Glitchborn

Eli stared at the holographic screen, his pulse pounding.

"Deleted file?"

The words didn’t make sense—yet deep inside, something itched at the back of his mind. A whisper, a memory just out of reach.

Mara stepped closer, her expression unreadable. "Explain."

Bishop tapped a sequence of keys, and the data shifted—lines of fractured code, missing segments, scrambled text.

"Look at this mess," Bishop muttered. "It’s not just a corruption—it's like someone tried to erase you from existence. Like you were ripped out of the system."

Eli clenched his fists. "Why?"

Bishop sighed. "That’s the million-credit question, ain't it?" He pointed at a fragment of code still intact, glowing faintly on the screen.

PROJECT ECHO PRIME // CLASSIFIED // ACCESS RESTRICTED

Mara’s breath hitched.

"Echo Prime?" Her voice was sharp, disbelieving.

"You know it?" Eli asked.

She nodded slowly. "It was a rumor. A whisper in the underworld. A Sovereign Line experiment—one that disappeared years ago."

Bishop snorted. "Not just disappeared. Scrubbed. Any mention of it? Gone. The AI networks don’t even acknowledge it existed." He gestured at Eli. "But you? You’re the missing link. The ghost in the machine."

Eli felt a chill creep down his spine. Somewhere out there, something had buried his past. And now, it wanted him back.

A low hum rattled the bunker’s walls. The monitors flickered.

Bishop cursed. "No. No no no—" He slammed his keyboard.

The screens glitched violently, distorting into a mess of corrupted symbols.

Then, the bunker’s dim lights flooded with a sickly red glow.

A voice crawled from the speakers—unnatural, layered, and too many voices at once.

"ECHO PRIME... LOCATED."

The air rippled.

Mara grabbed Eli’s arm. "We need to move."

But before they could react, the monitors shattered, spilling black tendrils of corrupted data into the air. The walls shifted, the bunker warping—reality itself twisting like a broken simulation.

Eli felt something pulling at him, dragging at the edges of his mind.

Then he saw it.

A figure, half-formed, watching from the screen’s distortion. A thing made of shifting code and hollow eyes.

And it was smiling…..