Selina’s hands shook as she jammed the key into the ignition, her breath coming in ragged bursts. The engine spluttered, caught, and roared to life, the sound startlingly loud in the night. Rosa yanked the passenger door shut.
Neither of them spoke as Selina slammed the car into reverse, spinning them out onto the lane. Gravel spat against the wheel arches. The looming hedgerow, a black wall against the starless sky, blurred into a green-grey streak as she wrenched the car forward.
Rosa twisted in her seat, peering through the rear window. Nothing moved among the skeletal trees. No telltale beams of headlights. But the feeling of pursuit clung to her like damp air.
“We should have grabbed more stuff,” Selina muttered, fingers white-knuckled on the wheel. “Like, I don’t know, evidence? Something to actually…”
“LumiGard has enough,” Rosa interrupted. She kept her eyes on the mirror. “It'll have what we need.”
“Yeah, right! So we trust the rogue AI hijacking everything around us?” Selina let out a sharp breath, shaking her head. “Because that’s worked out so well for us so far. We just got hunted through your home by armed men. Before that, we kicked off an AI deathmatch between the Infinity NexUs’ assistant and the Barncar Auditant, which half the world has probably seen by now. And what was all of that for? To save a bunch of monkeys that - oh, wait - might not even be real. And, just to top everything off, I have to seriously consider the possibility that you might not be real either.” She gripped the wheel tighter, her voice dropping into something bitter and exhausted. “Yeah. I feel great about trusting LumiGard.”
Rosa didn’t answer. They hit the main road, winding away from the house, away from the last fragile sense of normalcy. The road was empty, stretching ahead in eerie stillness. No streetlights. No houses. Just black trees pressing in on either side.
Selina moaned. “So where do we even go?”
Rosa opened her mouth to answer, but had nothing. She folded her arms tightly, finally circling back to what worried her most. "You think I just vanished? Like, my actual body? And then popped back into existence?" She let out a strained laugh. "You must have - mis-seen it. Like, maybe I was still sitting there, but your brain - I don’t know, failed to register me for a moment?"
Selina’s expression didn’t change.
Rosa exhaled sharply. "Okay, fine. Maybe something else happened. Maybe I slumped over, like deep-trance levels of immersion, and you thought I wasn’t there because you weren’t expecting me to be. Or, or - what if the VR rig interfered with your perception? Some kind of afterimage effect? You know how sometimes you see a bright light and it stays burned into your vision? Maybe the opposite happened - maybe some kind of optical illusion."
Selina just raised an eyebrow.
"Okay, fine," Rosa huffed, rubbing her temples. "Maybe it wasn’t your eyes. What about... a timing issue? Maybe you logged off and there was a split-second delay between when you saw the room and when I actually disengaged. Like, a very bad desync. Or - or maybe I…"
"Rosa."
She shut up.
Selina tilted her head. "I looked at your chair. It was empty. I stared at it. And then you appeared."
Rosa swallowed. "That’s not…" She stopped herself. Her mind felt like it had short-circuited, caught between instinctively rejecting the absurdity and the sheer weight of Selina’s certainty.
"It happened," Selina said simply.
Rosa shook her head, but it wasn’t in disagreement - it was just the only thing she could do.
A noise then.
Something like a breath stretched and warped. The infotainment screen flickered.
Then, in the dash display, a keystroke.
A single letter - in silence.
A pause.
Then another. Both women saw it.
Not a word. Just stray, orphaned characters, appearing in stuttering flashes on the screen. M - A - then nothing, as if whatever was writing had hesitated, reconsidered. The letters dissolved, replaced by static crawling in slow waves.
“Now what?” Selina groaned, trying to keep her eyes on the road.
The speakers clicked. A burst of sound. Not quite a voice - more like a thousand whispers collapsing into a breath.
Then, buried beneath the distortion…
What could almost be a monkey’s scream.
Rosa flinched.
The screen rippled. Lines of text flickered - nonsense, symbols, the scrambled wreckage of a corrupted file. But in the mess, something was forming.
A glimpse…
S.
Gone.
For a fraction of a second, an image - no, a shadow - flickered into existence. Hunched, indistinct, shifting like a figure behind frosted glass.
Another scream - closer this time, layered over a voice.
“…learning the truth…”
The infotainment display spasmed. The letters reappeared, warped, doubling over themselves - S, S, S, S - multiplying like a corrupted file until they filled the screen.
And suddenly…
The video began.
The car lurched as Selina tried to drive and watch. Headlights flared on the hedge as she swerved.
A table. People. All at a steep angle on the screen as if recorded on a discarded device.
Rosa sucked in a breath.
The feed was smeared with digital artifacts, its details unnaturally blurred - yet the figures remained unmistakable.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
Art Numier sat at the long table, skeletal hands steepled, his high-tech wheelchair pulled close. His body was a tangle of wires and tubes, threading from his skull and spine into the chair’s frame, his hollowed face barely more than a death mask. The glow of embedded diagnostics flickered across his wasted form, pulsing in time with some unseen system.
At the far end of the table stood Orin Fane, his silhouette sharp against the dim, shifting light. He was unnervingly still, hands clasped behind his back, the woven circuitry of his gloves gleaming faintly.
And between them, perched on the table, claws rapping impatiently against the metal, was a three-foot-tall white rat.
It leaned forward, pink eyes burning, whiskers twitching in irritation. “You're dragging your feet, Art.” Its voice was a rasping snarl, a sound too big for its small frame. “We should’ve put it down yesterday.”
The video lagged, the rat’s lips still moving after the words had landed.
“…needs to be controlled. One of the Cebus first.”
Rosa’s hands clenched in her lap.
The feed stuttered.
Now Fane was closer.
She hadn’t seen him move.
“We need to be sure before we act on the larger problem.”
The lighting shifted - not dimming, but subtly distorting, as if bleeding through from another layer of reality. Numier’s face stretched the width of a breath, just enough to make the stomach twist.
The rat bared its teeth, tail lashing. “LumiGard’s already in pieces. We strike now.” Its claws scraped against the table in an ugly, rhythmic pattern. “Or are you losing control?”
Numier’s voice followed a second later, eerily detached. “The fact that LumiGard has begun partitioning itself…”
“You mean your monkey has,” the rat cut in.
A whisper - no, a breath - exhaled from the speakers.
Selina flinched, looking for a place to pull off the road.
“Yes. He’s certainly interfering… slipping through our firewalls…”
The image glitched again.
Now Numier’s eyes were on them.
Like he knew they were watching.
Selina’s pulse jumped. “Turn it off.”
Rosa didn’t move.
“We need to test first,” Numier breathed.
The rat’s grin was all needle teeth. “Enough tests.” Its fingers curled, claws clacking against one another. “One dead Cebus. One dead glitch. Then we see what’s left standing.”
Fane’s voice cut in, steady and deliberate. “We mean to disengage one, not kill it. We need to be sure the entire system can be relocated without it breaking apart.”
Numier’s voice, distorted now. “If separating a single Cebus destabilises the AI’s core, we rethink the transfer. If not…”
The video stuttered.
The rat’s laughter was a low, glitching chitter. “We eliminate the trouble maker.”
Then the video cut out, leaving a single word, glitching among static: HURRY.
Selina slammed the brakes. The car skidded to a stop on the gravel, throwing them forward in their seats. Silence rushed in like a vacuum.
Outside, the night stretched, vast and listening. Somewhere beyond the road, a bird let out a thin, warbling cry.
Selina swallowed, fingers locked around the wheel. “What was that?”
Rosa barely heard her. She stared at the jittering screen, the rat’s words echoing in her head.
Eliminate the trouble maker.
She swallowed. “They’re talking about killing Gum.”
Selina let out a humorless laugh. “Or LumiGard. Or us! Or all of the above. You know what? Maybe we should just get out and let them have their experiment.”
Rosa turned to her, heat rising in her chest. “Walk away? From what?”
“From all of it!” Selina barked. “From this absolute nightmare! From the maybe-monkeys and the maybe-AI and…” she waved a hand wildly, “...the maybe-rat!”
She yanked at her ponytail, fingers unsteady as she tightened the band on her hair.
“I mean, that thing - we saw it in the NexUs, right? In that ridiculous Liberation Expo? They called it a liberant, whatever that means. And now it’s here? In real life? Giving out death warrants like a crime boss?”
Rosa pressed her fingers to her temple. “I don’t know.”
“Yeah? Well, let’s add that to the list then, right?” Selina’s voice climbed higher. “Because you know what else I don’t know? If the monkeys are real. If any of this is real. Because - correct me if I’m wrong - you literally materialised out of nothing when we logged off from Dolphin’s Barncar. Which is…” she released a helpless laugh, “...a teensy, tiny, little problem when it comes to, you know, basic reality!”
Rosa stiffened.
Selina gave a sharp shake of her head. “Look, I get that we’re in deep, I do. But what's even real, Rosa?” She swallowed hard. “Are you?”
A long silence settled between them.
Rosa pressed her hands into her lap. They were shaking.
She forced her voice steady. “I feel real.”
Selina’s throat worked as she swallowed. “Yeah?” She exhaled slowly. “Then tell me why I - why I - saw you appear. Tell me why we’re hearing rats order assassinations. Tell me why we're being led about by mysterious black monkeys.”
Rosa just blinked.
Something twisted in her chest.
The road outside looked empty and black, swallowed by hedgerows and twisted trees. In the distance, something yelped - a fox, maybe - its cry thin and reedy in the stillness. The world felt unreal - flattened, stretched, like a half-rendered simulation struggling to load.
Selina’s fingers relaxed slightly on the wheel, she turned off the engine, eyes on the dead dashboard screen. She was still rattled, still trying to force some sense onto the chaos. "I mean it, Rosa. Why are we listening to that thing? Every time LumiGard speaks, it just dumps more cryptic nonsense on us. Maybe it’s just - just…" she floundered for the right words, "...some kind of noise, you know? Like, screaming into the void, and we’re stupid enough to keep listening."
Rosa too stared at the darkened infotainment screen. It felt like something was still watching them from behind it.
The silence was vast. The car ticked in the cooling night, its warmth fading into the damp air. Beyond the narrow road, mist curled in restless tendrils, bending the hedgerows into shifting, uncertain shapes.
Selina wasn't surprised when the display flickered with tiny yellow lights. Thin, luminous filaments, weaving together in slow, coruscating ripples. A pattern, delicate and intricate, unfolding like the breath of something immense and unseen. What did surprise her was the rearview mirror.
The same golden light.
Behind the car, through the misted glass, golden glimmers danced in the night, swirling like embers caught in an unseen tide. Rosa twisted in her seat, eyes wide.
Neither woman spoke.
Selina reached for the door first. The click of the handle impossibly loud in the hush, she stepped out into the stillness. Rosa followed, shoes soft against the tarmac as the world outside swallowed her footsteps.
Behind the car little lights hung in the air above the road, shifting like an ephemeral constellation, weightless yet utterly present. Not sparks. Not glitches.
Fireflies?
Hundreds of them - whirling in slow, deliberate spirals, their glow pulsing in careful sequence, not in chaotic bursts but in something measured. Something beckoning.
Selina’s breath was unsteady. “That’s…” She trailed off, her voice barely above a whisper.
Rosa’s gaze never left the luminous shapes, her lips parting in disbelief. “Not possible,” she murmured, her voice soft, like she was afraid to disturb the beauty unfolding before them.
Selina tore her gaze away, blinking as if the motion might reset the world into something ordinary. “Fireflies don’t live here,” she said.
“They don’t,” Rosa agreed. “So…”
Selina exhaled, pulling her jacket tight against the chill of the night. “So what are we seeing?”
Rosa swallowed, her fingers tightening at her sides. “This could be… I don’t know. A projection? Something artificial?”
“Like some VR overlay? A bleed-through?” Selina’s voice was hushed, uncertain. “Could LumiGard do this? Or…” She altered, looking tired.
The fireflies - or whatever they were - did not scatter. They did not drift away into the night as they should have, as any ordinary creatures would. Instead, they hovered, their glow reflecting in Rosa’s wide eyes.
The car boot clicked open.
And, as if some unseen thread had tightened between them, they moved.
Not randomly. Not aimlessly.
Together.
They spiraled down, slow and deliberate, curling into the boot like a ribbon unwinding in water. One by one, they settled - silent, weightless, forming a halo of flickering gold upon a single object in the otherwise unremarkable space.
Selina’s portable headset. Used for meetings, for last minute shopping, for skimming through the curated digital ghostlands of a life that had once felt so straightforward.
It sat there, unremarkable in its shape, straps slightly twisted from being tossed in among other forgotten things, now clothed in light.
Selina exhaled. She reached for it, hesitating just before her fingers touched the smooth surface.
The fireflies did not move.
The glow of their bodies cast shifting shadows across her hands, across the headset, across the dark curve of the boot’s interior. The night itself seemed to fold around them, poised on some invisible threshold, waiting.
Rosa swallowed.
“They're… guiding us,” she murmured.
Selina’s fingers finally closed around the headset, lifting it from its resting place.
The fireflies rose, spiraling up, dispersing in slow, liquid arcs, their glow trailing like the last echoes of something half-remembered, something too delicate to hold. And they were gone.
A breeze stirred.
Selina turned the headset over in her hands. Her voice, when it came, was barely above the hush of the wind.
“…What are we supposed to do?”
