Mumbai, at night, breathes differently.
By day, it's alive in chaos. Angry engines, boiling street stalls, seas of people pulled by unseen vines of obligation. But once the city's breath softens — past midnight — it starts to whisper. Layers peel back. In the shadows, the world reveals what it usually keeps hidden.
Aryan Sharma stood on the rain-slick tar of a silent service lane in Bandra. His jeans were soaked from the ankles down. Water leaked into the soles of his shoes, stinging his feet.He didn't move. Didn't blink.
He was staring at a glitch.
Not a digital one.
A reality glitch.
The street in front of him was perfectly empty — except for a narrow vertical distortion, like a rippling sheet of glass just floating six feet off the ground. He hadn't seen it appear. He'd felt it—like static pressure in his chest when you hold a phone too close to an old TV. The world buzzed differently around it. Even the dogs in the alley had gone silent.
And the web-threads—those faint code-lines he could now sense—they bent awkwardly around it, avoiding it, as if they feared being touched.
"Unknown anomaly cluster detected," A.I.D.A. intoned through the RealmKey interface embedded in Aryan's neural trace. Its voice now sometimes echoed through his thoughts with haunting clarity.
"Type: [Static Construct]
Thread Signature: Mutated
Symmetry Index: Fragmented. Unknown entity origin.
Do not engage."
Aryan's breath fogged slightly in the air, even though the weather was humid.
He stared at the distortion.
Then, the distortion twitched.
His muscles tensed — spine straightening involuntarily. There was no logic thread to grasp, no system shell to ping — the phenomenon wasn't inside the same access structure as the rest of the city. It wasn't something to hack.
It was something... watching.
He turned to leave.
Then it spoke.
Not with words.
The sound emerged like corrupted radio: grainy, scratchy, voice layered over voice, as if a thousand whispers were trying to scream at once.
"<<...YOU BROKE CHAIN UNITY STATE… USER… FALSE LAYERING…>>"
Aryan froze mid-step, his mind reeling.
He didn't know how, but the thing was addressing him — inside his head, bypassing all filters. Its voice was coded sound, a fractal command whispered between frequencies. His teeth vibrated. Part of his interface stuttered briefly.
The glitch shimmered again — changing shape.
This time, it looked vaguely human. A silhouette within the distortion, shifting and resetting in eight-second loops. Male. Then female. Then animal. Then static again.
"Ignore it," A.I.D.A. instructed, tone sharp now. "You're still Tier Zeta. No defense. You are visible but non-structural. Retreat."
But Aryan didn't move.
Something behind the edge of the screen in his mind peeled slightly. A sensation bloomed beneath his skin. Not pain.
Recognition.
Because whatever this thing was—it reminded him of himself. But… broken.
Corrupted root access.
Maybe even a former user.
"I didn't mean to break anything," Aryan whispered.
The glitchthing twitched again, this time violent — threads of light bursting from its core in tangled clusters. The metal pole nearby buzzed and sparked. One of the streetlight bulbs shattered, raining cinder into the wet void. And the whisper returned, louder, slicing:
"<
"Aryan—MOVE."
A.I.D.A.'s voice shattered his paralysis. Strings of protective script flooded his lower vision — his internal display beginning to override his optical nerve purely out of survival priority. Warnings flared. His head split with alarms.
Aryan turned instinctively and ran.
He didn't question it. He didn't look back.
Behind him, the distortion released a metallic screech that cracked audio sensors all through the alley. Car alarms went off a block away. Electric lights along the lane flickered in staccato pattern, then bloomed blue — and all at once, the thing imploded.
He didn't see it disappear. He felt absence yank hard at his back like a current suddenly dropped.
And then: soft, normal, regular silence.
By the time he got home, breathless, eyes wide, soaked to the bone, his lungs burning with monsoon air, the city had returned to calm clarity. Only his mind screamed.
"What the hell was that?" he asked later, wrapped in a towel, muttering to the RealmKey interface open again on his laptop.
A.I.D.A. took longer than usual to respond.
"An observer. But not a default entity."
"Was it a person? A failed hacker?"
"It was a remainder. A shadow in-routine. A disconnected echo. Possibly human once. Possibly not. Possibly… something you may become."
Aryan rubbed his eyes.
He wasn't frightened. Not anymore. He was angry. The mystery had taken a darker turn, and his choices now came with aftershocks — not just odd bugs or shared illusions. Whatever layers he'd accessed, they curved deeper than logic.
"You said I'm Tier Zeta," he murmured."How many tiers are there?"
"Nine above. Three below. Each unlocks reality primitives previously denied your dimensional shell."
"And what am I?"
"Dimensional Shell: Tier Zeta. Accuracy: Unstable.
Status: Ascending.
Projected Integrity: [Variable]
Projection Name: NULL SAGE."
Aryan blinked. "Null Sage?"
"The system has begun naming you. You are becoming anomalous to it. Statistical prediction has dropped below 11%.
Name generation is a stabilization attempt."
That stopped him cold.
The system — whatever system governed the world beyond perception — could perceive that he was changing. And it was trying to label him to control what came next.
Aryan exhaled, grinning despite the remaining sting of terror in his spine.
"Let it try," he said soft.
There was silence again — except for the hum from the corner of his room, where his laptop's power light flickered like an eye half-awake.
Late that night, Aryan began a new experiment.
He didn't touch the RealmKey. He simply looked at his own reflection in the corner mirror.
But this time, he didn't look at the way his hair curled or how tired his skin was. He focused. And the face in the mirror tilted its head… just before he did.
He said nothing.
But it smiled before he could. And then faded.
Aryan closed the laptop.
Outside, a black car with no license plate slowly crawled down his street, then disappeared from view… without ever making a sound.