The silence after the scream of machines was a physical thing.
It pressed in on Leo's ears, a vacuum filled only by the ragged, too-loud sound of his own breathing and the low, panicked murmurs from the corridor.
The red emergency strips on the floor painted the dead server room in the color of a wound.
Danilo and the two others in the doorway were statues, their faces etched in the hellish light.
Their eyes weren't on Leo anymore.
They were fixed on the space where the screaming man of light had been, now just a faint, shimmering scar on the air and a crumbling pile of… something… slumped against the wall.
Leo used their paralysis.
He didn't run. He slid sideways, keeping to the deepest shadows between the silent server towers, moving toward the back wall.
Toward the other glitch. The first one he'd seen.
The body.
Up close, the distortion wasn't a violent splash. It was a bubble.
A pocket of still, cold air that made the light wiggle.
Inside it, the woman sat propped against the wall, legs splayed, head lolled to the side as if in deep, unwakeable sleep.
She wore the standard-issue pale-blue shirt, a size too big. An intern's pass, the lanyard twisted, hung from her neck.
Maya R., it read.
He'd seen her maybe twice, fetching coffee for a project manager. She'd had a sticker of a cartoon cat on her laptop.
Now, the cat was gone. The laptop was gone.
Just Maya R., her eyes open and dry, gazing at nothing. The pupils were dilated, black pools that reflected the flickering red emergency lights without seeing them.
Floating before her face, the translucent HUD was frozen, a still frame in a dead stream.
Most of it was garbled static, but one line was perfectly, cruelly clear:
[Final Log: Interface Synchronization Failure during Initialization Event.]
[Status: CORRUPTED.]
[User Designation: TERMINATED.]
Not killed. Terminated.
Like a faulty process. A background service the System had decided to end.
The hum of the dead servers around him felt different now. Not a mechanical sound.
A funeral dirge for a deleted girl.
From the doorway, Danilo found his voice. It was cracked, stripped of its earlier project-manager calm.
"What is… what is that? Is she—"
"Don't look at it," one of the others hissed, a man Leo recognized from Logistics.
His name was Harris. He was clutching a fire extinguisher like a club.
"Look at him. The glitch came from him."
They were refocusing.
Fear of the unknown was powerful, but the fear of losing ten thousand points and condemning a district was more visceral, more immediate.
It was a math problem they could solve.
A heavy, rhythmic THUD started up again on the door frame.
Someone outside was using something solid—maybe that fire axe—to batter at the metal, widening their entry point.
"The anomaly is right there!" Danilo shouted, the command meant to rally himself as much as the others.
He pointed a shaking finger at Leo's shadowy form.
"Ignore the static! It's a trick! A debuff!"
Leo's eyes stayed on Maya R. On the bubble of glitch that contained her.
His [Glitch Reading] throbbed, a dull ache behind his eyes that had nothing to do with lost memories.
It fed him information, cold and clinical.
Anomaly Type: Stable Data-Corruption Pocket.
Designation: Post-Wipe Echo.
Status: Inert. Boundary Integrity: High.
Observation: Pocket maintains localized reality exclusion field.
A pocket. A hole. A place the System's reality didn't fully touch.
A new, targeted chime in his skull.
Environmental Alert: Quarantine Zone Detected.
Cause: Residual Data Instability from Unauthorized Core Access (User: Maya R.).
Advice: Avoid prolonged exposure. Data erosion of un-synchronized entities is probable.
Data erosion.
Is that what he was seeing? Was she being slowly unmade?
The battering at the door grew louder. A hinge screamed in protest.
They'd be inside in seconds, and the room had no other exit.
Except.
He looked at the bubble. The 'Stable Data-Corruption Pocket'. The 'reality exclusion field'.
His eyes darted to the network of smaller glitch-lines around it. One, a thick, root-like distortion, ran from the bubble down into the floor tiles.
It didn't look like a tear. It looked like a… drain. A pathway.
The voice in his head, the System, was warning him away.
That was the only clue he needed.
"He's cornered!" Harris yelled, taking a step into the room, hefting the fire extinguisher.
Leo didn't have a plan. He had a last, desperate bet.
He muttered a rough, soundless "sorry"—not to the empty shell of Maya R., but to the idea of her, to the cartoon cat sticker—and lunged forward.
Not at the people.
At the glitch-bubble.
His shoulder slammed into the space just beside the body.
The moment he made contact, the shimmering boundary of the distortion didn't break.
It enveloped.
The world peeled away.
Not in a blink, but in a slow, nauseating stretch.
The sound of the battering axe didn't vanish; it was pulled, elongated into a deep, groaning bass note that decayed into nothing.
The red emergency lights smeared across his vision like wet paint.
The smell of ozone and dust was replaced by a sterile, metallic blankness, like the inside of a new server casing.
He was falling. Or maybe the floor was rising.
There was no direction, only a rushing sensation through a tunnel of cascading visual noise—fragments of office layouts, shreds of text from forgotten reports, faces of colleagues flickering and dissolving into pixelated mist.
Then, his foot hit solid ground.
He stumbled forward, knees buckling, and caught himself on a wall.
The wall felt wrong. It was cool, like drywall, but the texture was too smooth, like a high-resolution render.
He blinked, pushing himself upright.
He was in a corridor. It was the E-Net office corridor.
And it wasn't.
The colors were leached out, existing in a spectrum of grays, muted blues, and sickly greens.
The overhead fluorescent lights glowed with a steady, silent hum, but the light didn't seem to cast shadows properly. It just filled the space, flat and even.
The air was still and cold, devoid of the scent of coffee, sweat, or life.
It smelled of nothing. Of empty space.
The sounds were muffled, as if heard through thick glass. He could hear the distant, rhythmic thump of the axe, but it was a ghost of a sound, an echo from another world.
And there were people. And there weren't.
Silhouettes of translucent, blueish light moved through the space.
A figure walked past him, gliding more than stepping, repeating the same path from the water cooler to a cubicle entrance, then flickering and reappearing at the cooler to start again.
Another sat at a phantom desk, its hands moving in a rapid, looping tap-tap-tap on a keyboard that wasn't there.
A pair of them stood by a ghost of a printer, their forms shimmering as they performed a silent, repetitive conversation.
Data-ghosts. Echoes of actions, of routines, captured in a buffer loop on the day the System initialized.
They were memories of work, playing on repeat in a quarantined drive.
Leo looked down at his own hands.
A jolt of pure, primal fear shot through him.
His hands were faintly translucent. He could see the vague, grayish outline of the floor tiles through his skin.
He brought a hand to his face, and his fingers passed slightly through the ghostly image of his own cheek before solidifying with a tingling resistance.
His HUD flickered. The clean, professional overlay was now marred with subtle static.
And a new line had appeared, pulsing with a slow, ominous rhythm:
[Base Reality Synchronization: 87%]
[Status: DEGRADING - Quarantine Zone Detected]
[Advisory: Return to synchronized reality to prevent irreversible data loss.]
Irreversible data loss.
Like Maya R.
He was becoming a ghost. An echo in the making.
He turned, looking for the glitch-bubble he'd come through.
It was there, a few feet behind him, but it was no longer a doorway.
It was a shrinking, sputtering hole in the air, like a patch of corrupted video struggling to render.
Through it, for a fraction of a second, he saw the dark, red-lit server room, saw Danilo's back as he faced the other way.
Then the image dissolved into static.
The hole was sealing. The System was patching the breach.
He was trapped in the echo.
A soft, shuffling sound to his left.
Leo froze.
The sound wasn't part of the muffled background. It was new. A break in the loop.
One of the data-ghosts by the phantom printer had stopped its repetitive motion.
Its shimmering, head-shaped form slowly turned away from its companion echo.
It turned toward Leo.
The featureless face, a blur of pale light, seemed to hold his gaze.
Then, with a motion that was horrifyingly deliberate amidst the mindless repetition of everything else, it took a single, gliding step toward him.
The synchronized tap-tap-tap from the typing ghost at the desk stuttered.
Stopped.
One by one, down the gray, silent, haunted corridor, the echoes of a dead workday stopped their loops.
Their faceless heads swiveled.
All of them turned to look at him.