Sabri is not sure what to eat. She has a bin of dried sweet potatoes, a carton of milk, a box of mac and cheese. Technically, she could make a very heavy mac and cheese with milk and garnished with milk poached sweet potatoes, but she plans to not fall in a food coma so close to a Ritual.

She’s not even going to be near there, either. She’s only going to watch it on TV, and that’s about it. Still better to be awake during it.

So she calls her more money-easy friends.

Mitra doesn’t mind being called. She also does not have the free time to physically come, so she sends a flatbread, locally sourced from soil to plate.

None of the other calls went through.

Flatbread and sweet potato fries is a decent meal.

She browses local channels. There is a new channel #789, which got flagged and suspended with a deletion pending tag: “This channel has been verified to be a bug in the system, deletion will commence after the Ritual.” Not new. The duplicator had been corrupt lately, creating extra Observers or even Mobiles.

Perhaps it is a bigger issue, she thinks. Other Cities do not have such error. Cities are all similar in their mechanism, except this one. No Harvest. All other Cities have a Harvest, yet this City, Undatus, has the Ritual instead. City Angels are built around the concept of the Harvest, so Ritual is but a variation of, yet the scale is very much different, like the negative of it.

The Harvest, where all humans are harvested except one.

The Ritual, where only one human is collected.

What are the humans being harvested for, she wonders, wiping the dish while thinking. There is nothing special in a dead human, even less a few thousands. Carbon is not a rare element on this planet. Cells and neurotransmitters can be cheaply synthesized. The only thing unique is the consciousness, yet it is destroyed during the Harvest.

The Ritual is starting.

The Child of the Crossroad climbed onto the altar. Devouts sat on the sub-altars, placed in an extending radius around the Child. Flowers are placed in adoration around the altar, forming a barrier between the main altar and the subs.

The Child of the Crossroad is not yet a child. They are very old, old as the City of Undatus, whose age span centuries.

The connecting cable is placed on the Child’s spine.

Gradually, that age is drained out of the Child. The memories, cerebral and spinal alike, removed from the being’s current vessel.

Until their eyes display nothing but innocence and curiosity. They do not know where they are, who they are, and why they are sitting atop the altar. Their lips twist up in a child’s smile at the spectacle before them.

It is then that the cable sends up the kill signal.

The Child’s eyes widen in pain. They writhe on the altar, gasping for breath, crying wordlessly as their limbs refuse to move beyond convulsions. This lasts for minutes. The devouts begin to cry, some begin to start their own death.

Then, after half an hour, there are only corpses on any of the altars.

Slowly, the cleaning crew begin to move in, starting with burnt flowers. The devouts’ remains next, placed in separate recycling bags. The host starts their closing words.

It was then when a corpse started to move.

A body recycling bag, initially not even in the background of the camera view, begin to twitch and convulse. The screams of the onlookers and cleaners called attention to it, and soon a few of the braves rush in and tear the bag open.

The body springs into life, standing tall. Its head had been burnt and melted, the charcoal and ash falling off as it moved. Nothing of the organic brain remains.

The spine, however, was untouched by the sacrificial bombing, and was how the body stayed mobile. A bit of spinal cord could be seen exposed… and attached to wires that the staff initially assumed was connected to the bomb meant to blast off the head, but now realize lead elsewhere as well, down to the abdomen.

The body spins and trembles, confused and panicking. Eventually, it drops to its knees. Eventually, a woman brave enough approaches, and lifts the shirt covering the body’s abdomen.

A remote relay. The type usually used by cyborgs trying to multitask. She configures her wristphone to wireless speaker and connects to it.

“Help.” The voice repeats.

She turns on her phone’s mic. “Can you hear me?”

“Oh god. Oh my god.”

“Can you hear me? You are… Your body is kind of, headless right now. It’s connected to this remote relay.”

“Sorry, yes, I hear you. My body? Where am I?”

The onlookers sigh in relief. Somebody is alive on the other end. Must be some messed up remote sacrifice of one’s own duplicate.

“Citizen? You rigged your body for a sub-sacrifice at the Ritual. Your head blew clean off, but since you put the remote relay on the abdomen rather than on the neck, it’s moving. Do you want me to turn it off?”

There was a brief hesitation. “No,” the citizen answers, “please don’t, not yet.”

“Citizen, this body is kind of scrapped. Do you want to come collect it? You could want to reuse the relay, it’s working fine.”

“No, no, don’t. You don’t understand.

“I don’t have a body on this end.”