The café door creaked shut behind him.
Tahir adjusted the straps of his faded backpack and stepped into the pulse of Capital Majeb. Glass towers rose above him, reflecting hard sunlight off steel ribs. Scooters weaved recklessly through cars, and bright digital billboards shouted news of tech summits and university rankings. The city looked alive, modern, unstoppable. Yet beneath the sheen of glass and chrome, Tahir always felt the weight of something older, something buried.
At the bus stop, he waited among workers and students, their voices a low hum under the buzz of overhead lines. When the bus arrived, he slipped into a corner seat, earbuds in, trying to fold himself into the background.
The bus rolled forward, gliding past cafés filled with laughing students hunched over laptops, past holographic ads that flickered and reformed, past drone-shuttles cutting across the skyline.
Tahir scrolled aimlessly on his phone before stopping at an old recording. His thumb hovered. He pressed play.
Crackling static. Then a younger voice—his own.
"Today marks the start of the final year of high school…""…our goal is the Higher School of CS."
The words echoed hollow in his ears. His chest tightened. He switched the screen off and let his head fall back against the rattling glass.
The bus turned a corner.
And there it was.
Capital Majeb University of Sciences.
Sunlight glared against the glass-paneled buildings. Banners stretched wide across the gates: WELCOME, FIRST-YEARS! Crowds of students streamed through, a tide of voices mixing a dozen languages. Recruitment stalls crowded the sidewalks, drones zipped between engineering labs, and laughter carried in the air.
It was good. Respected. A future for many.
But it wasn't the dream.
Not the Higher School.
Tahir's steps were steady but cautious as he walked through the towering glass doors. The patched straps of his backpack pressed heavy on his shoulders, and with each step his senses sharpened. Something here was wrong.
The students around him—bright-eyed, buzzing with excitement—were oblivious. They pointed at sleek holographic campus maps, traded jokes, clutched stacks of enrollment forms. None of them felt it.
But Tahir noticed. He always noticed.
Since childhood, he'd carried what he called an eye for glitches. A cup slightly moved from where it should be. A flicker in the lights that no one else caught. A sound in someone's voice that didn't fit their words. He had taught himself to ignore them—or at least to pretend to. But today, the feeling pressed harder than ever.
Something's been rewritten here.
He slowed near the atrium and let his gaze drift. Guards stood at the far end, three of them, their posture too deliberate, eyes scanning the crowd behind dark lenses. Cameras watched from above, six at least, their movements almost sluggish, like a hand dragged them across the feed.
And then there were the others.
Foreign faces. Not students—too stiff, too sharp. A man and a woman in tailored coats stood by a pillar, speaking clipped Ortusian into discreet earpieces. No registration tags. No backpacks. They didn't belong.
Tahir lowered his head, pretending to check his cracked phone screen.
Security. Foreign officials. A campus reopened after decades, against protests. And no one else finds this strange?
The thought pressed at him, insistent.
This university had history—buried, but not gone. Once the beating heart of Majeb's scholars, it had also been the cradle of the ideology that birthed a war. The Crazed Monarch, as history called him, had walked these halls. And after his death, the government had sealed the place, purged its archives, locked its doors.
For seventeen years, silence.
Until last year.
Now, restored and gleaming, the campus opened again. But Tahir's instincts whispered otherwise. This wasn't rebirth. This was something else.
He shifted the backpack on his shoulder and stepped forward, face carefully blank.
Around him, the students laughed, jostled, dreamed of futures yet to be written.
Tahir alone saw the tension—the sideways glances of guards, the faint clink of boots on polished floors, the measured hum of drones.
The glitches were stacking again.
Somewhere deep in his gut, he felt it.
The world was running processes no one was meant to see.