Elias ran. Not with the calculated efficiency of a city runner, but with the desperate, jagged panic of an animal. Every alley looked the same, every gleaming wall a mirror reflecting his growing fear. The city was a perfect machine, and he was the wrench in its gears. The humming drones, once a comforting symphony of order, now felt like a swarm of hungry insects. He risked a glance up, a quick violation of the vendor's warning. A single red eye, the optical sensor of a low-altitude drone, was tracking his every move.
He ducked into an abandoned sanitation bay, the air thick with the smell of stale synth-cleaner. The vendor's words echoed in his mind, and he finally understood. "We're watching." The message on the screen hadn't been a threat; it had been a warning. There was a network beneath the network, a signal in the static, a life beyond the Axiom. The very thought was a brand-new form of heresy.
His datalink buzzed again, this time with a new, more aggressive tone. The Axiom was escalating. His Social Coherence Score, a number he had guarded his entire life, was free-falling. He could feel it in his gut, a cold, empty sensation. 98… 95… 90. Every point was a part of his life slipping away. His apartment access, his meal plan, his entire identity—all were tied to that number.
Panic gave way to a cold, hard resolve. He had to disappear. He needed to find the source of that flicker, the signal in the static. He needed to find whoever sent that message. He checked his terminal, his hands shaking as he typed a query. He sent a burst of encrypted data, a simple question: Why?
A moment of silence, then a reply. The data packet arrived, not through the clean channels he knew, but through a corrupted stream that smelled of forgotten code and broken protocols. The message was a single, flickering image of a stylized hummingbird. Beneath it was a string of characters he almost recognized, but didn't. It was gibberish to the Axiom's protocols, a language from a forgotten time.
Then, a voice. It wasn't through his datalink. It was on an old, scratched speaker in the sanitation bay, a voice that was rough, low, and perfectly human. "The hummingbird leads to the song. If you're fast enough to follow it, you'll find the nest." The voice paused, a dry chuckle crackling through the static. "But be warned, little auditor. You're not just looking for a data point anymore. You're looking for a glitch."
Elias stared at the speaker, his heart thudding in his ears. A glitch. That's what he was. He was an anomaly in a perfect system, a line of bad code that had to be corrected. The glowing red eye of the drone appeared at the entrance to the bay, its hum growing louder. They had found him. He had to run again, but this time, he had a direction. He had a glimmer of a promise that a world beyond the Axiom existed, and he had a name for its inhabitants: a glitch.