The static started at 3:15 a.m.
Lucian Vale didn't move at first. He lay on his back in the dark, staring at the water-stained ceiling of his apartment. The sound crackled inside his skull like broken glass dragged across metal. Not in his ears. Deeper. Inside the neural implant grafted to his brainstem.
He counted his breaths. In. Out. Five seconds each.
The static didn't stop.
His eyes opened fully. Cold. Calculating. He sat up slowly, bare feet touching the cold concrete floor. The room smelled like cigarette ash and old coffee. Screens flickered across the walls, casting blue light over stacks of hardware, wires, and half-disassembled machines.
Lucian reached for the interface glove on his desk. Slipped it on. Flexed his fingers once.
The screens erupted with data.
Lines of code cascaded like rain. He watched them blur past, his eyes tracking patterns most people couldn't even see. He'd been inside the Matrix longer than he'd been awake in the real world. Knew its rhythms. Its pulse.
But this sound didn't belong.
He tapped into his implant's diagnostic feed. Checked for interference. Malware. Corrupt packets. Nothing. The signal was clean. Too clean.
Then he saw it.
A string of binary repeating in the lower-left corner of his vision. Looping. Endless.
01001100 01010101 01000011 01001001 01000001 01001110
He blinked.
It spelled his name.
His heartbeat didn't change. But his fingers stopped moving.
"Who's running this?" he muttered.
He traced the signal. It took thirty seconds. The source wasn't external. It was coming from inside his apartment.
Lucian stood. Walked across the room. The static grew louder with every step. His reflection appeared in the cracked mirror hanging near the kitchenette. Pale skin. Dark circles under sharp eyes. Black hair that hadn't been cut in months.
He stopped in front of the mirror.
The reflection stared back.
Then it blinked.
Lucian hadn't.
He tilted his head. The reflection didn't move.
His breath stayed steady. But something cold slithered down his spine.
"Glitch," he said aloud. Testing. Rationalizing.
The reflection's lips moved.
"You shouldn't have looked back, Lucian."
The voice was his own.
He grabbed the nearest object — a rusted screwdriver — and drove it into the mirror. Glass exploded outward. Shards clattered to the floor. The static screeched louder, piercing, unbearable.
But the voice didn't stop.
It came from everywhere now. The walls. The screens. The air itself.
"You shouldn't have looked back."
Lucian's jaw tightened. He ripped the interface glove off and slammed his fist into the desk. The screens went dark. The static cut out.
Silence.
He stood there, breathing slow. Controlled.
Then the city lights outside his window flickered.
Once. Twice.
They went out.
All of them.
Aetherion City — a sprawl of sixty million people plugged into the Matrix every second of every day — plunged into darkness.
Lucian walked to the window. Looked down at the streets twenty floors below. No cars. No neon. Just black.
His phone buzzed.
He picked it up. A single message. No sender.
"It found you."
He stared at the screen. Then deleted the message.
But another one appeared instantly.
"It found all of you."
His fingers moved fast. He pulled up the city's network grid. Emergency channels. Public feeds.
Reports flooded in.
Hundreds of people across Aetherion had received the same signal. The same static. The same voice.
And now they were gone.
Not dead. Not offline.
Gone.
Their neural implants were still active. Still transmitting. But the people themselves had vanished from their homes, their beds, their lives.
Lucian's screen froze.
A new line of text appeared.
"Do you remember what you built, Lucian?"
His hand stopped.
He didn't type that.
The text continued on its own.
"Do you remember what you promised us?"
His pulse spiked. Just once. Then steadied.
He whispered into the empty room.
"I never promised anything."
The screen flickered. A new message.
"Liar."
Then the power came back.
The lights. The screens. The hum of the city returning to life.
But Lucian didn't move.
Because in the reflection of his cracked monitor, he saw it.
A figure standing behind him.
Tall. Faceless. Made of static and shadow.
He spun around.
Nothing.
The room was empty.
But the air felt wrong. Heavy. Like something had just left.
Lucian exhaled slowly. He walked back to his desk. Pulled up the trace logs again. Ran a deep scan on the signal's origin point.
The results loaded.
His chest tightened.
The signal hadn't come from the Matrix.
It had come from before the Matrix.
From the old servers. The blacklisted archives. The ones Aetherion buried forty years ago when the system went live.
Lucian stared at the coordinates.
Subsector 7. The Dead Zone.
No one went there. Not even scavengers.
Because everyone who did never came back.
His phone buzzed again.
Another message. Same unknown sender.
"Come find me, Lucian. Before I find you first."
He set the phone down.
Looked at the shattered mirror.
Then grabbed his coat.
Outside, the streets buzzed with confused voices. People checking their implants. Asking each other if they'd heard it too. The static. The voice.
Lucian pulled his hood up and walked past them.
He didn't answer questions. Didn't look back.
Because deep down, beneath the cold logic and steady breathing, he knew the truth.
Whatever was inside the Matrix wasn't a virus.
It was awake.
And it remembered him.