Everything is white.

  Not the neutral white of infirmaries, nor the faint blue tint of administrative corridors. This is a raw, overexposed white that eats distance. There are no shadows. No corner for the eye to rest. Just light, flattening everything into the same dead brightness.

  If it weren’t for the table and the chair, the room could be a loading error. Walls, floor, ceiling all feel cast from the same seamless material, as if someone poured a single block of matter, then carved out a hollow in the middle and called it a room.

  At the exact center sits a gray metal table. A single chair. No camera visible, no mirror, no vent. Just those two objects, dropped into the void like someone dragged them in from another file.

  I’m in the chair.

  Too straight. My spine feels like it has been replaced with a rod. My shoulders are locked. Every muscle that tries to relax bounces off the brightness and tenses again. My wrists rest against the surface; the metal is so cold it feels sterile, humming faintly up through the bones of my forearms, as if the table is trying to find my frequency and cancel it.

  Around my left arm, the biometric band clings tight enough that I can feel my pulse pushing against it. It does not hurt, but there is that constant pressure, like a thumb on a bruise. Its light pulses at steady intervals, a green blink brushing the inside of my vision every second.

  A translucent cable runs from the band to a small dock welded into the table, the kind of object that looks harmless until someone explains what it actually does. The dock itself is silent, no fan, no noise, just a faint internal glow, like there is a captured storm inside it.

  Above it floats the holographic readout.

  It does not flicker. It does not lag. It just hangs there, perfectly stable, perfectly indifferent, casting a thin rectangle of light over the hair on my arm.

  KAI VIREK — STUDENT

  R: 4.01

  My name looks wrong in all caps, too loud, too official. The digits after the R blink once, then freeze again, as if the system has already judged me and decided I am not interesting enough to move.

  Beneath my name, a vertical bar rises and falls in green. It syncs so well with my heartbeat that I cannot tell which one is leading. The more I try not to think about it, the louder it becomes, heartbeat, bar up, heartbeat, bar down. If I stare at the numbers long enough, it almost feels like they are staring back.

  Across from me sit the two Sentinels.

  The first looks like a walking manual. Uniform pristine, insignia perfectly centered, posture rigid enough to be load?bearing. His face allows nothing through, like someone uninstalled the “expression” feature at birth.

  The second looks like he forgot what posture is. One leg hooked over the other, back slightly slouched. He twirls a stylus between his fingers, plastic clicking softly against skin, sometimes tapping the table as if he is bored enough today to use my stress as background music. Even my pulse seems to entertain him.

  “We can begin,” the first says.

  His voice is flat, calibrated. He adjusts his insignia with a sharp movement, as though the fabric needs to be aligned before I do.

  "We began when he sat down,” the other replies. “Now we are just giving it a title screen.”

  The first does not react. He brushes the table with two fingers, very precise, like he is swiping dust that is not there. An interface unfolds between us, slicing the pale space into clean layers of data.

  “Location.”

  A frozen image of Skyplaza appears. Oversaturated colors, crowd stuck mid?motion.

  “Time.”

  Numbers cascade beneath my name.

  “Purpose.”

  He lifts his eyes to me. Same temperature as the room.

  “Skyplaza. Seventeen forty?two. Major incident. Three confirmed injuries. Structural damage. Crowd panic. Café Parallax identified as point of origin.”

  On his badge I finally read his name. SENTINEL R. HALE. The R could stand for rigid.?

  The stylus in the other one’s hand slows, then stops. He squints at the image like it is a trailer he has watched too many times. His badge is slightly crooked.

  “I liked that place,” he says. “Weird vibe, but the synthetic chocolate did not taste like printer ink, which is rare. Jace Hale, by the way. He is Hale too, but I got the fun genes.”

  The first does not blink.

  “Kai Virek. Where were you at seventeen forty?two?”

  My throat tightens. The overhead glare presses against my skull, slips behind my eyes.

  “I was—”

  “Location.”

  The word snaps like a system command.

  “At Café Parallax.”

  The green bar speeds up a little, but stays green.

  “Purpose.”

  I hesitate. The brightness flattens everything, makes memory slippery, like it is trying to open me one pixel at a time.

  “The school validated a medical absence,” Hale says, without leaving me space. “Anxiety episode. Medical center recommended.”

  He adjusts his insignia again, thumb dragging along the edge, checking the alignment like it is a weapon sight. The gesture fits his name. Everything about him is calibration.

  “Yet your band places you at Café Parallax.”

  The other Hale leans closer to the hologram, elbows on the table as if this was a casual hangout.

  “And this thing,” he says, tapping the detector dock with his stylus, “does it do medical centers too, or just Christmas decorations and cardiac drama? Asking for a friend.”

  “Do not touch the device, Officer J. Hale ,” the first says.

  “I am not touching it, Officer R. Hale,” the other answers. “I am establishing a connection. Big difference.”

  Heat crawls up my neck. I swallow. It tastes like metal.

  “I was with someone,” I say.

  The stylus freezes mid?air. Jace’s eyes light up.

  “Oh,” he says, suddenly interested. “Social link detected. Finally something fun in this shift.”

  “Identity,” Hale asks.

  “Maya. Maya Ren. A classmate.”

  The bar remains steady.

  “Maya Ren has confirmed your shared presence at Café Parallax,” Hale says. “Same time. Same table.”

  Relief cuts through me, brief and guilty. A pocket of air in a pressurized chamber.

  “At this point,” Jace adds, “if you are both lying, at least you rehearsed. That is basically romance by system standards. Congratulations, you unlocked Couple Mode.”

  My ears burn. The word romance floats over the table like a notification I cannot close.

  “We are not here to comment,” Hale says.

  He studies me longer now. It feels like he is searching for rendering glitches behind my pupils.

  “In the café. Immediately before the incident. Do you recall anything unusual?”

  I breathe in. The glare sinks with the air into my lungs.

  “I was with Maya. We were talking. It was… normal. Just a café.”

  Inside my head, normal fractures.

  The music did not stop. It twisted.

  A high, surgical whine drilled straight between my ribs. Amber ceiling lines bled into pulsing red. A service drone froze mid?motion, tray hovering, its head snapping sideways with a brittle crack.

  What followed was not silence. It was a charged vacuum, like the air itself had slipped out of tune.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Sitting there. Or standing. The red light devoured half his face. His voice lagged half a beat behind his mouth, like it had to cross a filter nobody else could see.

  I shove the image away so hard it bounces.

  “The music changed,” I say. “There was a sound. Not an explosion. A… dissonance.”

  The green bar wavers, then steadies.

  “Clarify,” Hale says.

  “Like something malfunctioned. All at once. Like reality missed a frame and tried to catch up.”

  Jace leans back, chair tilting dangerously. He ignores the warning icon blinking near his foot in the HUD.

  “Reality hiccup,” he says. “Love those. They make the reports less boring.”

  Hale triggers another display.

  “Interior feed. North angle.”

  Footage plays. Slight tremor in the image. People pouring out, hands over their heads, bodies stumbling over chairs and each other. Mouths open, but the sound has been eaten by white noise.

  I spot myself before they say anything. I see myself stand, hesitate, look for Maya. I see her turn, searching for me.

  “You exit together,” Hale says. “You leave the zone.”

  Another gesture. New angle. A secondary mall entrance. Maya and I move fast, our bodies all sharp lines and tension. Zoom.

  “No fox,” Hale says.

  My heart skips. The green bar stutters, then recovers.

  “Yet subsequent footage shows the animal with you,” he continues.

  Jace smiles, eyes narrowing, predator and comedian at the same time.

  “So the fox spawned between cameras,” he says. “Teleportation perk? Parallax buff? Secret DLC we did not get? I am feeling left out.”

  “Animals are not allowed in the café,” I say. “I left him further inside the mall, out of the way. When everything… dissonated… I went back for him. I was not going to leave him there.”

  Green. Still green.

  Hale adjusts his insignia hard enough that the seam almost creaks.

  “Table.”

  “East wall. Three meters from the entrance. Two tables away from the bar.”

  “Consumption.”

  “Synthetic vanilla latte. Maya had iced tea.”

  “Timeline.”

  I list it. Arrival. Order. Background music. That exact point where it all tipped. The hum of the projector and the faint breathing of the Sentinels fill the gaps.

  “So,” Jace says, “to recap: free pass to the medical center, traded for caffeine and a minor collapse of reality. Very teenage of you. I respect the commitment.”

  A sharp tone cuts the air.

  “Forty?five minutes elapsed,” the system announces.

  Hale hesitates. Just enough time to feel his doubt.

  “We will contact you if necessary,” he says.

  When I stand, my legs feel hollow. The floor does not make a sound under my steps, and somehow that is worse. In the corridor, the pallor follows me, burned into the backs of my eyelids.

  “Free advice,” Jace says, walking beside me for a few paces. “Skipping class to impress someone feels great for about an hour. Then the system catches up and you are just grounded, interrogated, and still single.”

  The door seals shut behind me.

  “He is hiding something,” Hale says.

  “Of course he is hiding something,” Jace answers. “He is a teenager. If he was not hiding anything, I would be worried. Also this detector changes color if someone remembers they have taxes, or parents, or both. Super scientific.”?

  Silence stretches.

  “Truth is not the point,” Hale says at last. “Pressure is.”

  Jace spins the stylus again, the plastic clicking against his fingers.

  “And yet,” he says, “you still adjust your badge every time the bar stays green. One day, we should put you under that thing. For science.”

  Hale ignores the bait. The detector’s interface fades to black, leaving only the ghost of Kai’s name in Jace’s memory.

  Jace tilts his head toward the empty chair.

  “You heard him, though,” he adds. “Dissonance. Kids these days do not learn that word in basic curriculum. They barely learn how to spell ‘test’ without an emoji.”

  Hale does not look up from the file he is closing.

  “Vocabulary can be acquired from public feeds,” he says. “FluxClip. FluxLine. Thousands of videos. Music breakdowns. Amateur psycho?analysis. He could have picked it up anywhere.”

  “Sure,” Jace says. “Anywhere.”

  He lets the stylus roll once more between his fingers, eyes on the darkened dock where the cable still lies.

  “But if it was ‘anywhere’,” he murmurs, “why did it sound like he had heard it from inside the noise, not from a comment section?”

  Hale finally glances at him.

  “Are you suggesting prior exposure to Parallax influence?”

  “I am suggesting,” Jace says, smile fading just a little, “that when a kid in a white box calls it dissonance before we do, maybe your FluxClip theory is not the most interesting explanation.”

  Hale snaps the file shut.

  “Then we add one line,” he says. “VIREK, KAI — TERM USAGE ANOMALY. Monitor content sources.”

  Jace nods, but the doubt does not leave his face.

  “Yeah,” he says. “Monitor content sources.”

  He pockets the stylus.

  “And maybe,” he adds under his breath, “monitor who is teaching them words the system did not put in the textbook.”

  The room stays white for a second longer than it should. The dock hums once, a tiny surge of power, then powers down with a soft click. Kai’s name dissolves from the air, pixel by pixel, until only the empty chair remains.

  The door hisses open behind them.

  Another student steps in. His High-tier uniform is almost right but not quite, the cut cleaner and the blue insets humming on a different grid, his eyes still too wide, trying not to look scared. The system has already pulled up a new header above the table

  XANDER THORNE — STUDENT

  R: 5.5

  Jace sighs.

  “Next episode,” he says.

  Hale straightens his badge.

  “Next subject,” he corrects.

  The door seals again, swallowing the outside world in white.

  At school, the name pops back up.

  The classroom HUD sits pinned at the top of my vision:

  KAI VIREK — ABSENT (PENDING JUSTIFICATION)?

  Of course.

  My own score flickers just beside my name, a faint little ghost of numbers in the corner.

  NOLAN COLE — PRESENT

  R: 4.19

  Not high enough. Just high enough that the system demands effort and refuses to say thank you.?

  The HUD collapses with a blink when I swipe it away. The world widens, and I am not really in a classroom anymore. I am in the NovaHelix auditorium.

  It used to be a simple school theater. Now it looks like someone fed the blueprints into an AI and said: make it impressive. Tiered rows of seats curve around the stage in a wide arc, climbing high under a dark ceiling laced with Skylume strips. The seats are soft and reactive, their fabric shifting tint with the ambient lighting. Every armrest hides a HUD port; plug in, and the show plugs back into you.?

  The stage is a wide black plate in the center, a clean rectangle that can turn transparent, reflective, or vanish under holograms, depending on what the system decides. Right now it is in rehearsal mode: no audience, half?power lights, illusions turned down. Just raw structure.

  Above the stage, drone projectors hang in layered grids, like metallic swarms frozen mid?flight. Some drift slowly along rails, recalibrating angles. Others float in place, lenses closed, tiny status LEDs breathing in soft blues and greens.

  Backstage is where I live.

  Cables snake across the floor in controlled chaos, feeding into server towers that line the rear wall. The towers hum like caged beehives, a constant low vibration in my chest. Transparent panels reveal the guts inside: data cores pulsing with faint light, cooling systems whispering. To one side, a cluster of Skylume nodes throws test patterns into the air, floating grids, color gradients, lines of code that unfold and fold back in on themselves.?

  I stand in the middle of it with a tool belt around my waist and a ladder at my side, watching the system churn.

  I am the Flux Operator.

  The job title sounds cooler than it feels. I am the one in the technical shadows, the one keeping drones from colliding, servers from overheating, Skylume from turning into a migraine generator five minutes before a performance. If the end?of?year play crashes in front of the entire school, no one will remember the director. They will remember the guy who broke reality on stage.

  Out on the main stage, the Halo Club’s set for the final performance is half?built. Benches rise in staggered rows, not plain wood but sleek composite with thin light lines along the edges. When they light up, they can pass for an old theater, a courtroom, a train station, whatever the script needs. Right now they are just dark silhouettes, props waiting to be told who they are.?

  Behind them, vertical Skylume panels stand like translucent pillars. During the show, they will bloom with cityscapes, constellations, layers of data. Today they mostly show calibration grids and error codes whenever someone screams loud enough.

  That someone is Liora.

  She stands on stage, center left, hands on her hips, hair caught in the glow of a half?open spotlight. The badge on her chest reads HALO CLUB — ARTISTIC DIRECTOR, as if anyone here could possibly forget. She turns in place, taking in the benches, the panels, the drones, all of it, like a queen inspecting a kingdom that refuses to line up properly.

  “We are three weeks from the end?of?year show and that rig is still misaligned,” she says, pointing up at one of the side arrays. “If the left wing looks like a cheap glitch and the right wing is perfect, we do not look experimental, we look incompetent.”

  Her voice carries across the empty rows, bounces off the back wall, rides over the server hum. A first?year at the edge of the stage flinches and stares down at their tablet, as if the screen might shield them.

  My mouth kicks in before my brain.

  “Or we call it an artistic choice,” I say. “Half?stable reality. Very on theme.”

  The word theme is barely out when my bracelet tightens.

  Not much. Just enough to drive a thin, cold spike under my skin. A red flash cuts across the edge of my vision, like a tiny lightning strike in the HUD.

  UNRESOLVED VERBAL CONFLICT

  –0.02

  The sting vanishes almost immediately, replaced by an odd hollow feeling in my chest, as if something has been pulled out of me.?

  NOLAN COLE — PRESENT

  R: 4.17

  I grit my teeth. My arm keeps the ghost of the pressure wrapped around the bracelet.

  Liora turns toward me in one clean, practiced movement.

  “Nolan, if I wanted commentary, I would put it in the script,” she says. “I asked for a clean halo on the left. Not a philosophy elective.”

  I do not answer. I haul the ladder under the faulty lighting rig. The rungs scrape lightly against the stage, the sound swallowed by the steady drone of the servers. New LED bars rest on my shoulder, still wrapped in thin protective film that smells like plastic and ozone.

  Above me, the drone grid shifts in a subtle ripple to give me space, tracking my movement with quiet sensor pings. Skylume knows me. It has my access level memorized. By the time I reach the base of the rig, a notification is already waiting in my peripheral vision.

  MAINTENANCE REQUEST — HALO ARRAY L3

  PRIORITY:

  I climb. The auditorium shrinks below, rows of seats turning into neat patterns, Liora into a bright little figure pacing and gesturing at invisible actors. The rig metal is warm under my hands from being on all morning.

  I unclip the dead LED segment. It comes away with a small, brittle crackle. The new bar slides into place with a satisfying click, connectors locking cleanly. The instant it seats, my bracelet vibrates.

  Not like before. Not that cold bite. This is a softer buzz, almost pleasant, rolling up my forearm. I know this one so well my body barely registers it anymore. It is just background.

  INFRASTRUCTURE UPDATE VALIDATED+0.06 — NETWORK CONTRIBUTION

  The numbers reshuffle in the corner of my HUD.

  NOLAN COLE — PRESENT

  R: 4.23

  I let out a breath I had not realized I was holding.

  I feel the penalties. The bonuses are just… breathing. As long as they keep happening, I barely notice them.?

  I earn more points by swapping out lights than by opening my mouth. Perfect. Peak system logic.

  Down below, Liora raises her voice again.

  “Remember,” she says to the others, “this is not just theatre. This is NovaHelix on public stream. Parents, sponsors, external evaluators, everyone will be watching. The Halo Club does not glitch. Ever.”

  The drones drift in a slow, rehearsed arc over the benches. Test patterns sweep across the Skylume pillars, washing the stage in brief waves of color. For a second I picture every seat full, hundreds of HUDs open, hundreds of little scores ticking up or down with every beat we miss.

  In the corner of my vision, the classroom HUD still lingers, small and stubborn.

  KAI VIREK — ABSENT (PENDING JUSTIFICATION)

  Even when he is not here, Kai sits at the center of the system.?