36. VoidChanneler
VoidChanneler
Playlist: Impose - Bad Omens
Lyra
Kael is quite impressed with himself. He keeps circling the room, pacing, hands making animated, sweeping movements while explaining the logic and architecture behind what just happened between us. It’s innocent, childlike, and definitely not like the Kael I know. I kind of like it.
I hear technical terms like “sensitivity threshold,” “feedback loops,” “realistic simulation code,” and something about bodily fluids. Don’t think I want him to expand on that one.
He sounds like a man who’s just solved a mathematical equation, equal parts brilliance and disbelief. Weeks ago, I never would have believed that intimacy could be neatly programmed and coded.
His passion is intense. It should annoy me.
I want it to annoy me. But instead, I watch the way he focuses on the future, what else he can do for me, ideas taking shape right before my eyes.
His excitement ignites the dragon ink along his spine, flaring burnt orange and deep gold. I quietly take note.
I feel my anger soften. Just for a moment. If I actually allowed myself to care for him, I might just feel a sense of pride.
I lie across his bed, admiring him as he shimmies into a pair of black joggers.
I watch his forearms tighten, his tattooed fingers grasping the corded tie.
A lotus blossom blooms in ink on the top of his left hand, a mandala covers his right.
Something I never really took the time to notice about him, until now.
This man just ruined me with his touch.
I can feel my mask of anger cracking and something like acceptance, maybe even forgiveness, beginning to shine through.
But can I trust it? The tiny voice inside me, the one that screams into the void each night for the life I lost, pushes back.
I just can’t help myself. “Kael...I get it, you’re a programming god alright? You are seriously ruining the moment.”
“Then worship me.” He slides next to me on the bed, grinning sinfully as our bodies touch once again. It sends a glitch surge through my holo-form.
I can’t allow it to be this perfect. I cover his mouth, my hand flaring in the dark of the room. “Keep talking, and I’ll torch your screens.” It’s only a half-joke. I laugh sarcastically but it comes out muffled. Odd. A fault in his code?
“Threatening. I like it.” His thumb rests on my cheek but his smile turns grim quickly. “Lyra!” He sits up abruptly and grabs both my hands. Pixels scatter and flutter toward the light of the window like moths to flame.
His hands are still on me when it begins, wrapped around my wrists like iron cuffs.
He won’t let go of me. Something’s wrong.
I can see it in his face. For a fleeting second, I forget that I’m not real, that I’m nothing more than light and code sitting in the center of his digital kingdom.
I don’t want to be. I’d rather pretend I’m just a normal girl being touched. But deep down I know I’m not.
I’ve experienced something similar many times before. Void energy.
The system chirps, followed by LINK’s incoming alert slicing through the room. We both jump up when the lights of the city go black.
CRITICAL FAILURE
I hear his battery backups start with a whir of air, brutally snapping us back into reality. It’s three a.m.
TheKast? No. Too late for that.
A blackout? Kael would never allow something as simple as that to happen in his grid.
It doesn’t matter. Whatever this is, it rips us out of each other’s arms and back into duty, back into danger. I instinctively know what this is. The one thing that remains an open wound between us.
My brother.
Beyond the wall of windows, the city flickers once, then collapses entirely. Skyscrapers go black, holo-ads fade out, and the steady pulse of Kael’s digital system is severed in an instant.
Total darkness, except for the stark-white spires of VikkCorp ominously reaching toward the sky as if trying to escape the very city it turned into a neon hellscape.
He jerks up, muscles taut, every sensor in his architecture screaming alive with alarms. The wall of screens in his living room is suddenly dead. Just a single line of warning feed remains, strobing blood red:
POWER GRID VOIDED
Not down. Voided.
“God dammit, Eli!” He curses through clenched teeth. His voice is barely a sound in the suffocating silence, but I hear it.
He runs to his corner office, fingers flying on the keyboard, but every command stutters into nothing. I follow and stand behind him, my face over his shoulder. I can see the words:
SYSTEM COMPROMISED and DREAMNET DESTABILIZED. Even I know this is catastrophic.
I place my hand on his shoulder only to find it gone. Vanishing into golden pixels. I quickly hide it behind my back.
“LINK, are you with me? Do you have power?” Kael stares at the angry red light of his battery backups.
YYYYESSS DDDR. RRRRYUDONNNN
The AI’s voice fractures into shards, glitched syllables running into each other. For the first time, LINK sounds as if she’s stumbling for control.
Kael slams his palm against the glass desk. “He’s voided the grid. That power surge. It’s too big to be contained.” His eyes snap to me, the revulsion for U21s returning like a scorching heat. “Your brother is going to tear the fucking city apart!”
I want to answer, apologize, stay with him here in this stolen moment of heat and tension. But the edges of me flicker. My body distorts into jagged lines of light. I can feel it like a rope around my neck, the pull of Eli’s void reeling in every piece of light I’m made of.
I reach for Kael, my hand almost brushing his cheek, but my form shatters like glass under pressure.
“No!” He spins around to grab me as the feed cuts.
I’m yanked backward violently. The walls of his penthouse slam shut like a metal door. Kael disappears as warmth turns cold. Everything around me is gone in an instant.
I hit the grid with a thud so hard it knocks the breath out of my lungs. It escapes me as a violet puff of vapor.
Here we go again.
Black, empty, a hollow mesh of dead code stretches infinitely before me. The doors I built have disappeared once more. DreamNet is gone, voided out by Eli’s magic. No beach, no cottage, no illusion of freedom. Just me, raw and exposed, hanging in the ruins.
The silence presses against me like a thick, impenetrable wall, blocking out all sound and light.
I feel instantly suffocated. Spots of light surge and then plummet from the darkness above, streaking past me like shooting stars.
I duck and sprint across unstable ground as the blackness above me seems to split at the seams. Each light hits somewhere below with a dying flicker, snuffed out mid-fall.
At first, I can’t see a pattern to discern what’s happening.
I just need to survive. I continue pushing my legs to their limits, hoping I’m not running off the edge of nowhere.
When my chest heaves with the last breaths I can possibly bear, I bend over, clutching my side.
One glance up and it all falls into place.
Every light is a person.
Every glowing ember is a U21 being torn loose from DreamNet, ripped from their only sanctuary and hurled back into bodies that aren’t ready to hold them. The dying flickers were their magic being extinguished in violent bursts.
My brain can’t rationalize what my eyes are seeing: Every U21 in the grid is falling. Every anomaly logged into DreamNet is being stripped bare, their power muted, their dreams erased in real time. Eli didn’t just void the city; he detonated our oasis, our place to be ourselves.
I hear echoes—not voices exactly, but I sense the panic vibrating through the grid.
DreamNet is hemorrhaging. Eli is spiraling and pulling us all down with him. But why? Why would he want the same thing the Corporation aims to impose on us?
And somewhere deep in the abyss below me, in between layers of collapsing code and screaming data, my brother is burning himself out, void pouring out of him. I’ve seen it, lived it, and I’ve always been there to bring him back.
Except now I’m not.
“Eli,” I reach for him with everything I have, magic, memory, love, but I get nothing. No thread. No door. No presence. Just falling lights and the knowledge that every second he remains out of control, more of us suffer.
I’m not the only prisoner. Eli is trapped in his own hell, and I’m powerless to stop it, powerless to reach him.
But Kael. Kael will find a way to save us. He has to. He promised me.
And if he doesn’t...I will.