24. HatefulHeart
HatefulHeart
Playlist: HATEFUL - HEALTH, Sierra Veins
Lyra
I wake to nothing again.
The air, if it’s air, buzzes against my skin like the inside of a speaker on full blast. I scream, and it erupts as bright yellow lines twitch in the void around me. Vertical grids appear; they slide and rearrange every time I blink. At least there’s some color to my rage now.
My stomach churns, but I’m not hungry. I don’t know if I’m standing or floating. Gravity feels like a coin toss the system hasn’t decided on yet.
“I hate this.” My voice comes out broken and distorted, like I’m underwater. It bounces back to me in five different tones, some too deep, some too high. One of them laughs at me. I can hear him, talking to me, promising to “rescue me” and “find me.”
Fuck you, Kael Ryudon.
I don’t need your pity.
Sometimes when the static clears, I can hear him. The tapping of keys cutting through the vacuum of silence, fast, like he’s afraid to stop. I imagine lines of code scrolling beneath his fingers, orders being given, names being flagged, people like me being erased with just one of his keystrokes.
If I focus on one dark spot for long enough, I can sometimes see him. Never clearly. Just a silhouette moving through a cavern of light and glass. A dark shape pacing, stopping, circling back on itself like he’s trapped in his own cage.
I’m glad.
He never looks relaxed. Even blurred and distant, I can feel the tension in the way he moves, his shoulders tight, jaw clenched, like the world is something he’s holding together by himself.
Serves him right.
I don’t think he knows I’m watching, but for some strange reason, I know he senses it. Sometimes, I swear he pauses mid-motion, tilting his head to the side, as if he feels my eyes on him.
Good.
I whip my head around. “I hate you, Kael Ryudon!” I yell with everything I have into the blackness, hoping he can hear me.
No response. Cold claws its way under my skin, but I can’t shiver. I can’t even breathe. Each inhale rattles, artificial, like the world has to teach me how to exist here.
I wish for death.
My heart answers, thundering in my chest, reminding me I’m still here, still existing. But the question won’t leave my thoughts: If this isn’t death, what is it?
My unease worsens because a heartbeat alone doesn’t make you human. Neither does fear, or memory, or wanting something badly enough it hurts.
I exist. I know that much. I can think. I can feel emotion. I can certainly feel anger, maybe even hate. So, if this isn’t death, if I haven’t crossed from this life, then what have I become?
I stand to inspect a pulse I hear thumping from across the room.
A flash of light shoots under my feet like an electrical current.
It spreads until it surrounds me, forming a circle.
What is this? A spotlight? I stumble back, but the circle moves with me, following my every step.
It moves a few steps in front of me, then bounces back as if it’s undecided on where to go next.
Panic takes over. Instinct guides me to claw at the edges, step out of it, but my hands pass through easily. It’s not trapping me, it’s leading me. The circle of light hangs in the air, then moves again. It coils around my fingers like shadows, humming with power.
This is an all-too-familiar feeling. My magic.
My anger, confusion, fear, it allows it to build.
It bursts out of me before I can even protest. Suddenly there’s a beach and a sunset.
Our little cottage by the sea glitches in and out like bad reception.
Then sand, warped and metallic, sprouting out of the floor.
The more I panic, the more the system responds, spitting random fragments from DreamNet into my reality.
I fall to my knees with a glimmer of hope. In all the chaos of finding myself here, I completely forgot to reach for my magic.
At first, I think it’s a mistake.
Something tugs on me through the static, like a thread being pulled too tight. The grid responds before I consciously do anything. Light bends. Code shivers. Somewhere far above, images of my dreams recalibrate.
I freeze.
For once, I’m not reactive. I reached for my magic, and it answered. My magic isn’t gone. It isn’t muted or trapped. It’s diffused. Everywhere. Threaded through the architecture of this place like veins under my skin.
I lift my hand, and the grid reacts obediently. “Stars,” I whisper, awe slipping into my voice. “You’re listening to me.”
I close my eyes and focus, not on my emotions, but on my intent. The way Ash feels vibrations, the way Eli always said the system hums constantly like it’s alive if you stop and listen.
I lean into it, and the world opens. The walls ripple, and for the first time, I notice something odd. A seam, like fabric with silky threads extending toward me.
I stop breathing.
The harder I focus, the clearer it becomes: Lines woven together, loops and knots holding the grid in place. I reach for them, not with my hands, but with whatever spark has been itching inside me since the night my life shattered. The threads respond, move, they answer. I pull one.
DreamNet is suddenly not a destination but a door I’ve always been standing in front of. I step through effortlessly, and the gray static peels back like a curtain. Color rushes in, sound floods my senses, dreamscapes layered together like overlapping clouds.
I’m inside. Free.
My laugh bubbles out before I can stop it. I turn, test the boundaries, and because curiosity has always been my fatal flaw, I push further. I pull another thread.
GameNet answers.
Gamified code, full of rules and reward loops, slips past me. I slide through easily, rewriting the code as I go. NPCs stutter, a leaderboard flickers and resets, but players continue gaming all around me.
I didn’t break it. I edited it.
My pulse spikes. “What else can I do?” I mumble to myself.
The answer comes in the form of a thousand blinking threads. I pull and see windows containing corporate newsfeeds, holo-ads plastered across Oneiro City’s streets. I can see through the eyes of drones, as I drift along with them upward, until the city itself feels small beneath me.
I touch one of the corporate headline feeds. It glitches. A smiling AI anchor flickers, then freezes, mouth open, eyes hollow. The slogan beneath her fractures, letters scrambling before reforming into one of my thoughts.
...THE CORPORATION DECIDES WHO GETS TO DREAM...
I gasp.
Below, holo-billboards stutter. A luxury ad dissolves, replaced by a wash of amber-and-gold light that forms a sunset over an ocean, the waves pulsing in time with my heartbeat. For three whole seconds, the city sees what I want it to see, not what it was meant to.
Silence, but then that familiar mechanical voice cuts in.
UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS
Around me, alarms begin to ring, and the fail-safes kick in. The feeds snap back to normal, and the ads resume. The lies continue to be spread out over the city like a plague.
But I know now. I can go anywhere.
I can slip between systems like a ghost in the circuitry. I can whisper into machines Kael built to obey only him. I can tug at the seams of a city that thinks it’s untouchable.
And the most terrifying part?
This isn’t an accident fueled by emotion. This is intentional.
I smile, slow and dangerous, as the grid hums around me. “Okay,” I shout into the system, to Kael himself, wherever he is. “Let’s see what happens when your anomaly learns to fight back!”
I make the decision to become a weapon, a tool that will unravel Kael’s corporate system like it’s cloth under my fingers.
Threads begin to wrap around my hands and stitch together. “I can weave it.” I say softly. This feels like fulfilling my destiny. I can reshape code, rewrite it...or destroy it.
EchoWeaver.
I remember my mother calling it that when she would have to explain the strange bursts of light and power that flickered over the computer screens in our house.
I never really knew what it meant, until now.
The name blooms in me, feels ancient and inevitable.
My gift is more than sabotage, it’s design.
I’m not just breaking Kael’s cage. I’m stitching the world into something new, something mine.
I ready myself for battle. The circle under my feet strobes brighter. Tears sting my eyes and my chest heaves. My magic wants me to move, to fight.
I close my eyes and refocus. The circle cracks.
Neon shards scatter like glass, and the black void splits wide open into a thousand doors, a thousand possible worlds waiting for me to step inside.
I run for the nearest door and push myself in, the sense of falling, grabbing my stomach, like flying off a cliff and dropping to a sea below.
Alarms echo in the distant edges of the grid now. Another booming mechanical threat from LINK:
CONTAINMENT brEACH
PURGE CODE NEEDED
DR. RYUDON PLEASE ADVISE
Let it shout.
DreamNet breathes like a living world, but not my world. Another U21 who must be in DreamNet at this very moment is creating mountains that pulse with faint neon veins, waterfalls, and glowing butterflies. The air tastes like spun sugar and peppermint candy, and a feeling of joy fills me.
I sigh, for this is someone else’s dream. I just need to find mine.
I drag my memories to the surface, willing myself into the dream I replay each night, my beach, the sunset, our cozy cottage. The images around me flicker and eventually light up like fireworks in the summer sky.
I’m back. My corner of DreamNet.
A laugh bubbles out like champagne being poured. I have a second of pure, ridiculous happiness where I imagine making a whole life out of this place because it feels like home.
Perhaps it could be while I’m here. Anything is better than the cold electronic prison I’ve been in.
I’m not stupid. In our world, freedom comes with risk.
Somewhere under the beauty of DreamNet, there is a log or file constantly tracking me, revealing my every move and reporting it to Dr. Kael Ryudon.
The AI system alarms are still echoing in my ears, faint but there, a reminder that the door I slid through was not meant to be left open.
I test the edges of the world like a curious child.
I let the memory of Eli’s laugh, the summer’s warmth, and my parents’ voices fill it.
I’m careful to take only what I need here, to move silently, to hide my memories.
The rule I’m learning is delicate: Don’t announce yourself.
DreamNet is indulgent, but it’s also a place of attention. Attention calls the Corporation.
I tense because I know LINK’s purge protocol is patient and relentless. I hear nothing. If I’m not thorough, the system will call back to the servers; someone will notice, and someone in a suit will trace it. It will ping Kael or some CIC monitor until they find the digital footprint.
Still, the temptation to test more is a live wire under my skin. I close my eyes and pull, lightly, just a tiny thread, and I’m inside our cottage. I make a sudden decision. I need time.
Time to learn this world, to master my magic in it, to get strong enough to bend it to my will. I plant a tiny anchor here, this is where I’ll hide. If LINK scans here, she’ll see a dream echo, not an anomaly. Just harmless noise.
I can go where I want, I tell myself. I can stay.
I know this...
And now that I do, the work begins.
I settle into my bed and find my sketchbook waiting for me. I write the word out without thinking, letting the syllables taste the air.
EchoWeaver
My chest opens with an ache I’ve tried to muffle for so long. The rage of being here, the grief, the stubborn refusal to be erased turns into leverage. I’m not just a glitch in his system, I’m a powder keg of magic.
My fuse is threaded through the core of Kael’s architecture, and when I light it, I’m going to blow his whole goddamn cathedral of code to ash.