The Pod formed without the tearing violence of before. It coalesced from the shared, quiet despair of two men trapped in the wrong cages. The space was clearer this time, the connection holding at a steady forty percent, a stable platform of mutual ruin. Julian saw the chrome walls of his habitation pod, but they were slick with moisture, overgrown with the glowing green moss of Garran’s swamp. A STATIC_GLITCH, less a rip and more a slow shimmer, pulsed between the two realities. The air smelled of ozone and wet earth, of a circuit board left out in the rain.
They stood on opposite sides of the impossible room, two versions of the same soul, marinated in different flavors of failure. Garran, in Julian’s body, was a statue of coiled rage. Julian, in Garran’s form, was a bundle of frayed nerves, still feeling the phantom sting of poison-thorns. The silence was a confession. There was no one left to blame. They had run out of enemies and found only each other.
Then a third thing entered the silence. A voice. It was not the whisper of the Synoptic Muse or the guttural croak of the swamp. It was tinny, distant, and layered with the sound of frying electricity.
— Can you hear me, you idiot? — The voice crackled through Julian’s neural feed, a ghost in his own machine bleeding into their shared space.
Garran flinched, his head snapping up. He scanned the glitching treeline, his hunter’s instincts searching for a threat he could not see. It was the spirit song, but this one had teeth. It had words.
— Rory? — Julian whispered, the name feeling foreign in this new mouth.
— Who else? — The voice was a low rasp, the sound of a man who gargled with rust. Rory Phelan, the Free Feed’s cynical quartermaster, was a one-way audio link into their private hell. — Stop gawking. I’ve been piggybacking your trauma feed. You two hit the jackpot.
— This is a jackpot? — Julian asked, a hysterical laugh bubbling in his throat.
— You’re alive, — Rory’s voice was flat, devoid of sympathy. — And you’re stable. That’s more than most get. Now listen. What happened to you, it has a name. The Ontological Offset. It’s not a glitch. It’s a law.
The words hung in the humid, sterile air. A law. Not an accident. Not a curse. A piece of physics, as impersonal as gravity.
— The universe hates a paradox, — Rory explained, his voice cutting through the static. — You two held a stable, conscious link. The system balanced the equation. It swapped you. And it will keep swapping you. It’s a recurring event, tied to the integrity of your connection. It’s semi-predictable. Like a tide.
A tide. A pattern. A system.
Julian’s mind, so long a tool for analyzing engagement metrics and predicting market trends, latched onto the concept. A system could be understood. A system could be gamed.
He turned to Garran, who was still staring at the spot where Rory’s voice seemed to emanate, his hand clenched into a fist. The rage was still there, but beneath it was a flicker of confusion. A law was not a spirit. You couldn’t fight a law with a spear.
— We have to work together, — Julian said. The words were simple, stripped of all his usual irony. It was a plea, born of pure, uncut desperation. — He said it’s a law. That means there are rules. If we understand the rules, maybe we can… influence it.
Garran said nothing. He looked from Julian to the shimmering image of his own world, a world of deep greens and living things, now occupied by this pale, soft ghost. Then he looked at the chrome walls of the cage he was in, a cage of dead air and screaming lights. The choice was simple. Die alone in the wrong world, or trust the man who broke everything.
After a silence that stretched for a full minute, Garran gave a single, curt nod. It was not forgiveness. It was an alliance of the doomed. The trust between them was a sliver of ice, maybe five percent of the way to solid, but it was there. The price of that trust was the taste of ash in Garran’s mouth. He was agreeing to conspire with his own violation.
— Rory, are you still there? — Julian asked.
— Where would I go? — the voice rasped. — This is the best content I’ve seen in years.
— The connection, — Julian pressed, his mind racing. — It’s tied to the stability of the link? Stress, shared emotion… it makes it stronger?
— Looks that way. You two panicking together is what stabilized you in the first place.
Julian’s thoughts began to connect, forming a desperate schematic in the air of The Pod. He looked at Garran. — What are the rhythms of your day? The hunt? When do you sleep? Are there rituals? Things you do at the same time, every cycle?
Garran stared, his suspicion returning. — Why?
— If we can create moments of weak connection, of predictable noise, maybe we can encourage the swap to happen in those windows. If we can create moments of intense, shared focus… maybe we can force it. We can’t stop the tide, but maybe we can build a channel for it to run in.
He began to sketch it out, a plan born of corporate systems analysis and primal necessity. A protocol. A schedule for their shared soul.
— We dose at the same time, — Julian explained, the words coming faster now. — A smaller amount of the Staticbloom. Just enough to open the door, not kick it down. That creates the window.
Garran listened, his expression unreadable.
— Then, you do something. A ritual. Something with a rhythm. Something you can teach me.
— The hunt-beat, — Garran said, his voice a low rumble. — The drum rhythm we use before a stalk. It is for focus.
— Yes, — Julian seized on it. — You drum. I… I tap it out. On a console. At the same time. We synchronize our breath. We create a shared, rhythmic pulse across two worlds. We invite the swap. We don’t command it. We nudge it.
He called it the Custody Protocol. A schedule for a soul split in two. It was a ridiculous, desperate plan, an attempt to file a polite request with a hurricane.
— It’s not a leash, — Julian said, looking Garran in the eye. He had to make him understand. — It’s a suggestion. The chances of it working are… low. Less than ten percent. But it’s not zero.
Garran considered this. To take the sacred rhythm of the hunt and share it with this… ghost. To turn a piece of his world’s soul into a gear in one of the other man’s machines. It felt like a profanity. But the alternative was to remain a prisoner of chaos, a leaf in a storm. He would trade a piece of his world’s soul for a fraction of control over his own.
— I will teach you the rhythm, — Garran said, the words costing him more than Julian could ever know. — And you will learn it. You will not be a songbird. You will be a drum.
The agreement settled in the air. The shimmering STATIC_GLITCH between their worlds seemed to pulse with a slower, more regular beat. They were no longer just victims. They were conspirators. They were partners. The Pod began to feel thin, the connection fraying as their shared purpose diverged into individual tasks. They had a plan. A fragile, insane, beautiful plan.
Now they just had to hope the hurricane listened.
