The swap was a quiet violence this time. One moment, the scent of woodsmoke and damp earth. The next, the taste of recycled air and the oppressive, silent hum of the cage. Garran stood in the center of the white room, the ghost of a paddle’s weight still in his hands. The walls were the same. The floor was the same. But the number floating in the air beside his head was different. It was a brilliant, arrogant 9.8. A king’s number.
He could feel the power of it, a low thrum of permission that vibrated through the floor. The lights in the pod were brighter. The air felt a fraction warmer. This number was a key. Julian had earned it by accident, with a scream of pure rage that this world mistook for art. Garran would not make the same mistake. He would not scream. He would use it. He walked to the wall that served as a terminal and pressed his palm against its cool, dead surface. He thought of the word Julian had used in the dream-space between worlds. Parliament.
A menu of options bloomed in the air, a garden of light and text. He wanted to see the enemy. He wanted to see the faces of the ones who sent machines to poison his world. He chose to spend the power he had been given. The price was immediate, a flicker in the corner of his eye as the number dropped from 9.8 to 8.6. A cost of 1.2 points for a single question. He had just paid for knowledge with a piece of his own life, and he had not even asked the question yet.
The system, the thing Julian called the Synoptic Muse, responded to the payment. It was not a creature that could be threatened or reasoned with. It was a river of data, and a high Dynamic Quotient was like having the strength to swim upstream. A search query appeared, waiting. He didn't have the words for it, the smooth, empty language of this place. He focused on a single, primal concept. Power. Leaders. The alpha pack.
The archive system, a library of ghosts, understood. The wall dissolved into a new image. It was a recording of a room, a circle of figures seated around a glowing table. They were not people. They were holograms, shimmering and translucent, their faces smooth and confident. This was the Stakeholder Parliament. The council of the Continuum Collective. Garran watched, his posture that of a hunter at the edge of a clearing, observing a new and dangerous species of predator.
He did not understand their words. It was a language of ghosts, a stream of sounds like ‘heuristic feedback’ and ‘emergent reality verticals’ that meant nothing. It was 95% static to his ears. But he understood the movements. He understood the way they postured, the way one shimmering figure would speak and the others would nod, their own floating numbers shifting in response. He watched as they voted. There were no hands raised, no stones cast. It was a market.
A proposal would appear in the air above the table, and the members would simply… buy it. Their Dynamic Quotients, their life-scores, would flicker. A number would drop, and that number would be added to the vote’s total. They were trading their social standing for influence, spending their visibility to shape the world. It was the most profane thing Garran had ever seen. A council where the richest voice was the only one that mattered. It was a lie, a noisy, elaborate lie that pretended to be order.
Then a new proposal filled the air. The words were meaningless, but the feeling behind them was as clear as the scent of blood on the wind. ‘Monetize Emergent Reality Streams.’ As the words hung there, the hologram flickered. For a half-second, the image of the boardroom was overlaid with a flash of green, a canopy of familiar trees, the glint of a dark river. A STATIC_GLITCH. A ghost of his own world, trapped in their machine. He knew. He knew what they were talking about. They were talking about his home.
He watched as the numbers flashed. 80%. 90%. The vote climbed to 98% approval in seconds. There was no debate. There was no dissent. There was only the quiet, efficient sound of a world being sentenced to death for the crime of being profitable. The figures around the table smiled their bloodless smiles. They had just declared war, and they called it growth.
A wave of fury washed through him, but it was not the hot, screaming rage from before. That was the anger of a trapped animal. This was different. This was the anger of a hunter who has finally seen the creature that has been killing his herd. It was a cold, clean fury. A clarifying rage that settled deep in his bones and sharpened his vision. His breath, which had been shallow and tight in this dead air, now came slow and even. The tension in his shoulders eased, not into relaxation, but into a predator’s patient readiness. He had a target.
He had spent his life hunting things he could see, things with tooth and claw. This was a new kind of prey. It was a creature made of light and rules. But a hunter’s mind was a hunter’s mind. Every creature had a weakness. Every system had a flaw. You just had to watch. You had to learn its patterns, its habits, its needs. You had to find the place where the bone met the sinew, the single point where a well-placed strike could bring the whole thing down.
He ended the simulation. The wall returned to its flat, empty whiteness. The ghosts were gone, but their scent remained. The scent of carrion and coin. He was alone in the pod, but the world felt different now. It was no longer just a cage. It was a hunting ground. He had a purpose here. It was not to survive. It was to dismantle.
Garran accessed the terminal again, the system granting him instant access, a privilege of his high score. He did not search for entertainment or news. He pulled up Julian’s private files, a chaotic library of notes, half-finished code, and desperate theories. He began to read, his eyes scanning the text not for meaning, but for weakness. He was not a reader. He was a tracker, and these words were the spoor of the beast he now hunted.
He sifted through Julian’s frantic research on the Synoptic Muse, on the architecture of the Dynamic Quotient, on the very protocols of the Stakeholder Parliament. He was looking for a vulnerability, an exploit, a crack in the perfect, seamless wall of the system. His mind, accustomed to tracking the subtle signs of a deer’s passage through a dense forest, began to see patterns in the data. He saw how the voting system relied on real-time data feeds, how a disruption in those feeds could invalidate a vote.
A flicker of movement caught his eye. The stream of data on the wall wavered, and for a moment, the lines of code resolved into a new shape. It was a STATIC_GLITCH, but clearer this time, more defined. The glowing text formed the unmistakable pattern of wolf tracks in soft earth, a perfect image that pulsed once and then dissolved back into meaningless characters. It was a sign. A message from his own world, or from the strange, shared space between them. It was a reminder of what he was.
The air in the pod was still and cold. The light from the terminal cast long shadows that twisted like branches.
The hunt had begun.
