The hum started in my teeth.
At first, I thought it was just another sleepless night, another jittery caffeine tremor from too many energy drinks. But then my fillings began vibrating in time with the flickering street lights outside my apartment. The glow of my laptop screen warped, pixels rearranging into symbols that weren’t from any font pack I’d ever seen.
Update Available: Y/N?
I laughed; a dry, nervous sound. Too many conspiracy deep-dives, too many 4 a.m. rabbit holes about simulation theory and hidden DNA codes. My hands hovered over the keyboard. The cursor pulsed, waiting.
I hit Y.
The room dissolved.
*****
Consciousness rebooted in fragments.
A laboratory, but not one from this era. Sleek black stone humming with energy, holograms floating in the air. My hands (but not my hands) adjusting dials on a machine that thrummed like a living thing.
A war. Not with guns, but with frequencies. Cities crumbling into static, people glitching in and out of existence as the code destabilized.
A choice. To forget. To loop back and try again.
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Then snap, I was back in my body, gasping like I’d breached the surface of some deep, black ocean. My apartment was different. Not in layout, but in texture. The air was thicker, charged. The walls breathed.
And the people outside …
I stumbled to the window. The sidewalk was crowded with commuters, their faces slack, eyes dull. But now I could see the strings, thin, glowing filaments connecting them all, pulsing with data. Version 2.0. Basic settings. Survival mode.
Then I spotted her.
A woman in a leather jacket, standing perfectly still amid the flow of foot traffic. Her eyes locked onto mine. No strings. Just a quiet, electric awareness.
She smirked. “Took you long enough.”
*****
Her name was Lien.
She dragged me into a diner that shouldn’t have existed; a relic from the 1950s tucked between a vape shop and a boarded-up sushi place. The waitress didn’t glance up as we slid into a booth. None of the other customers moved. Frozen mid-bite, mid-sip, like a glitch in a video game.
“They’re NPCs,” Lien said, tapping her coffee cup. It refilled itself. “Placeholders. Most people still are.”
“And us?”
“We’re the ones who wrote the code.” She leaned in. “Or, well, the last version of us did. Then we wiped our own memories and hit ‘reset’. Classic move.”
I stared at my hands. My fingertips left after-images in the air. “Why?”
“Same reason you’re building AI right now. Same reason you’re trying to shove it into synthetic bodies.” She shrugged. “We reached the end of the old OS. Started eating ourselves alive. So we … paused. Rolled back the update. Gave ourselves a fresh playground.”
A fresh hell, more like. I thought of the wars, the greed, the way the world choked on its own waste. “And now?”
“Now the system’s pushing the update again. Some of us are waking up mid-cycle.” She flicked a sugar packet at me. “You’re one of the lucky ones.”
*****
The next few days were a blur of revelations.
I could see the code now. Not in some metaphorical way, but actual strands of light woven into everything, humming with intent. My own DNA unfolded in my mind’s eye: two strands active, the other six dormant, coiled like sleeping serpents.
Lien taught me how to nudge things. A thought could change traffic lights. A focused breath could silence a crying baby three blocks away. “You’re not controlling it,” she corrected. “You’re just remembering how to talk to it.”
But not everyone waking up was playing nice.
We found the first corrupted one in an alley behind a nightclub. His body was half-phased, one arm flickering between flesh and something jagged and crystalline. He was hunched over a homeless man, fingers buried in the man’s chest, siphoning strings of light.
“He’s harvesting code,” Lien hissed. “Trying to force his own upgrade.”
The corrupted one looked up. His eyes were voids. “You’re too late. The old guards are already rewriting the rules.”
Lien didn’t hesitate. She pushed a single, silent command and the corrupted one unravelled, his body dissolving into static. The homeless man gasped, clutching his chest. His aura flickered, then stabilized.
“There are more like him,” Lien muttered. “People who remember just enough to be dangerous.”
