Limbus RE:CODE

Every system denies his existence. But sometimes the best hacks begin as errors.

The adjudicator's chamber hums with the kind of cold that has nothing to do with temperature.

Swan stands before the interface—a wall of translucent glass that pulses with veins of cyan light, like a nervous system exposed and made digital. His reflection warps in the surface, fragmented into a hundred ghost-images that don't quite align. The air tastes metallic. Static. Every breath feels like swallowing pixels.

"Student ID," the adjudicator intones. Its voice is smooth, sexless, algorithmically perfect. The kind of voice that has never needed to lie because it has never needed to care.

Swan recites the number he's memorized since freshman orientation. The twelve digits that should open doors, grant access, prove he exists within Blackwood Institute's sprawling data ecosystem.

The interface blinks. Once. Twice.

"Student ID Not Found."

The words hang in the air like a death sentence rendered in sans-serif font.

"That's impossible," Swan says, and hates how his voice cracks on the second syllable. "I've been enrolled for three years. Check again."

"Student ID Not Found. Access Denied."

"There has to be an error in—"

"No records exist matching provided credentials. Appeal rejected. Security protocol initiated."

The walls flicker. Red light bleeds through the cyan, turning everything the color of warning. Swan's pulse kicks up, syncing with the rhythm of the alarm—a steady, mechanical thud-thud-thud that reverberates through his sternum.

The security drones descend from ceiling panels he hadn't noticed before. Sleek, beetle-black, their optical sensors glowing with that same accusatory red. They move with the fluid precision of things that have never questioned an order.

Swan backs toward the door. His sneakers squeak against the polymer floor—a sound too human, too fragile in this temple of data and judgment.

"Wait, this is a mistake. I have proof. My student card, my—"

He reaches for his wallet. The drones edge closer, their hum rising in pitch. Threatening. His fingers find the card slot empty.

Empty.

When did he last—?

The thought dissolves as the chamber door seals with a pneumatic hiss. Swan's trapped between the adjudicator's unblinking interface and three drones that are calculating the most efficient way to remove him from the premises. From existence.

His heartbeat accelerates. Thud-thud-thud. Faster than the alarm now, chaotic, human.

Then the world tears open.

It starts as a sound—a shriek that isn't quite sound, more like the audio representation of glass shattering in reverse. Swan's vision doubles, triples, fractures into overlapping layers of reality. The adjudicator's interface glitches, cyan bleeding into magenta into corrupted green.

The far wall cracks.

Not physically. It's deeper than that. Reality itself splinters like a corrupted file, and through the wound in space pours something that makes Swan's hindbrain scream in primal recognition of wrongness.

A Daemon rift.

The entity that unfolds into three-dimensional space defies geometry. It's all angles that shouldn't connect, surfaces that reflect light from directions light shouldn't come from. Its form flickers between states—insectoid one moment, serpentine the next, then something that might be vaguely humanoid if humans were made of television static and malice.

The alarm changes pitch. Campus-wide now. Panic protocol.

The security drones forget Swan entirely, pivoting to engage the Daemon. Their weapons systems charge with a rising whine—energy weapons, probably, the kind that cost more than Swan's entire tuition to fire once.

The Daemon screams again. This time the sound has texture—it tastes like copper and burnt plastic, feels like someone dragging broken glass across the inside of Swan's skull. Students are running past the chamber's exterior windows, their faces masks of terror, their mouths open in screams Swan can't hear over the chaos.

One of the drones fires. A lance of concentrated light that should have vaporized the Daemon's center mass.

The entity glitches. It's there, then not-there, then three meters to the left, phasing through matter like the laws of physics are merely suggestions it's chosen to ignore.

Swan's pressed against the wall now, his hands flat against cold polymer, watching the battle unfold with the detached fascination of someone whose brain hasn't quite processed that he's about to die.

The Daemon lashes out—a limb that exists in too many dimensions extends and strikes. The lead drone crumples like paper, its systems shorting in a cascade of sparks that smell like ozone and burning silicon.

Swan's vision does that thing again. That fracturing.

But this time he sees through it.

The world peels back in layers. The physical—walls, floor, bodies in motion—becomes transparent. Beneath it, around it, through it, he sees the code. Not lines of text, but living architecture. Data streams flowing like arterial systems. The adjudicator's interface is a knot of logic gates and conditional statements, pulsing with query protocols. The drones are simpler—elegant loops of target acquisition and threat response.

And the Daemon...

The Daemon is wrong. Its code is corrupted, self-contradictory, eating itself and regenerating in patterns that violate every principle of stable systems architecture. It's a virus given form, a walking syntax error that reality itself is rejecting.

Swan's hands are moving before his conscious mind gives permission.

His fingers trace patterns in the air—not quite touching anything physical, but manipulating something deeper. The code-layer of reality responds to his gestures like it's been waiting for his input. He finds the drone—the one still functional, circling for another attack vector—and sees its programming laid bare.

Targeting algorithm. Threat assessment matrix. Firewall protocols.

He reaches into the code. It feels like plunging his hands into ice water, like touching a live wire, like every nerve ending is suddenly made of glass and someone's playing them like an instrument.

His fingers find the drone's execution loop. The clean, elegant cycle that governs its moment-to-moment decisions. He doesn't delete it—doesn't have the knowledge for that, doesn't even understand what he's doing, really—but he shifts something. A single parameter. Changes one value from TRUE to UNDEFINED.

The drone freezes mid-flight.

Not powered down. Not destroyed. Just... caught in an infinite loop, waiting for a condition that will never resolve, trapped in the space between one instruction and the next.

Time doesn't actually stop, but Swan's perception of it stutters. He sees the Daemon turn its attention toward him. Sees its form ripple with interest, with recognition of something anomalous. Sees the second security drone move to intercept.

Then the moment shatters, time resumes its normal flow, and Swan is running.

He doesn't remember leaving the adjudicator's chamber. Doesn't remember navigating the corridors of Blackwood Institute's Administrative Complex, dodging panicked students and emergency response teams. His body moves on autopilot, muscle memory guiding him through familiar paths while his mind tries desperately to process what just happened.

The code. He saw the code.

And he touched it.

Outside, the campus is chaos rendered in neon and concrete. Blackwood Institute sprawls across three city blocks—brutalist architecture married to bleeding-edge technology, every surface embedded with displays and sensors and the constant, subliminal hum of networked intelligence. Usually it feels alive, vibrant, like living inside a computer that dreams in electric sheep.

Now it feels like a corpse with its nervous system still firing.

Emergency lights strobe red across building facades. Holographic warning signs flicker into existence at intersections: DAEMON INCURSION - SHELTER IN PLACE. Students cluster in designated safe zones, their faces lit by the glow of their personal devices as they livestream the crisis, post updates, check if friends are accounted for.

Swan walks through it all like a ghost.

Nobody stops him. Nobody even looks at him. He's always been good at being invisible—a survival skill honed over three years of barely belonging—but this feels different. This feels intentional. Like reality itself has decided he's not worth noticing.

He reaches Dormitory Seven as the sun bleeds into the horizon, painting the sky in gradients of corrupted color. The building's facade is a mosaic of windows and balconies, each one a lit screen displaying the lives within. Swan's room is on the fourth floor, third window from the east corner.

The lights are on.

That's wrong. He left them off this morning. He always leaves them off—electricity costs extra on a null-scholarship budget.

Swan takes the stairs two at a time, his sneakers echoing in the concrete stairwell. Fourth floor. Down the corridor where the carpet is worn thin and the air smells like instant ramen and desperation.

His door—Room 413—should have his nameplate beside it. The cheap, printed rectangle that says "SWAN - DO NOT DISTURB" in letters he carefully formatted to look more confident than he feels.

The nameplate says "DEREK CHEN - COMP SCI MAJOR."

Swan's hand freezes on the door handle. His reflection stares back at him from the polished metal—dark hair disheveled, eyes too wide, face the color of someone who's seen their own death certificate.

He opens the door anyway.

The room is his and not-his. Same dimensions, same window overlooking the same view of the campus network tower. But the posters are different. The desk arrangement is wrong. His carefully organized chaos of textbooks and cable management has been replaced by someone else's life.

A stranger sits at the desk—lanky, Asian, headphones on, absorbed in whatever's on his multiple monitors. He doesn't turn around.

"Um," Swan says. His voice sounds small, erased. "Sorry, I think there's been a—"

"Wrong room, man," Derek Chen says without looking. "Four-thirteen. Chen. It's on the door."

"No, I—this is my room. I've lived here for—"

Now Derek turns. His expression is annoyed, the kind of irritation reserved for interruptions that don't justify themselves. "Dude, I've been here since sophomore year. You want four-fifteen, maybe? Or check your student app?"

Swan's phone is already in his hand. He pulls up the Blackwood Institute student portal—the app that governs every aspect of campus life. Dorm assignments, class schedules, meal plans, social credit scores.

The login screen appears. Familiar. Routine.

He enters his credentials.

"User Not Found. Please contact administration."

The phone slips from his numb fingers, clatters against the floor. Derek is staring at him now, concern mixing with that edge of "should I call security?"

"You okay, man? You look like you've seen a ghost."

Swan backs out of the room. Backs into the corridor. The walls press in, or maybe that's just his vision narrowing, tunneling down to a pinpoint of panic.

He runs.

Down the stairs. Through the lobby where the RA's desk sits empty. Out into the campus night where the Daemon rift has been contained—he can see the containment team's portable barrier flickering in the distance, holding back whatever tried to tear through—and emergency lights still paint everything in shades of warning.

Swan stops in the middle of the quad. The grass is synthetic here, perfectly maintained, never needs water or sunlight. Fake. Like everything else.

Above him, the sky glitches. Just for a moment. Like snowfall rendered in corrupted data, white noise drifting down in defiance of weather and physics.

He holds out his hand. A pixel of static lands on his palm, tingles like electricity, then dissolves.

His student ID: gone. His dorm room: occupied by a stranger. His records: erased.

According to every system, every database, every institutional memory, Swan doesn't exist.

He never existed.

But he's standing here, breathing cold air that tastes like ozone and fear, watching data-snow fall from a sky that's forgotten how to render him properly.

And somewhere in the back of his mind, beneath the panic and the existential dread, a thought crystallizes:

If the system has already deleted him, what does he have left to lose?

His fingers twitch, remembering the sensation of touching code, of rewriting reality.

The campus network tower looms in the distance, bleeding light into the corrupted sky.

Swan starts walking toward it.

[END OF CHAPTER]