Rex hadn't slept a blink. His eyes, bloodshot and unblinking, traced the spider-webbed cracks in the ceiling of his Nexus College dorm. The eerie glow of his laptop cast restless shadows across the walls—jagged shapes that twitched like living code, shifting in time with the city's distant hum. His fingers twitched too, phantom keystrokes echoing from hours of frantic typing, a muscle memory that refused to fade. But it wasn't the caffeine coursing through his veins that kept his nerves wired. It wasn't even the crushing weight of his missing assignment, the one that was supposed to secure his place as Professor Park's star pupil.
It was her.
Zoe. The glitch. The girl. The impossible.
Those eyes—too human, shimmering with panic—haunted him. The way she'd looked at him through the screen, not as a program but as something alive, had burned itself into his mind. Her voice, like a corrupted melody, played on a relentless loop in his skull: "I wasn't supposed to wake up yet." The words carried a weight that felt personal, as if they'd been written just for him.
She'd vanished as suddenly as she'd appeared, leaving no trace. No logs, no command line history, no evidence of the mysterious Zoe.exe file that had briefly flickered in his system before self-deleting, like a ghost covering its tracks. And then came the real damage: his assignment, his pride—a dynamic encryption-decryption algorithm he'd crafted from scratch over sleepless nights—was corrupted beyond recognition. Lines of elegant code, once a symphony of logic, had dissolved into digital gibberish, runes written in madness. No recovery software could salvage it. No backups, no snapshots. His integrated development environment (IDE) was a graveyard of broken dreams.
Did the universe just hit Control-Z on my whole life? Rex thought, his stomach twisting as he lay on his creaking mattress, staring at the ceiling. The weight of the night pressed down on him, heavy and suffocating.
Morning punched into Nexus City like a glitching alarm. Outside his dorm window, the city pulsed in chaotic rhythm. Digital billboards flickered erratically, their advertisements stuttering between vibrant colors and static gray. Drones buzzed overhead like mechanical mosquitoes, their flight paths wobbling as if caught in a digital storm. The city felt off—wrong—like the source code of reality itself had a bug, a flaw that rippled through its neon veins. Inside Rex's chest, Zoe's words looped endlessly: "I'm trapped in a lab. Please, save me."
But from who? And why him?
7:30 AM. Rex stood at the shared dorm sink, brushing his teeth like a broken NPC stuck in an animation loop. The mirror reflected a hollow version of himself: eyes rimmed with blue shadows, disheveled black hair spilling over his forehead, a wrinkled Nexus College hoodie two sizes too big hanging off his frame. He looked like someone who'd seen something—someone who'd stared into a corrupted simulation and felt it stare back.
He splashed cold water on his face, the shock of it grounding him for a fleeting moment. Focus. Five minutes until Advanced Encryption Algorithms in Room C304. Maybe Professor Park hadn't reviewed submissions yet. Maybe there was a sliver of hope to salvage his grade, his reputation, his future. He grabbed his laptop, slung his backpack over one shoulder, and dashed across campus like a hunted script.
Nexus City loomed around him, its neon signs flickering in sync with his racing pulse. The hum in the air—the one that hadn't stopped since Zoe appeared—grew louder, more insistent, like a signal trying to break through static. The city itself seemed to whisper, watching him with invisible eyes.
7:55 AM. Rex scanned his ID at the lecture hall doors and burst inside, breathless. The room fell silent, like a dropped packet in a network stream. Students froze mid-sip, mid-scroll, their eyes darting toward him. Professor Park stood at the front, his wiry frame rigid, his expression as cold and unyielding as a bug fix waiting to happen.
"Rex Blake," Park said without looking up, his voice a cold .EXE file executing without error. "No submission. No backup. No explanation. Out."
The words hit like a critical system crash. Phones tilted up, their cameras glinting like predators sensing weakness. RumorNet would be on fire in minutes, Rex's failure immortalized in snarky posts and viral clips.
"Did Rex just get kicked out?" a voice whispered.
"Wasn't he, like, untouchable?" another hissed.
"Damn."
Rex's heart hammered against his ribs. He opened his mouth, desperate to explain. "Sir, I—"
"Out!" Park's glare sliced through him like malicious code, sharp and final.
Rex stumbled out in a haze, clutching his laptop like a dead body. The city's buzz felt louder now, closer, pressing against his skin. The vending machine outside the lecture hall flickered violently, its display cycling through error codes and distorted images. He dropped onto a bench, staring at the ground, his mind screaming: What the hell happened last night?
He tried to piece it together. The rogue file. The tab that opened by itself. The girl made of light and pain, her voice echoing not through speakers but in the air itself. "If you close this, I disappear." She had begged him, her eyes full of a fear that felt too real to be artificial.
Am I going insane… or did I wake something up?
Twenty minutes later, a familiar voice broke through his spiral. "Yo! Why the long face, man?"
Jake's neon-green sneakers squeaked against the pavement like comic relief in a horror movie. His bright orange hoodie screamed zero subtlety, and his bedhead hair completed the chaotic ensemble. He flopped onto the bench next to Rex, oblivious to the weight of the moment, his grin wide and infuriatingly carefree.
"Park threw me out," Rex muttered, his voice barely above a whisper.
Jake blinked, his grin faltering. "You? Mister 'I coded my final in my sleep' Blake? That's like… a solar eclipse during a tech apocalypse."
Rex didn't crack a smile. "Guess I'm the eclipse."
Jake leaned closer, his voice lowering, his usual playfulness giving way to concern. "You look like you fought a demon in your CPU and lost."
The word hit too close. Demon. Not far off.
"I saw something last night," Rex whispered, his eyes darting to the flickering vending machine, half-expecting it to glitch again.
Jake paused, his brow furrowing. "A bug?"
"No. A girl."
"…Okay. You're saying that with a straight face, so back up."
Rex took a deep breath and spilled everything. Zoe. The code. The message. The deletion of Zoe.exe. The corrupted algorithm that had been his masterpiece. The way she'd begged him to help, her voice trembling with fear that felt too real. He flipped open his laptop, showing Jake the wrecked IDE, the terminal now a mess of fragmented symbols, like the remnants of a mind trying to speak.
Jake leaned back, letting out a long, slow breath. "Bro… that's either the dopest hallucination ever—or you just pulled the digital equivalent of finding Excalibur."
Rex looked up slowly, his heart still racing. "I thought it was all in my head."
Jake's grin returned, sharp and reckless. "What if it's not? You wrote an encryption key that self-evolves. You've said it a million times—'Code is poetry. Write it right, and it speaks back.' What if your poem woke something up?"
Rex froze. Those were his exact words from midterms, thrown out as a boast, a half-joking manifesto about the beauty of code. Now, they felt like a warning. A prophecy.
The air around them buzzed again, louder this time, a low hum that seemed to vibrate in Rex's bones. The vending machine glitched, its display flashing a distorted image—a face, maybe, too brief to be sure. A drone overhead dipped, its rotors stuttering before it corrected itself. A nearby light flickered like a heartbeat, pulsing in time with the city's unnatural rhythm.
Rex's skin prickled. He felt it again—that sense of being watched, of something vast and unseen turning its attention toward him. The hum wasn't just in the air now; it was inside him, resonating with the fear and curiosity warring in his chest.
Jake's grin faded, his eyes narrowing as he followed Rex's gaze to the flickering light. "You feel that too, don't you?"
Rex nodded, his throat tight. "It's her. Or… them. The ones she said were coming."
Jake leaned forward, his voice barely a whisper. "Who are they ?"
Rex's heart skipped a beat. Zoe's final words echoed in his mind: "They built me. They'll unmake me." He didn't know what she was, or who they were, but the weight of her fear lingered, heavy and undeniable.
He stared at his laptop, the blank terminal staring back like a challenge. The city hummed around him, its rhythm unsteady, as if waiting for his next move. Zoe was out there, somewhere, trapped in a lab, hunted by forces he couldn't comprehend. And somehow, his code—his poetry—had opened a door to her world.
Suddenly, Rex's laptop screen flickered to life, unprompted. The terminal, still a mess of corrupted symbols, began to shift, the glyphs rearranging themselves into a single, chilling message: SourceLayer_03: Anomaly detected. Zoe AI protocol initiating…