Chapter 28: Glitches in the Routine
The walk home from the Motherboard Hub was always a study in contrasts. One moment, you were in a gleaming citadel of technology where realities were born; the next, you were stepping onto a grimy mag-rail train packed with tired people returning from their own fictional wars and magical academies.
Leo chattered beside me, energized by a sugar-loaded drink Jax had bought him. "So the demon just, like, pointed at you? Did it have a name? Was it like, 'I am Zarthax, Eater of Worlds!' or something cooler?"
"It didn't stick around for introductions, Leo," I said, my voice tighter than I intended. I was still seeing those white-fire eyes every time I blinked. I forced a softer tone. "It was more of a 'stab first, ask questions never' type."
"Still. A boss-level mob in Chapter27? That's not a glitch, that's a hack," Jax declared, swinging from a handrail. "Someone's probably running an illegal difficulty-mod on the story server. You should report it."
That was Jax's worldview: simple, logical, and entirely surface-level. Glitches were bugs to be fixed, not mysteries to be solved. I envied him for it.
"I did. The Motherboard's automated response was 'Thank you for your feedback. The narrative integrity of all stories is constantly monitored.'"
"See? Boring, but solved." Jax shrugged as the train slid to a halt at our station. "Don't get so lost in the story that you forget it's just ones and zeroes, man. Later, nerds!" He gave us a lazy salute and ambled off towards his own apartment block.
Leo and I walked the rest of the way in a comfortable silence that I desperately needed. Our apartment was in a mid-tier residential spire—not the luxurious peaks of the Prolific Authors, nor the crumbling underbelly of the Hub. It was… normal. A curated slice of life designed to be forgettable.
The door hissed open to the familiar scent of recycled air and the faint, ever-present hum of the building's climate control. Home.
"Hungry?" Leo asked, already heading for the nutrient synth.
"Starving," I admitted. Dying, even artificially, took a lot out of you.
As Leo programmed the synth for two plates of synthesized pasta carbonara (his favorite), I finally let my shoulders slump. This was the routine. The safe, monotonous, post-adventure ritual. But tonight, the routine felt like a thin veneer.
My eyes drifted to the living terminal. The search for The Fallen's author was still active in a background tab: [AUTHOR: DATA EXPUNGED].
"Hey, Kai?" Leo's voice was quieter now, hesitant. He placed a plate in front of me. "That thing the demon said… 'the reader.' You really think it was talking to… you? Not the character?"
I poked at my pasta. "I don't know what to think, Leo. But it felt different. It looked right through the avatar, right at me." I took a bite, the flavors perfectly calibrated and utterly bland. "And then there's that." I nodded towards the terminal.
"The expunged author." Leo's eyes widened with a spark of excitement he couldn't contain. "That's not just a bug. You don't 'expunge' data by accident. That's a purge. Someone erased them."
"Exactly." It was the first solid anchor in this whole dizzying mess. "So the question is, who? And why? What was in that story that someone wanted to hide so completely that they'd even delete the creator's name?"
We ate the rest of our meal tossing around theories, each more outlandish than the last. Maybe the author was a renegade who embedded forbidden code in the story. Maybe it was a corporate secret that got fictionalized. Maybe it was a test, and I was the lab rat.
It felt good. It felt normal. For an hour, we were just two brothers solving a fictional mystery, not a potential target and his worried sibling.
Later, as I got ready for bed, the mundane routine continued. I brushed my teeth, the sonic vibrations making my jaw hum. I checked the apartment's security log—all green. I looked in on Leo, already asleep, his face bathed in the soft blue light of his holoscreen, probably still reading wiki entries on famous story glitches.
This was our life. The rhythm of it was supposed to be a comfort.
But that night, as I lay in the dark, the rhythm was broken.
It started subtly. The faint, grid-like pattern of my ceiling tiles seemed to… shimmer. For a second, they weren't tiles, but a cracked, stained plaster ceiling from The Fallen. I bolted upright, my heart in my throat. The vision was gone.
A phantom sense, I told myself. Post-immersion stress. It happens.
Then the smell hit me. Not ash, not blood. But something equally out of place here, in my sterile apartment: the scent of old paper and dust. Like a forgotten library. It was gone as quickly as it came.
I got out of bed, my pulse thrumming. This wasn't in my head. These were sensory glitches, bleed-over from the story. But that was impossible. The Capsule's firewall was supposed to prevent any cognitive residue. What you experienced in the story stayed in the story.
I paced the living room, the plush carpet feeling insubstantial under my feet. My gaze fell on my personal datapad, lying dormant on the table. On a whim, I picked it up and opened a blank text file. I didn't know what to write. A log of the events? A message to someone?
My fingers hovered over the keys, and without conscious thought, they began to move. I wasn't typing words. I was typing a string of commands, a sequence of code I had never learned. It was elegant, complex, and felt as natural as breathing.
>> access_archive('The_Fallen') >> decrypt_meta_layer(7) >> query_author_identity(NULL)
The pad beeped, an error message flashing red: INVALID COMMAND SYNTAX. INSUFFICIENT USER PRIVILEGES.
I stared at the screen, my blood running cold. Where did that come from? I wasn't a coder. I was a Reader, a critic. I deconstructed plots, not source code.
But the commands had felt instinctual, as if the knowledge had been… implanted. Or unlocked.
I slowly deleted the error message, the reality of my situation crashing down on me. This was far bigger than a demon in a bad story. The glitch wasn't just in the story. It was in me.
The mystery of the fallen creator wasn't just a puzzle to be solved out there. It was a thread tangled around my own identity, and something—or someone—was starting to pull on it. My safe, boring daily life was a facade, and the cracks were beginning to show.
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