The swap was a punch, not a fold. One moment, the damp scent of moss filled his lungs; the next, the air was dead and dry, tasting of nothing. Garran found himself on a floor so smooth and cold it felt like ice. He was in the white cage again. Before the rage could build, a soft chime echoed in the small room, a sound too perfect to be real. A woman’s voice, smooth as polished stone, spoke from the air itself.
— Julian, your presence is required at the Q4 strategy session. You are three minutes late.
The wall slid away, revealing a corridor of blinding white light and cool, moving air. The voice was a command. The open wall was a command. This world did not ask. It told. Garran rose, his borrowed body feeling weak and ill-fitting. The muscles were soft, the hands pale and uncalloused. He was wearing the skin of a man who had never truly lived, and now he had to walk it into the den of its masters.
He followed the silent, glowing lines on the floor, a trail laid for a tame animal. The corridor hummed, a low, oppressive sound that vibrated in his teeth, a cousin to the spirit song but without its chaotic energy. This was the sound of order. The sound of a trap that had already closed. He passed other people, all dressed in shades of grey, their faces illuminated by light only they could see. They did not meet his eyes. They did not seem to see him at all.
The door to the boardroom did not open. It simply ceased to exist, dissolving into the wall. He stepped inside. The air was even colder here. Around a long, glowing table sat a dozen of the soft people, men and women who looked like they had been grown in a sterile tube. They were arrayed around the light like moths, their faces pale in its blue glow. At the head of the table stood a man in a suit the color of a storm cloud. Marcus Ward. The name surfaced in his mind, a piece of Julian’s memory floating in the wreckage.
Ward was speaking. His voice was a calm, even drone, but the words were meaningless. It was a language of ghosts, full of sounds that slipped past the ear and left nothing behind. Garran stood by the entrance, a stone in a river of noise. He tried to find a pattern in the speech, a rhythm, a sign of intent, the way he would listen for the breathing of a predator in the dark. There was nothing. It was ninety-five percent static. He understood none of it.
— And by leveraging the heuristic feedback from the emergent reality verticals, we can synergize a new paradigm of attentional resource extraction, — Ward said, his hands gesturing at the glowing data that swirled above the table. The data was a frantic, shimmering cloud of numbers and charts, a visual echo of the man’s empty words. It was a blizzard of lies. A faint STATIC_GLITCH ran through the holographic display, a momentary tear in the fabric of the illusion. No one else seemed to notice. It was the spirit song, made visible.
Garran’s mind, a thing of instinct and observation, rejected it all. This was not a council. This was not a sharing of wisdom. It was a performance. These people were preening, showing off their fine feathers, their voices a meaningless squawk in a cage of light. He felt a surge of contempt so pure it was almost clarifying. His world had predators, but they were honest. They showed their teeth.
Then the drone stopped. The room fell silent. Every face, every pair of soft, indoor eyes, turned to him. Marcus Ward gestured in his direction, a flick of his wrist that was both an invitation and a command.
— Julian, your projections on this?
The silence was a weight. It pressed on him. He was being tested. They wanted him to make the noises, to perform the ritual. They wanted him to squawk back. In his mind, he felt the ghost of Julian Hale screaming, a torrent of data and apologies and plausible deniability. A thousand clever things to say. But Julian was not here.
Garran said nothing.
He met Marcus Ward’s gaze across the glowing table. He did not look away. He did not nod. He did not challenge. He simply stood, his body still, his face a mask of stone. It was the silence of a hunter in a blind, waiting for the prey to reveal itself. It was the only weapon he had. He would not run. He would not fight. He would be. The choice was not a choice; it was an inevitability. The price was the last shred of his invisibility. He could feel it burning away under their collective gaze.
The other people at the table shifted. A man coughed. A woman tapped a nervous rhythm on the console in front of her. His silence was a disruption, a broken note in their carefully composed song. It was not a move they understood. It was a void in their data set, and it made them deeply uncomfortable. The social fabric of the room, woven from predictable responses, had been torn.
Marcus Ward’s placid expression did not change, but his eyes narrowed. It was a subtle shift, the kind of stillness a wolf shows just before it strikes. The polite curiosity was gone, replaced by a flicker of something colder, more analytical. Ward was a predator who had just discovered a new and unpredictable species in his territory. He had flagged him. Garran could feel the man’s attention settle on him, a focused, calculating weight. He was no longer just an anomaly. He was a target.
The silence stretched for five heartbeats. Ten. It became a physical presence in the room, more powerful than all the words that had come before it.
Then Ward smiled, a thin, bloodless curve of his lips.
— Profound, Julian. As always, — he said, his voice dripping with a sarcasm so refined it was almost sincere. He turned back to the rest of the table, dismissing Garran with a wave of his hand. — We’ll table that for now. Let’s move on to the Q4 engagement metrics.
The river of noise began to flow again. The moment had passed. Garran remained by the wall, a statue carved from another world’s stone. He had survived. He had done it by refusing to play, by being so completely alien that their rules simply slid off him. But he could still feel Ward’s gaze on him, a cold spot on his skin. He had won the battle, but in doing so, he had told the alpha predator exactly where to find him.
He looked at his reflection in the polished black wall behind the board members. For a second, his face flickered, a STATIC_GLITCH that overlaid Julian’s pale, worried features onto his own. He was a ghost wearing another man’s skin, and the master of the house had just seen him move.
The air in the room was still and cold. The droning voices of the soft people faded into a meaningless hum.
