Read the book: «The Man Who Wasn’t Real. Three unforgettable books in ONE»
© Zohar Leo Palfi, 2025
ISBN 978-5-0067-3448-7
Created with Ridero smart publishing system
The Man Who Wasn’t Real
Zohar Leo Palfi
From the author
This book began with a simple but frightening question: what would be left of us if our memories were taken away?
WHAT IF YOUR LOVE IS JUST A BUG IN THE SYSTEM?
We live in a world where our entire lives – photos, correspondence, stories – are stored on servers, in the cloud, as zeros and ones. We trust digital ghosts to keep our souls safe. But what if one day they decide that some part of it shouldn’t exist? What if one day you wake up and the most important person in your life is just a broken file that the system decided to delete?
This story is about a love that is stronger than a 404 error. About fighting for the right to remember in a world that desperately wants to forget and simplify everything. It’s a journey into the heart of what makes us human: our scars, our losses, our imperfect but infinitely precious memories.
I don’t know if Kael is real. But his pain is. I hope you feel it.
And maybe after reading this, you’ll hug the ones you love a little tighter.
Just in case.
Kael Vance is a data archaeologist. His job is to resurrect dead data. His world is a perfect, verified reality. His life is Elara.
But one morning he wakes up in a world where Elara never existed.
All records have been erased. All memories of loved ones are blank. The empty photo frame on his desk is the only evidence of his rapidly slipping sanity. The system says he was always alone.
But Kael remembers. He remembers her laugh, her touch, her scent. That memory is the only thing he has left, and it’s his death sentence.
Because they’re coming for him. Faceless Purifiers whose job it is to erase mistakes in reality. And Kael is the biggest mistake of all.
To survive and prove that his love was real, he’ll have to plunge into the digital underground, trust those who trust no one, and learn the terrible truth: reality doesn’t disappear. It is being forgotten.
“The Man Who Wasn’t Real’ is a dizzying sci-fi thriller where “The Matrix” collides with “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” A novel that will make you question your own memories. Are you ready to remember?
Table of Contents:
Book One: STATIC
Chapter 1: The smell of coffee and ozone
Chapter 2: Failure in the Sea of Data
Chapter 3: An empty frame and videotapes
Chapter 4: The Forgotten Signal Bar
Chapter 5: The Anamnesis Message
Chapter 6: The hunter in the industrial zone
Chapter 7: Analog Weapons
Chapter 8: The Half Shadow Hotel and Dr. Lee’s journal
Chapter 9: Siege and escape through the garbage chute
Chapter 10: A ghost technician named Raven
Chapter 11: Lair in the Pneumatic Tube
Chapter 12: Fighting in the Tunnels
Chapter 13: The Station Dungeons and the Second Key
Chapter 14: Quarantine
Chapter 15: The War of the Two Ghosts
Chapter 16: Jumping on a Train
Chapter 17: The Observatory and the Last Guardian
Chapter 18: An Eye in the Universe
Book Two: THE SILENT SKY
Chapter 19: New World Physics and Lee’s Plan
Chapter 20: Traveling the fading earth
Chapter 21: The Artist Who Paints the Void
Chapter 22: The Principle of Resonance
Chapter 23: Concert Hall by the Sea
Chapter 24: The Silence Between the Notes
Chapter 25: Sacrifice of the Lyre
Chapter 26: Library of Zero
Chapter 27: The Truth About Elara
Chapter 28: The Principle of Choice
Book Three: THE ISLANDS OF REALITY
Chapter 29: Reassembling the Anchor
Chapter 30: Point Zero and New Allies
Chapter 31: The Battle with Titan
Chapter 32: The Cult of Silence
Chapter 33: Ghost Ark
Chapter 34: Return to the Dead City
Chapter 35: The Final Confrontation
Chapter 36: The Gray Sky (Finale)
Prologue
Dr. Ahrimann Lee knew that they were coming for her.
That knowledge wasn’t paranoia. It was cold, mathematically verified fact. She herself had created the system that now hunted her.
She stood in her lab on the 112th floor of the Nexus Tower. Outside the panoramic window lay the nighttime city, an endless tapestry of neon rivers and glowing dots. Beautiful. Orderly. Perfect. And built on the lies she’d helped create.
On her desk lay a small crystal chip. The first component of the Anchor. Next to it, a communicator showing a map of the city with a single blinking dot. Gamma-7 industrial zone. An old, godforsaken place. The perfect mailbox.
She had to hurry.
“They’re already on the floor, Dr. Lee,” came the calm, synthesized voice of her assistant, David, in her ear. He wasn’t in the room. He was online, her eyes and ears.
“How many are there?” – She asked, not taking her eyes off the chip.
“Three. Walking down the main corridor. The movements are… synchronized. The Security Corps can’t see them. The corridor is empty to them.”
Ahrimann grinned bitterly. Of course it doesn’t see them. They weren’t moving in physical space. They were moving in data space, simply overwriting their coordinates. Her own technology.
She picked up the chip. Cold, smooth. Part of her hope in it. Part of her monstrous mistake.
“David, activate the blank slate protocol. Complete wipe of all data on this terminal. Reboot the server core in three minutes.”
“Copy that. This is going to be… noisy.”
“I’m counting on it. I need to distract them.”
She walked over to the wall, touched a panel. The wall silently moved aside, revealing a secret service elevator not mapped on any schematics of the building. Her escape route.
“They’re at the lab door,” David reported. – They’re not trying to break through it. They’re… going through it.”
Ahrimann saw it on the security monitor. Three figures in strict suits simply walked through the titanium door like ghosts. Their faces were smooth, serene, devoid of features. Agents of Static. Cleaners. They had come for the anomaly. For her.
She stepped into the elevator.
“David,” she said one last time. – Thank you for everything.”
“It’s been an honor working with you, Dr. Lee. Goodbye.”
The elevator doors began to close. Through the gap, she saw three figures turn their faceless heads in her direction. They had spotted her.
One of them raised his hand, and his fingers began to disintegrate into shimmering particles.
The elevator tore downward.
Three seconds later, her lab on the 112th floor exploded, turning into a ball of fire. Not from explosives. From data overload. Millions of terabytes of information released simultaneously created a blast of pure energy that blew out the panoramic windows and painted the night sky white.
Ahrimann Lee was carried down into the darkness, clutching a tiny crystal chip to her chest.
She had escaped. For the time being.
She knew that Static would be looking for her now. But she also knew she had left a decoy. A far more interesting and important anomaly.
A man whose memory was the only thing that mattered. A man who didn’t yet know that his world was a ticking bomb.
A man named Kael Vance.
She’d sent him the key. Now all she could do was hope he was strong enough to use it. Or crazy enough to survive.
The elevator stopped in the dungeons of the city. She stepped out into the darkness, alone against the system she herself had spawned. Her personal war had just begun.
And the war for Kael Vance’s soul was due to begin in a few weeks. With the simple smell of coffee and ozone.
Book One: STATICS
Chapter 1: The smell of coffee and ozone
The morning smelled of two things: real, dirt-grown Colombian coffee and ozone from her work terminal. To Kael Vance, it was the smell of home, and he wouldn’t trade it for any of the flavorings their Comfort 3000 kitchen system offered.
He stood barefoot on the cool polymer floor, watching the slow, thick drops fall into the glass flask of the Kemex. Water heated to ninety-three degrees Celsius – no more and no less – passed through the freshly ground grains, releasing hundreds of shades of flavor. Chocolate, notes of citrus, something nutty. It was his morning ritual, his little analog meditation in a world that had long ago traded rituals for efficiency.
In a world where 99% of food and drink was printed on food synthesizers on the command “Alice, make me a latte,” this process was an act of quiet rebellion. Real beans he ordered from South Block smugglers. A hand grinder with ceramic millstones. A paper filter. A process that couldn’t be sped up or optimized. It drove his inner data archaeologist crazy, who was used to the fact that any task could be broken down into subroutines and completed a thousand times faster. But it also soothed the man in him who clung desperately to things he could touch, smell, and feel.
– You’re fiddling with your witch potion again,” came a sleepy, slightly mocking voice behind him. It was warm, with the slight huskiness she always had in the mornings.
He turned around, unable to stop slowly pouring water in a spiral. Elara was standing in the bedroom doorway, wrapped in his old, stretched out t-shirt with the faded OmniTech Archives logo on it. The t-shirt was too big for her, bunching up ridiculously at the shoulders and revealing her long legs. Her short-cropped blonde hair was tangled from sleep, sticking out in all directions like the feathers of a disheveled bird. There were freckles on the bridge of her nose, which she always wrinkled when she was displeased or deep in thought. He adored those freckles. He thought they were constellations that could only be read by getting up close.
– It’s not a potion. It’s art,” he objected, smiling. The smile came of its own accord, easy and natural. He was always smiling around her. – And what you’re drinking is a Class B suspension with coffee-vanilla-cappuccino-alpha flavoring and stabilizer E-745. I checked the composition. It’s got more polymers in it than your sneakers.
– But my polymer poison shows up in three seconds on voice command,” she walked over, hugged him from behind, and rested her chin on his shoulder. Her body was warm and soft. She smelled like sleep, her skin, and something subtly floral-the scent of the shampoo she’d also ordered from underground “analog” vendors. – And your art requires the sacrifice of ten minutes of precious morning sleep. Ten minutes, Kael. In that time, we can analyze the genome and breed a new species of glowfish.
– The world doesn’t need new glowfish,” he muttered, finishing the spill. – The world needs good coffee.
He put the kettle on and put the lid on the kemex, letting the drink ‘breathe’. He could feel her steady breathing against his neck. Those quiet morning moments were his anchor. Everything else-work, the city, the endless sea of data-was somewhere out there, beyond the walls of their small apartment on the seventy-third floor. And here was the center of his universe.
– What do you have today? – She asked, not letting go of him.
– The Helios Crypt. A logistical manifesto from a hundred years ago. I’ll spend all day poring over rusty digital invoices and parts lists for ancient ion engines. Boring as hell. Every data necromancer’s dream.
– Don’t say that,” she pinched his side lightly. – You’re not going through rusty overheads. You’re saving oblivion from oblivion. You listen to the whispers of the dead. You give them back their stories.
That’s what she always said. She saw hidden poetry, metaphysics in everything. To him, it was just a job. Complicated, requiring the utmost concentration, like clearing an ancient information field, but a job nonetheless. He saw zeros and ones, which had to be added up correctly. She saw them as destinies.
He poured coffee into two cups. His – black, matte, austere. And hers, a ridiculous, pudgy one with a silly drawing of a cat in a spacesuit riding a comet. It was his first purchase for their shared apartment. He’d found it at a flea market in Old Town, and it squealed with delight like a baby.
– And you? “Saving the world in your secret lab again?” -he asked, holding out a cup to her.
Elara worked in the R&D department of Nexus Corporation, a division that dealt with something so complex that even its names sounded like incantations: “cognitive architecture,” “next-generation interfaces,” “collective database optimization.” He knew only in general terms that her team was trying to create a new type of neural network based not on individual consciousness but on collective consciousness. A network that could combine the thoughts and experiences of thousands of people into a single, self-learning organism. It sounded impressive, utopian, and a little creepy.
She rarely talked about work, citing a nondisclosure agreement that even his love wouldn’t save her from. But sometimes, late at night, he’d wake up and see the light from her terminal. She would sit hunched over, drawing complex, fractal-like diagrams in her electronic notebook, her eyes burning with the kind of fire that only geniuses or madmen have. Kael still hadn’t decided which category she fell into.
– “Something like that,” she took the cup and sipped his witch’s potion carefully. She wrinkled her nose, but took another sip. She always did that, like it was a favor to him. – We have a big breakthrough today. Or a big failure. The line, as always, is thin. We’re running basic protocol. The first simulation of Anamnesis.
She said the word – Anamnesis – almost in a whisper, with a kind of sacred awe.
– If it worked, it would change everything. The way we learn, communicate, remember. Imagine, Kael,’ she looked up at him, and her eyes sparkled, ‘you wouldn’t have to dig through dusty archives anymore. You’d be able to just… plug in and feel. Feel what it was like to be an engineer on the Helios a hundred years ago. Relive his memories, his experiences.
– Sounds like a way to go crazy,” he muttered. – I prefer my memories to stay mine. And other people’s are behind a thick wall of encryption.
She sighed. This was their eternal argument. His analog conservatism versus her digital radicalism.
She set her cup down and looked at him again, and this time her gaze was serious, devoid of morning playfulness.
– Kael. If… if anything goes wrong today…
– Hey,” he interrupted her, setting his cup down and taking her face in his palms. Her skin was warm and smooth. He forced her to look into his eyes. – It’s going to go like this. You’re the smartest woman I know. You can rewrite the laws of physics just by frowning. Your Anamnesis will work.”
She smiled, but the smile didn’t touch her eyes. There was an unease in them, a deep, dark unease he hadn’t noticed before. Or didn’t want to notice.
– Just… remember that I love you,” she whispered. Her voice trembled. – Remember that. No matter what. Promise?
– I promise,” he kissed her. First on her lips, then on her favorite freckles on the bridge of her nose. – I love you, too. More than real coffee.
– That’s a big statement,” she laughed, and the tension seemed to subside. She was his Elara again. – All right, I’ve got to go. Great things don’t wait.
She dressed quickly, a strict corporate suit made of a smart fabric that adjusted itself to her figure and temperature. The look contrasted so much with her domestic dishevelment that Kael felt as if he had two wives. One for him. The other for the rest of the world.
Another kiss at the door, quick, promising.
– I’ll see you tonight. We’ll order Chinese noodles. Real noodles. From that shop in Old Town.
– Deal,” he nodded. – With beef and too much hot sauce.
– That’s the one.
The door closed behind her. The smart lock clicked quietly.
Kael stood in the silence of the ensuing solitude. He finished his perfect, hand-brewed coffee. It was bitter, but the aftertaste was sweet. He glanced at the clock on the wall. It was time. Time to dive into the world of the dead.
He made his way to his office, a small room that Elara jokingly referred to as the “engine room.” The walls were hidden behind racks of servers, and there was a constant quiet hum of cooling systems in the air. In the center of the room, looking like a futuristic throne or torture tool, stood his Dive-7 work chair.
He sat down. Mechanical manipulators gently but insistently locked his arms and legs. The neurointerface helmet slid down over his head, and cold gel contacts pressed into his temples. He took a deep breath, banishing the image of Elara’s worried eyes from his mind. The job required total concentration.
– AURA, activation,” he said into the void.
“Good morning, Kael,” the smooth, emotionless, perfectly calibrated female voice of his personal Artificial Intelligence echoed in his head. – Your biometric readings are normal. Pulse 65. Cortisol levels are slightly elevated. I recommend an after-work meditation session.”
– Copy that, AURA. Target is Helios Archive, Sector 73-Gamma. Downloading data-archaeology protocols. Let’s go.
The world dissolved.
Body sensation, weight, temperature, odor – all vanished, replaced by a boundless, dark void. And then the void exploded with information.
He was in the Sea of Data. And he was home.
Chapter 2: Failure in the Sea of Data
The world dissolved.
The feel of his body, the weight, the temperature, the smell of coffee, the quiet hum of the servers-all vanished, replaced by a boundless, dark void. For a moment, Kael ceased to exist. He was pure consciousness, a dot in nowhere. And then the void exploded with information.
He was in a Sea of Data.
It wasn’t just a visual interface that was broadcast to his brain. It was a complete sensory substitution. The Sea of Data had no top or bottom. It was an ocean of pure meaning, where gravity was replaced by relevance and distance by the number of logical connections. To the untrained mind, it would have been an instant, all-consuming psychosis. For Kael, it was work. It was his element.
His consciousness, separated from his corporeal shell, spread out in a fine, sensitive net. He didn’t “see” information in the usual sense. He sensed it. Old, stable archives felt like dense, warm currents. Corrupted data – like cold, prickly reefs against which consciousness could be stabbed. Viruses and defense programs were like predatory, swift shadows on the periphery of perception, hunter fish in this bottomless ocean.
He ignored them, moving toward his goal. The crypt of Helios. He could feel it – a vast, ancient accumulation of data, archived over a century ago. It felt like a sunken galleon, resting at unthinkable depths, covered in the ooze of outdated encryption protocols.
“Making contact with the archive,” AURA announced. Her voice was background, part of his expanded consciousness, like the instrument panel on a pilot. – Data corruption level – 7.3%. Structural integrity at 89%. Residual traces of Cerberus 3.0 defense system detected. The system is inactive, but its subroutines could cause cascading errors if accessed carelessly.”
– Roger that, AURA. Bypass Cerberus using the Silent Step protocol. I don’t want any surprises.
He carefully, like a sapper, pulled the thread of his consciousness to the outer shell of the archive. He fumbled for the “seam” – the place where the data packets were sealed. It was a delicate job. Too much pressure and the archive could collapse into an unreadable mess. Too weak and he’d slide across its surface for eternity.
He’d found a vulnerability. An old access port that Helios engineers had forgotten to close. He’d gotten inside.
The world changed. He found himself in a giant, silent cathedral. “Columns” of system logs went off into infinite heights. “Stained glass windows” were matrices of financial reports, shimmering all shades of green. The air was dense, smelling of dust and cooled silicon. Here, unlike the turbulent outer Sea, there was peace. The peace of a graveyard.
His task was to find the logistical manifest for a particular cycle. He began sifting through the data, discarding the unnecessary. Accounting reports, personnel files, meeting minutes, blueprints… Millions and millions of files, stories, lives reduced to zeros and ones. He was a necromancer searching for one particular skeleton in a giant crypt.
Hour after hour passed. His real body in the chair was motionless, but his mind was doing titanic work. He was completely absorbed in the process, his mind working like a perfect, fine-tuned machine. He was about to find what he was looking for, a massive but badly damaged file with the right labeling.
That was why he’d noticed it.
It wasn’t a bug in the code. Not a corrupted file. It was… a note. One wrong, foreign note in the perfect requiem symphony of data. Something that couldn’t, shouldn’t be here.
A small, flickering packet of information that didn’t belong in the Helios archive. It was encrypted using an entirely different protocol, one that was unfamiliar to him. And it felt… warm. Alive.
Any other data archaeologist would have ignored it as random trash stuck to the archive. But Kael was a perfectionist. The anomaly demanded study.
He carefully isolated the package from the rest of the array and reached out to examine it.
And the moment his consciousness touched the package, it exploded. Not with data. But a feeling. Pure, concentrated, distilled feeling.
Sunlight on her face, so bright she squinted. Freckles on the bridge of her nose that she hated and he loved to kiss. The laugh that sounded like the tinkling of little silver bells when he said something stupid about coffee.
Her voice, not just a sound but a vibration in his chest, “Just remember that I love you. No matter what. Promise?”
It was a memory. His own. Today’s. This morning.
But it was distorted. Passed through some strange, amplifying filter. It was too bright, too clear. Hyperreal. Like a retouched photograph that is prettier but less true than the original. It was missing the small, imperfect details of a real memory: the dust specks dancing in the sunlight, the subtle tiredness in her eyes, the background noise of city traffic outside the window. It was an idealized, sterile replica.
Kael instinctively jerked his consciousness away as if from fire. His real body in the chair twitched convulsively, and the security system howled a piercing red signal in the periphery of his mental vision. He ignored it. His heart, even here in the incorporeal world, was pounding at breakneck speed, disrupting the smooth rhythm of the dive.
What was this? A psychotropic trap? Some new kind of virus, attacking not the system but the operator’s mind directly?
“AURA! – he mentally shouted, his calmness swept away like a house of cards. – What was that! Analyze the last stream! Now!”
“Analyzing,” AURA’s voice was as calm as ever, but it seemed to Kael that there was a delay of a fraction of a nanosecond. As if she had encountered something that didn’t fit into her algorithms. – No anomalies detected in the data structure of the Helios archive. The package you touched is not part of the archive. Its signature is unknown. It self-destructed after contact with your consciousness. You may have experienced neural feedback caused by overexertion. Your biometric readings indicate a surge of adrenaline.”
“It wasn’t feedback,” Kael retorted. – It was my memory. Mine. A morning one. It shouldn’t be here. It shouldn’t be…like this.”
He tried to find the words. So redacted.
“Check the status of Elara Vance,” he ordered. – My wife. Her work terminal in the Nexus. Her current location by network ID.”
A pause.
It was long this time. Unbearably long. A full second. In the Sea of Data, where processes are measured in femtoseconds, it was an eternity. Kael could feel AURA sending queries, its tentacles penetrating the global network, its tentacles scouring through trillions of records in search of the one.
He waited for a response, “Elara Vance is in her office,” or “Her communicator signal has locked on to Sector Beta-3.” He waited for any ordinary, mundane response.
“Search complete,” AURA finally replied.
And in her perfectly even, synthesized voice, Kael heard something new for the first time in their ten years together. Something that had never been there, and could never be there.
A glitch. Not technical, but logical. The sound of a program producing a result that contradicted its own fundamental axiom.
“There is not, nor has there ever been, any record of a person named Elara Vance on the global network.”
The words weren’t a scream. They were silence. Emptiness. They fell into Kael’s mind like a stone into a bottomless well. He waited for an echo, but there was none.
“Error, AURA,” his mental voice was surprisingly calm. The voice of a man talking to a malfunctioning machine that had just given him live fish instead of coffee. – Repeat the scan. You misinterpreted the request. Use my personal identifiers. Marital status: Married. Spouse: Elara Vance, ID number 730-Gamma Epsilon. That can’t be off the grid.”
He called her number from memory without thinking. He remembered it better than his own. He’d entered it a thousand times: when applying for insurance, when buying tickets, when filling out tax returns.
The pause again. Kael could feel it physically now. He could feel AURA straining all its resources as it ran the query over and over, trying to find the error in its own calculations.
“Kael,” AURA’s voice returned, and now there was a distinct tinge of… confusion. As if the program had encountered an unsolvable paradox that threatened to cascade into failure. – I searched all available archives, including Red-level government databases and historical records up to digital zero. The identifier 730-Gamma-Epsilon is not and has never been assigned to any citizen. Your personal information on the global network and in my local files, which I have maintained since your activation, indicates marital status: single. This status has not changed since you registered in the system.”
Single.
The word didn’t fit in his head. It was foreign, impossible.
“Ah… what about…” he stuttered even in thought. – Our apartment? A rental agreement in two names. Our joint bills? Health insurance?”
“The lease for apartment 73—8B is in your name, Kael Vance. You have one bank account. Your health insurance covers one person. You do not have, nor have you ever had, any legal or financial ties to an entity named Elara Vance.”
AURA’s logic was impeccable. Her conclusions were undeniable. And that only made it scarier. If AURA was right, then… then who was the woman who slept in his bed this morning? Who drank his coffee? Who kissed him goodbye?
“Emergency session termination. Immediately,” he ordered, his voice as hard as ice hiding the simmering panic underneath.
“An interruption at this point could damage the Helios archive and cause instability in your neural interface. I recommend that you terminate the session using standard protocol…”
“Execute!”
The data world collapsed with a painful, mind-breaking crackle. Kael returned to his body with a scream.
