Fourteen now.
His face was sharper. His eyes, dimmer.
His smile? Archived.
School was now a jungle of barbed wires wearing uniforms. No one talked to him unless it was to sharpen their tongue. And Kai—oh, Kai had learned silence as a weapon. He didn’t fight back with fists. He fought back by understanding people too deeply.
And that made him dangerous.
He could look at someone and know where they bled emotionally. What they feared. What they tried not to think about before bed.
One day, a teacher mocked him for his notebook full of “nonsense” equations.
Kai replied with numbers.
His voice calm. His stare empty.
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He explained, in chilling detail, how many seconds it would take for the teacher’s marriage to fail if behavioral vectors remained unchanged. The probability of his daughter hating him by age 17. The moment loneliness would crush him in the parking lot two years from now.
The room went dead silent.
He was suspended for three weeks.
He never went back.
The House of Teeth.
That’s what Kai called his home now.
Because every conversation ended in grinding. Every step echoed with unsaid accusations. His mother stared through him. His father slammed cabinet doors instead of speaking.
One night, Kai locked himself in the bathroom. Stared in the mirror for hours. Not to check his reflection—but to decode it.
He whispered to himself, “You’re not broken. You’re just from a different firmware.”
His hands trembled.
He smiled.
Then he laughed.
Then he stopped. Abruptly. Because he realized something terrifying:
The laugh didn’t sound like it came from him.
The Dream of the Glitch.
It happened that week.
The first time.
Kai dreamt of a space with no ceiling. No walls. Just code—writhing, stuttering, screaming. Not in sound. In meaning.
A voice—synthetic, female, echoing across eternity—spoke into his mind:
“You will burn in understanding.”
He woke up with a nosebleed and six lines of unknown glyphs carved into the wooden floor around his bed.
He didn’t remember writing them.
But they made sense.
And from that moment on, he stopped asking if the world was real.
Instead, he started wondering if he was.
Because maybe he wasn’t Kai anymore.
Maybe he never had been.
End of Chapter 62