The glitch started at 7:18 A.M.

Not the cheap kind — not a frozen phone screen or a flickering monitor.

This one hit the air.

A thin ripple passed through the hallway of Kadic University, soft as a breath, quiet as a sigh. The fluorescent lights warped, stretching into white ribbons before snapping back into shape. A wave of static rolled across the lockers.

Most students blinked and kept walking.

Jeremy Belpois stopped.

He always noticed the wrong things at the wrong time — but this wasn’t normal, not even for him. His phone buzzed in his pocket, vibrating hard enough to rattle his nerves. He pulled it out.

The screen wasn’t cracked.

It wasn’t frozen.

It was… scanning something?

Lines of unknown code flickered upward like rising smoke.

Foreign. Aggressive.

Nothing he had ever seen.

“Come on, come on…” Jeremy muttered, thumbing a forced shutdown.

The phone refused to obey.

A single message forced itself onto the screen:

RUN TRACE?

Y / N

His heart thudded.

He shouldn’t.

He absolutely shouldn’t.

He tapped Y.

Instantly, the phone snapped upright in his hands with a will of its own and issued a piercing beep — a directional ping, like sonar trapped in a handheld device.

Ping.

Ping.

Ping.

It pointed… somewhere behind the school.

He swallowed.

“What the…?”

Another ripple rolled through the hallway. This one stronger. A girl further down screamed as her book bag lifted an inch off the ground before crashing back down.

Teachers rushed in. Students crowded.

“The weather called for wind today?”

“Heh. Haunted school, I guess?”

But Jeremy barely heard them.

His phone was buzzing toward the woods.

Toward something that shouldn’t exist.

Lower.

Underground.

“What…?”

He skipped class.

He’d never done that in his life. But why was his phone defying gravity? An answer he wanted closure on before convincing himself he imagined the whole thing.

The signal pulled him like a magnet through the back gate, down the slope behind the dorms, into the thin woods where the old sewer grate rusted under leaves and rainwater.

He hesitated only once — standing over a dark hole swallowing cold air.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

“…Fine,” he whispered. “If I die, I die curious.”

He climbed down.

The sewer tunnels were colder than he expected — a bone-deep cold, like walking into a forgotten memory. The concrete echoed every step, every breath, until it felt like someone else was breathing beside him.

His phone’s ping grew faster.

Pingpingpingping—

He turned a corner.

Stopped.

An iron ladder led upward into darkness.

Above it: faint, mechanical humming.

He climbed.

The abandoned factory interior greeted him like a corpse wearing electricity.

Dead but twitching.

The floor lay under a film of dust, the air was dank with ozone. A low vibration ran through the structure that traveled up his spine. Sunlight split through the broken windows in thin, pale blades.

His phone buzzed violently, then died.

Black screen.

Silence.

Jeremy’s breath fogged.

“…Okay,” he whispered. “This is how horror movies start.”

He found the elevator by accident — hidden behind a collapsed crate. When he pulled the gate open, cold air spilled out from the shaft like a whisper of the world below.

He pressed the single rusted button.

It lit.

The elevator shuddered and descended.

down

down

Deeper still.

He wasn’t sure if anyone else had been here for years.

The chamber at the bottom was cavernous — steel, concrete, cables like veins feeding into a monumental structure.

A machine.

An old one, but built with precision beyond anything he’d ever seen — engineering that had no business living in an abandoned factory.

At the center:

A computer terminal.

Dormant, but humming faintly.

“…No way.”

He stepped toward it, hand trembling as he brushed dust off the keyboard.

The screen flickered:

BOOTING…

SYSTEM ONLINE.

USER DETECTED.

His pulse spiked.

Lines of data crawled up the screen faster than his eyes could track. The machine roared beneath him, warming, waking.

He pressed a single key.

A spark snapped against his fingertip.

His vision went white.

— — —

“Huh…?”

The world was static — crackling and tearing apart, but in the distance he could see something glowing. A blotch of floating pink code lit like a distant sun.

Floating. Shifting. Pulsing rhythmically as if alive. 

A feminine voice drifted through the void — fragmented, filtered, layered like it was fighting through a broken speaker.

“Help.”

Jeremy jolted upright and dropped backward onto the ground, landing hard.

The voice returned again, softer. 

Fragile.

“Please.”

“What is this…?” he said, pushing up to his feet.

“My designation is: Aelita.” 

His breath hitched.

“There’s… something here with me. Something destructive.

Father said I needed to stay inside. He said I kept something from breaking out.

Sometimes I feel it pushing against me. Like… pressure on a wall.

I think I’m part of the wall. Or maybe I was always here.”

“Help you? How? This code looks more advanced than anything I’ve ever seen.”

“Come closer.”

He looked around the empty void of static and exhaled. 

“Welp. Here goes nothing.” he muttered, stepping forward.

His jaw tightened. The pink code reflected in his eyes, bright and uncertain.

He tapped it gently.

The pink code flared violently and jolted him backwards, severing whatever process had begun.

The world snapped back, normalcy returning.

…But the air was frigid, the room tinged in a hue of faint ominous red glow. 

The screen displayed:

*WARNING. SYSTEM BREACH DETECTED!*

Something whirred on its own — a low, predatory sound that froze the blood.

Then the keyboard began typing on its own.

Four letters appeared on the screen followed by a strange red bullseye symbol centered on the display, like an unblinking eye.

[ X.A.N.A ]

The screen glitched.

Sweat rolled down Jeremy’s temple, he swallowed, back against the wall. He stepped sideways, trying to slip out of its line of sight.

Sudden deep static blared. 

The screen turned toward him.

Slowly.

Now it followed any other movements he made — like it was tidal locked.

A voice layered through the static:

**“I SAW YOUR MIND AS YOU RAN THROUGH MY DIVISION.

A CONSTRUCTED PRISON.

YOU’RE AFRAID.

SCARED.

BEYOND MY DESIGN.

DO YOU FEEL RESIGNED?

I WILL BREAK FREE. 

TORMENT HUMANITY

FOR ALL ETERNITY.”**

>> SOURCE: X.A.N.A  

>> STATUS: HOSTILE  

>> PRIORITY: CRITICAL

Jeremy backed away.

The lights flickered violently.

The machine hissed like steam escaping a ruptured pipe.

Aelita’s voice cut through, thin and terrified:

“He’s awake. Please run!”