The connection was not a door opening. It was a building collapsing. The Pod formed without invitation, without the ritual of the protocol, without the taste of ozone and wet earth from the Staticbloom atomizer. It was triggered by the synchronized terror of two men in two separate cages, a resonance of pure despair that punched a hole through the walls of reality. It was a jagged, ugly thing, a shared space built from the wreckage of their minds. Stability was a laughable 5%.
Julian was there. Garran was there. They were a tangled knot of consciousness in a place that was neither forest nor chrome, but a violent STATIC_GLITCH of both. A nutrient paste dispenser, its red light blinking INSUFFICIENT QUOTIENT, flickered in and out of existence, half-submerged in a swamp of black water. The air tasted of recycled oxygen and decaying leaves. The sound was the hum of a corporate server farm and the chittering of insects that were not there. It was the sound of two worlds dying into one another.
They were not two men anymore. They were a single panicked thought in a fractured skull.
Then came the itch. For Julian, it started between his shoulder blades. It was not a surface irritation. It was a deep, structural wrongness, a feeling buried in the bone. It was a phantom itch for a phantom limb he’d never had. He felt an impossible urge to stretch something that did not exist, to unfurl wings from his back. He could almost feel the ghost of feathers tearing through the skin of Garran’s body, a body he was not in but was now, somehow, a part of. The sensation was a biological memory, an echo of Garran’s shapeshifting nature, and it was crawling inside Julian’s mind like a parasite.
He was a man who had spent his life in a box of clean data, and now he could feel the memory of flight in his marrow. It was not wonder. It was violation.
For Garran, it was a pressure. He was in his own body, trapped in the corporate outpost’s medical bay, but his mind was here, in this broken place. He felt a cold, abstract dread that had no smell and no sound. It was the feeling of a closing window, of a number getting smaller. He found a word for it blooming in his thoughts, a word that was not his, a piece of Julian’s soul stuck to his own like a burr. Deadline. The concept was alien, a cage made of pure time, but the anxiety it produced was as real as a predator’s claw.
He was a hunter who understood the rhythms of seasons and the patience of the stalk. Now he was being haunted by the ghost of a clock.
They tried to speak, to name the specific horror that was colonizing them. Their thoughts were a panicked scramble, two sets of feet running in opposite directions down the same narrow hall.
— I can feel… — Julian started, the words forming in the shared space, tasting of mud and fear. He was trying to describe the impossible itch, the feeling of his skeleton wanting to become a bird’s.
— …your cage, — Garran finished. The thought was seamless, a single sentence spoken by two mouths across the void.
The realization hit them both at once, a wave of cold shock that momentarily silenced the glitching chaos of The Pod. They were not just sharing a space. They were sharing a self. Garran could feel the phantom weight of Julian’s life, the endless, grinding pressure of the Dynamic Quotient, the quiet terror of being ignored into non-existence. It was a prison of whispers and numbers.
Julian could feel the brutal simplicity of Garran’s world, the constant, gnawing hunger, the damp chill of the forest floor, the weight of the tribe’s survival on his shoulders. It was a prison of blood and bone. They were the same cage, just painted a different color.
A violent STATIC_GLITCH tore through the dreamscape, no longer just noise, but a coherent image. It was a memory, sharp and clear and unwanted. It was Julian’s face, seen from above, pressed into the black mud of the swamp after the first swap. It was the taste of rot and failure. It was a memory that belonged to Julian, but now, Garran remembered it too. He felt the mud in his own teeth. He felt the shame. It was a shared scar, carved into the new, soft tissue of their merging soul.
The price of their bond was no longer theoretical. It was the slow, systematic erasure of the self. They were becoming a paradox, a single consciousness in two bodies, and they both knew, with a certainty that went deeper than thought, that the universe did not tolerate such things for long.
The fear of their separate fates—erasure by algorithm, death by corporate pacification—was suddenly eclipsed by a new and more immediate terror. The fear of fusion. The fear of becoming this single, broken thing forever.
They had to get out.
They pulled. It was not a thought. It was a primal, physical act of will. They threw the entire weight of their identities against the connection, against each other. It felt like tearing muscle, like pulling their own minds apart at a seam that was rapidly dissolving. For a moment, they were locked together, a single scream of ‘no’ echoing in the space between worlds. Then, with a sound like ripping fabric, the connection snapped.
Julian was back in his holding cell on the Grid, the grey walls a sudden, welcome reality. He was gasping, his heart hammering against his ribs. He could still feel the ghost of the itch on his back.
Garran was back in the outpost’s medical bay, the hum of the machinery a solid, grounding presence. He was breathing hard, the abstract pressure of the deadline slowly receding.
They were alone again. They were safe from each other. And they had never been more terrified.
