I am Annette," she said. "And if you are over thirty, you probably should not even be able to see me right now."
I rubbed the back of my neck. Sweat was pooling under my collar. "I am thirty-two. I see you because I look for things that do not want to be found. Occupational hazard. What do you mean, it is happening to everyone?"
Annette scoffed. "Look around, detective. Actually look."
She pointed down Portage Avenue. I followed her finger. The street was packed with summer traffic. Cars crawling bumper to bumper. People in business suits sweating through their cotton. Construction workers leaning on shovels.
Then I shifted my focus. I stopped looking at the solid things. I looked at the gaps.
There they were.
Dozens of them. Young people. They were walking down the sidewalks, sitting on the bus benches, waiting at the crosswalks. But they were all like Annette. Diluted. Washed out. Some were just faint outlines, ripples in the heat distortion. A kid on a skateboard passed right through the side of a delivery truck. The driver did not even flinch.
"The older generation cannot see us," Annette said. Her voice was flat, devoid of the theatrical sorrow you expect from a tragedy. It was pure, distilled burnout. "We are literally losing our grip on the physical plane. We have been stripped from the social fabric, so the physical fabric is rejecting us too."
"That is not how physics works," I said.
"It is how magic works in this city," she snapped. "You think property values just naturally went up four hundred percent while wages stayed flat? You think the bus routes just accidentally bypass every low-income neighborhood? It is not just bad policy. It is a spell. And we are the ones paying the toll."
I looked back at Leo's clothes. The melted laptop. "Leo faded out completely."
"Yeah. When you hit zero percent opacity, you just... drop. You become a Ghost. You cannot touch anything. You cannot speak. You just watch the boomers drink their five-dollar coffees until the end of time."
Annette's hands were shaking. Not from fear, but from a deep, vibrating anger. I could see the pavement through her boots.
"Why is it happening faster to some?" I asked. "You are worse off than the kid I just saw on the skateboard."
Annette crossed her arms. "I refused to vote in the municipal election last month. The candidates were a landlord and a different landlord. I spoiled my ballot. The next morning, I woke up and my hand went right through my toothbrush."
I stared at her. The tight ache in my jaw flared. "You are fading because of civic disengagement? That is insane."
"It is not civic disengagement!" Annette shouted. A few solid pedestrians turned to look, but they were looking at me, not her. They could not hear her. "It is a rigged system! But the magic in this city treats non-participation as consent. We check out, the city checks us out of reality."
She was right about the magic. Winnipeg had always been a sinkhole for residual energy. The long winters and the brutal summers trapped it here. But magic was usually chaotic. This was organized. This was structural.
I looked up at the skyline. Above the bank towers, catching the aggressive afternoon sun, was the new development. The Glass Tower. It belonged to City Councillor Bollard. It was a massive, jagged spike of luxury condos, built on top of a demolished community center.
"Bollard," I said.
Annette followed my gaze. Her expression hardened. "He championed the new zoning laws. He ran unopposed in my ward. The day he won, fifty kids in my dorm dropped their clothes and vanished."
I walked back over to Leo's melted laptop. I knelt again. I pulled a pen from my pocket and used it to pry the fused battery casing away from the concrete. It snapped with a sharp crack. Underneath the plastic, the concrete was scorched in a very specific pattern.
It was a geometric spiral. A kinetic siphon.
"Annette," I said, keeping my eyes on the scorch mark. "Leo did not just fade away. He was harvested."
Annette walked over. Her footsteps made absolutely no sound. She looked down at the spiral. "Harvested for what?"
"Kinetic energy," I said, standing up. "A body holds an immense amount of potential energy. When you fade out, that mass has to go somewhere. The law of conservation. If someone is forcing the youth to fade, they are collecting the energy released during the transition."
I pointed my pen at the Glass Tower. It was gleaming, practically vibrating with power.
"Bollard is using an ancient artifact. An illegal one. The manual calls it The Algorithm, but it is basically a vacuum. He is using the unengaged youth of this city as batteries to power his real estate empire."
Annette stared at the tower. The neon yellow flyers in her pocket seemed to lose another degree of color. She looked down at her hands. They were trembling, and I could see the double yellow lines of the road right through her palms.
"He is drinking us," she whispered.
"Yes," I said. "And we are going to go break his cup."
We walked north toward the municipal district. The heat sat on my chest like a wet towel. Every step felt heavy, deliberate, while Annette drifted beside me like a bad memory.
She was getting worse. I could tell by the way the light interacted with her. When we passed under the shade of an elm tree, she almost vanished entirely, blending into the dark green shadows. Only when we stepped back into the harsh, direct sunlight did her form solidify enough to read her facial expressions.
She was terrified. She hid it behind a permanent scowl, her jaw locked tight, her eyes constantly scanning the street, but the fear was there in the shallow, rapid way she breathed. Even if her lungs were only half-real, the panic was completely physical.
"How does a city councillor get his hands on a kinetic siphon?" Annette asked. Her voice was getting quieter. I had to strain to hear her over the rumble of a passing bus.
"Money," I said bluntly. I wiped a line of sweat from my forehead. "The artifact market is entirely unregulated if you have enough capital. The Algorithm was dug up in the badlands a decade ago. It changes hands between billionaires at private auctions. It is a machine that processes intent and converts it into raw power."
"Intent," she repeated. She kicked at an empty Tim Hortons cup on the sidewalk. Her boot passed right through it. The cup did not move. She let out a sharp, frustrated breath. "So because I intended not to vote, the machine reads that as a surrender of my physical mass?"
"Basically," I said. "It exploits a loophole in the social contract. You live in the city, you are bound by its rules. If you opt out of the mechanism of change, the machine decides you are surplus. It dissolves your physical anchor and sucks up the energy."
We crossed Broadway. The architecture shifted. The old stone buildings gave way to brutalist concrete and, eventually, the towering glass structures of the new development zone.
Bollard's tower dominated the street. It was a monument to wealth, a sheer cliff face of mirrored glass that reflected the dying neighborhoods around it. The sidewalk in front of the building was pristine. No trash. No cracks. The pavement felt suspiciously cold under my boots, completely untouched by the July heatwave.
"Air conditioning for the sidewalk," Annette muttered, staring at the ground. "Do you know how many people froze to death last winter three blocks from here?"
"I know," I said.
I stepped up to the massive glass doors of the lobby. There were no handles. Just a smooth surface.
"We cannot just walk in," Annette said. She leaned against the glass. Or, she tried to. Her shoulder dipped an inch into the solid pane before the magic of the building pushed back, sparking with a faint blue light. She recoiled, rubbing her arm. "Ow. That actually hurt."
"Wards," I said. I placed my bare hand flat against the glass.
The cold was immediate and aggressive. It bit into my skin, numbing my fingers. I closed my eyes and focused on the pressure behind my jaw, pushing that tension down into my hand.
I felt the grain of the magic. It was thick, oily. It smelled like copper wire and ozone.
"It is a polarization ward," I said, opening my eyes. I pulled my hand back. My palm was red. "Standard high-end corporate security. It feeds on internal conflict. It scans anyone trying to enter. If it detects ideological opposition to the owner, it triggers a defensive illusion. It creates an echo chamber."
"An echo chamber?" Annette asked. She was hugging her arms, trying to keep her fading form together.
"It isolates you," I explained. "It projects your worst political and social anxieties right into your retinas. It forces you to fight with whoever you are with until you tear each other apart. If you cannot find common ground, the ward crushes you under the weight of your own argument."
Annette let out a dry, hacking laugh. "Common ground? Between us? You are a private cop who charges a day rate to find missing kids. I am a radical organizer who cannot afford groceries. What common ground do we have?"
"We both want to stop Bollard," I said.
"That is not a philosophy, Riel. That is an errand."
I looked at her. Her face was pale, almost translucent. The red dye in her hair looked like watercolor washed out by rain.
"You do not have time to debate philosophy, Annette. You have maybe an hour before you drop your clothes on the pavement like Leo."
She glared at me. The anger solidified her slightly. "Fine. We go in. We find the common ground. How do we trigger the door?"
"We just push," I said.
I put my shoulder against the glass. Annette placed her hands next to mine. I felt the sharp, static sting of her proximity.
"On three," I said. "One. Two. Three."
We pushed.
The glass did not shatter. It dissolved. We fell forward into a lobby that was not a lobby. It was a sensory void. The bright summer day vanished. The street noise cut off instantly.
We were standing in an endless, grey expanse. The floor felt like polished marble, but there were no walls. No ceiling. Just a heavy, suffocating silence.
Then, the screaming started.
The noise hit us like a physical blow. It was a cacophony of overlapping voices, distorted and aggressive.
Figures began to materialize out of the grey fog. Phantoms. They looked like protestors, but their faces were blurred, their mouths stretched unnaturally wide. They carried signs with slogans that shifted and rearranged themselves so fast they made my eyes water.
"What is this?" Annette yelled, covering her ears. Her hands kept clipping through her head, the magic of the ward actively degrading her physical cohesion.
"The ward!" I shouted back over the din. "It is pulling from our subconscious! It is trying to divide us!"
The phantoms swarmed around us. One of them, a man in a tailored suit with a monstrously oversized head, leaned directly into my face.
"You let the market crash!" the phantom screamed, spraying spit that felt like actual ice against my cheek. "You sat back and watched!"
I pushed the phantom away, but my hand went right through it.
Annette stumbled backward. A group of phantoms resembling exhausted, hollow-eyed students surrounded her.
"You gave up!" they chanted at her. "You let go of the steering wheel! You threw a tantrum instead of doing the work!"
Annette's eyes went wide. She looked at me, her expression twisting into a snarl. The ward was working. It was injecting the ambient anger of the illusions directly into our nervous systems. My heart was hammering against my ribs. A surge of irrational, blinding rage toward Annette flooded my chest.
"They are right!" I yelled, stepping toward her. I did not want to say it, but the words forced themselves out of my throat. The ward was pulling the strings. "You refused to vote! You handed Bollard the keys because you wanted to be ideologically pure! Now your friend is dead!"
Annette's form flickered violently. She looked like a strobe light. She pointed a trembling, semi-transparent finger at my chest.
"You do not get to lecture me!" she screamed. Her voice was no longer thin. It was deafening, amplified by the magic of the room. "You are a boomer! You bought into a system that was designed to crush us! You watched housing prices skyrocket and you did nothing! You are a parasite!"
"I am thirty-two!" I roared back, my vision tunneling. The grey room felt like it was shrinking. The air pressure was rising, pressing against my eardrums. "I rent a one-bedroom apartment over a laundromat! I did not break the world, Annette! But at least I live in it! You checked out!"
"Because the world was already broken when we got here!" she cried out, tears of actual, physical frustration welling in her eyes. The tears did not fall; they evaporated before they reached her cheeks.
Around us, the phantoms began to solidify. They were no longer just yelling. They were changing shape. Their limbs elongated, turning into sharp, geometric constructs of jagged glass and concrete. The ward was escalating. Since we were fighting, it was preparing to execute us.
A glass construct lunged at me. Its arm was a shattered mirror. It slashed across my shoulder.
Pain ripped through my arm. Hot, wet blood soaked into my shirt.
I stumbled back, clutching my shoulder. The pain broke the cognitive static. The blinding anger receded, replaced by a sudden, sharp clarity.
"Annette!" I shouted. The constructs were closing in on her. She was throwing punches, but her fists were passing right through them. She was too faded to make contact, but the constructs could hurt her. One of them struck her in the ribs. She collapsed to the floor, gasping.
I ran to her. I grabbed her by the collar of her utility jacket. It took every ounce of focus to keep my hand solid against her fading fabric. I hauled her up.
"Stop fighting me!" I said. My breath was ragged. I looked into her eyes. They were terrified, losing focus. "The ward feeds on the polarization! We have to agree on something! Right now!"
"I hate you!" she sobbed, clutching her ribs.
"I know!" I yelled over the screeching of the glass constructs. "But who do we hate more?"
The constructs raised their jagged limbs. They were seconds away from tearing us into ribbons.
"Bollard," she gasped.
"Why?" I demanded. I needed the intent. The magic needed the intent.
"Because he owns everything," she said, her voice shaking.
"Because he is the landlord class," I said, forcing my breathing to slow down. I looked at her chest, watching the rapid rise and fall. "Breathe with me. Sync your breath. One. Two."
Annette stared at me. She dragged in a shaky breath, timing it with mine.
"The landlord class is the real enemy," I said, my voice steady, projecting it into the grey void.
"The landlord class is the real enemy," Annette repeated. Her voice locked onto the same pitch as mine.
We held the thought. We held the shared anger. We directed it away from each other and aimed it squarely at the man at the top of the tower.
The glass constructs froze. They vibrated, emitting a high-pitched whine that rattled my teeth.
Then, they shattered.
The grey void collapsed. The heavy silence rushed out, replaced by the sterile hum of central air conditioning.
We were standing in an elevator. The doors were closed. The panel above the doors displayed the number 84. The penthouse.
Annette was leaning against the brass railing, taking deep, gulping breaths. She looked down at her hands. They were still translucent, but the violent flickering had stopped.
I leaned against the wall, clutching my bleeding shoulder. The blood was real. The pain was real.
"You are bleeding," she said, her voice hoarse.
"I noticed," I said. I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket and pressed it against the cut. "You did good."
She looked up at the floor indicator. The numbers were climbing. 85. 86. 87.
"I still think you are complicit," she said quietly.
"I know," I said. "We can argue about it after we break the machine."
The elevator chimed. Floor 90. The doors slid open.
The penthouse was massive. It did not look like an apartment; it looked like a server room designed by a luxury interior decorator. The walls were floor-to-ceiling windows, offering a dizzying, panoramic view of the sweltering city below.
But the center of the room was dominated by the machine.
It was an ugly, brutal piece of technology, a clash of ancient brass gears and modern fiber optics. It hummed with a deep, sickening vibration that made the fillings in my teeth ache. Thick black cables snaked from the base of the machine, plugging directly into the floor, feeding the harvested energy straight into the building's power grid.
At the top of the machine was a glass hopper. It was filled with thousands of small, rectangular pieces of paper.
"Uncast ballots," I said, stepping out of the elevator.
"Very observant, Detective MacKay," a voice said.
City Councillor Bollard stepped out from behind the machine. He was a man in his late fifties, wearing a sharp, charcoal suit that cost more than my annual rent. His hair was perfectly styled, untouched by the summer humidity. He looked serene. He looked like a man who had never waited for a bus in his entire life.
"Bollard," I said, keeping my hand pressed against my bleeding shoulder.
He smiled, a polished, practiced expression. He did not look at me. He looked directly at Annette.
"Fascinating," Bollard said. He walked slowly toward us, his leather shoes silent on the hardwood floor. "You bypassed the polarization ward. That takes a rare degree of ideological compromise. Usually, your demographic prefers to tear itself apart over semantics."
"Turn the machine off," Annette said. She stepped forward. Her voice was remarkably steady, considering I could see the city skyline right through her chest.
Bollard chuckled. It was a patronizing, policy-speak chuckle. "I am afraid I cannot do that, young lady. The city requires energy to grow. Progress is expensive. And your generation... well. You produce so little economic value. But your kinetic potential? It is extraordinary."
"You are murdering people," I said.
Bollard finally looked at me. His eyes were cold, flat. "I am doing no such thing. The Algorithm is entirely voluntary. It only harvests those who have surrendered their agency. They refused to participate in the civic process. They consented to the blur. I am simply recycling wasted potential."
"We did not consent!" Annette screamed. She lunged at him.
It was a mistake. She was too faded. She threw a punch at Bollard's jaw. Her fist passed harmlessly through his face, a spray of cold static that made him blink, but nothing more. The momentum carried her forward. She tripped over one of the thick black cables and fell.
When she hit the floor, she did not bounce. She flattened.
"Annette!" I yelled, dropping my handkerchief and running to her.
The machine whined. The pitch escalated, a piercing shriek. The glass hopper full of uncast ballots began to spin violently.
Annette was disintegrating. Her legs were already gone, fading into the hardwood floor. Her utility jacket was turning into mist.
"She is at zero percent," Bollard said, adjusting his cuffs. He sounded bored. "The machine is offering her the final prompt. She can opt out peacefully, and her energy will power my new HVAC system. Or, she can attempt reentry."
I fell to my knees beside her. Her face was barely a sketch, a faint outline of panic.
"Annette!" I grabbed her shoulders, but my hands found no purchase. It felt like trying to hold onto smoke. "Stay here!"
Her voice echoed in my head, bypassing my ears entirely. It was the machine broadcasting her choice.
Pain, she transmitted. It hurts to go back.
"If she forces reentry into the physical plane, the somatic shock will likely kill her," Bollard noted lightly. "Most choose to just... drift away. It is painless."
I glared at Bollard, then looked back at the fading ghost of the girl.
"Annette, listen to me!" I shouted. "Do not give him the satisfaction! You want to fight the landlord class? You have to be solid to throw a brick!"
Her outline flickered. The machine screamed louder, the brass gears grinding.
Suddenly, the air pressure in the room dropped.
Annette's eyes solidified. They were wide, bloodshot, and filled with absolute, unadulterated rage.
She chose the pain.
With a raw, tearing sound, like wet canvas being ripped apart, Annette pushed back into reality. Flesh and bone materialized violently. She gasped, a ragged, wet sound. Her hand lashed out, fully solid, and grabbed the nearest heavy object.
It was a vintage, heavy iron ballot box, sitting on a display pedestal next to the machine.
She lifted it with both hands. Her muscles strained, veins popping in her neck. With a guttural scream, she swung the iron box directly into the central glass housing of The Algorithm.
The impact was deafening.
The glass shattered. The uncast ballots exploded outward in a blizzard of paper. The brass gears seized, grinding against the iron box.
"No!" Bollard shouted, throwing his hands up.
The machine detonated.
A shockwave of raw kinetic energy blasted through the penthouse. It hit me like a truck, throwing me backward across the room. I slammed into the wall, the breath knocked out of my lungs. The windows bowed outward, spiderwebbing with cracks before blowing out completely, raining safety glass down onto the streets below.
I lay on the floor, gasping for air. My ears were ringing. The room smelled like burnt hair and exploded capacitors.
Slowly, I pushed myself up.
Bollard was pinned under a heavy structural beam that had dropped from the ceiling. He was alive, but he was not moving.
I looked out the shattered window. Down below, the city was in chaos. Traffic had stopped. Cars were honking wildly. I could see people stumbling out of coffee shops, looking confused, patting their own arms and chests.
The faded youth. They were back. The machine had released the kinetic tether, dumping thousands of ghosts back into the physical plane all at once. The disruption was massive, immediate, and beautiful.
I turned away from the window.
Annette was sitting on the floor amid the wreckage of the machine. She was covered in dust. A piece of shrapnel had caught her on the forehead, and a thick stream of bright red blood was running down the side of her face.
She was panting, her chest heaving. She looked at her hands. They were dirty, scraped, and entirely opaque. She squeezed them into fists.
I walked over to her. I stepped over a sparking cable and offered her my hand.
She looked up at me. She did not take my hand. She pushed herself up off the floor, wiping the blood from her eye with the back of her wrist. She looked out the broken window at the paralyzed city, the screaming car alarms, the glorious mess of it all.
"Well," I said. "Now you have to actually do something about it."
“"Well," I said. "Now you have to actually do something about it."”
