Short Story – Science Fiction, Futurism
Some systems don’t fail. They leak.
Between the Buzz
The corridors of Vectored didn’t feel the same.
Caleb walked the same route he’d taken every cycle, but something had shifted. The hum was louder, the lights more clinical. The soft pulse of air vents felt sharp in his ears, and the antiseptic sting of recycled oxygen clung to the back of his throat. Even the walls seemed to lean inward.
Or maybe it was him. Maybe the implant wasn’t buffering it all like before.
He moved in sync, enough not to be noticed, but his eyes were always scanning. Looking for reflections. Listening for static. Sensing… something he couldn’t name. A tension in the air that felt older than the infrastructure around him.
He passed through Sector 12, where the walls were reinforced with older composite panels, uneven and discoloured. The sound of his footsteps echoed differently there, like he was being followed by versions of himself out of sync. A maintenance drone trundled by, leaking coolant, its casing dented and blinking irregularly. The overlay flagged it as “non-critical.” Caleb didn’t even blink.
In Sector 17, the scent changed. A hint of mildew, dampness from ancient vents, and something faintly metallic. The floor grates rattled under his boots. A flickering banner still looped a motivational quote: “Progress is obedience.” He looked at it longer than he meant to.
Every few minutes, the overlay would stutter. His task queue would briefly blink out, and for a breath’s length, he would exist in silence. Not peace. Just absence. A kind of static quiet where time bent and slowed.
In those moments, something inside him surfaced, an unease, raw and new. His thoughts drifted to the silence as a living thing. Was it watching him? Or waiting for him to see?
He didn’t report the glitch.
Instead, he started to crave it.
The sync notifications became noise. The overlay text, once crisp and guiding, now looked like static graffiti sprayed across his eyes. Warnings. Alerts. Directives. All hollow. He remembered reading his father’s books as a child, words printed on real paper. Their weight. Their permanence. Not filtered through a system that could erase or rewrite.
He remembered Lena’s face. Not her collapse, but before that. Her hands moving in perfect form, her eyes focused and empty. That wasn’t functioning. That was surrender.
His implant buzzed.
He tapped his temple.
Nothing happened.
“Sync recalibration suggested.”
He ignored it and kept walking.
As he reached the Level 9 transit tier, his overlay glitched again, longer this time. And in the stillness, he heard it.
A pulse.
Not mechanical. Not digital. It came from the walls. From beneath the floors. From somewhere inside him.
The deep signal.
It wasn’t sound exactly. It was like pressure behind his eyes. A pulling in his chest, like gravity adjusting. His vision blurred slightly as if something was trying to emerge through his perception rather than his senses.
He stopped. Let it wash over him. Not understanding, not resisting. Just… listening.
A memory returned, bare feet running on wet grass. Rainfall. Laughter unfiltered by the protocol. He didn’t know if it was real. But it felt like something important had been whispered and lodged deep inside him.
The moment passed, and the overlay roared back in with doubled brightness.
“Attention deviation recorded. Report for wellness sync.”
He didn’t.
He changed sectors.
And didn’t go back.
The Flicker
The power drop was brief. Not enough to trip any alerts. Just enough to leave a mark.
Caleb sat alone in a forgotten cafeteria unit, one of the old ones that hadn’t been updated since the Soft Protocols. It smelled of scorched plastics and overused protein packs. The air was thick, recycled slower here. Paint peeled in long curls down one wall, and a flickering vendor machine looped a broken menu for items no one had stocked in years. Crumbs of synthetic bread clung to plastic trays like relics of a time when people still sat to eat.
No drones. No cams. Just time.
The kind of place people came to not be seen.
The lights flickered. And for exactly 1.3 seconds, his overlay died.
Everything was raw.
No glossed floors. No projected guidance lines. No muted colours.
Just dirt. Rust. Exposed wires in cracked tiles. The air was thick with age and neglect, metallic, dusty, and stale.
He stared.
A single word pulsed in the dark corner of his vision, not part of the system. Not part of any UI.
Flicker…
And then it was gone.
His overlay returned, rebooting with an aggression he hadn’t felt before. The buzz behind his eyes was louder than ever.
But something had changed.
His breathing was shallow. Then deeper. He felt the weight of his own body again, the creak in his joints, the tension in his neck, the thump of his pulse in his ears. His hands were trembling, not from fear, but from recognition. The word had meant something. Like a key slipped under a door. A whisper from behind the mirror.
He stood, slowly, feeling the slight give in the floor beneath him. Grounded. Human.
And whispered back to the room, not knowing if it would hear him:
“Still listening.”
