Page 14 of GlitchBorn Heart

Playlist: Bad Dream - Cannons

Lyra

Eli and I stumble into the door of our apartment wet, cold, and as drunk as those old-time sailors we read about in the history logs. I glance over at the digital clock on the wall monitor and breathe a sigh of relief. It’s 1:45 a.m. We made it. Fifteen minutes later, and it would be two a.m., the time the Corporation enforces a total digital blackout every night, called TheKast. During TheKast, all screens, holograms, DreamNet bands, public ads, and even personal devices automatically switch to static for thirty minutes of mind-numbing white noise. The three beeps before it not only alert you to its arrival—they also warn you to be inside for the citywide curfew that begins at the same time.

I know they say TheKast is for “updating” and “safety scanning” but that’s complete nonsense. We’re not as stupid as they think.

What it really does though? It keeps the population compliant.

We know why the corporations want to prevent gatherings or unauthorized VR sessions through a nightly curfew. Anyone caught outside after TheKast without corporate permission is hauled away by our “friends” the Corporate Integrity Corps or the CIC, as we like to call them.

A brilliant, but underhanded way to force the gifted or the rebels to out themselves.

“Straight to bed,” I remind Eli. Because the temptation to escape into other worlds better than ours is always there, always stronger than our need to feel safe.

“Yes, ma’am!” He gives me his best drunken salute.

Technically, we shouldn’t even be in DreamNet or GameNet during TheKast. The city’s mainframe system floods the airwaves with a pulse of static strong enough to rattle the bones and boil the blood. There’s no pain, just discomfort, more like...exposure.

Easy to locate means easy to capture.

In the very few times I’ve been inside DreamNet during TheKast, it has taken all my strength to squash any signal my magic may be giving off. I’ve even pushed to try it after a few drinks...a girl’s gotta know what she’s up against.

Look, I wasn’t that drunk. I tell myself, my inner voice trying to break through that last stem-cocktail haze. Okay, fine, I was plastered. But in my defense, TheKast hit mid-cocktail, and trying to hide your magic during the whiteout, while hammered, is basically expert-level wizardry. Tonight, I’ve had enough cocktails to basically glow like a glitching Christmas tree.

One foot carefully in front of the other and I only just make it into bed, stripping off my wet leather jacket and smoke-saturated pants. I look over at the webs of rain traveling down my window, streaks of neon colors reflecting from the city below. I focus on them as I lie down.

I close my eyes, breath shallow, world spinning and wait for the three robotic beeps that chime at two a.m. on the nose. I feel it before I hear it, the way my magic recoils, tightening deep in my chest. It always feels like someone’s sliding cold fingers down my back, hooking into the tattoo that appeared down my spine during StarFell. It’s a gentle tugging which immediately makes me pull the sheets up close and bury myself, every piece of me wanting to flare bright but forced to dim.

TheKast bathes my room in a glow of peaceful white light. Audio devices begin to emit a low, continuous hum or “psychoacoustic static” designed to suppress thought and prevent unauthorized dreaming or magic activity.

Those of us powerful enough to flare know how the pre-programmed static interferes with our magic, refracts it across the surveillance grid, and lights us up like a beacon.A bright, blinking ANOMALY DETECTED on some corporate nerds radar.

Said nerd then calls the CIC and a team of armed corporate assholes show up at your door. No one talks about what happens after. Some say you get “relocated,” some say you disappear, others say you wake up a corporate lab rat, experimented on, different, hollow, and wrong.

Personally? I kind of like it. Not the whole capture, pokey, labby thing...but it’s the only time Oneiro City ever shuts up, ever goes quiet. The only time the hum of tech, the buzz of ads, or the roar of crowds slips into silence.

A brief moment where I’m not being watched or measured or hunted.

I love the few minutes of peace before the lights snap back on, and the city starts devouring us again. TheKast is their way of reminding us we don’t own our magic.They do.

Tell us you didn’t engineer StarFell without telling us...

But still, there’s something strange I always feel in those few seconds before the city restarts.

I would be kidding myself if I didn’t admit the curfew has become its own twisted little time-pressure device. Every night, I find myself racing home, either to beat the moment reality gets smothered in white noise, or to lie in bed waiting, counting down the slow, torturous seconds until I can activate my DreamNet band.

Because TheKast doesn’t just shut the city down. It shuts us all down.

For the rebellion, it’s a window to move unseen, to illegally organize, and plan. For the non-rebellious U21, it’s a guilty-pleasure countdown.

We’re all waiting for the minute the static fades, and the grid re-ignites with all the things we’re not supposed to have: GameNet on hacked servers, late-night VR hookups, whispered secret messages, and the kind of holographic sexual explorations we pretend we’re definitely not doing.

We’re not able to dream, but somehow, the curfew makes us want to even more.

When I’m in DreamNet, I can be whatever and whoever I want. I can dream that I’m not part of a hunted generation, that the despair carved into us after StarFell didn’t swallow us whole.

Ugh. Thoughts interrupted. That noise.