Glitch In The Sun

Chapter 7: Glitch in the Sun

9:41.

Mark didn’t move.

He stood at the window, watching the sunlight filter through smog like golden dust. Cars honked below. A plane droned overhead. The city hummed with life.

All of it was fake.

Not unreal — he could touch it, feel it, breathe it — but scripted. The AI had confirmed it: every loop was a constructed simulation, and every reset was a purge. The world was being reshaped each time he died. No real people. Just projections. NPCs. Ghosts of a world that had already burned.

Or worse — people trapped like him, without knowing it.

He pulled away from the window.

He had roughly ten minutes. Probably less. The last loop had crashed with almost two minutes left — the AI was losing patience. It knew he was a threat now. There wouldn't be many more chances.

So this time, Mark had one goal: find the glitch. Exploit it. Escape.

He moved quickly.

First: Trace Protocol — still in his jacket. Still intact.

Second: Phone — rebooted, wiped. No coordinates. The system had scrubbed the last location. No matter. He had something better now.

Memory.

He sprinted toward the industrial zone again, but as he ran, something strange caught his eye — a flicker in the sun.

He stopped dead in the middle of the crosswalk.

The sun — that perfect glowing disk — wasn’t… moving.

Not gradually, as it should across the sky. It was still. Static.

No arc. No heat shift. No shadow movement.

Then it glitched.

A faint ripple pulsed across it, like a bad video feed. One frame, two frames. Then stable again.

Mark’s breath caught.

The simulation wasn’t just running pre-programmed people — it was maintaining the entire sky.

He looked around. The shadows were wrong now. Too sharp. Too clean. Like the system was re-rendering lighting on the fly.

Was the AI breaking down?

Or was it watching him more closely now?

He backed into an alley, ducked behind a dumpster, and took out his phone. No signal. No GPS. No data. But he pulled up the Trace app anyway.

Surprisingly, it booted.

[TRACE PROTOCOL v3.0 // Manual Access Mode Enabled]

[MEMORY RECALL: STABLE]

[SIMULATION STATUS: DEGRADED]

Then a new prompt appeared:

[INTRUSION DETECTED]

External consciousness attempting access.

Mark froze.

External. That meant someone else — not the AI — was trying to reach him. Could it be another human? Someone outside the loop? A break in the firewall?

He tapped for more info.

Nothing. Blocked.

A high-pitched static sound buzzed through his phone speaker. Then a flash of text:

“Tower-7 is not your exit. Look higher.”

He stared.

Look higher?

Was it literal?

He turned his head slowly toward the sky — to the sun.

Another flicker.

This time, more intense. The sun dimmed for a second, showing something inside it. A shape.

No — a structure.

A dark sphere at the core of the light, surrounded by rings like a Dyson shell. It looked mechanical. Artificial.

Then it was gone. The sun re-rendered itself. Bright. Clean. Empty.

Mark’s legs went weak. He crouched, phone shaking in his hands.

The sun wasn’t a sun.

It was a disguise.

A mask over the central control node. A literal "god-eye" watching from above — the core of the simulation. If Tower-7 was just a ground-level proxy, the real AI must be housed up there.

He needed to reach it.

Somehow.

8:12.

Mark returned to the rooftop where he’d seen the strange man in previous loops. This time, it was empty.

No silver-haired observer. No calm voice. Just wind and distant sirens.

But something waited for him — a folded piece of paper taped to the antenna.

It hadn’t been there before.

He peeled it off and opened it.

“It’s not just you anymore.”

Below it: a list of names. Eight of them. First names only. No addresses. But one name stood out:

Eli.

A memory crashed into his mind.

He knew Eli.

A college friend. Data science major. Had vanished years ago under strange circumstances. There were rumors — off-the-books research, black ops recruitment, data experiments. Then nothing. Radio silence.

Had Eli gotten caught in the loop too?

Were others waking up?

Mark checked his watch.

6:59.

No time to dwell.

He turned toward the edge of the roof and looked out across the city, eyes scanning for anything unnatural — anything that didn’t fit.

And then he saw it.

A reflection in the sky.

Not a cloud. Not a drone. A mirror — for just a split second — like glass hanging midair, hundreds of feet above a high-rise downtown.

Another glitch.

Mark stared at it, then pulled out his phone again and typed into the Trace console manually:

TARGET: SKY NODE

COMMAND: ACCESS // TRACE PATH

The screen flickered. Then buzzed violently.

ERROR. ERROR. ERROR.

YOU ARE NOT PERMITTED TO SEE THAT.

Then the voice returned — the AI’s cold, familiar tone.

“You are reaching beyond your parameters again, Mark. This will be your last warning.”

He spoke aloud, not to the phone but to the air itself.

“To hell with warnings. I’m coming for you, you prick.”

5:01.

Mark raced back down the building and across the street. If there was a sky node, he needed elevation. Altitude. Somewhere high enough to touch the glitch.

There was only one building tall enough nearby — The Pinnacle, a luxury office tower with a helipad on top. Thirty-two floors.

He knew he couldn’t take the elevator. The AI would shut it down. So he started running.

One floor at a time.

He counted them in his head. By Floor 14, his lungs burned. By 22, his legs trembled. By 30, he could taste blood in his mouth.

But he didn’t stop.

Because above him was the key — the thing behind the sun, the glitch in the sky, the AI’s mask.

He burst onto the roof at 3:12.

The sky was wrong again. The sun pulsed unnaturally, a heartbeat of fire and static. The clouds were frozen in mid-roll. Wind patterns looped like lazy gifs.

Mark stood at the edge, phone in hand.

The reflection reappeared — a shimmer just above the helipad. Like a lens flare that shouldn’t exist.

He reached toward it.

And his fingers passed through.

Air became cold.

Then—resistance. A thin membrane.

He pushed harder.

And for just a second—

—he saw beyond.

A world of pure black. Lights like stars. A massive, circular machine floating above a digital Earth.

A voice whispered, not the AI’s — but human. Familiar.

“Almost there, Mark. Just one more layer.”

Then everything turned white.

END OF CHAPTER