Back in our apartment, I sat alone in my room, leaning back in a chair that had lost its padding sometime before my first life ended.
The hum of the city bled through the walls—ventilation drones, distant traffic lanes, the soft, omnipresent thrum of GAIA's infrastructure humming like a god's pulse beneath the concrete. The air smelled faintly of reheated metal and old detergent. Home, in the loosest sense of the word.
My wrist timer blinked crimson.
00:28:42
Thirty minutes until the security team arrived.
Thirty minutes until some overpaid uniform with a plastic smile and an automated warrant told us to pack what we could carry and vanish politely.
I stared at the countdown, feeling the pressure build behind my eyes—not panic, not fear. Something colder. Sharper.
Resentment.
This wasn't the first eviction notice. It wasn't even the second. But this time, the landlord hadn't bothered hiding the contempt. Raised rent. Shortened notice. Weaponized legality sharpened into a blade aimed at the softest target.
Us.
I exhaled slowly and rolled my shoulders, bones popping.
"Yeah," I murmured to the empty room. "Not happening."
I flicked my fingers, and the holographic interface bloomed into existence, casting pale blue light across the cracked walls. Code scrolled lazily, like it had all the time in the world.
I didn't.
First target: the landlord's private security system.
According to GAIA's public registry, it was a Class-III residential fortress—biometric locks, AI-assisted surveillance, redundant fail-safes, predictive behavioral analysis.
Cute.
I tunneled in sideways, slipping between authentication layers like water finding a crack in stone. The system resisted for exactly half a second before Codebreaker leaned forward inside my skull and bit.
The cameras blinked.
One by one, they went dark.
The landlord's facial data—painstakingly recorded, indexed, worshipped—corrupted itself into static. Voiceprint authorization collapsed into white noise. Retinal scans scrambled into abstract art.
Their house stopped recognizing them as human.
I smiled thinly.
"Welcome to the club."
I didn't linger. Nostalgia was for people who didn't have clocks ticking down their lives.
Next: the building's main security system.
That one was laughable.
A few nested permissions. A badly encrypted backdoor left in place for "authorized emergency access." I slipped through, fingers dancing as alerts blossomed across my vision.
There it was.
Eviction Protocol – Unit 7C
Timestamped. Approved. Clean.
I rewrote it.
Not deleted—never delete. Deletion leaves fingerprints. I reframed it.
A new alert propagated through the system, dressed in official syntax and sanctified by GAIA's own formatting rules.
SYSTEM ALERT:Unauthorized owner detected.Eviction initiated.Security requested for immediate removal of intruder.
I leaned back, letting the irony marinate.
The guards would respond automatically. They always did. No thinking required. No judgment. The system had spoken.
They'd never question that the "intruder" was the landlord himself.
I could already imagine it—the confusion, the sputtering rage, the way authority crumbles when it realizes it's no longer recognized.
But I wasn't done.
Not even close.
I reached deeper.
Into places you weren't supposed to touch unless you were GAIA—or pretending very convincingly to be her.
The property registry unfolded before me like a ledger carved into reality itself. Ownership lines, transactional history, legal bindings reinforced by divine algorithmic fiat.
I bypassed them anyway.
Ownership transferred.
From a man who hoarded wealth like insulation…
…to an orphanage two sectors over, perpetually underfunded, perpetually ignored.
The system didn't object. It never does when the paperwork looks right.
Then came the finances.
That part almost bored me.
Accounts opened. Accounts drained. Wealth evaporated, not into my pockets, but outward—hospitals, food banks, disaster relief nodes, animal shelters flagged as "low efficiency, high compassion."
I left him exactly what he'd left us before: nothing.
When I finally leaned back, the timer blinked:
00:01:12
I watched the last confirmations lock into place.
Everything perfect.
Everything done.
That was when the pain hit.
Not gradual.
Not polite.
It slammed into me like a spike driven straight through my forehead.
I gasped, the chair scraping backward as my body lurched forward, hands clutching my skull. The room warped, colors bleeding at the edges, vision fracturing into sharp, nauseating layers.
"—gh—!"
My teeth clenched so hard I tasted blood.
The pressure wasn't physical—not exactly. It felt like my brain had been overclocked, every neuron screaming as Codebreaker tore itself back into dormancy, dragging too much data with it.
GAIA hadn't detected me.
But I felt it.
The cost.
A migraine bloomed behind my eyes, white-hot and merciless. My stomach churned. The world tilted. My legs went weak, knees threatening to fold as I staggered against the desk.
So this was the price.
Not alarms.
Not hunters.
But feedback.
Raw, biological consequence for daring to bend a god's spine.
"Worth it," I rasped through clenched teeth, even as my vision swam.
The timer hit zero.
Through the haze, I heard it—the distant shout, the boots, the automated authority barking orders.
I forced myself upright and staggered to the window, pressing my forehead against the cool glass.
Outside, rain poured in silver sheets.
The landlord stood there, silk robe plastered to his body, hair slicked flat, face twisted in red disbelief as two security officers hauled him backward.
He screamed.
The system didn't care.
For the first time in a long while, I felt like I had the power to change the game. No more living under someone's thumb. No more feeling helpless. I wasn't just surviving anymore—I was thriving.
I slid down against the wall, breathing shallow, the pain pulsing in time with my heartbeat. Every throb felt like punishment, like a reminder etched directly into my skull.
You can do this.
But not for free.
When the pain finally dulled into a brutal ache, I pushed myself to my feet and wiped the blood from my lip.
Time to sell the lie.
*************
I stepped into the living room to find Brixley folding clothes with frantic precision, her fingers shaking. Damian sat stiffly on the couch, a small suitcase at his feet, crutches leaning against the armrest like punctuation marks at the end of a sentence.
They both looked up.
Immediately stood.
Brixley rushed to Damian's side, worry etched into every line of her face.
"Let's go to my friend's place," Damian said quickly. Too quickly. "He said it's fine. Just for the night."
Then he frowned.
"Noah… why aren't you packed?"
Even Brixley paused, eyes flicking between me and the bare room.
I swallowed, forcing the lingering pain into the back of my skull.
"We're not leaving," I said.
Silence.
"I filed a complaint," I continued calmly. "Turns out the landlord doesn't own this place."
They stared at me like I'd started speaking another language.
I motioned toward the balcony.
"Come see."
The rain hit us first.
Then the scene.
The landlord—screaming, flailing, utterly powerless—was dragged toward a waiting transport as security ignored his protests. Papers scattered. Pride shredded.
Brixley gasped.
Damian let out a low, incredulous laugh.
"You did this?" he asked softly.
"Yeah," I said. "We're staying."
Brixley turned to me, eyes wide. "Noah… I didn't know you had it in you."
I smiled, thin but real.
"I'm learning."
****************
Later, after the adrenaline faded and the headache settled into a dull throb, I stood alone by my window, watching the rain wash the city clean.
Power wasn't free.
Freedom wasn't clean.
But for the first time in a long while, the game had shifted.
And this time—
I was the one holding the knife.