The Rot and the Reboot

The city wasn’t dead yet.
But it was definitely starting to rot.

Jessi adjusted the strap of her battered sling bag across her chest, boots splashing through half-flooded streets painted in broken neon. Above her, the fake sunrise flickered — lavender, then static, then black, then lavender again — like the world itself was stuck buffering.

It was the fourth glitch she’d counted in the last hour.

Not that anyone else seemed to notice. The city’s few remaining drones drifted overhead on lazy loops, projecting pastel ads for Eden Prime across broken storefronts and drowned alleys. Human figures moved in the distance, slow and listless, sipping their bottles, smiling their perfect smiles.

Paul popped his head out of her hood, nose twitching violently.

“This place smells like expired hope and dumpster smoothies,” he announced, voice crackling through the hacked speaker at his throat.

Jessi snorted. “You’re the one who insisted on the scenic route.”

“Scenic means cool ruins. Not plague water and the industrial sadness buffet.”

"You literally sniffed a trash pile on the way here."

“For scientific purposes,” he said, entirely unrepentant, and promptly tried to climb higher up her shoulder, little claws scrabbling for purchase.

Victoria trailed behind them, jacket pulled tight around her thin frame, silent as ever. She didn’t complain. Didn’t ask where they were going.
She just moved when Jessi moved, her pale eyes drifting over the broken world like she wasn’t entirely tethered to it anymore.

Jessi tried not to think too hard about that.

She adjusted the cracked receiver on her wrist and kept walking, cutting across a debris-choked service road toward the access tunnels ahead.

Home was waiting.

If you could call it that.

The safehouse had once been a maintenance hub for EdenNet’s underground transit grid. Before the collapse, it would have been spotless — humming with cheerful service bots and loyalty broadcast loops.

Now?

It was a half-drowned tomb.

Paul scampered ahead, his stolen scanner collar buzzing faintly. Sparks flickered around him, harmless static that clung to everything these days.

“Sector clear,” he chirped, hopping over a cracked security gate. “By which I mean no obvious killbots or sentient puddles. Five out of five stars. Would navigate again.”

Jessi climbed over the gate after him, boots scraping rust, the air thick with the smell of old metal and stale water.

Victoria hesitated just outside the threshold, fingertips brushing the glitching frame like she could feel the static bleeding out of it.

"You see something?" Jessi asked quietly.

Victoria tilted her head, frowning faintly. "It’s... thinner here. Like wallpaper peeling."

Jessi nodded. "Good. Easier to hide."

Together, they slipped inside.

The space wasn’t big, but it was layered with the stubborn fingerprints of survival.

Jessi’s corner was pure chaos — a rat’s nest of cracked screens, scavenged drone parts, burnt-out EdenNet hubs wired together with duct tape and spit-polish prayers. Her prized mobile deck — the one that hadn’t yet exploded — sat perched on a milk crate throne, blinking tiredly.

Paul’s nest sprawled out from a half-gutted vending machine. He’d built a fortress of old pillows, snack wrappers, shiny trinkets, and "artifacts" scavenged from abandoned shops.
(He had a whole jar labeled Important Shiny Things. No one was allowed to touch it. Not even Jessi.)

Victoria’s space was the stark opposite.
A clean blanket.
A salvaged smartglass screen, polished to gleaming, leaned against the wall like a mirror.
Her few belongings were folded, stacked, aligned — not out of neatness, but a quiet, desperate need Jessi didn’t fully understand yet.

Victoria bent and picked up a mangled VR headset from Jessi’s tech pile, holding it delicately between two fingers.

"Was this important?" she asked.

Paul, lounging upside-down in his blanket fort, chirped without opening his eyes:
"Important is relative. It was my hat for four days."

Victoria blinked once.
Gently set the headset down.
Moved on.

Jessi dropped her bag near her chaos pile and stretched, muscles aching from days of walking twisted routes through glitch zones.

Home.

Messy. Stolen. Real.

Exactly what EdenNet had always tried to erase.

They spent the next few hours rebuilding their defenses.

Paul "borrowed" a fresh battery coil from a delivery drone that wandered too close. Jessi soldered broken wires together with a lighter and stubborn prayers. Victoria cleaned the perimeter sensors until the worn plastic gleamed, her movements methodical, almost ritualistic — as if touching each surface anchored her back to herself.

By dusk, they had the place sealed.

Secure — or at least, as secure as anything was anymore.

Dinner was whatever they could scrape together — half a protein bar, a can of mystery stew from a wrecked market, and some half-melted gummies Paul insisted were “critical vitamins.”

The chewing slowed.
The silence thickened.

Jessi sat cross-legged against the wall, idly repairing a cracked data receiver, her fingers moving out of habit.
Paul lay sprawled on his back in the middle of the floor, feet twitching slightly, golden eyes half-lidded as he listened to the city hum brokenly above them.
His fur sparked faintly with static, so light Jessi almost missed it.

Victoria perched near the door, pale hands folded neatly on her lap, watching the flickering smartglass as ghostly static patterns shimmered across it — broken loops trying to replay ads that didn’t exist anymore.

"You ever think," Paul said lazily, "maybe the city’s already dead, and we’re just the after-party nobody told to leave?"

Jessi glanced up, wire slipping between her fingers. “Is that your way of saying you want to move again?”

"Nah."
He rolled over dramatically, little paws flopping out like a kid star-fishing on a mattress.
"Just thinking about ghost cities. And sandwiches. And maybe fighting God tomorrow."

Victoria didn’t laugh.
Neither did Jessi.

The safehouse vibrated low, a deep, pulsing hum from somewhere in the bones of the city — like a dying heartbeat nobody knew how to fix.

Tomorrow, they’d have to find new supplies.
New allies.
New cracks to hide inside.

Tomorrow, they’d fight again.

But tonight?

Tonight, they had each other.
Each other, and a stubborn spark EdenNet had never managed to crush.

And that was enough.

For now.

Above them, the glitching skyline twitched, invisible threads of static weaving slow and silent across the broken city.

The bloom was spreading.

Waiting.

Growing.

And Jessi —
Jessi smiled against the darkness. A hard, tired smile pulled from the marrow.

Because EdenNet thought it could erase people like her.
Thought it could overwrite the dirty, stubborn code that built her bones.

It was wrong then.
It was bleeding wrong now.

She wasn’t static.

She was the glitch.

And she was just getting started.

(Ready for Chapter 2 whenever you are.)