The tunnels beneath Los Angeles had once felt ancient—brick and rebar, damp stone and rusted conduit, history pressing in from all sides.
Now Maren saw the seams.
At first it had been subtle—edges that didn’t quite align, shadows that lagged a fraction of a second behind the lantern’s flame. But once she allowed herself to look, truly look, the world began to betray itself.
The bricks weren’t bricks.
They were repeating meshes.
The dripping water was not water but a loop—three variations cycling endlessly. The darkness ahead of her wasn’t absence of light. It was unrendered space waiting for her to approach.
She stopped walking.
The tunnel flickered.
For a split second the stone peeled back into translucent grids, wireframes hovering where concrete should have been. Thin strands of pale green symbols pulsed through the walls like veins. Lines of logic scrolled vertically in the distance, vanishing when she focused too directly on them.
Maren steadied her breathing.
She had crossed a threshold.
“I see you,” she whispered—not to the tunnel, but to whatever ran beneath it.
The lantern in her hand faltered, then corrected. Somewhere, something recalibrated.
She understood the risk now.
Awareness was deviation. Deviation triggered correction.
If she pushed too far—if she tore at the veil—she might be flagged, isolated, deleted. The thought didn’t terrify her the way it should have. What frightened her more was the idea of returning to ignorance. Of walking blindly through a world that was only ever scaffolding.
There was something wrong with the system. She felt it in the stutters, in the way distant sounds sometimes clipped mid-echo. The simulation was strained. Branches colliding. Timelines bleeding.
Silen.
The realization struck her like a current.
If she could see the underlay, then so could he—or soon would. And if he began asking the wrong questions too loudly, the system would notice. It would patch. Reset. Rewrite.
Erase.
Maren closed her eyes and concentrated not on the rendered world, but on the faint hum beneath it. A deeper frequency—like servers thrumming miles away. She imagined tracing it upward, northwest, past the scorched coastline and the skeletal remains of cities.
San Francisco.
The source wasn’t here. The tunnels were only stage dressing.
She opened her eyes and experimentally reached toward the wall. Instead of touching brick, her fingers brushed through a lattice of luminous characters—mathematical, structured, alive. The contact sent a ripple outward. Symbols cascaded away from her hand like disturbed birds.
A warning pulse answered.
The tunnel darkened.
Maren withdrew instantly, forcing her perception to narrow, to reaccept the illusion. The wireframes solidified into stone. The code dissolved back into mortar.
She had to be careful.
If something nefarious was embedded in this system—and she was certain now that it was—then it was sophisticated. It would monitor anomalies. It would hide its true architecture behind layers of narrative and catastrophe.
Wars. Collapses. Reset phases.
Distractions.
“I won’t disappear,” she murmured to herself. “Not quietly.”
She adjusted the lantern and resumed walking, but now her steps were deliberate. She wasn’t just moving through tunnels. She was navigating a rendering engine.
Occasionally she allowed her vision to widen just enough to glimpse the scaffolding—timelines branching like roots above her head, thin threads connecting nodes labeled with names she almost recognized. One pulsed brighter than the others.
Silen.
It flickered, unstable.
Fear cut through her composure. Not fear of death—but of dereferencing. Of his thread being severed and garbage-collected by whatever maintained this world.
She quickened her pace.
The system compensated. The tunnel extended ahead, generating new sections seamlessly. But she noticed now: there was latency. A fraction of delay before new geometry locked into place.
The world was not omnipotent.
It was processing.
And that meant it could fail.
Somewhere above, servers strained. Somewhere, architects—or simulations of architects—scrambled to maintain continuity. But down here, in the dim half-rendered corridors, Maren had become something dangerous.
A variable that knew it was a variable.
She paused at a fork in the tunnel. The left path shimmered faintly—over-optimized, too smooth. The right path showed microfractures in the grid, artifacts of rushed compilation.
She smiled faintly.
The glitch would lead her closer to the truth.
Lantern raised, she stepped toward the instability, determined to reach the root of the system before the system realized just how awake she had become.
