Milwaukee, 2044 — August -– where the rain never stops and the skyline has learned to watch you back.
Sixteen-year-old Aiden [Fade] Cross knows the rules of the city the way a stray knows alleys: stay low, keep moving, and never — ever — let the system get a clean look at your name. In a world where identity is currency and permission is oxygen, being “unregistered” isn’t rebellion. It’s a death sentence you live one minute at a time.
By night, he runs the Drift — jacked into the virtual world from wet tunnels beneath the street where the air is cool, the dark has teeth, and the only light comes from the glow of stolen signals rippling like water across the concrete. There are windows — small ones — where the Leviathan exhales and forgets to listen. Aiden has built his life inside those gaps.
Then a job goes wrong.
The kind of wrong that doesn’t just cost you blood or breath — it costs your future. Suddenly Aiden is holding something he was never meant to touch: proof that the world isn’t merely broken. It’s designed that way. And now the Citadel wants him corrected. Quietly. Permanently.
Forced into the orbit of the Human Hands — anti-technology terrorists living in Coasterville on the shores of Lake Michigan — Aiden is forced to choose between surviving alone and risking everything for a truth that might finally burn a hole through the fog. But truth is expensive, and the people who sell safety don’t like competition.
Because in Milwaukee, the tower at the center of the skyline doesn’t just scrape the clouds.
It breathes.
NULL KIDS is a razor-bright dystopian thriller about humanity, memory, stolen futures, and the terrifying intimacy of a system that knows you better than you know yourself — until you learn how to disappear.
NULL & VOID
A Practical Guide to Being Absolutely Nothing
[ SIGNAL SPOOFED: 89.2% STABILITY ]
You Aren’t Here (And That’s Your Only Weapon)
Congratulations. If you’re reading this, you’ve already committed the most underrated felony in the Heartland Citadel: Existing Without Permission.
Maybe your parents were “off-grid purists” or you were born during the blackouts of the Ten-Year War. Either way, you’re a Null Kid. A Zero Pulse. A ghost in a city that tracks everything from your heart rate to the micro-expressions you make while eating state-approved Nutri-Paste.
The Good News: The Leviathan is blind to what it cannot name.
The Landscape: Milwaukee District 7
The Citadel calls this “Order Through Stability.” We call it a pressure cooker. In the humidity of Walker’s Point, the world is split into those who “clock in” and those who vanish.
[ STATUS: UNTRACKED ]
Basic Survival: How to Look Like a Lamppost
The Digital Leviathan is designed to find and “optimize” anything that moves with purpose. To survive, you must master the art of being background noise.
The Gutter Economy: Sats Over Credits
Money in the Citadel isn’t about value; it’s about leverage. If the state gave you the “credits,” they own the “you” that spends them.
| FEATURE | CITADEL CREDITS | SATS |
|---|---|---|
| Origin | The Leviathan | The Old World |
| Visibility | Total Surveillance | Trace-Proof |
Found Families: The Culvert Bond
Blood means nothing when the system can rewrite your memory.
What matters is the person who jumps into a freezing river to pull you into a dark culvert while Seraph drones are turning the surface into a light show. We’re a tribe of ghosts haunting the same ruins.
STAY OFF THE LEDGER
The system is archiving.
Sign up for BLUE NOISE TRANSMISSIONS to receive world dossiers and release alerts for NULL KIDS.
Addendum: How to Avoid the Human Hands
They don’t want a fix. They want a target.
The Human Hands don’t hunt scrap. They hunt meaning. They’ll tell you it’s dignity. They’ll tell you it’s freedom. Then they’ll charge you fifty sats to keep walking just because you’ve got a port and they don’t.
“KNEE. THROAT. GONE.”
- KNEE: Take the door’s leg, not his pride.
- THROAT: Make him breathe wrong for one second.
- GONE: Don’t finish the fight. You’re not here to win. You’re here to leave.
How to Spot the Trap
One becomes the door. Two become the walls. One stays back and watches like a metronome with a heartbeat. Look for bare knuckles, chain, and rebar. If the path narrows into “quiet,” someone already took the noise away.
TRACE’S MARGINALIA: “Don’t be heroic. Heroic is how you die with good posture.”
[ SYSTEM STATUS: OFF-GRID / SIGNAL SPOOFED ]
[ ENCRYPTION: SPLITCH-DECK V.2.1 ]
Rob Hoehn 