The coffee was a lie.
Damien Vance had reached this conclusion after three hours, four cups, and approximately seventy-four pages of his doctoral thesis. The lie wasn't in the flavor, a decent medium roast that coated his tongue in a pleasant, earthy bitterness. The lie was in its promise. Coffee promised focus, clarity, a sharpening of the mind. For Damien, it was just a ritual of postponement, a warm, caffeinated lubricant for the slow grind of his own existential inertia.
His thesis, titled "Causal Discontinuity in Multi-Fold Quantum States," was, by all academic accounts, brilliant. It was also, to him, profoundly boring. The intricate dance of theoretical particles felt distant, a problem for a universe he wasn't sure he was living in half the time. His real research, the work that consumed him, was scribbled in a dog-eared Moleskine notebook tucked safely in his messenger bag. It had a much less impressive title: The Glitch Catalogue.
He took a long sip, the porcelain warm against his lips, and stared at the blinking cursor on his laptop screen. It pulsed with a steady, mocking rhythm. Something which Damien took completely in the wrong direction for no apparent reason at all.
Damien felt as if the computer was saying:
"Well? Got anything else? Another groundbreaking insight? Or are you just going to sit there?"
With a sigh that felt like it came from his very bones, Damien leaned back in the worn cafe chair. The ambient noise of 'The Daily Grind' washed over him—the hiss of the espresso machine, the low murmur of conversations, the soft clatter of ceramic on wood. It was a symphony of normalcy he desperately tried to cling to.
He reached for his cup for a fifth time, his mind already wandering down a rabbit hole of fractal geometry, when his elbow caught the rim. Time seemed to slow, the way it does in moments of minor, stupid crisis. The cup tilted, a perfect arc of dark brown liquid sloshing over the side. It was heading directly for his laptop keyboard.
"Ah, hell," he muttered, a useless, reflexive curse.
But the splash never came.
Damien froze, his hand hovering in mid-air. The coffee hadn't splashed. It hadn't even landed. A single, cohesive, quivering puddle of it hung suspended in the air, a centimeter above the keys. It was a perfect, glossy, impossible brown teardrop. The light from the cafe window bent around its edges, creating a tiny, distorted rainbow. Inside its depths, the reflection of the cafe was warped, twisted, as if seen through an ancient, imperfect pane of glass.
A familiar cold dread, sharp and metallic, coiled in his stomach.
Glitch #117, his mind catalogued automatically.
Spontaneous localized gravitational anomaly. Duration: unknown. Cause: clumsiness. Damien further thought.
His eyes darted around the cafe. No one had noticed. A woman was laughing into her phone. A man was furiously typing, his brow furrowed. Normal. Always normal. It was just him. It was always just him.
He slowly, carefully, retracted his hand. The suspended coffee drop trembled. He could feel it, a strange, faint vibration in the air, like a plucked string on an instrument he couldn't see. It was an extension of him, a chaotic tumor of his subconscious blooming into reality.
He held his breath. Forcing his mind into a state of practiced calm, he focused on the image of the coffee hitting the table, of gravity reasserting its god-given authority. Fall, he pleaded internally. Just fall. Be normal.
For a terrifying second, nothing happened. Then, with a wet plop, the coffee collapsed onto the table, splashing harmlessly against the base of his laptop. It was just a spill now. A mundane, annoying spill.
Damien let out a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding, his heart hammering against his ribs. He grabbed a handful of napkins, his movements jerky, and began sopping up the mess. His hands were shaking, not from the caffeine.
This was his life. A genius by every metric the world cared about, yet his own mind was a leaky faucet, dripping impossible nonsense into the fabric of reality.
He packed up his things, the thesis forgotten. The drive to work on it was gone, replaced by the gnawing anxiety that always followed a Glitch. He needed to go home, to open the notebook and document everything. The time, the place, the stimulus, the perceived effect. Data. He could control data. It was the only thing he could control.
The Glitch Catalogue wasn't just a journal; it was a desperate attempt at a scientific method for his own fracturing sanity.
He looked over some of his entries.
"Glitch #12: The Closet of Unfinished Symphonies. Duration: 4 minutes, 12 seconds. Opened the hall closet to find it was a concert hall where an orchestra of shadows played a piece that had no ending, exit available only after the set duration time is complete."
"Glitch #43: The Puddle to Nowhere. Duration: 3 seconds. Stepped in a puddle that was, for a moment, bottomless. Felt a cold wind that smelled of ozone and petrichor."
"Glitch #89: The Book That Reads You. Duration: unknown. A copy of Moby Dick in the university library whose pages rearranged themselves to describe my own childhood memories."
He called them Glitches because it was a neutral term. "Hallucinations" implied they weren't real, but the coffee he was still wiping off his table felt very real. "Magic" was a word for children's stories. This was messy, unpredictable, and terrifying.
The walk back to his small, third-floor apartment was tense. Every shadow seemed to stretch a little too long, every flicker of a streetlamp felt like a prelude to another Glitch. He kept his head down, shoving his hands in his pockets, a tall, lonely figure lost in the river of evening commuters. He could feel it, the low hum of potential chaos just beneath the surface of his thoughts. It was like living with a sleeping, unpredictable animal curled up at the base of his skull. Most of the time, it was quiet, but when it stirred, the world went sideways.
He took a shortcut through a narrow alley, a familiar route lit by the jaundiced glow of a single flickering bulb. The smell of damp brick and old garbage was a comforting slice of reality. He was halfway down the passage when the bulb didn't just flicker. It went out.
Plunged into near-total darkness, Damien froze. His senses went on high alert. The sounds of the main street seemed to vanish, muffled as if by a heavy blanket. The only sound was the frantic drumming of his own heart.
A feeling washed over him, one he'd never experienced before. It wasn't the prelude to a Glitch. This was different. This was the feeling of being hunted.
From the deep shadows at the end of the alley, something moved. It wasn't a person. It was a tear in the darkness. It unfolded itself, a creature made of television static and jagged glass, all sharp angles and impossible geometry. It had a vaguely humanoid shape, but no discernible features, just a constant, shimmering distortion where its body should be. A faint, high-frequency whine emanated from it, a sound that felt like a needle sliding into his ear canal.
Damien didn't need a catalogue to know what this was. This was not one of his Glitches.
This was a predator.
His brain, the same one that could effortlessly manipulate high-level calculus, offered up a single, primal command: Run.
He spun around, sprinting back towards the mouth of the alley, his messenger bag thumping against his hip. The creature let out a shriek that was not a sound but a wave of pure static that made his teeth ache and his vision swim. It moved with a horrifying, stuttering speed, as if it were a glitch in a video game, lagging from one frame to the next.
Panic seized him. His thoughts, normally so ordered, became a firestorm. The sleeping animal in his skull woke up.
The brick wall to his right shimmered. For a heart-stopping instant, a perfect, circular hole opened in the masonry, revealing not the building next door, but a sky filled with two green suns and swirling, violet clouds.
Glitch #118: Spontaneous extraterrestrial window, a hysterical corner of his mind noted.
He didn't have time to process it. He dodged left as the Glimmer lunged, its staticky claw swiping through the air where his head had been. The touch of its passage was an icy burn, a feeling of absolute nullity.
He stumbled, his foot catching on an uneven piece of pavement. He fell, hard. His palms scraped against the gritty concrete. The creature was on him in an instant, its formless shape looming over him, the static sound intensifying into a deafening roar. This was it. He was going to die in a filthy alley, killed by a living TV signal from hell.
Desperation is a key.
His panic, his raw, undiluted terror, was a thought more powerful than any of his calm meditations. His mind screamed for an escape, for anywhere but here.
The ground beneath him gave way.
There was no sensation of falling, only of transition. One moment, he was on cold, hard pavement; the next, he was lying on a floor of smooth, dark wood. The air smelled of old paper and leather. He scrambled to his feet, his mind reeling.
He was in a library.
"Another glitch, huh?" He thought without much surprise.
The shelves stretched up into an impossible, vaulted darkness where a ceiling should be. The books on them had no titles; their spines were blank canvases of aged leather. And from their pages came a soft, constant whispering, a million different voices reading a million different stories all at once. This was one of his more frequent, more coherent pockets of reality.
Glitch #27: Library of the Lost.
He was safe, he had escaped.
A wave of dizzying relief washed over him, so potent it made his knees weak. He leaned against a towering bookshelf, catching his breath, the cacophony of whispers a strangely comforting blanket.
Then, a flicker of movement near the spot where he had appeared. A jagged tear of static ripped through the fabric of the library.
The creature pulled itself through.
The impossible had happened. The predator had followed him into his sanctuary. The whispers from the books faltered, turning from murmurs to terrified shrieks. The very air of the library seemed to grow cold, the warm scent of paper replaced by the creature's sterile odor of ozone.
The thing had invaded his mind-space. The implications were staggering, a violation so profound he couldn't even begin to process it. The one rule he thought he understood, that the Glitches were his and his alone, had just been shattered.
It fixed its non-existent gaze on him and began to glide forward, its stuttering movement smoother now, more deliberate. There was nowhere to run. This was his own mind, his own cage.
Damien backed away, his heart a frantic bird trapped in his chest. He tripped over an ornate reading chair and fell backwards. He was cornered. This time, there was no escape. He squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for the touch of cold fire, the scream of static that would unmake him.
He heard a gunshot.
The whispers from the books fell silent, as if in reverence.
The creature's form flickered violently. It spasmed, letting out a silent shriek of agony. Then, with a final, violent implosion of static, it dissolved into nothingness.
Silence.
The library was utterly quiet for the first time in Damien's memory. He lay on the floor, stunned, his ears ringing with the phantom echo of the note.
It really only took a bullet to kill it?
A figure stepped out from behind a bookshelf, moving into the dim light. It was a young woman, perhaps a year or two older than him. She was dressed in practical, dark clothing, jeans, and a fitted leather jacket. Her hair was a shock of silver, long hair, messy, and her eyes, a piercing shade of gold, regarded him with a mixture of pity and professional assessment.
"Hmmm," she said, her voice calm and conversational. "They get bolder every year."
Damien could only stare. "Who... what...?"
"You're a Host," she said, stating it as a simple fact. "An unregistered one, leaking Resonance all over the place. You're lucky that was just a crawler. An overlord or worse would have devoured this whole reality fragment in seconds."
The words were English, but they barely made sense. Host? Resonance? Overlord?
"My Glitches..." he started, his voice hoarse. "You're saying they're... real?"
The woman offered a look of confusion. "Hold on, Damien, you're saying that you made this place?"
He flinched. She knew his name. The dread in his stomach returned, colder than ever.
"How do you know my name?"
"Answer the question," she replied instantly.
"Answer mine first," Damien retorted."
She sighed.
"We've been observing you for a while," she said, taking another step closer. She wasn't threatening, but her presence radiated a quiet competence that was more intimidating than any overt threat. "Your Resonance signature is... chaotic. We were waiting for the right time to approach. An attack qualifies as the right time."
She reached into her jacket and pulled out a simple, black card. She tossed it, and it fluttered down to land on his chest.
"My name is Sophie," she said. "The power you have is called Resonance. The connection to the entity that grants you this power is your Echo, and the things that hunt you, Stillbeasts, are parasites drawn to Resonance."
Damien picked up the card. It was made of a smooth, cool metal he didn't recognize. On it was an embossed silver crest, a shield intersected by a single, unwavering soundwave. Below it, a couple of words:
"The Resonance Concord Initiative..." he whispered.
"Oh, and also, you don't have to tell me anything anymore. I'm not interested."
She turned to leave, her form starting to shimmer at the edges.
"The address is on the back of the card. Orientation is in two days. If you're not there, we'll assume you're not interested. But know this, Damien. Now that they have a taste of you, they won't stop coming."
With that, her form dissolved into a cascade of soft, glimmering light. And Damien was alone again in his whispering library.
He stayed there for what felt like an hour, the cold metal of the card a heavy, solid weight in his hand. He looked around at the impossible, chaotic manifestation of his own mind. For years, he had been trying to study a ghost. He had been documenting, analyzing, and trying to impose logic on the illogical.
He had been wrong.
There had been no logic in this to begin with; this was no schizophrenia of his.
It was all painfully real and just as illogical, two things that can't go together.
His thesis on quantum entanglement lay forgotten on a cafe table in a world that suddenly felt thin and fragile. The blinking cursor, his aimless future, his brilliant but hollow achievements—they meant nothing. The only thing that mattered was the choice presented by the cool, black card in his hand.
He finally stood up, his legs steady now. He looked at the card, then at the vast, silent library that was his own soul. For the first time in as long as he could remember, the aimlessness was gone, burned away by the cold fire of terror and the faintest spark of purpose.
He knew, with absolute certainty, that he would be at that address in two days.