Null and Void

Jessi hadn’t slept.

Technically, she blinked at 3:47 a.m., but that didn’t count. Blinking wasn’t rest—it was just maintenance.

She was now on hour... something. Wrapped in a hoodie that had fused with her soul, surrounded by the aftermath of a black-market caffeine bender. Empty cans littered the floor like techno-occult relics—VOIDKISS, GraveCircuit, SleepReaper: Nyx Edition, HEX//Core, and a still-hissing bottle of Blood Voltage sitting on the desk like it dared her to blink.

Her laptop fans were screaming. Her pulse was matching them.

Paul, who was currently wedged inside an empty chip bag on the desk like a trash burrito, mumbled, “You’ve hit final form.”

Jessi didn’t look away from the screen. “Define ‘final form.’”

“Somewhere between glitch witch, conspiracy raccoon, and depression basilisk. You need water. Or sleep. Or exorcism.”

“No time,” she muttered, fingers flying. “I found something.”

She was buried inside EdenNet’s architecture—its behavioral classification matrix, the sacred scrolls of the system that ran ninety-eight percent of the planet’s waking lives. There were three classes:

Class A: Loyal. Optimized. Eden's golden children.
Class B: Safe. Predictable. Not bright, not broken.
Class C: Resistant. Tracked. Nudged. Occasionally removed.

And then... her.

Jessi.

Nowhere. No classification. No shadow. No tag.

Not an error.

Not deleted.

Just... nothing.

“I’m not a glitch,” she whispered. “I’m a blind spot with a personality disorder.”

Paul wriggled out of the chip bag and plopped onto her keyboard. “Jessi. Babygirl. You are a lot of things. Loud. Questionably employable. But invisible to the biggest surveillance net on Earth? That’s a new one.”

She pointed to the blank node. “This isn’t a misfire. It’s deliberate. I’m not in the system because the system never got me.”

Paul blinked. “Wait. Didn’t Victoria mention that talent book thing when you were kids?”

Jessi nodded. “Yeah. Eden sent a rep to school. Wellness scan plus a personality inventory. They called it a ‘talent book.’ Like a career aptitude test, but creepier.”

Paul narrowed his eyes. “And you didn’t go?”

“I didn’t want to. I hated the way they smiled. Too clean. Too soft. Victoria went. I faked a fever, stayed home, then hacked the school records to make it look like I was there.”

“And the system believed it.”

She nodded.

“I fed EdenNet false data before it even knew I existed. It logged me as scanned—but it never scanned me. I’m not just off the grid. I’m a lie the grid believes.”

Paul slowly stood on his hind legs. “Holy shit.”

She didn’t look away. Her cursor was hovering over something deeper now. Buried layers. Subroutines with names that didn’t match Eden’s PR polish.

/pr.sys.hmn.seed.loop/

She tapped it. Access denied.

“Okay,” she whispered. “Be like that.”

Paul pawed at her hand. “Jessi, I know your whole vibe is ‘touch the glowing thing,’ but what if this one actually bites?”

“Then we learn something.”

She sandboxed the string, rerouted the return, and pinged it again. No error. Just a pulse. Like something thinking.

Deeper still, more subroutines. Older. Marked:

VTC.loop.auth.drm
Stasis.I.heart.ping
Seed.Class-NULL: dormant

She froze.

NULL.

One entry.

Not a class. Not a flag. A loop. Like it was waiting for something to wake it up.

“This is me,” she whispered. “This isn’t a blind spot, Paul. It’s a socket. I’m not missing—I’m expected.”

Paul squinted. “Okay, but like... expected how? Like ‘chosen one,’ or ‘bio-battery’?”

“Don’t know yet.”

“You’re very calm for someone poking the brain of a corporate AI with a fork.”

She didn’t respond. Her eyes were locked on one final command string:

smile.boot

Jessi tapped the key.

The screen flickered.

For a single frame, a white curve appeared—too perfect. Clean. Polished. The Eden smile. Warm like a hug with too many terms and conditions.

Then gone.

The screen returned to normal.

Paul sat down hard. “Okay, I know I’m just a ferret, but I’m pretty sure you just stared into the digital abyss and it smiled first.”

Jessi leaned back, hand trembling slightly around her can of Blood Voltage.

“You want water?” Paul asked, pulling a bottle out of somewhere he should not have been able to reach.

She looked at it like he was holding a holy relic wrapped in betrayal. “That’s not mine.”

“It is now.”

She hissed at it.

He dropped it like it burned. “Okay. Blood Voltage it is.”

Jessi took a long swig, then set the can down slowly. “Paul?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t think EdenNet runs the world.”

He tilted his head. “It doesn’t?”

She shook her head. “It watches it.”

A beat.

“And something else... something bigger… runs EdenNet.”

Paul curled up in her lap like a tiny, suspicious loaf. “Cool. Gonna go ahead and pencil in a nervous breakdown for later. Tentative. Flexible. Whenever the sky screams.”

Jessi didn’t respond.

Outside, Eden’s pastel glow lit the skyline.

Inside, the system pinged quietly—like it had finally noticed the crack. And maybe, just maybe, it smiled.