Neon Bones Conclave

The room hummed like an iron lung in the afterglow of vanished sunlight, circuitry spitting out lines of code while the smell of burned coffee tangled with solder and ozone. They gathered under the glare of violet screens, each console a frontier outpost in this digital badlands, their boots long since traded for headphone cords and fractured keyboards. Overhead, estranged skeletons hung like ancestors dragged from shallow graves, not dead enough to rest, not alive enough to speak—except in their silent warning. Everywhere the name VOJTA blazed, etched like a curse across the monitors, pinned into the walls with cables as if to keep the legend from running loose. One scribe clutched a cracking thermos, another fitted neon wire through his lapel like an oath worn in secret. Rumor says a signal hid in the purple sweep of those horizon screens, a scent of cedar and steam riding it home—but the signal stuttered, and Vojta never walked back across that threshold. Even now, the search threads their code, unbroken yet unfinished.