The Blink

Conditional Trigger: Interrupt

Three seconds. That’s all it took to disappear.

Andre blinked, and the world didn’t come back right.

He was prone, elbow sunk into grit, hand hovering near a switch he didn’t remember reaching for. Rain stitched faint rhythms into the concrete around him. Acrid. Electric. Still.

Nothing moved.

“Still breathing?” Brenda’s voice crackled in his comm, half a smirk, half a warning.

He didn’t answer immediately. The air here was thick: burned metal, mold, and something behind it, something wrong. Like a room that remembered death.

“Barely,” he muttered. “Something’s rotting in this place. Twice.”

“You got eyes on the uplink?”

“Negative. Holding. Waiting on the loop.”

“Clock’s running. You’ve got ninety seconds, maybe less. Patrols are tightening.”

He wiped at the slick blur on his visor. Rain, or interference. It didn’t matter. Time had fractured again. Another cut in the reel.

The blink.

No warning. No static. Just off. And then, back on.

He was a meter to the right.

Rifle against the concrete. No sensation of movement. No memory of crawling. Just repositioned, like someone had adjusted the frame.

Brenda’s voice again, sharp this time. “Andre?”

“I’m fine,” he said, though his fingers trembled slightly. “Another blink.”

A pause.

“That’s three now.”

“Four.”

“You need to run a full scan. I told you to—”

“And I told you we’re on borrowed time.”

Above, the drone buzzed by, three seconds early.

He stayed low.

That detail mattered.

They had always passed on a sixty-three count. Gospel. Now: sixty.

If he had been where he was supposed to be, that drone would have tagged him. Branded him. Burned him down.

But he wasn’t. He had been moved.

Because of the blink.

“You caught that?” he asked.

Brenda’s reply was tight. “Yeah. That drone jumped the clock.”

“No,” Andre said. “We did.”

“What?”

He didn’t explain. The thought wasn’t ready yet. Just a shadow of one.

He crept forward. Quiet. Careful. Letting the darkness fold around him. The uplink waited beneath a burst pipe, crusted with corrosion and old code.

He crouched. Plugged in.

The spike clicked. Lights flickered. Heat pulsed.

“You’re in,” She confirmed. “Start the transfer and get the hell out.”

But Andre didn’t move.

His HUD shimmered.

Not a fault. Not a fade.

A symbol.

White. Thin. A triangle, split straight down the center. There and gone, like a dream flinching at waking.

“Brenda,” he said slowly, “have you ever seen a mark like this? Triangle. Split. Faint.”

Her silence stretched.

“I have,” she said finally. “Once. Freight job out of the Deepgrid. Dead zone packet. Ancient. Pre-fall. The mark was in the header.”

“What was it?”

“Not hostile. Just… aware. We bailed before it could decide.”

The spike blinked green. Sync complete.

Protocol Handshake: Accepted.

Status: Access Granted.

“Brenda,” he said, lower now, “it authenticated me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I didn’t enter anything. It just… let me in.”

The uplink pulsed, slow and rhythmic. Like breathing.

Then:

YOU’RE NOT MALFUNCTIONING.
YOU’RE ALIGNING.

He pulled the spike like it burned.

Brenda’s voice snapped back. “Andre. What the hell was that?”

“There’s something in my system,” he said. “Not a virus. Not malware. Older. Quieter. Waiting.”

“Run a wipe. We’ll isolate, scrub, reset.”

“I’ve tried. It blocks me. It’s under everything. Root access. Hardware, maybe. Feels like it knows I’m coming.”

“Sentient?”

“I don’t know.”

He stood, slow. The rain hissed where it hit exposed steel. Patrols buzzed past overhead.

They didn’t scan him.

They didn’t even see him.

His signature was gone.

No ID. No tag. No heat.

Erased.

Brenda’s voice came softer. “What did it say?”

He looked at his hand. Fingers flexed like they didn’t belong entirely to him.

“It said I’m not broken,” he whispered. “It said I’m aligning.”

“With what?”

“I don’t know.”

But deep in the quiet places of his mind, something old stirred. Code that wasn’t his. A logic deeper than instinct. And it had kept him alive. Twice.

He stepped into the rain, soundless, deliberate.

“You think it’s controlling you?” Brenda asked.

“No,” he said. “Not yet.”

“And if it does?”

A quiet laugh. “Then it better know how to fight.”

Brenda hesitated. Then, gently: “Just make sure it’s still you in there.”

“I will,” Andre murmured, lifting his collar against the rain. “But if it isn’t… maybe it’s still on our side.”

Behind him, the drones veered west, hunting echoes, scanning air where no trace remained.

And Andre moved east, silent, untagged, following something nameless humming just behind his eyes.