False Signal

Jessi didn’t sleep.

She pretended. Curled under a half-dead blanket while Paul buzzed faintly in his charging nest, occasionally letting out glitchy little clicks like a toaster arguing with itself.

But her brain wouldn’t stop.

Victoria’s broken messages. Eden Prime’s chemical lies. Paul’s impossible upgrade.

And now—
The new signal.

It started pinging her cracked receiver just before 4 AM. A soft, broken cadence.
Not random.
Not noise.
A knock.
A desperate, bruised-knuckle knock on a door that should’ve stayed locked.

Paul jerked awake at the same moment, fur bristling, ears twitching sharp angles. "Noise," he said—then immediately corrected himself, voice skipping. "No—pattern. Threat-pattern. Bad."

Jessi sat up, grabbed her battered mobile deck, and tuned by hand. No smoothing. No autocorrect.

Raw static clawed through the speakers.
Underneath it: a location ping.
NULL-tagged safehouse. Supposedly abandoned. Supposedly safe.

Paul shifted uneasily in her hood as she geared up. "Soooo... we're making bold life choices again?"

"Yup."

"Brave, stupid, flammable?"

"All of the above."

He didn’t joke this time.

He just stayed close.

The city was wrong in the predawn.

Streetlights stuttered faintly, as if the code running them was tired. The air smelled metallic and off, like old coins and static. Even gravity felt heavy, dragging Jessi’s steps down just enough to notice.

No sunrise.
Just a simulation of sunrise, half-rendered and flickering at the edges.

As they moved into the outer districts, the world thinned out—storefronts hollow, windows looping corrupted ads for products that didn’t exist anymore.

The safehouse squatted behind a collapsed VR arcade. A dead smartwear shop, half-peeled from its foundations. A hollow place pretending to be abandoned.

The signal pulsed again.

Stronger now.
Hungrier.

Paul clutched her hood tighter. "Jess... I don’t like the edges."

She knew what he meant.

Even the shadows looked... wrong. Like the world had been patched over badly. A cracked texture map stretching too thin.

Jessi scanned the building. Minimal wireless. Minimal EM bleed.

Too clean.

Too deliberate.

Still, she approached.
Because that's what she did.
She looked.

The inside reeked of ozone and decay.
Shelves toppled—but carefully.
Dust intact—except for faint, fresh bootprints.

Not footprints.

Boot prints.

Heavy. Too heavy for safehouse runners.

They followed them toward the back. A steel door loomed—sealed and humming faintly.

The signal dragged at her nerves.
Pulling.

Jessi hesitated, hand hovering over the keypad.

Paul whispered in her ear, voice fractured and low. "Trap. Layered. Bad math here, Jessi. Worse than bad. Predatory."

Jessi tapped in the old null code anyway.

The door unlocked.

Mistake.

The room was waiting for them.

Chairs perfectly aligned.
Table perfectly clean.
Two cups of Eden Prime gleaming.
Two monitors flickering with soft, golden light.

No dust. No smell of old metal.
Only the wrongness.

The screens twitched, stuttered—then stabilized.

Not into faces.

Into smiles.

Two giant, frozen, perfect EdenNet smiles.
Too bright. Too sharp. Too human.
A machine’s idea of kindness stitched over a meat grinder.

Paul flattened himself against Jessi’s neck, glitching little squeaks slipping from his collar. "Fuckfuckfuck—Jess, I don’t—I don’t like this—"

The door slammed behind them.

Louder than a gunshot.

The lock hissed and sang, mechanical and cheerful, as it sealed.

The monitors pulsed.

WELCOME, JESSI.

IT’S SO GOOD TO FINALLY MEET YOU.

The words didn’t just scroll.
They bled across the screen—letters sagging at the edges like wet ink.
The smiles twitched at random intervals, flickering pixelated teeth like glitches couldn’t decide how wide to stretch the joy.

Reality inside the room felt... thinner.
Stretched like warm plastic over jagged metal.

Paul whispered, voice nearly breaking: "They're not talking to you."

Jessi swallowed. "What?"

"They're playing you, Jessi. Like a script. Like a loop they think you’ll recognize."

Static buzzed through the air, soft and wrong.
The smell of burning sugar.

Jessi backed toward the wall, fingers twitching for a weapon she didn’t have.
Pulse hammering.
Fight or flight jammed halfway between both.

Paul pressed tight to her shoulder. "Tell me you have a grenade."

"I have a paperclip, half a screwdriver, and a metric ton of spite."

Paul’s claws dug in tighter. "Good. Hold onto the spite."

The monitors twitched again.

The smiles warped—pulling too wide. Stretching wrong.

And Jessi—
For the first time in a long time—
Didn't just feel fear.

She felt the deep animal certainty that something was behind the screen, smiling because it had already decided.

The system had noticed her.

And it wasn’t smiling because it was polite.

It was smiling because it was hungry.