The lab smelled faintly of solder and ozone, the signature perfume of half-baked experiments. Aisha pressed her palm against the console to steady her breathing. The number—47.2—still glowed faintly at the corner of the screen, even though the scanner had already begun its erratic spasms.
"This doesn't make sense," she muttered, scrolling through the code lines. "It shouldn't be pulling this much power."
Her project notebook lay open beside her, pages filled with formulas and diagrams scribbled in uneven ink. She had been refining this model for weeks, pushing it beyond the club's original assignment. Everyone else was content to let the analyzer spit out vanity scores and laugh at them. But Aisha had a theory—that the scanner was more than a silly algorithm. With enough calibration, it could predict outcomes.
Beauty had always been tied to privilege: better job offers, social opportunities, even the benefit of the doubt. Studies proved it. Aisha wanted to build a system that didn't just score appearance but tracked how society responded to it. A machine that could expose how shallow the world was, by making the bias undeniable.
Of course, that wasn't how she pitched it at the club. If she told people she was building a device to reveal how beauty defined destiny, they'd call her obsessive.
But wasn't it true? She saw it every day—her classmates effortlessly gaining attention, internships, scholarships, dates, while she sat invisible in the background. People denied it, but numbers never lied. If beauty dictated power, then she wanted to see exactly how far the chain extended.
The scanner flared again, light washing across her face. This time the code didn't just stutter—it bled into nonsense symbols, characters she hadn't written. For a moment she thought she saw words form in the static, but when she blinked, they dissolved.
Error: Data Overflow.Warning: System Breach.Initializing Secondary Protocol…
"What secondary protocol?" she whispered. She hadn't built one.
The machine thrummed, the sound resonating in her ribs like a second heartbeat. The light shifted from blue to a strange, prismatic shimmer, as if every color of the spectrum had been squeezed into a single beam.
She reached for the emergency kill switch under the console, but the panel sparked, heat searing her fingers. She yelped, stumbling back.
The hum grew louder. Her notebooks fluttered as a wind stirred inside the sealed lab, scattering loose pages across the floor. Monitors flashed with cascading numbers she didn't recognize—ratios, geometric diagrams, strings of equations that seemed to generate themselves.
Aisha's heart hammered. "No, no, no, you're not supposed to do this—"
Her mind raced through possibilities: had she accidentally triggered an experimental AI module? Was this a virus, a hack? But none of that explained the shimmering air, the way the light bent the room itself.
She thought about Devon's words earlier: Don't burn yourself out. It's just for fun.
Fun. Right. Fun projects didn't swallow the air and tear reality apart.
The glow intensified until she had to shield her eyes. Her skin prickled as if the light were crawling over her. She tried to shut it down again, slamming commands into the keyboard, but the keys no longer responded. The console had stopped listening to her.
Instead, the scanner's lens rotated, tilting upward as if it were no longer observing her but choosing her.
Her reflection appeared again on the screen, distorted in the kaleidoscopic light. For a breathless moment, she wasn't staring at herself anymore. She saw faces she didn't know: men and women with impossibly symmetrical features, flawless skin, dazzling smiles. Each face was tagged with numbers—98.4, 92.7, 99.1—scores far beyond hers.
And then, flashing briefly between them, she saw another face. A girl with tired eyes and plain features. A score of 12.6 hovered beside it.
Aisha's breath caught. That wasn't her. That couldn't be her. But the face… the body… it looked familiar in a way that made her stomach twist.
"Who are you?" she whispered to the image.
The screen pulsed violently in response, the hum rising into a shriek. Her papers tore free from the desk, whirling around her like a storm.
Instinct screamed at her to run, but her feet wouldn't move. It was as if the air itself had pinned her in place.
"Stop!" she cried, slamming her hand against the console one last time. Sparks leapt, burning her skin. The scanner's light surged, blinding, swallowing everything in sight.
She felt it then—not pain, not exactly, but a wrenching, as if something inside her chest had been ripped free. Her vision fractured into shards. Her body dissolved into weightlessness, every sense unraveling at once.
The world stretched, twisted—And snapped.
Silence.
For one terrifying heartbeat, there was nothing. No sound, no body, not even thought. Just the empty drift of a mind unanchored.
Then, slowly, sensation returned. A faint ringing in her ears. The pressure of fabric against her skin. The distant murmur of voices.
Aisha gasped, her lungs dragging in air that tasted wrong—sweet, perfumed, heavy. She opened her eyes.
The lab was gone.