Not all hauntings come from the dead. Some are born from the corrupted living.
Swan doesn't sleep.
He spends the night in the campus library's third floor—the section dedicated to obsolete media formats, where physical books gather dust and nobody comes anymore. The silence here is absolute, broken only by the hum of climate control systems and the occasional flicker of emergency lighting through frosted windows.
His phone sits on the table before him, screen glowing in the darkness like a dying star.
He's been scrolling for hours. Social media profiles, student directories, group chat histories. Searching for proof that he existed. That he mattered. That twenty years of life left some kind of mark on the digital landscape.
What he finds is worse than nothing.
His profile on the Blackwood Institute social network is still there—technically. But the profile picture has degraded into pixelated noise, a face-shaped blur that could be anyone or no one. His bio text fragments mid-sentence: "Third-year student majoring in Cogni—" and then nothing, just empty space where words should be.
The posts are the worst part.
They're changing as he watches.
A photo from last month—him and three classmates after a study session, all exhausted smiles and energy drink cans. He remembers taking this. Remembers tagging everyone, adding some self-deprecating caption about surviving midterms.
Now the photo shows three people. The fourth figure—his position, his space—is a smear of visual corruption. Like someone tried to Photoshop him out but forgot to fill in the background properly. The faces of his classmates smile at the camera, untroubled by the reality-wound where their friend used to be.
The caption reads: "Made it through midterms! Us three against the world 💪"
Us three.
Swan refreshes the page. The corruption spreads. Now his arm—the part that was draped over someone's shoulder—is gone entirely. The photo has recomposed itself, reality healing over the gap he left like skin closing over a wound.
He opens his messages. Hundreds of conversations, years of accumulated social proof. Friends, classmates, study partners, that girl from orientation who he talked to exactly once but stayed connected with out of awkward politeness.
The names are becoming generic. "User_7392847." "Contact_Unknown." Profile pictures dissolving into default avatars.
He clicks on a conversation at random—someone named Marcus, apparently. A friend, judging by the casual tone. The chat history loads, and Swan watches in real-time as the messages rewrite themselves:
Swan: "Hey man, you still up for that study session tomorrow?"
becomes
Unknown User: "Hey man, you still up for that study session tomorrow?"
becomes
[Message Deleted]
And Marcus's response—"Yeah dude, meet at library?"—suddenly loses its context, becomes a non-sequitur addressed to no one, and then vanishes entirely. The conversation compresses, contracts, erases itself in a cascade of logical cleanup. The system is tidying up loose ends. Removing references to something that never existed.
Swan's hands shake. He sets the phone down before he throws it.
"This is insane," he whispers to the empty library. "This is fucking insane."
His voice doesn't echo. The words fall dead into silence, swallowed by the weight of obsolete knowledge surrounding him.
He tries logging into his email. Account not found. His cloud storage. User credentials invalid. The student portal that governed his entire academic life. Access denied—no associated student record.
Every digital footprint he ever made is being systematically erased, overwritten, debugged out of existence.
Swan picks up his phone again. Opens his contacts list—the one backed up locally, not synced to the cloud. Names he's known for years. People who should remember him.
His thumb hovers over one entry.
Kai Yoshida - Best Friend Since Middle School.
The label he added himself, years ago, back when labeling your best friend felt important. Back when friendship felt permanent.
Swan's finger trembles as he taps the name.
The messaging app opens. Their conversation history stretches back years—thousands of messages, inside jokes, shared memes, late-night philosophical discussions and early-morning complaints about homework. A complete archive of a friendship.
He watches it dissolve.
Messages vanish from bottom to top, most recent to oldest, like someone's holding down a delete key on reality itself. Photos become corrupted squares of static. Voice messages turn to error messages. The timeline compresses, years of friendship evaporating in seconds.
Finally, it stops. The chat history is empty except for a single message from three days ago:
Kai: "Dude, who is this? Wrong number?"
Swan stares at those words until they blur.
He starts typing.
Swan: "It's me. Swan. We've known each other since we were twelve. You remember me. You have to remember me."
He hits send.
The message appears in the chat window. Delivered. Read receipt pops up almost immediately—Kai's online, even at three in the morning, because some things don't change.
The typing indicator appears. Kai is responding.
Then Swan watches his own message unmake itself.
The text flickers. Glitches. Individual letters corrupt into symbols, then into empty space. The message compresses into a single character—a question mark—and then vanishes entirely.
Like he never sent it at all.
The typing indicator disappears. No response comes.
Swan tries again.
Swan: "Kai, please. Something's happening to me. I need help."
Send.
This time the message doesn't even make it to the server. It deletes itself mid-transmission, dissolving pixel by pixel until his text input field is empty again.
The app crashes. When it reopens, Kai's contact entry is gone.
Swan scrolls through his entire contact list. Kai Yoshida doesn't exist anymore. Not even as a corrupted entry. Just... gone. Excised. The system closed around the absence and pretended there was never a gap.
"No," Swan breathes. "No, no, no—"
He's on his feet, phone clutched in white-knuckled hands, moving before conscious thought catches up. The library's exit. The stairs. The quad where sodium lights paint everything in sickly orange. His feet know the path—muscle memory navigating through campus toward the undergraduate dormitories on the east side.
Kai's building. Kai's floor. Kai's room.
Swan runs.
He hammers on the door marked 217 until his knuckles ache. Three-thirty in the morning and he doesn't care, doesn't care about noise violations or disturbing neighbors or any of the social contracts that govern civilized behavior.
The door opens.
Kai Yoshida stands there in boxer shorts and an oversized hoodie, hair messed from sleep, eyes squinting against the hallway light. He looks exactly the same—sharp features, perpetually skeptical expression, that small scar above his left eyebrow from the skateboarding accident in ninth grade.
Swan has never been so relieved to see another human being in his entire life.
"Kai," he gasps. "Thank god. It's me. It's Swan. Something's happening, something with the system, and I need—"
Kai's expression shifts from sleepy confusion to irritation.
"Dude, what the fuck? Do I know you?"
The words hit like a physical blow.
"It's me," Swan repeats. "We've been friends since middle school. You—we used to skip last period to get ramen at that place by the train station. You taught me how to jailbreak my phone. I helped you pass chemistry. You know me."
Kai's eyes narrow. He's fully awake now, and there's no recognition in his gaze. Just the wary calculation of someone being confronted by a stranger who knows too much.
"Look, I don't know if this is some weird prank or if you're stalking me or what, but I've never seen you before in my life. And it's three in the fucking morning. So unless you want me to call security—"
"Check your phone," Swan says desperately. "Our messages. Years of messages. You have to have—"
"My phone?" Kai pulls it from his hoodie pocket. Unlocks it with a gesture. Navigates to his messages with the fluid ease of someone who's done it ten thousand times. His thumb scrolls. Stops.
"I don't have any messages from you. I don't have your number. I don't have any pictures of you. Because I don't fucking know you."
He steps back, hand on the door, ready to close it.
"Kai, please—"
"Security. Now. Or I'm calling them myself."
The door slams. The lock engages with a solid click.
Swan stands in the empty hallway, his own ragged breathing the only sound. Down the corridor, someone's door opens a crack—a nosy neighbor checking out the disturbance. The moment they see Swan, their eyes slide off him, uninterested. The door closes again.
He raises his hand to knock again. To hammer and scream and demand to be remembered.
His hand falls to his side.
What's the point?
Swan walks through campus as dawn breaks, painting the sky in gradients of pink and corrupted gold. Early morning joggers pass him on the paths. Maintenance drones sweep the quad. The world continues its functioning, indifferent to the ghost moving through it.
He should go to that coffee shop. Meet Elara. Seven AM, she said.
But right now, he needs to understand.
He needs to see the machinery of his own deletion.
Swan stops in the middle of the quad and closes his eyes. Remembers the sensation from the adjudicator's chamber—the moment reality peeled back and he saw the code beneath. He doesn't know how he did it. Doesn't know if he can replicate it.
But he has to try.
He breathes. Focuses. Lets his mind slip sideways into that space between perception and understanding.
At first: nothing. Just darkness behind his eyelids, the ordinary void of not-seeing.
Then: a flicker.
Like adjusting your eyes to see one of those magic eye pictures from the nineties, where patterns suddenly resolve into three-dimensional depth. The world behind his eyelids begins to structure itself.
Swan opens his eyes.
The campus is still there—solid, physical, real. But now he sees through it. Sees the layer beneath the layer. The substrate code that reality runs on.
It's beautiful and terrifying.
Every object is wrapped in lines of light—not quite code as he knows it, not text on a screen, but something more fundamental. Equations made tangible. Logic given form. The bench beside him is a density map of probability fields. The tree nearby is a recursive growth algorithm rendered in organic matter. The passing student is a staggering complexity of biological systems and networked identity markers, their student ID broadcasting authentication handshakes to every sensor they pass.
And Swan himself—
He looks down at his hands and sees nothing.
Where his body should interface with the code-layer, there's just absence. A blank space. A null reference. He's a walking segmentation fault, a pointer to nowhere.
The system can't see him because he's not part of the system anymore.
But he can see the system. And that's when he notices the errors.
Everywhere he's been, everywhere he's touched, there are tiny corruptions in the code. Glitches in the reality-substrate. The bench where he sat in the library—its structural code has a memory leak, constantly trying to load data about a previous occupant and failing. The path from Kai's dorm back to the quad is littered with orphaned variables, references to someone who should exist but doesn't.
He's not just erased. He's leaving wounds in reality. Paradoxes. The system is trying to compile a world where he never existed, but the evidence of his existence keeps creating logical contradictions.
And reality hates contradictions.
Swan watches as a maintenance drone passes over one of his corruption sites. Its sensors flag the error, run a cleanup routine, attempt to patch the glitch. The code flickers, stabilizes, then fragments again. The paradox is too complex. The drone moves on, leaving the corruption unresolved.
How many of these has he created? How much damage has his existence—his non-existence—inflicted on the fundamental architecture of reality?
Movement catches his attention. Three figures approaching across the quad. Even in code-vision, Swan recognizes their patterns. Marcus Chen, Trey Williams, and Jake Something-or-other. Campus social hierarchy's middle tier—not quite popular enough to be untouchable, not quite invisible enough to be ignored.
He remembers them. Specifically, he remembers them from sophomore year, when they decided his face looked punchable and his responses to their provocations sounded entertaining. Nothing serious. Just casual cruelty, the kind that happens in the gaps between classes when teachers aren't looking and everyone pretends not to notice.
They haven't bothered him in months. Found easier targets, probably.
But they're walking toward him now, and their body language reads as familiar. Like they know him.
Like they remember him.
Swan lets the code-vision slip away. Returns to normal perception as they close the distance.
"Well, well," Marcus says. His smile is sharp, predatory. "Look who's still skulking around."
Swan's confusion must show on his face.
"What, you think we forgot?" Trey adds. He cracks his knuckles—an absurdly theatrical gesture. "You still owe us for that thing last week."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Swan says carefully.
"The fuck you don't." Jake steps closer. "You ratted to Professor Chen about the answer key. Got us all put on academic probation."
"I never—" Swan stops. Tries to think through the paradox. "I don't even know what class you're—"
"Playing dumb?" Marcus is right in his face now. "That's cute. Real cute."
This doesn't make sense. They shouldn't remember him. Nobody remembers him. The system erased him, rewrote history, made him null.
But something about the way they're looking at him—there's a wrongness to it. Their eyes don't quite focus. They're staring at him, but it's like they're reading from a script, following behavioral patterns without understanding why.
"Look," Swan says, backing up. "I think there's been some mistake. Just let me—"
Marcus shoves him. Hard.
Swan stumbles, catches himself. His vision flickers—not to code-sight, but something else. For just a second, he sees Marcus overlaid with a shadow-shape, a darkness that doesn't match the morning light. A figure that's too tall, too angular, moving Marcus's arm like a puppeteer.
The shadow snaps back into place. Marcus looks normal again.
But Swan understands now.
They don't remember him. Not really. But the system remembers the holes he left. The contradictions. And it's using these people as cleanup crew, pointing them at the error and letting basic human aggression do the rest.
Reality trying to debug itself through violence.
"Just walk away," Swan says quietly. "You don't actually want to do this."
"Oh, I really do," Marcus says, and throws a punch.
Swan's code-vision snaps back involuntarily, adrenaline forcing the perception shift. He sees the punch coming not as a fist but as a trajectory calculation, a physics simulation playing out in real-time. He sees Marcus's balance points, the muscle contractions, the predictable arc of violence.
He also sees the shadow wrapped around Marcus like a parasite. Feeding him aggression, anger, the need to eliminate the error.
Swan doesn't think. Just reaches.
His hand intercepts Marcus's fist. And for a moment, in code-space, Swan sees the command structure governing Marcus's actions. Simple behavioral loops. IF target present, THEN aggress. IF resistance, THEN escalate.
Swan finds the loop. Touches it.
Changes a single value.
Marcus freezes mid-swing. His eyes go wide, confused. He looks at his own fist like it's a foreign object.
"What the hell am I—" He steps back, shaking his head. "Why are we even—"
The shadow-thing writhes. Swan sees it trying to reassert control, pump more aggression into Marcus's system. But the loop is broken. The logic doesn't compile anymore.
"Let's just go," Trey says suddenly. He sounds uncertain, like he's woken from sleepwalking. "This is stupid."
The three of them walk away, casting confused glances back at Swan. At each other. Trying to remember why they were angry.
Swan stands alone in the quad, breathing hard, staring at his hands.
He didn't just see the code that time.
He changed it.
Again.
The coffee shop is called "Static Grounds"—a name that makes sense when Swan sees the neon sign flickering above the entrance, the word "Static" bright and stable, "Grounds" corrupted into intermittent gibberish. The building itself seems to phase in and out of architectural styles, one moment a modern minimalist café, the next a vintage diner from the 1980s, then something else entirely.
It's exactly the kind of place that would exist in the gaps between stable reality.
Swan pushes through the door at 6:57 AM. Inside, the décor is impossible—vintage arcade cabinets stand next to holographic menus, neon tubes compete with Edison bulbs, the floor is checkerboard tile overlaid with hexagonal patterns that hurt to look at directly.
Three people sit at a corner booth.
Elara Vance looks up as he enters. Her eyes still flicker, but less than yesterday. She's wearing more bracelets today—both arms covered wrist to elbow in silver reminders.
"You came," she says, and something in her expression eases. Relief. "I was worried you'd vanish again."
"Where else would I go?" Swan slides into the booth beside her. "Everyone else forgot I exist."
"Not everyone," says one of the other people at the table—a girl with cybernetic tattoos that writhe across her dark skin, circuit patterns that rearrange themselves as Swan watches. "Some of us remember everything. Whether we want to or not."
The third person doesn't look up from their tablet. Agender, maybe, or just beyond caring about such labels. Their hair is white-static, literally—strands that flicker between colors like a TV tuned to dead channels.
"Swan," Elara says formally. "Meet the others. Ash—" the girl with the tattoos nods "—and Cipher." The static-haired person raises one hand in minimal acknowledgment. "They're like us. Glitched. Recoded. Existing in the spaces the system can't quite parse."
"There are more of us?" Swan feels something unknot in his chest. He's not alone. He's not the only one.
"More than you'd think," Ash says. Her voice has a musical quality, like she's speaking through a vocoder. "Fewer than we'd like. The system is getting better at eliminating errors. Most glitches get debugged before they become aware of what's happening to them."
"You're lucky," Cipher says without looking up. "Most erasures are permanent. Clean. You're still partially compiled. Still visible to some subsystems. That's rare."
"I don't feel lucky," Swan admits.
"You shouldn't." Elara's hand finds his under the table. Her fingers are cold. "But you're alive. And aware. And that means you can fight back."
A waitress approaches—or something that looks like a waitress. Her form flickers between different服务员 uniforms, different faces, like she's every server who's ever worked here simultaneously.
"The usual?" she asks Elara, her voice overlapping with itself.
"And something for him," Elara says, nodding at Swan. "Whatever stays down."
The waitress shimmers away.
"She's not real, is she?" Swan asks.
"Define real," Cipher says, finally looking up. Their eyes are white, pupilless, disturbing. "She's a residual entity. A ghost in the machine. This whole place exists because enough glitched people believe it does. Consensus reality for those of us who fell outside the consensus."
Ash leans forward. "Elara says you can see the code. Manipulate it."
"I don't know how," Swan admits. "It just happens when I'm scared or desperate or—"
"That's how it starts," Ash interrupts. "Instinct. Survival response. Your system-self was deleted, but your consciousness persisted. Found a new way to interface with reality. You're not running the standard human operating system anymore. You're Recoded."
"But what does that mean?" Swan's frustration bleeds through. "What am I supposed to do? The system is erasing me. My best friend doesn't remember me. I'm leaving corruption everywhere I go. And now these shadow-things are using people as puppets to try and—what? Kill me? Debug me?"
Silence around the table.
"Yes," Elara says quietly. "That's exactly what they're trying to do. The system maintains equilibrium. When paradoxes emerge, it sends cleaners. Usually automated—drones, security protocols, administrative procedures. But when those fail, it gets creative. Uses human agents. Feeds them just enough anger, just enough certainty, to make them eliminate the error."
"We call them Daemon Protocols," Cipher adds. "They're the immune system of consensus reality. And you're a virus."
"So I'm just supposed to hide? Live in broken coffee shops and hope they don't find me?"
"You're supposed to learn," Ash says firmly. "Master your Recoding. Figure out what you can do. Because here's the thing about the system, Swan—it's powerful, but it's not intelligent. It runs on rules. And rules can be exploited. Hacked. Rewritten."
The waitress returns with drinks. Coffee for Elara. Something that looks like a latte but shimmers with opalescent data-patterns for Swan. He sips it cautiously. It tastes like nostalgia and error messages.
"Start small," Elara says. "Practice seeing the code. Manipulating small things. Work your way up. And in the meantime—"
She pulls out her notebook. Opens to a page covered in cramped handwriting and diagrams.
"—we document everything. Build a map of the system's blind spots. Find others like us. And eventually, figure out why this is happening. Why people are being erased in the first place."
Swan looks at the three of them—Elara with her bleeding nose and stacked memories, Ash with her circuit tattoos and vocoded voice, Cipher with their static hair and dead-channel eyes. Broken people. Glitched people.
His people.
"Okay," he says. "Teach me."
Elara smiles. It's fragile, tentative, but real.
"Welcome to the Recoded," she says.
Outside, the neon sign flickers. The shadows on the street corner twist into shapes that don't match the light sources. And somewhere in the depths of Blackwood Institute's network infrastructure, something notices the anomaly cluster at Static Grounds and flags it for investigation.
The system is watching.
The system is always watching.
[END OF CHAPTER]