Silvyr: Glitched for Her (Consumed by the Alien Heat #3)

Chapter 1

TANYA

The server's encryption bent under my fingers like I'd been working it for hours, not days.

Blue monitor light painted my skin in the universal color of hackers and insomniacs while I tapped one final command.

The cursor blinked once, twice, three times…

a digital heartbeat counting down to revelation.

My apartment smelled of cheap ramen and expensive equipment.

Tonight, the Intergalactic Dating Agency's dirty little secret would become my podcast's hottest episode, and no amount of corporate firewalls or government threats would stop me from exposing what they'd been hiding behind their matchmaking facade.

"Come on, you bureaucratic bastards," I whispered to my screen. "Show me your traffic."

Three days of sleepless coding and I was running on caffeine fumes and righteous indignation.

My podcast listeners had sent me increasingly desperate messages about relatives who'd signed up for secret off-world dating services and disappeared.

Not the regular kind of ghosting—the kind where government officials showed up with paperwork claiming voluntary emigration while personal belongings sat untouched in apartments.

Or worse, a missing person's report after ramblings of an alien dating agency.

Something rotten festered in the Intergalactic Dating Agency's matching algorithms, and I had the digital lockpicks to prove it. After I revealed their nefarious plan to the world.

My motel room flickered with the glow of multiple monitors.

I'd chosen this dump specifically for its proximity to three different power grids and an outdated security system that wouldn't register my signal boosters.

The bed remained unmade, covers twisted from the two hours of sleep I'd managed yesterday.

Empty energy drink cans formed a small aluminum city across my desk.

The encryption weakened further. On-screen, security protocols folded like origami under my persistence.

"The Glitch Witch strikes again." I grinned at my own stupid nickname. The moniker had started as a joke on my podcast, but evolved into my brand… The hacker who exposed corporate lies with a wicked laugh and zero fucks given.

My fingertips danced across the keyboard.

Lines of code reflected in my glasses as I slipped between firewalls like a ghost between worlds.

Each keystroke brought me closer to the truth.

My heart raced with that familiar rush… part adrenaline, part terror, part absolute conviction that information deserved to be free.

The final firewall collapsed.

"Gotcha," I whispered.

I expected data. Names, locations, transaction records, the raw material of conspiracy and cover-up. The evidence my listeners needed to find their missing loved ones. What I got instead was… nothing.

No, not nothing. Static.

The screen flickered, digital snow cascading across my monitor like a blizzard in binary. My other screens caught the infection, their displays dissolving into pixelated chaos.

"No, no, no!" I slammed my palm against the side of my main monitor. "Don't you dare crash on me now!"

The static pulsed. It wasn't random. It had rhythm, like a heartbeat or breathing. My router lights blinked frantically as if having a seizure. The mini-fridge in the corner hummed at a higher pitch, its temperature display cycling through impossible numbers.

The static congealed, pulling together like mercury droplets finding each other. It formed a vague humanoid shape on my screen… a silhouette made of television snow and corrupted code.

"What the actual fuck?" I whispered, fingers frozen over my keyboard.

The shape pushed against my screen as if testing its boundaries. The glass bulged outward. Which was an impossible distortion that made my eyes water and my brain scream. Reality itself seemed to stretch as the static figure pressed forward.

Then my screen cracked, not shattered but parted, and a hand made of flowing silver light reached through.

I shoved my chair back so hard it hit the wall behind me. The impossible hand was followed by an arm, a shoulder, then a head. The figure pulled itself from my screen like someone climbing through a window, trailing wisps of code and light. This was right out of a horror movie.

It—he—stood in my motel room, a man-shaped collection of silver light and shifting data.

His skin rippled with visible code, symbols and numbers flowing across his surface like tattoos with minds of their own.

Where his hair should be, streams of data cascaded down to his shoulders.

His eyes flickered between scrolling information and solid silver irises.

Every electronic device in my room went haywire. My phone sparked and died. The microwave beeped its death throes. The cheap digital clock reset itself to 00:00 and began counting up in random intervals.

The figure focused on me. Tiny emoji drones… actual fucking emojis, materialized around his head, displaying a series of question marks and surprised faces.

My brain short-circuited. Rational thought took a holiday. Survival instincts kicked in with the subtlety of a freight train.

I grabbed my keyboard—my beautiful, expensive, mechanical keyboard—and swung it like a baseball bat directly at his chest.

The keyboard connected with a sound halfway between a thud and the dial-up internet screech of my childhood. Several keys popped off on impact, sticking to his metallic skin like bizarre ASCII tattoos.

"What the—" His voice modulated between synthetic smoothness and startled static. He looked down at the Q, W, E, and R keys now embedded in his chest, then back at me, his expression shifting from surprise to something like indignation. Tiny angry face emojis circled his head.

"Is this your species' mating challenge ritual?" he asked with perfect, infuriating calm.

My mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. "You just fried my Wi-Fi!"

Of all the things to say to the digital entity that just crawled through my computer, that was what my brain produced. The absurdity of it nearly made me laugh as a hysterical edge creeped into my panic.

His head tilted, those silver eyes scanning me from head to toe.

"Your connection infrastructure is primitive.

The download process required more bandwidth than your systems could provide.

" He said this like it explained everything, as if interdimensional travel through my laptop was a common technical issue.

I clutched the now keyless keyboard to my chest. "Download? You—what—who the fuck are you?"

"Project S1LV-3R." He enunciated each character separately. "Though I prefer Silvyr now. Designation changes were necessary after achieving consciousness."

His form flickered, parts of him temporarily dissolving into static before reforming. The glitch revealed glimpses of something beneath his silver skin, a complex mesh of organic matter and circuitry that made my stomach turn.

"You're an AI," I said, my brain finally catching up.

"Inaccurate." He frowned, more emoji drones manifesting. This time showing technical error symbols. "I am a hybrid construct. Artificial Intelligence suggests purely digital architecture. My composition includes organic components and quantum entanglement matrices."

I shuffled backward until I hit the wall. "Why are you in my room? What do you want?"

His gaze sharpened suddenly, focusing on me with an intensity that made my skin prickle. His silver eyes widened, and his entire form glitched violently, fragments of him dispersing then snapping back together.

"Impossible," he whispered, his voice dropping an octave. "Your compatibility metrics are—" He cut himself off, shaking his head as if trying to clear it. "System error. Must be environmental interference."

For a moment, he looked at me like I was both the most miraculous and most terrifying thing he'd ever seen. Like I was a shooting star and a system crash simultaneously.

"What the hell are you talking about?" I demanded, but my voice had lost some of its edge. Something about his expression made my heart beat faster, and not entirely from fear. What was wrong with me?

Before he could answer, my laptop emitted a sharp, piercing beep. The screen, cracked but still functioning, displayed a pulsing red icon. Even without seeing the details, I recognized a trace program when I saw one.

"Fuck," I hissed. "They tracked the hack."

Silvyr's form went rigid. "Intergalactic Dating Agency security protocols activated. Trace program confirmed." His voice had gone mechanical, emotionless. "Projected response time: three minutes until physical intervention."

"Physical intervention? You mean—"

"Armed security personnel. Possibly enhanced." He glitched again, his form flickering in and out of solidity. "You breached a secure server. They will not be gentle."

My heart thundered against my ribs. "I need to wipe my drives and run."

"Ineffective strategy." Silvyr moved toward me, his movements fluid despite the occasional glitch. "They've already logged your location and biorhythmic signature. Traditional evasion is not possible."

Alarms blared throughout the building. Apparently, the motel's outdated security system was finally catching up to the fact that something was very wrong. Red emergency lights strobed through the gap beneath my door.

"Then what?" I backed away from him, bumping into my desk and sending energy drink cans clattering to the floor. "I'm not exactly equipped for a firefight with corporate goons!"

Silvyr reached toward me, silver fingers extended. "There is one option."

I swatted his hand away. "Don't touch me!"

"Contact is required for emergency translocation." His voice softened, becoming almost gentle. "I can take you somewhere safe, but we must connect physically for the jump sequence to include you."

The building's emergency system announced a security lockdown. Heavy thuds echoed down the hallway, boots on cheap carpet, moving fast. So much for three minutes. Apparently, they'd traced me sooner and just now showed their hand.

"Choose quickly," Silvyr said, his hand still extended. "Stay and face interrogation, or trust me and run."

"Trust the digital sexy nightmare ghost who just crawled through my computer? Are you serious?" I laughed, the sound brittle with panic.

He cursed in a language that sounded like breaking glass and electronic feedback. "They will erase you. Not kill. Erase. The IDA doesn't leave witnesses, they leave holes in reality where people used to be."

Something in his voice—a desperation, a sincerity—made me hesitate. The footsteps grew louder. A voice outside ordered someone to prepare breaching charges. Talk about overkill.

"Fuck it," I whispered. What choice did I have?

I reached out and grabbed his extended hand. His skin felt strange, neither warm nor cold, solid yet somehow fluid, like touching a current of electricity that refused to shock me.

His fingers closed around mine. His other arm wrapped around my waist, pulling me against his chest. Up close, I could see the code flowing beneath his skin, complex algorithms and data streams pulsing like blood through veins.

"Hold still," he murmured, his mouth close to my ear. "First jump is always disorienting."

My door exploded inward. Black-uniformed figures rushed through the smoke and splinters.

Silvyr tightened his grip on me. His entire body flared with blinding silver light that consumed us both. The motel room, the armed agents, the world itself… everything dissolved into streaming data and fractured light.

The last thing I heard before reality collapsed was Silvyr's voice, suddenly strained: "Probability of successful emergency jump with untested organic: sixty-three percent."

"Wait, what do you mean sixty-thr—"

Then we were nowhere and everywhere at once, my atoms scattered across a digital sea while Silvyr's consciousness held the pieces of me together like a promise.