The world did not tear. It folded. The swap came not as a violent rip in the fabric of things, but as a clean, sharp line of visual noise, a STATIC_GLITCH drawn like a blade across reality. One moment, Julian was in a canoe, the smell of river mud and blood in his nostrils, the next he was gone. The universe was simply executing a command they had written in the language of desperation and drum-beats.
Garran blinked. The oppressive dark of the outpost prison vanished. He was in a small, bright room, the air so clean and dead it felt like a vacuum. Cold river water, a ghost from another world, dripped from the ends of his borrowed hair onto a floor of polished white polymer. In front of him was a glowing console, a back-door terminal Julian had built into his own holding cell. This was the place. This was the weapon.
He placed his hands on the console’s surface. A jolt, not of electricity, but of memory, shot up his arms. These were not his hands. They were Julian’s. And they knew what to do. His fingers, guided by a phantom intelligence, flew across the holographic keys. It was a frantic, precise dance he could not follow, a torrent of commands he did not understand. He was the body, the muscle, the sheer physical will. Julian, a ghost inside him, was the mind. The Logic Bomb, a silent prayer of digital poison, flowed from his fingertips.
The price was a sudden, sharp nausea. A headache bloomed behind his eyes, a pressure that felt like another man’s thoughts trying to get out. He had just used a part of Julian’s soul, and the strain was immense.
In the circular, black-glass heart of the Stakeholder Parliament, the great holographic table flickered. The numbers, the sacred digits of Dynamic Quotients that gave each member their voice, began to corrupt. A cascade of STATIC_GLITCH, like a digital fungus, ate the data from the inside out. Buy orders became gibberish. Sell orders inverted. The very logic of the market, where attention equaled power, was being turned upside down.
A high-ranking Director with a DQ of 18.4 suddenly found his voting weight was a negative number. A junior analyst, forgotten in the corner, saw her influence spike to become the most powerful voice in the room. It was not a crash. It was a revolution. It was a joke with a blade.
Panic erupted. The sound was not one of fear for their lives, but for their ledgers. They were not afraid of dying. They were afraid of their net worth becoming a question mark.
The swap hit Julian like a physical blow. The smell of the river was gone, replaced by the clean, metallic scent of the corporate outpost and the sharp tang of ozone. He was on his feet. The weight of a heavy, fire-hardened spear felt both alien and perfectly correct in his hands. He was in the lab.
Two corporate security guards in sterile white jumpsuits turned, their faces blank with surprise. Before Julian’s analytical mind could form a plan, Garran’s instincts acted for him. He moved. There was no thought, only a cold, clean line of action. A low, efficient sweep with the spear’s wooden shaft took out the first guard’s legs. The man went down with a wet crunch. The butt of the spear, a heavy knot of ironwood, cracked against the second guard’s helmet with a sound like a dropped stone. He crumpled without a word.
It was over in less than two seconds. It was brutal. It was precise. They were not his actions, but they were his hands. A phantom ache flared in his shoulder, a ghost of one of Garran’s old wounds. The shared scar of their bond had just paid its first dividend.
He saw Torvin. The hunter was strapped to a medical table, his eyes wide with a mixture of fury and disbelief. Wires snaked from his body to a monitor that displayed his anomalous biology in pulsing green lines. Julian didn’t hesitate. He brought the spear down, not on the man, but on the console. It shattered with a shower of sparks and a final, dying flicker of STATIC_GLITCH. With a knife from a fallen guard’s belt, he sliced through the restraints.
Torvin pushed himself up, rubbing his wrists. He looked at Julian, at the face of his friend Garran, and saw the impossible fight he had just witnessed. The confusion in his eyes was a storm.
Marcus Ward saw it all. On a dozen screens in his silent command center, his perfect plan was dissolving into chaos. On one, the river battle, a total loss. On another, the Parliament, a digital rout, his own DQ score bleeding into the red. On a third, the outpost lab, breached and his prize specimen freed.
He froze the feeds. He looked at the timestamps. The market crash on the Grid. The lab breach in the Wild. They had happened at the exact same moment. He pulled up the security log from the terminal where the Logic Bomb was uploaded. The face staring back from the recording was Julian Hale’s. He pulled up the feed from the lab. The face of the man holding the spear was Garran’s—the face he knew as Julian Hale.
One man. Two places. An impossibility.
— What is this? — he whispered to the silent room, his voice thin. His data-driven world, a universe of predictable inputs and profitable outputs, had just been broken by a variable he could not calculate.
The enemy was losing on both fronts, and he did not even understand the shape of the weapon that was beating him.
Ward’s finger hovered over a single, red icon on his console, a button he had never intended to press.
