[PULSE EMITTER: ARMED]

  He triggered it.

  The string of amber lights along the railing flickered and died. The guards’ comms shrieked with a burst of static.

  He was moving before they could even turn. The first was disabled with a precise knife strike to the base of the neck, his body slumping silently against the railing. Lucien flowed past him, disarming the second man with a brutal twist of the wrist that sent the rifle clattering to the floor.

  A swift, close-quarters takedown followed—an elbow to the jaw, a sweep of the leg—and the man was down, unconscious before he hit the ground. The entire engagement was over in less than ten seconds.

   Echo's voice bounced in his psyche.

  Copy, Lucien thought back to her. Moving in.

  He slid the glass door open and stepped inside. The executive suite was a temple of minimalist corporate power—all chrome, dark glass, and white walls. He moved toward the central data terminal, his steps silent on the polished floor. He was an artist at work—cool, competent, and in complete control.

  As he passed a window and caught sight of the first neutralized guard slumped against the railing, the body flickered.

  Lucien froze in place.

  It had only been for an instant, but the guard's form seemed to dissolve into a shimmering cloud of red pixels before solidifying again. He stared at it, trying to determine if it was a hallucination. His HUD still showed the guard's vitals as flatlined.

  “Echo, did you see that?" he asked aloud.

  

  He swore he didn’t imagine it.

  He brought up his mask diagnostics, watching the telemetry readouts bloom in his peripheral: system clock 02:17:34.122—no drift. Display pipeline integrity: nominal. Sensor fusion latency: within acceptable parameters.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Still, a tiny flag winked at the edge of the log: frame-stamp skew, +12 ms on a single render. It could have been any number of things. Temporal aliasing. Frame-buffer overlap. An artifact, a compression hiccup, rain refracting a holo-ad into the wrong vector. The maddening accumulation of adrenaline and lack of sleep nudging perception where it shouldn't be nudged.

  Lucien closed the diagnostic window with a sigh.

  He marked the timestamp so he could run a full sweep when they were clear. For now, he folded the prickling at the back of his neck into the same clinical mask he wore on the outside and moved on.

  He reached the terminal, and a holographic interface shimmered to life at his touch. As his gloved fingers interfaced with the glowing keyboard, the white wall behind it momentarily became transparent, revealing a lattice of green, glowing grid lines. It instantly snapped back to solid white.

  The hair stood up on the back of his neck. Okay, something is definitely wrong.

  "Run a full diagnostic on the mask's visual cortex," he commanded. "It's artifacting."

   Echo's voice was a beat too slow.

  Tired. Right. He hadn't had a full sleep cycle in…

  Come to think of it, he couldn’t remember the last time he slept. He couldn’t remember… a lot of things. But this felt different. It felt like the world itself had a loose connection.

  Still, the mission came first. He pushed the paranoia down, letting the familiar rhythm of the job take over. He slotted the datachip into the terminal. The holographic display shimmered, recognizing the hardware. His HUD updated with a clean line of text appearing in his vision.

  

  [OBJECTIVE: DOWNLOAD 'PULSE-LOCK' FILE]

  A progress bar bloomed in the corner of his vision as he initiated the transfer, its soft blue light a small point of comfort in the increasingly unstable reality.

  

  [DOWNLOADING... 10%]

  The glitches were getting worse. The chrome desk beside the terminal flickered, its solid form dissolving for a half-second into a wireframe model of glowing green lines before snapping back into place. The sound of rain against the windowpanes sputtered, then was replaced by a low, humming static that vibrated in the base of his skull.

  

  [DOWNLOADING... 45%]

   Echo's voice crackled in his head. Her voice was distorted and stretched, like a recording played at the wrong speed.

  It cut out, replaced by a sharp, digital shriek.

  

  [DOWNLOADING... 80%]

  He ignored it all. The mission. Focus on the mission. The bar crawled agonizingly toward completion, every percentage point a victory against the dissolving world.

  

  [DOWNLOAD COMPLETE]

  Lucien seized the datachip and pulled—

  The world unraveled.

  The moment the chip disconnected, reality shattered. The office walls peeled away like old wallpaper, revealing a screaming, crimson lattice of raw code beneath. The digital shriek in his ears intensified, a deafening, agonizing sound like a modem dying. The floor beneath his boots started to disappear.

  Then it fragmented.

  The tiles broke apart into a cascade of pixels, falling away into a black abyss. He lurched forward with a startled cry as his body dropped into the void—but his hand snagged on something.

  He looked up.

  The terminal was gone. The entire room was gone. The only solid thing in the universe was the datachip, stuck in the air like it was still connected to a phantom port. It was like a grip on a rockwall—his only handhold, keeping him from the oblivion below.

  His fingers, slick with sweat, strained around the smooth edges. Below him was nothing but screaming static. The shriek of dissolving code was a physical pressure, trying to tear him loose.

  His grip began to fail.

  One by one, they slipped. He tried to adjust, to find a better hold, but it was useless. At the last moment, his eyes focused on the object.

  It was no longer a corporate datachip.

  Patterns of ethereal silver and gold swirled from within the small box. It was a Memory Shard, a crystalline engram. And etched onto its surface were three words:

  

  LUCIEN “PULSE” THORNE

  It wasn't just data.

  It was him.

  And then he realized he wasn't holding onto it anymore. For a single, weightless moment, he just drifted in the void. He looked down at his empty hand.

  Then he fell.

  As he plummeted into the screaming black, there was a short, jarring flash of the real world.

  Cold leather straps bit into his arms and legs. Agonizing pressure filled his senses from the heavy, thick cable jacked into a port at the base of his skull. The sterile smell of antiseptic burned his nose.

  His vision cleared for a fraction of a second. A woman was strapped to a chair across from him, her face a mask of pained concentration. Blonde hair with subtle pink highlights underneath. Electric blue irises. Strange white antennae twitched in distress where her ears should have been. Wires ran from her head to the same humming machine that held him.

  A panicked voice cut through the digital shriek from just outside his vision. "The program is unstable. Run diagnostics and enforce stricter protocols. Lucien Thorne is too dangerous if he breaks free!"

  Then, only blackness.