Page 65 of GlitchBorn Heart

25

TheWindow

Playlist: Dangerous - Sleep Token

Kael

The gray static of TheKast washes over me, a digital snow that turns the lab into a monochrome cell. Time crawls as my impatience scrapes from within. As soon as it ends, I’ll upload the program I’ve been working on for the past twenty-four hours. It’s a simple bridge that will allow me to communicate with Lyra, to see her, to talk to her again, to figure out how this all happened.

Something stirs inside me, an unwelcome pull that heightens my senses and makes my heart race.

Excitement. Yearning. Both.

I hide it away instantly, stomping the feeling down where it belongs. Attachment is a liability. I refuse to let it rewrite me the way she’s rewriting my system.

I continue to convince myself this is simply about control. In the lab, my authority is a clean, brutal thing. It moves in keystrokes and protocols. It patches this chaotic world into something predictable.

Tonight, I’m using every twisted corner of my craft to do one selfish, ridiculous thing: to build a window from the inside to the outside.

The code isn’t elegant. It never is when you execute for the first time under pressure. It’s a three-layer proxy wrapped in encryption, with a translator to render any incoming visual vector into something the monitors can project. In layman’s terms, a translator meant to normalize corrupted data into an image my eyes can see.

It started as a joke, an academic exercise in the middle of my sleepless night. Capture the anomaly noise, translate the signal, output a human visual copy. A ghost in the machine, nothing more.

But somewhere along the way, the joke stopped being funny.

My notes began to reorganize themselves on the page, equations sliding into alignment without conscious thought, margins filling in before I reached for my stylus. The code followed, command lines flowing with an ease that felt less like coding and more like instinct. I didn’t question it. I never do when something works.

What emerged wasn’t just a simple tool. It was a window.

A two-way window program that would allow her to see through, and to communicate back to me and for me to do the same.

TheKast stutters a few minutes too soon for my liking. Violent images slash across the monitors, dripping with color and rage. The kind of wild, uncontrolled emotion no machine could simulate.

The kind that feels human.

I’m already moving. I lean toward the console, fingers hovering, ready to force an emergency shutdown. I don’t get the chance to.

TheKast hiccups, then fades into black. Words explode onto the screen in angry shades of red:

RISE. RESIST. REVOLT.

Two seconds.

That’s all it takes for me to cross the lab and slam my palm down on TheKast server’s kill switch. Too late. The system rights itself back to the usual gray fog that consumes the entire city at curfew.

Silence.

I exhale as my screens light up with program errors, LINK’s logs screaming my name for action. I begin to type, but my cursor slips, and I’m no longer able to do anything but read.

>: WOW—THAT TOOK YOU LONGER THAN I THOUGHT

It continues blinking at me defiantly.

My feed is hers. She’s inside my system, and she’s breaking it. Her defiance being shown to the public on every screen, every kiosk, for all to see. Violent bursts of light, images of StarFell, faces of the non-citizens living in squalor. I see her fury, and she wants the entire city to see it too.

Dangerous game, Lyra. Vikktor could be seeing this unfold right before his eyes.

“Fuck!” My curse is filled with dread. LINK will be throwing alarms left, right, center any minute, possibly notifying the jerks upstairs.