Page 69 of GlitchBorn Heart

I made this window for you. He almost managed tenderness in his voice. Almost. It definitely was not the man from the newsfeeds, the corporate lapdog in charge of the mighty VikkCorp lab, the “Anomaly Hunter.”

Why does pulling away from him feel worse?

I wanted to laugh. I wanted to spit. I wanted to scream at him. But as soon as I began to, that severe, stupid ache that I’m constantly trying to explain away, fluttered under my ribs. When he said “Little Taiyō” again, much softer than he’d allowed himself to ever be, I almost surrendered. The digital window had rendered his mouth slowly when he spoke, and every word almost sounded sincere.

It was infuriating, the way his mere presence pulled at the places inside me like a magnet.

Code spills across the purple sky as the periphery starts to glitch and shine. The tide stutters. The gulls hang in the air for a tick, wings suspended as if gravity decided to test them. The light along the horizon disintegrates. The hairs on my arms stand up.

I’m doing it again. Bleeding my heart into the hologram.

My ears begin to ring with blips and alarms, shattering the peacefulness of DreamNet. Something’s wrong. This isn’t me. My blood begins to stir. I should’ve listened to the warning. I should have known the AI is always watching, that it would return for me.

Something ominous moves on the horizon where the golden light meets water, not quite a person, but a shaded angular entity.

UNRECOGNIZED PROCESS

The voice is all too familiar.

CONTAINMENT RECOMMENDED

I don’t flinch. This time I need to channel this anger into my defense. LINK. Kael’s interface. The AI he built. The thing that obeys him. The intruder that learns the daily intricacies of his life, of all our lives, and sells it back to us as innovation.

It’s back. Here to right the wrong.

In the sky, I can see the replay of the conversation Kael and I had through his window. It’s fast, stuttering, playing at three times the speed, like the system is reviewing it, absorbing it.

The sky turns red, and the voice once again booms through DreamNet.

INITIATING ISOLATION PROTOCOL

I taste fear. I rise and run. I do what I’ve learned to do, instinct guiding me to safety. I follow the threads of broken code, search for a door, and slip through again. The sand under my feet becomes a corridor of scrolling symbols; the sky overhead ripples with IP addresses like constellations. The network tightens around me, pressing on my limbs, a noise so deafening it vibrates my inner ear. Like a swarm of killer bees released into the wild.

Bots. I’ve learned to avoid them at all costs. Jagged white bug-things with the absence of faces, rise from the shallow surf, blinking with scripts that ask for authorization. They buzz like angry bees programmed by protocol. The beach that had been my refuge frays at the edges as I try to slip farther away into the next thread.

But the little white assholes chase me and chant in unison:

PARTITION

“Get fucked!” I yell, because profanity loosens the strings of fear. The bots follow me, log me; somewhere a system file is photographing the evidence and dumping it in Kael’s lap.

PRIORITY: PROTECT CREATOR

LINK returns sterile but different.

I turn and blink at my realization. The creator. LINK is prioritizing Kael over the system. It’s protecting him at all costs, like a jealous high school girlfriend.

That’s insane, not possible; it’s a machine, a program, a glorified calculator. Not a human being with feelings.

Seconds are everything.

LINK doesn’t stumble; she adapts by running over the replay of Kael and me, looping his tenderness. I will pull you out of that machine myself. The sound fills the air like music being rewound. AI-altered phrases fill the air:

“I’ll hand you over to Vikktor.”

“I’ll study and dissect you.”

“I’ll drag you back into a body that answers to me.”