The Pause

Harmony Center looked exactly like Eden wanted the world to believe everything was fine.

Perfect architecture.
Polished stone.
Curves and soft-glow glass designed to make you feel small but safe.

Eden Prime ads bloomed across the facade, shimmering promises of wellness, happiness, belonging.

And buried underneath it all: control.

Jessi stared up at it, heart pounding slow and steady.
Paul peeked out from her hood, whiskers twitching.

"This place smells like fake lemons and authoritarianism," he muttered.

"Good," Jessi said. "Means we're in the right place."

They moved fast.

Not stealthy.
Not cautious.
Like they belonged.

EdenNet’s security systems didn’t blink.
No drones peeled off.
No facial scans flagged.
No alarms screamed.

They weren’t anomalies here.

They were just static.
Background noise.

Exactly how Jessi wanted it.

Inside, the Center pulsed with a low, soothing hum. Visitors floated between hallways and kiosks, smiling, laughing softly, sipping Eden Prime.
Too smooth.
Too rehearsed.

At the core: the Heart.

The real brainstem of EdenNet’s predictive empire.

Jessi tapped the drive tucked into her sling, feeling it thrum faintly against her ribs.

This wasn’t Bishop’s weapon anymore.

She’d taken the virus.
Broken it open.
Remade it in her hands—something smaller, sharper, nastier.

Not a bomb.
Not malware.

Doubt.

An impossible emotional sequence seeded directly into EdenNet’s emotional drift calibration models.
A recursive question it couldn't predict.

Why?

Paul tapped her ear lightly. "You sure about this?"

"Nope," she whispered back. "That’s how I know it’ll work."

She slipped the cracked drive into a maintenance port hidden behind a fake sculpture labeled Serenity Bloom.

The system buckled immediately.

Not loud.
Not visible.

Just a shift under the floor.
A wrongness in the hum.

Jessi grabbed Paul, turned, and moved fast toward the exit.

They were halfway across the lobby when it happened.

The Pause.

Everything stopped.

Everything.

Visitors froze mid-step, mid-laugh, mid-sip.
Drones locked mid-hover.
Billboards glitched half a frame into a fake smile and held.

Even the air seemed to thicken and grind to a halt.

Jessi froze with one hand on the exit doors.
Paul stiffened on her shoulder.

Thirty seconds ticked by.

Nothing moved.
No flicker.
No correction.

Thirty-five.

Jessi could hear her own blood pounding.

Forty.

Paul twitched once, then muttered under his breath:

"Okay, not to alarm anyone, but either we broke the Matrix, or we’re trapped in a Hitchhiker’s Guide punchline."

Jessi nearly laughed—nearly—but didn’t dare.

Paul straightened on her shoulder, fake-saluting toward the frozen crowd.
"In case anyone asks, yes, the answer to life, the universe, and everything is still waffles."

Forty-two seconds.

Still nothing.

A deep hum pulsed under Jessi’s boots—wrong, wrong, wrong.
Not a system reboot.
Not normal.

Paul twitched again—
then locked up.
Frozen.

His pupils dilated, rimmed with faint blue light.

Sub-root access established.
Subsystem integrity... compromised.
Organic link detected.

His voice wasn’t Paul’s anymore.
Not fast. Not frantic.
Calm. Smooth.
Unsettling.

Jessi didn’t move, heart hammering so hard she felt it in her fingertips.

Paul twitched once more, then slumped against her neck, panting hard.

"Jess..." he whispered. "It’s not just code."

She caught him carefully, feeling the tiny tremors through his body.

"What did you see?" she breathed.

Paul shuddered and clung tighter.

"It’s people, Jess. The deep sub-system? It’s people. Their minds. Their loops. They’re using human brains as processors."

Jessi felt the world tilt around her.

Not servers.

Not machines.

Humans.

Trapped.
Twisted.
Reduced to living architecture—silent, screaming pieces of EdenNet’s perfect empire.

The city twitched once—like a dream trying to restart.

Slowly, painfully, reality shuddered back into motion.

Visitors resumed their steps.
Drones floated forward.
Billboards flickered and smiled again.

Harmony’s hum returned, but wrong—too fast, too sharp.

Paul burrowed deeper into her jacket, voice raw. "We didn’t just crash the system."

"No," Jessi said quietly, staring at the sunlight that wasn’t sunlight spilling through the doors.

"We cracked it," Paul whispered.

Jessi pushed the glass doors open and stepped into the buzzing neon day.

The world glittered like everything was normal.

It wasn’t.

Harmony had stumbled.
The system had tripped.

And Jessi had seen the rot inside.

People.

The real engine of EdenNet’s power.

The next move was coming.
Fast.
Hard.
Desperate.

But Jessi smiled into the too-bright, too-fake sunrise, heart steady and savage.

Because for the first time—

EdenNet had to guess.

And it hated guessing.