Transmission 008 // “84>0”
Marv leaned back in the chair, exhaling through his teeth.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he murmured. “The spare key still works.”
Amelia hovered behind him, her weight rooted to the floor.
The laptop’s screen was all black aside from a single white cursor, pulsing—awaiting a command. Marv’s fingers moved across the keys, and text began to spill downward.
Names. Addresses. Dates.
Row after row. Millions of lives flattened into fields and codes. The entire country, compressed down to data.
Marv didn’t blink. The glow from the screen cut hard across his glasses
“Okay, we’re in. This is the full census. Every citizen in the United Commonwealth, when the data was last collected two years ago.”
Amelia stepped in closer.
“All of them?”
“Every last one.”
“Okay. How do we narrow it down?”
Marv didn’t reply. He was leaning over the digital scrambler, hands moving with a surgeon’s precision, pressing buttons and checking meters. The blue light on its chassis pulsed, slow and steady, like the beat of a patient’s heart.
For a moment, he just watched it, a faint smile flickering, then he turned back to the laptop.
“We’re still secure. Connection’s holding. I’ll start the search.”
His fingers hovered above the keys for a moment. The pause tightened the air.
“It might take a while to run the query. Hundreds of millions of records. Each with over twenty separate data fields. That’s seven billion data points…” His lips curved faintly. “It’s a work of art.”
Amelia swallowed hard. The scale of what they were about to do pressed down on her shoulders.
“I know this isn’t right, Marv,” she said, her voice unsteady. “But… it’s the only way, isn’t it? The only way to figure out what my mom’s message meant.”
Marv gave a quiet nod and typed the next command:
> QUERY_NAME / “HELPMANN”
The screen blinked once, then updated.
SEARCHING...
The three dots pulsed in sequence—one, two, three—looping in a steady rhythm. Amelia followed the pattern with her eyes.
The seconds stretched.
After a long wait, the dots froze and turned solid. Amelia drew in a sharp breath, steadying herself.
The screen updated:
0 RECORDS FOUND.
The number just sat there. Quiet and absolute.
Amelia’s breath snagged in her throat. For a heartbeat, neither of them moved. Even the scrambler’s slow, blue pulse seemed to hesitate.
“Zero? That can’t be—can it?.”
Marv blinked. His mouth opened, but no words arrived. He shook his head, as if trying to rattle the truth loose.
Finally, he did.
“No, It can’t. That’s… that’s not possible.”
He scowled at the screen.
“I definitely spelled it right. I don’t remember the search function being case sensitive. But, let’s try again, just in case.”
He retyped the search with a capital H.
The pulsing dots returned.
One. Two. Three.
The wait felt longer this time.
The screen updated:
0 RECORDS FOUND.
Marv’s mouth tightened.
“Still nothing.” he muttered. “What the hell is this?”
He ran the search again. And again. As if enough tries might change the answer.
It didn’t.
His palm hit the desk. The sound made Amelia flinch.
“So… according to the census, there’s not a single person named Helpmann in the entire Commonwealth?” she asked, voice low and laced with confusion.
“Yeah. That’s what it says. No Helpmanns at all. Not a single one.”
He paused, then turned to her.
“But it doesn’t make sense, Ames. We know it’s wrong… because of EverLink.”
“The profiles,” she said under her breath, catching his meaning.
“Yeah. Fifty-two Helpmanns on EverLink—right now. We saw them with our own eyes.”
Amelia considered it.
“Could they be bots? Or fake accounts?”
Marv blew out a breath.
“Possible, I guess. More likely than the census data being wrong. But why? Who’s making fake Helpmanns—and for what?” He shook his head. “That’s nuts, right?”
Amelia gave half a laugh.
“An hour ago we were studying for a maths test. Now we’re hacking a government database. At this point, ‘nuts’ is a moving target.”
A grin flickered across Marv’s face, but it was gone almost as soon as it came.
“Oh…”
“What is it, Marv?”
“Just a thought. An idea, I guess.”
“Go on.”
“They do a census every ten years.”
“Yeah?”
“So, let’s check the last one. See what that tells us”
“Why? What are you thinking?”
He hesitated.
“Just… I don’t know… a feeling.”
Marv turned back to the screen. His fingers swept across the trackpad, opening the previous census file. He ran the same search:
> QUERY_NAME / “HELPMANN”
SEARCHING...
The dots looped around again. A nervy silence pressed in around them.
Then, the screen changed:
84 RECORDS FOUND.
Amelia’s mouth fell open almost at the same time as Marv’s.
“Holy crap,” he breathed. “Ten years ago there were eighty-four Helpmanns.”
He scrolled through the list. Names flicked past in neat, sterile rows.
“Ursula. Nathan. Ilse. Taylor. Yvonne…” The click of the trackpad slowed. “The names we saw on EverLink are all here. Same ages. Same places. It’s them, Ames. They’re not bots. They’re real people. Or… at least they were ten years ago.”
He stopped.
“Now… I don’t know what they are.”
“What happened to them? They can’t have all just vanished.” Amelia asked, her voice small. “Maybe they… died?”
Marv’s eyes stayed on the screen, scanning the names like puzzle pieces.
“Some could have, sure. People die.” He tapped the date of birth column. “But look—Nathan was younger than us in this census. And, this one, Charlotte Helpmann… she was eight. Just a kid.”
He turned to her, meeting her gaze head-on.
“Ames,” he said slowly. “Do you know the odds of all eighty-four Helpmann’s—the only people in the country with this surname—dying in the last decade?”
She hesitated. “Low?”
He gave her a look.
“Understatement of the year. Try astronomically impossible.”
Leaning back, he rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“I mean, it’s not just unlikely—it’s statistically absurd. Like flip-a-coin-and-get-heads-eighty-four-times levels of absurd.”
“Maybe…” Amelia hesitated, almost afraid to finish. “ Maybe they didn’t die of natural causes.”
Marv froze.
A silence opened up between them, deep enough to drown in.
“What if…someone’s purging them? The Helpmanns, I mean.”
It sounded crazy, even as the words left her mouth—like a late-night post in a conspiracy forum, or a low-budget thriller on Pulse.
Marv didn’t flinch. However it sounded, she could see him weighing it up behind his eyes.
“I love how your brain works, Ames. But something that big? Nearly a hundred murders… there’d be bodies, witnesses, relatives. Mess. And mess means headlines. It would be almost impossible to hide.”
He glanced back at the screen, breaking off mid-thought.
“No, this… it’s something else.”
He shook his head slightly.
“Anyway, think about Nathan.” Marv tapped his name on the screen, his voice gathering momentum. “He’s the canary in the coal mine. He’s telling us, loud and clear, something is very wrong here. In this census, he’s thirteen. But he doesn’t appear in the next one. The data says he doesn’t exist at twenty-three. But—”
“We’ve seen his photograph,” Amelia finished for him, her voice quiet but certain. “We know he did.”
“Exactly.” Marv’s eyes stayed locked on hers. “Something really weird is going on, Ames. And I’m going to find out what. Hold on…”
He pulled up another window. The keys clicked fast. The screen refreshed—both of the last two census records side by side.
“Let’s start with the big picture,” he said.
On the left side of the screen, the population count from twelve years ago:
346,892,106
On the right, the two year old data:
338,731,992
Marv stared at the numbers, stunned. He gestured toward the screen.
“The total’s down eight million,” he said. “That’s… not right. It just can’t be.”
“Why not?”
“Populations don’t just drop like that, Ames. Births usually outweigh deaths. In stable countries, the numbers grow—or at least hold steady. A fall like this? It’s unthinkable.”
He shook his head.
“Eight million is massive. It might not sound like much compared to three hundred and fifty million, but it is. That’s Columbria and New Brighton combined—two of the biggest cities in the Commonwealth. Imagine all those people just… gone.”
Amelia’s head felt light as the implications sank in, but Marv kept pulling the thread.
“I don’t get it. For that kind of drop it would take a seismic event. A war. A plague. A famine…”
Amelia’s voice was delicate, but it cut like glass.
“…Or the Black Fall.”
The name landed between them like a curse. She looked across at Marv.
“It’s not murder, Marv… it’s erasure.
…I think maybe they just stopped counting people.”
“But, why would they—” Marv started, then stopped, the words turning to dust in his throat.
Amelia stayed silent, turning the thought over and over. When she spoke again, she measured her words carefully.
“Think about it, Marv. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Nine years ago Hurricane Leda wiped out Seraluna. You remember the footage? The city was destroyed—completely uninhabitable.”
“Yeah. I watched it on TV with my mom. She cried. Said it was like nature had decided to claim back what it owned.”
Amelia continued to join the dots. “After that, the great displacement started. People flooded to the other cities, trying to find somewhere—anywhere—to stay.”
“And then, the city borders. The EverPass system.”
She nodded.
“No EverPass, no entry.”
Marv’s brow furrowed, his eyes drifting off to the far side of the room.
“I remember when the walls first went up in Greenhaven,” he said. “A year or two after the Black Fall. I must’ve been ten… maybe eleven”
He leaned back in his chair, like he was trying to see it all again.
“They built the walls right around the edge of Old Town, just past the old highway. I used to ride my bike down to watch the cranes. I was fascinated by them.”
He let out a slow breath.
“Before the borders, there were so many people arriving. Mom says that’s when everything changed. Crime. Homelessness. New faces everywhere. Families squatting in empty houses. Shops and warehouses turned into shelters overnight. It felt like the whole place was bursting at the seams.”
Amelia stayed quiet, listening.
“I didn’t really understand it back then,” Marv went on. “Mom didn’t like the crime, or the overcrowding… but she hated the walls more. I remember the way her voice changed when she talked about them. I think she always knew they were here to stay. ‘Temporary,’ they said. ‘An emergency measure.’ But they’re still there, surrounding every major city, nearly a decade later.”
He looked up at her.
“When they’d finished building them, the cranes left. And the new people stopped arriving. But it felt like they’d boxed in all the chaos with concrete and steel.”
His gaze dropped.
“Old Town was never the same after that.”
“That’s when the shanty towns started growing outside the cities,” Amelia said. “My dad used to talk about it—doesn’t now. And you never see the people outside the walls on the news anymore. It’s like everyone just… forgot about them.”
Marv nodded slowly.
“And now, we live in a country that’s haunted by eight million ghosts,”
For a while, neither of them spoke. The night pressed at the window, the screen’s glow carving shadows into their faces.
Then, Marv moved suddenly, his fingers flying back to the keyboard.
> QUERY_NAME / “FRANCIS” AND “DUMILE”
Amelia understood at once. That was his father’s name.
She stayed completely silent, waiting with him.
The screen blinked and the search returned.
1 RECORD FOUND.
The color drained from Marv’s face. He looked like he’d forgotten how to breathe.
“My dad,” he said, his voice trembling, wonder and fear tangled together. “He’s one of the uncounted. He could be alive, Ames. He could be out there.”
Amelia met his eyes.
“Okay. So, how do you find someone who technically doesn’t exist? Where do you even start?”
Marv ran a hand through his hair, shoulders slumping.
“I don’t know if it’s even possible. The people outside the cities are completely off-grid. No wifi. No phone signal. The only way is to go out there and look.”
“Which we can’t do,” she said flatly.
“Right. Too dangerous. And, besides, the borders—” Marv let out a small, humorless laugh. “They’re there to keep people out, but also to keep kids like us in. Even with EverPasses, the guards wouldn’t just let us walk out.”
“So that’s it? We’re done? no way to find Helpmann, or contact your Dad?”
Marv stared down at the keyboard, his mouth a thin line.
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “No way.”
Amelia swallowed hard, anger flickering beneath the grief.
“I thought we were close, Marv. So close. And now… I’ve got this message from my mom, but I’ll never know what it means. Who Helpmann is. Why they matter.”
She kicked the edge of the desk drawer in frustration.
“Eighty-four people. In the whole damn country, there were only eighty-four. It should’ve been easy. It’s not even a common name.”
Marv went still—a flicker in his eyes. Then he looked up at her, his voice suddenly alive.
“That’s it, Ames. You’ve got it. The name Helpmann, it’s not common. But why? That’s the question we haven’t asked.”
Amelia frowned. He continued.
“That’s why it’s rare. It’s foreign. Think about it—Ilse, Ursula… not common names. And the surname Helpmann isn’t either. Because it’s from somewhere else, outside the Commonwealth. Which means our Helpmann—the one we’re looking for—might not be from here at all.”
“I have no idea what you’re saying, Marv.”
“Look, Ursula and Ilse are in the data because they must be permanent residents. But, what if our Helpmann doesn’t live here—no permanent address, no home—maybe they just visit. For work, something like that?”
“So…?”
“So, if that’s right, we might have one more shot. If our Helpmann isn't a Commonwealth citizen, they wouldn’t be counted in the census. And, if that’s true, there may be another way to trace them.”
He reached for the Digital Scrambler, pushing buttons, flicking switches—resetting it.
Amelia crossed her arms.
“Okay. How?…”
“Travel records,” Marv said without hesitation. “That’s where we look next, Ames—people entering and leaving the Commonwealth.”
“You think you can even do that?”
He hesitated, just for a second.
“Maybe. Honestly, I’ve never tried. It’s a long shot, but—”
The Scrambler whirred back to life, pulling his focus. He adjusted dials, tapped buttons.
“Okay,” Marv started, fingers poised over the laptop’s keys again. “In theory, the scrambler should be able to punch into the Commonwealth’s travel system without being detected. If any Helpmanns flew in from somewhere else, well, there would be flight records, check-ins, boarding passes.”
He started typing. Lines of code unfurled, the screen flickering with activity. The clack of the keyboard filled the room.
It took time. Marv’s brow beaded with sweat. His tongue poked out the side of his mouth, like it always did when he was concentrating.
Amelia hovered in the background, her breath shallow.
Eventually, Marv let out a deep sigh.
“Okay. We’re in.”
A different database opened up—one that Amelia hadn’t seen before.
Marv ran a new search.
“Okay, brace yourself. Thirty-one different Helpmanns entered the Commonwealth over the last fifteen years.”
Amelia’s stomach turned.
“That’s… not many,”
“Yeah,” Marv said, refining the search. “Not many.”
His fingers danced over the keys.
“We need to narrow it down. If Helpmann knew your parents, my bet is they traveled here—to Greenhaven—at least once in the years before they died. If it were today, it’d be easy. Biometrics at the city border record everyone on entry now. But, we’re looking back to a time before the walls.”
He frowned, thinking hard, then his eyes lit up.
“EverPay. It was live back then. We can check transaction histories. If they came here, odds are they bought something. That’d leave a record—a trail we can follow.”
His hands moved fast, cross-referencing windows. The Scrambler worked silently, its blue pulse beating like a heart in the dark.
The seconds ticked away.
Then the results appeared.
“Okay, Ames. Want to know how many Helpmanns came to Greenhaven in the two years before your parents died?”
She nodded.
“Three,” he said, a tremor in his hands. “Just three.”
Amelia’s heart fluttered—a flicker of hope she hadn’t dared to feel until now.
“Let’s see them, Marv.”
He clicked. The first profile opened.
“Here we go… Dieter Helpmann. Businessman. Frequent traveler—lots of stamps on his EverPass.”
Several photos loaded side by side. First, a young man with wild, unkempt hair, a traveller’s rucksack slung over one shoulder, grinning at the camera. Beside it, a professional headshot—older, more serious, hair cropped neat, suit and tie immaculate.
“Vice President of Corporate Affairs… renewable energy company,” Marv read. “There’s a factory here in Greenhaven. Always stays at the same hotel nearby. Plenty of transactions there, but not much else.”
He tilted his head.
“Stiff now, but looks like he used to be fun.”
Amelia closed her eyes and took a breath, drawing something deep. After a moment, she spoke.
“I don’t think it’s him, Marv.”
He nodded.
“Okay… next.”
Marv pulled up the second profile.
“Richard Helpmann. Foreign diplomat. Visited Greenhaven plenty back then—still does, by the looks of it. Lots of expenses scattered around the city, mostly in Uptown.”
“Makes sense,” Amelia said. “That’s where all the political rallies and events are. Nothing suspicious so far.”
Rows of official photos filled the screen—handshakes, press conferences, and speeches.
Marv began cycling through them.
“Interesting…” His eyes scanned the images. “But a stuffy diplomat? Not who I pictured as our guy.”
He scrolled toward the third profile, but Amelia’s hand shot out, clamping around his wrist like a vice.
“Marv. Wait.”
He turned to her, confusion etched across his face.
“What’s wrong, Ames?”
“I don’t think we need to look at the next one.”
Her eyes were fixed on the screen, her face pale as a ghost. She pointed to a thumbnail in the bottom corner.
“That picture. Look who he’s standing with.”
Marv followed her gaze and clicked. The image swelled to fill the screen, sharpening into focus. Richard Helpmann stood in a banquet hall, his back straight and smile sharp. On either side of him, a man and a woman in formal evening attire. The man was wearing a black tuxedo and a warm, easy grin. The woman had dark hair and gentle features, with deep, intense eyes that seemed to look straight through the camera lens.
His breath caught.
“Is that—”
“Yes.” Amelia’s voice cracked.
“They’re my parents.”
