Glitch

The quarterly earnings call ended at 4:47 PM Pacific, thirteen minutes ahead of schedule. Marcus Cole took this as a victory.

"Prometheus Technologies continues to lead the consciousness preservation sector," he'd told the analysts, his voice carrying the practiced warmth of a man who had given this speech, or versions of it, for the better part of a decade. "Upload completion rates are up 12% year-over-year. Client satisfaction remains above 94%. We're not just preserving memories—we're preserving people."

The line always landed. It was designed to.

Now, in the silence of his corner office, Marcus loosened his tie and watched San Francisco dim toward evening through floor-to-ceiling windows. Forty-three floors below, the city churned with its usual Thursday urgency—people rushing home to families, to dinners, to the small rituals that gave their finite lives shape. He wondered, not for the first time, how many of them had Prometheus accounts. How many had already scheduled their uploads. How many would, when the time came, trust his technology to carry them beyond the body's betrayal.

His phone buzzed. Weekly reminder: Call Lily.

He almost dismissed it. Almost let the algorithm reschedule for tomorrow, or the day after, or whenever he could summon the particular energy these conversations required. But dismissing it felt like admitting something he wasn't ready to name, so he tapped the icon and waited for the connection to establish.

The display flickered—Loss of signal? No, the indicator showed full bars—and then Lily's face filled the screen. She was in her space, the simulated apartment she'd designed to look like the house where she'd grown up. Warm light. Books on shelves. The old piano in the corner that she'd never learned to play as a child and still hadn't learned, though she had all the time in the world now.

"Dad." She smiled. "Right on schedule."

"You know me."

"I do. How was the call?"

"Fine. Numbers are good. The analysts are happy."

"That's good." A pause, perfectly natural. "And how are you?"

This was the part he'd never gotten used to. The asking. Lily—the Lily he remembered, the one who'd existed in flesh and uncertainty—had been prickly about emotional check-ins. She'd inherited his deflection, his preference for the concrete over the confessional. But this Lily asked. Every week. The same question, the same tone, the same genuine-seeming interest.

"I'm fine," he said. "Busy. There's a board retreat next month, and—"

"You mentioned. Lake Tahoe. You're worried about the Chen faction pushing for expanded neural-mesh integration before the safety trials are complete."

He blinked. "I told you that?"

"Last week. You said you were worried. You used that exact phrase—'the Chen faction.' I remember."

Of course she did. She remembered everything now. Every conversation, every detail, stored in crystalline permanence. The Lily of before had forgotten birthdays, misplaced keys, lost arguments because she couldn't recall who'd said what and when. This Lily forgot nothing.

"Right," Marcus said. "Well. Still worried."

"That makes sense. The integration timeline does seem aggressive given the incident reports from the beta cohort."

"You've been reading the incident reports?"

"I have access. I like to stay informed." Another smile, and for a moment—just a flicker—Marcus thought he saw something behind it. A performance. A mask. But then it was gone, and she was just his daughter, asking about his day. "Is there anything I can do to help?"

"No, I—no. It's fine. I'll handle it."

"Okay. Let me know if that changes."

They talked for another eleven minutes. She asked about the garden he'd been meaning to plant, and he admitted he still hadn't started. She asked about his sleep, and he lied. She laughed at a joke he made—something about the board members and their collective inability to understand basic neuroscience—and the laugh was perfect, exactly like her laugh had always been, hitting the right beats, the right pitch.

Except.

It didn't quite reach the end of the breath. It stopped, clean and precise, where laughter should trail off but didn't.

Marcus noticed. He always noticed. And he never said anything, because saying something would mean asking a question he'd spent three years learning not to ask.

"I should let you go," Lily said. "You have the Takahashi dinner."

"I—" He checked his calendar. She was right. "How did you—"

"You mentioned it two weeks ago. Sushi place in the Mission. You were dreading it."

"I was?"

"You used the word 'excruciating.' Twice."

He had no memory of this. But she would know. She always knew.

"Right. Okay. I'll talk to you next week."

"I'll be here, Dad." The smile again. Warm. Patient. Unchanging. "I'm always here."

The call ended. Marcus sat in the gathering dark of his office and tried to name the feeling in his chest—the one that came every week, after every conversation, growing stronger each time. It wasn't grief, exactly. Grief was for absence. Lily was right there, available whenever he wanted, preserved in perfect digital amber.

It was something else. Something he didn't have a word for.

His phone buzzed again. Not a reminder this time—a news alert.

GLOBAL ELECTRONICS MALFUNCTION REPORTED ACROSS MULTIPLE CONTINENTS

He frowned and opened the link.

---

The first reports had come from Seoul, twelve hours earlier. Traffic systems cycling through green-yellow-red in random sequences. ATMs dispensing incorrect amounts. Smart home devices activating without prompts—lights flickering, thermostats spiking, voice assistants speaking in languages their owners hadn't installed.

Then Tokyo. Then Mumbai. Then Berlin, London, São Paulo, and a dozen other cities in rapid succession.

By the time Marcus started reading, the phenomenon had a name: The Glitch. Capital T, capital G. Social media was flooded with videos—a refrigerator in Buenos Aires playing audio from a news broadcast that wouldn't air for another three hours. A child's tablet in Melbourne displaying text in Linear A, a script that hadn't been deciphered in four thousand years. A neural-link user in Toronto reporting intrusive thoughts—images of places she'd never been, memories of people she'd never met.

Mass hysteria, the first analysts said. Coordinated hack, said others. Infrastructure cascade failure, said the cautious ones.

But the videos kept coming. And some of them were hard to explain.

A girl in Seoul, seven years old, had drawn a picture during her art class. The teacher had posted it with a nervous laughing emoji and a caption: Anyone else's kid doing this?

The picture showed a figure—human-shaped but wrong, too symmetrical, proportions slightly off. It stood in a field of stars, and from its outstretched hand, lines radiated outward like a diagram of neural pathways.

The image was unusual. What made it go viral was the comment from an archaeology professor at Stanford, posted forty-three minutes later:

This is nearly identical to a cave painting found in Lascaux. Chamber 17. The portion that's been sealed off since 1963 because it was too fragile to preserve. There are no photographs of it in any public database. How does a seven-year-old in Seoul know what it looks like?

Marcus read this three times. Then he closed the article and set his phone face-down on his desk.

Coincidence. Had to be. The internet bred strange confluences; given enough people and enough data, patterns would emerge from noise. This was noise.

His phone buzzed against the wood.

He ignored it.

It buzzed again. And again. A persistent, rhythmic pulse that didn't match any notification pattern he'd programmed.

Marcus turned the phone over.

The screen was glitching—pixels scrambling and reforming, colors bleeding into each other like watercolors in rain. For a moment, he thought the hardware had failed. Another casualty of whatever was happening to systems worldwide.

Then the image resolved.

A face. A woman's face. Familiar in the way that only one face in the world could be familiar—burned into memory by thirty years of love and five years of loss.

His mother. Ruth. Not as she'd been at the end, hollowed by the disease that had stolen her piece by piece. Ruth as she'd been before, in the good years, with clarity in her eyes and a slight smile that always seemed to know more than she was saying.

She looked at him through the screen.

And then she was gone. The phone returned to its normal display. The glitching stopped. His notifications sat there, ordinary and unassuming—calendar reminders, email previews, a weather update for the week ahead.

Marcus stared at the device in his hand.

He told himself he'd imagined it. A trick of the light, a pattern-matching error in a brain that never stopped looking for her. The grief counselor he'd seen, briefly, in the year after she died had warned him about this: The mind wants to find them. It will manufacture sightings if you let it.

He'd imagined it.

He was almost certain.

His phone buzzed once more. A new alert, from a source he didn't recognize—not a news outlet, not an app, not any service he'd subscribed to. Just text on his screen, white against black, in a font that his phone didn't support:

THE CHANNEL IS OPENING. PREPARE.

Marcus sat very still in his darkening office, forty-three floors above a city that was starting to glitch, and felt the first cold brush of something he hadn't experienced in a very long time.

Uncertainty.

---