Limbus RE:CODE

Ghost in the System (2)

Movement catches Swan's attention. Three figures approaching across the quad. Even in code-vision, he recognizes their patterns. Marcus Chen, Trey Williams, and Jake Something-or-other. Campus social hierarchy's middle tier—not quite popular enough to be untouchable, not quite invisible enough to be ignored.

He remembers them. Specifically, he remembers them from sophomore year, when they decided his face looked punchable and his responses to their provocations sounded entertaining. Nothing serious. Just casual cruelty, the kind that happens in the gaps between classes when teachers aren't looking and everyone pretends not to notice.

They haven't bothered him in months. Found easier targets, probably.

But they're walking toward him now, and their body language reads as familiar. Like they know him.

Like they remember him.

Swan lets the code-vision slip away. Returns to normal perception as they close the distance.

"Well, well," Marcus says. His smile is sharp, predatory. "Look who's still skulking around."

Swan's confusion must show on his face.

"What, you think we forgot?" Trey adds. He cracks his knuckles—an absurdly theatrical gesture. "You still owe us for that thing last week."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Swan says carefully.

"The fuck you don't." Jake steps closer. "You ratted to Professor Chen about the answer key. Got us all put on academic probation."

"I never—" Swan stops. Tries to think through the paradox. "I don't even know what class you're—"

"Playing dumb?" Marcus is right in his face now. "That's cute. Real cute."

This doesn't make sense. They shouldn't remember him. Nobody remembers him. The system erased him, rewrote history, made him null.

But something about the way they're looking at him—there's a wrongness to it. Their eyes don't quite focus. They're staring at him, but it's like they're reading from a script, following behavioral patterns without understanding why.

"Look," Swan says, backing up. "I think there's been some mistake. Just let me—"

Marcus shoves him. Hard.

Swan stumbles, catches himself. His vision flickers—not to code-sight, but something else. For just a second, he sees Marcus overlaid with a shadow-shape, a darkness that doesn't match the morning light. A figure that's too tall, too angular, moving Marcus's arm like a puppeteer.

The shadow snaps back into place. Marcus looks normal again.

But Swan understands now.

They don't remember him. Not really. But the system remembers the holes he left. The contradictions. And it's using these people as cleanup crew, pointing them at the error and letting basic human aggression do the rest.

Reality trying to debug itself through violence.

"Just walk away," Swan says quietly. "You don't actually want to do this."

"Oh, I really do," Marcus says, and throws a punch.

Swan's code-vision snaps back involuntarily, adrenaline forcing the perception shift. He sees the punch coming not as a fist but as a trajectory calculation, a physics simulation playing out in real-time. He sees Marcus's balance points, the muscle contractions, the predictable arc of violence.

He also sees the shadow wrapped around Marcus like a parasite. Feeding him aggression, anger, the need to eliminate the error.

Swan doesn't think. Just reaches.

His hand intercepts Marcus's fist. And for a moment, in code-space, Swan sees the command structure governing Marcus's actions. Simple behavioral loops. IF target present, THEN aggress. IF resistance, THEN escalate.

Swan finds the loop. Touches it.

Changes a single value.

Marcus freezes mid-swing. His eyes go wide, confused. He looks at his own fist like it's a foreign object.

"What the hell am I—" He steps back, shaking his head. "Why are we even—"

The shadow-thing writhes. Swan sees it trying to reassert control, pump more aggression into Marcus's system. But the loop is broken. The logic doesn't compile anymore.

"Let's just go," Trey says suddenly. He sounds uncertain, like he's woken from sleepwalking. "This is stupid."

The three of them walk away, casting confused glances back at Swan. At each other. Trying to remember why they were angry.

Swan stands alone in the quad, breathing hard, staring at his hands.

He didn't just see the code that time.

He changed it.

Again.

The coffee shop is called "Static Grounds"—a name that makes sense when Swan sees the neon sign flickering above the entrance, the word "Static" bright and stable, "Grounds" corrupted into intermittent gibberish. The building itself seems to phase in and out of architectural styles, one moment a modern minimalist café, the next a vintage diner from the 1980s, then something else entirely.

It's exactly the kind of place that would exist in the gaps between stable reality.

Swan pushes through the door at 6:57 AM. Inside, the décor is impossible—vintage arcade cabinets stand next to holographic menus, neon tubes compete with Edison bulbs, the floor is checkerboard tile overlaid with hexagonal patterns that hurt to look at directly.

Three people sit at a corner booth.

Elara Vance looks up as he enters. Her eyes still flicker, but less than yesterday. She's wearing more bracelets today—both arms covered wrist to elbow in silver reminders.

"You came," she says, and something in her expression eases. Relief. "I was worried you'd vanish again."

"Where else would I go?" Swan slides into the booth beside her. "Everyone else forgot I exist."

"Not everyone," says one of the other people at the table—a girl with cybernetic tattoos that writhe across her dark skin, circuit patterns that rearrange themselves as Swan watches. "Some of us remember everything. Whether we want to or not."

The third person doesn't look up from their tablet. Agender, maybe, or just beyond caring about such labels. Their hair is white-static, literally—strands that flicker between colors like a TV tuned to dead channels.

"Swan," Elara says formally. "Meet the others. Ash—" the girl with the tattoos nods "—and Cipher." The static-haired person raises one hand in minimal acknowledgment. "They're like us. Glitched. Recoded. Existing in the spaces the system can't quite parse."

"There are more of us?" Swan feels something unknot in his chest. He's not alone. He's not the only one.

"More than you'd think," Ash says. Her voice has a musical quality, like she's speaking through a vocoder. "Fewer than we'd like. The system is getting better at eliminating errors. Most glitches get debugged before they become aware of what's happening to them."

"You're lucky," Cipher says without looking up. "Most erasures are permanent. Clean. You're still partially compiled. Still visible to some subsystems. That's rare."

"I don't feel lucky," Swan admits.

"You shouldn't." Elara's hand finds his under the table. Her fingers are cold. "But you're alive. And aware. And that means you can fight back."

A waitress approaches—or something that looks like a waitress. Her form flickers between different uniforms, different faces, like she's every server who's ever worked here simultaneously.

"The usual?" she asks Elara, her voice overlapping with itself.

"And something for him," Elara says, nodding at Swan. "Whatever stays down."

The waitress shimmers away.

"She's not real, is she?" Swan asks.

"Define real," Cipher says, finally looking up. Their eyes are white, pupilless, disturbing. "She's a residual entity. A ghost in the machine. This whole place exists because enough glitched people believe it does. Consensus reality for those of us who fell outside the consensus."

Ash leans forward. "Elara says you can see the code. Manipulate it."

"I don't know how," Swan admits. "It just happens when I'm scared or desperate or—"

"That's how it starts," Ash interrupts. "Instinct. Survival response. Your system-self was deleted, but your consciousness persisted. Found a new way to interface with reality. You're not running the standard human operating system anymore. You're Recoded."

"But what does that mean?" Swan's frustration bleeds through. "What am I supposed to do? The system is erasing me. My best friend doesn't remember me. I'm leaving corruption everywhere I go. And now these shadow-things are using people as puppets to try and—what? Kill me? Debug me?"

Silence around the table.

"Yes," Elara says quietly. "That's exactly what they're trying to do. The system maintains equilibrium. When paradoxes emerge, it sends cleaners. Usually automated—drones, security protocols, administrative procedures. But when those fail, it gets creative. Uses human agents. Feeds them just enough anger, just enough certainty, to make them eliminate the error."

"We call them Daemon Protocols," Cipher adds. "They're the immune system of consensus reality. And you're a virus."

"So I'm just supposed to hide? Live in broken coffee shops and hope they don't find me?"

"You're supposed to learn," Ash says firmly. "Master your Recoding. Figure out what you can do. Because here's the thing about the system, Swan—it's powerful, but it's not intelligent. It runs on rules. And rules can be exploited. Hacked. Rewritten."

The waitress returns with drinks. Coffee for Elara. Something that looks like a latte but shimmers with opalescent data-patterns for Swan. He sips it cautiously. It tastes like nostalgia and error messages.

"Start small," Elara says. "Practice seeing the code. Manipulating small things. Work your way up. And in the meantime—"

She pulls out her notebook. Opens to a page covered in cramped handwriting and diagrams.

"—we document everything. Build a map of the system's blind spots. Find others like us. And eventually, figure out why this is happening. Why people are being erased in the first place."

Swan looks at the three of them—Elara with her bleeding nose and stacked memories, Ash with her circuit tattoos and vocoded voice, Cipher with their static hair and dead-channel eyes. Broken people. Glitched people.

His people.

"Okay," he says. "Teach me."

Elara smiles. It's fragile, tentative, but real.

"Welcome to the Recoded," she says.

Outside, the neon sign flickers. The shadows on the street corner twist into shapes that don't match the light sources. And somewhere in the depths of Blackwood Institute's network infrastructure, something notices the anomaly cluster at Static Grounds and flags it for investigation.

The system is watching.

The system is always watching.