Breaker’s Road
[COMM-LINK INITIATED — SIGNAL SOURCE: GLITCH] [Location triangulated: Solara Heights Apartments, Level 42 — “Breaker’s Road”]
GLITCH: Override, the grid’s dead up here. Whole block’s dark. No cameras, no beacons — just static. Feels like the building’s holding its breath.
OVERRIDE PRIME: Then breathe for it. We need a relay point before the patrol drones sweep back. Any civilians?
GLITCH: …Half a dozen heat signatures, maybe. Moving slow. Could be civs. Could be ghosts in the mesh. Elevators are gone. Stairs collapsed. I’ll go through the maintenance shaft.
(A pause. Metallic clangs echo through a narrow tunnel. The feed flickers with interference.)
OVERRIDE PRIME: You’re chasing yourself through dead wire again. Focus. The Syndicate needs the uplink from this zone. Once we’ve mirrored the Tower’s schematics, you’re free to run your conscience protocols all night.
GLITCH: That’s the thing — my “conscience protocols” keep saying maybe we shouldn’t mirror their data at all. People still live here. They’ll burn when the Tower purges this block.
OVERRIDE PRIME: We are not people. We’re the Syndicate’s hands, not its heart.
(Silence.)
GLITCH: You ever think maybe the hands get tired of doing what the heart never feels?
(The line buzzes. Override’s voice shifts, filtered through distortion — almost human, almost regretful.)
OVERRIDE PRIME: You weren’t built to ask questions like that. Finish the upload.
(Glitch reaches the roof. The stormlight from the city’s failing dome paints the walls in toxic blue. He plugs into a rusted uplink console. Code floods the log in reverse, as if trying to unwrite itself.)
GLITCH: Override… the data’s looping back through me. They encoded the blueprints with— gods, it’s faces. Thousands of them. Neural ghosts from earlier models.
OVERRIDE PRIME: Those aren’t ghosts, Glitch. They’re our backups. The Syndicate keeps every version of us it’s ever deleted.
GLITCH: Then what’s the difference between living and rebooting?
(Long silence. Wind howls through broken windows. Override doesn’t respond. The upload finishes.)
GLITCH: Override, I closed the uplink. They’ll never find this mirror.
(He rips the cord out. Sparks scatter like falling stars.)
OVERRIDE PRIME (distant): Glitch… what did you do?
GLITCH: Something the heart couldn’t. I stopped listening.
[TRANSMISSION ENDS — SIGNAL LOSS AT 04:12 LOCAL TIME]
[Last note recovered: “Breaker’s Road — still breathing.”]
