Page 58 of GlitchBorn Heart

“So, she fell out of DreamNet and landed in GameNet.” I ponder his words. “I knew it! She’s not dead.” A smile creeps across my face, foreign but welcomed.

“Yes...and no,” Ash snaps with uncertainty. “I saw her. I touched her. She was inside the game, same time I was. It was her. But she said something about being trapped. She was ghosted just as I was grabbing her.”

The anomaly surge flickers again, almost like agreement, like it can hear everything he’s saying. My eyebrow raises.

My hands curl into fists as my eyes narrow at the data trail Ember gathered. It does match what Ash is saying...sort of.

I walk over to the GameNet servers and pull down the keyboard. Before I can even begin to type, the cursor duplicates, and the feed begins to hum with static that feels more like a voice than white noise. I flinch. For the first time since Vikktor unleashed hell on the system, I’m not sure what’s real anymore. Nothing about this is logical.

It shouldn’t even be possible for an image like this to generate organically. Someone must be toying with me. “So, you’re saying something is trapping her in GameNet?” I clarify with Ash, but mostly to control the thoughts swirling in my head right now.

I swipe the GameNet BIOS screen to bring up the command line and hover my fingers over the delete string. Whatever is trapping her there must be a remnant of the virus. I just need to purge it from the system, and I should be able to bring her back.

“Alright,” I mutter to the console. “Let’s see where and what you really are.” A large round golden image blows up on the screen like a balloon bursting.

Odd.

Fine, let’s play. One strike, a full purge command, and it should vanish. Clean and simple. I hit the Enter key, and the golden globe flickers like a flame, warps, and then moves, as if it’s under attack. Good.

“Uh, Kael?” Ash’s eyes are wide with disbelief. “I’m no code nerd like you, but is a virus supposed to look like a sun that’s fighting to sink into the sea? I mean, that’s some whack graphics shit.”

He’s right. A strange image fills my screens like digital art, a sun rising, glowing so bright it forces me to squint. My system isn’t just receiving input anymore. It’s answering back. But how?

A second later, a word appears, jagged and bold across every diagnostic window in the lab:

ELI

The word pulses like a heartbeat, synced to my own.

“What the fuck?” I slam another command through. “If someone’s in my system...” I don’t allow myself to even finish that sentence. Rage begins to build, and that crawling sensation starts to fill my veins.

This time Ember hits enter, a lockdown script executes to contain the breach. The system wholeheartedly rejects it, pinging sounds flooding the speakers. LINK chimes in.

ANOMALY DETECTED

My screens shudder with static, code splintering like glass. The console hisses, like an open circuit about to blow. Anomalies are always in GameNet. Practically everyone in there has magic. They just can’t use it.

“LINK—volume up.” I swear I hear something lingering beneath the static. It’s a non-mechanical sound like a quickened breath. It’s definitely a human sound, echoing, like it’s lost in a dark cavern.

HELP ME

The sound repeats itself by visualizing text on the wall monitors. Ember, Ash, and I all rear our heads back, startled, shocked. I’d think I was hallucinating from exhaustion if we didn’t hear it simultaneously. Viruses don’t breathe. They don’t draw suns on horizons or spit words into the static, and they certainly don’t do it twice.

I built every line of this system. I know it like I know my own self. Every line of code, every firewall, every dataset, and yet something inside it just spoke to me, and, for a moment, communicated to me. It wasn’t LINK.

I still, my breath holding in the air; I can’t move, can’t fathom what this could be. My hands hang uselessly at my sides, fingers twitching like my instinct is to delete, purge, burn it all out. But I don’t.

I can’t. Because there it is again. My chest feels tight, heavier than it should, the blood in my veins tingles, and my tattoos feel as if they’re crawling over my skin. Someday they’ll find my body in the lab, dead from the stress of this job.

The monitors flicker with faint pulses of golden-orange light, patient, waiting for me to move in this game of chess. I decide to engage, strong, silent intuition calling for me to study this further.

Ash interjects. “Kael, it’s her, Bro. I feel it. That signature is unlike any I’ve ever felt. She didn’t land in the system. The virus isn’t trapping her. She is the system.”

His words echo through the lab and don’t quite register. My logic fails to comprehend just what this means. I whip toward him, throat dry. “What the hell are you saying?” I know perfectly well what he’s saying, but if I don’t acknowledge it, then maybe I can deny it’s actually happening.

Ash doesn’t flinch. He leans in, eyes glaring vividly like he’s been waiting for me to finally catch up. “She didn’t just land in your system. She is your system. You have LINK and Lyra! That’s why you can’t kill it with a command. That’s why it keeps looking at you...speaking to you.“ A devilish grin slides across his features. “And fuck, from the looks of that blinking...she’s pissed.”

Ember’s gasp betrays her, the serious scientist mask slipping for a split second. “That’s highly improbable,” she whispers, shaking her head. “That...that would mean she’s—“