The fire was the first real thing he had felt in years. Not the simulated warmth of his habitation pod, but a living heat that pushed back against the cool night air. Julian sat on a log, a piece of roasted meat in his hand, the grease running down his fingers. He had a place of honor. A real one, not a temporary status boost bought with a viral meme. He had earned it with a map made of lichen and flies.
He watched the faces of the tribe, their features dancing in the orange light. They were laughing, sharing stories in a language he was only beginning to understand through its rhythm. The smell of woodsmoke and cooked meat was thick in the air, a smell of community and survival. It was a smell he had only ever read about in historical data-files.
Torvin, the hunter who had called him a songbird, walked past and dropped another piece of meat onto the hide beside him. The hunter didn't look at him, but the gesture was louder than any word. It was an acknowledgment. A fact had been established. The useless man had found water.
Nia sat beside him, her presence a quiet anchor in the cheerful noise. She wasn't watching him anymore, not like a warden. She was just there. He felt the simple weight of her shoulder near his. It was a connection that had no score, no metric. It was just real.
— You did a good thing, — she said, her voice low.
— I got lucky.
— Luck is a pattern you haven't learned to read yet, — she replied, and a genuine smile touched her lips.
He felt a sense of belonging so sharp and clean it was almost painful. This was it. This was the freedom he had chased through static and code, the escape he had paid for with every credit he had. He had found his new home, a place where his strange mind had a purpose. He had finally, truly arrived.
In the heart of the fire, a flicker of impossible blue light, a brief, sharp STATIC_GLITCH, twisted the flames into a grid of pixels for a half-second. A ghost of his old cage. He blinked, and it was gone.
Then the universe pulled the floor out from under him.
The familiar, nauseating pulse of the Ontological Offset began. It was supposed to be a clean transition, the rhythmic fold they had practiced with the Custody Protocol. But this was different. It was violent, jarring, a summons, not a suggestion. The happy sounds of the tribe dissolved into the taste of ozone and wet earth. The world tore.
Garran appeared on the log where Julian had been sitting. One moment he was in a sterile white box, the next he was here, surrounded by the fire and faces of his people. The smell of home was a shock. He was holding a piece of roasted meat he hadn't killed. He was confused, but the tribe was cheering, raising their own pieces of meat to him.
Inara Zale, the matriarch whose gaze could strip a soul bare, gave him a slow, deep nod of approval. He was being celebrated for something. He didn't know what, but he was a hunter, and a hunter never refuses a gift of food. He took a bite of the meat, the familiar taste a strange counterpoint to the absolute confusion in his mind. He was accepting praise for a victory he hadn't earned.
Julian rematerialized with a gasp, collapsing onto a floor that was unnaturally smooth and cold. The smell of woodsmoke was gone, replaced by the dead, recycled air of his pod. He was back in the cage. Disoriented, he pushed himself up, his borrowed muscles aching with a phantom memory of the hunt.
An alert flashed in his vision, a screaming banner of corporate blue. It was his Dynamic Quotient, the number that decided if he ate. It was a number he hadn't seen in years, a number that belonged to celebrity broadcasters and corporate directors.
15.7.
He was in the top 0.1% of all citizens on the Grid. A new set of notifications flooded his feed. Access to premium nutrient paste flavors. Unrestricted bandwidth. A private transport credit. He was a star, a king in the system he despised, all because Garran had screamed in a box. It was a victory that tasted like ash.
The system, however, did not care about his disgust. The system only cared about the numbers. And the numbers were beautiful.
For the Continuum Collective, the anomalous energy signature of the swap, amplified by the massive, viral surge in Julian's Dynamic Quotient, was too clean to ignore. Most rogue signals were messy, full of noise and decay, like whispers in a hurricane. This was different. This was a cathedral bell ringing in a silent room. The success was so great, it had burned away all the statistical noise, leaving a pure, traceable signal.
Their success was their undoing.
In a silent office of polished black glass that reflected nothing, Marcus Ward watched the data streams flow. He was the Director of Ontological Assets for the Continuum Collective, a title that meant he was a prospector for new realities to monetize. He was a patient man. He knew that eventually, every secret would broadcast itself.
An alarm chimed, a soft, insistent tone reserved for high-priority anomalies. Not a security breach. An opportunity. He brought the file to his main screen. The signal wasn't a rogue broadcast from a shielded sub-level. The origin point was outside their known network entirely. The coordinates were impossible, a set of numbers that belonged to a different physics.
He zoomed in on the signal's tail, the residual data left by the swap. A flicker of visual noise, a STATIC_GLITCH, resolved itself on his screen. It wasn't the usual chaotic snow. For a single, perfect frame, it was a clean, stable image. A canopy of luminous green jungle foliage under a sky of two moons. It was no longer a glitch. It was a photograph.
A very faint, very cold smile touched Marcus Ward's lips. He finally understood. Julian Hale wasn't just a broadcaster. He was a doorway. And on the other side of that door was a new, untapped market. An entire world of primitives, a fresh audience, a new reality vertical waiting to be synergized.
He leaned forward, his voice a quiet, calm command to the listening terminal.
— Lock signature.
The system confirmed. The coordinates for Earth-Alt were now a fixed target in the Continuum Collective's navigation systems.
— Authorize Phase 1 probe.
The command flowed silently through the network. In a sterile orbital dock, automated systems began to prep three sleek, black skiffs. Their engines were silent. Their purpose was simple. The invasion had been greenlit.
