Limbus RE:CODE

The Glitch Anchor

You can't anchor yourself if the world is shifting tides beneath your feet.

The network tower stands at Blackwood Institute's heart like a steel spine, its surface a lattice of antenna arrays and fiber-optic veins that pulse with data-light. Swan has passed it a thousand times—background architecture, as mundane as streetlights. Now it feels like the only solid thing in a world that's decided he's negotiable.

He stops at the tower's base, hand pressed against cold metal that hums with the vibration of a million simultaneous transmissions. The sensation grounds him. Real. Tangible. He exists here, in this moment, even if every database says otherwise.

The quad behind him is emptying. Students filter back to dorms now that the containment team has erected their barrier—a shimmering dome of hardlight and compressed EM fields that wraps around the administrative building like a translucent cage. The Daemon rift flickers within, still visible as a wound in space, but contained. Neutralized, probably, or at least scheduled for neutralization once the specialists arrive.

Swan should feel relief. Should feel grateful that whatever tore through reality has been stopped.

Instead, he feels kinship.

The Daemon was an error in the system. A thing that shouldn't exist, glitching through the cracks of ordered reality.

Just like him.

Movement catches his attention—a figure stumbling near the containment barrier's edge, silhouetted against the flickering light. Female, slight build, moving with the uncoordinated desperation of someone fighting an invisible current. Students flow around her without looking, their attention sliding off her like water off glass.

She collapses.

Swan runs.

She's on her knees when he reaches her, hands pressed against her temples, breath coming in sharp, arrhythmic gasps. Blood trickles from her nose—bright red against pale skin, surreal in the strobing emergency lights.

"Hey, are you—" Swan starts, then realizes how stupid the question is. She's clearly not okay.

Up close, he can see the details. Dark hair cut in an asymmetric bob, silver bracelets stacked up both wrists, a notebook clutched in one white-knuckled hand. Her eyes are squeezed shut, but her lips move, forming words with mechanical precision:

"Tuesday. October seventh. Containment protocol initiated at 18:47. Daemon-class entity. Rift origin point: Administrative Complex sublevel three. No casualties reported. No casualties reported. No casualties—"

She chokes on the repetition, a sob catching in her throat.

Swan drops to a crouch beside her. "What's happening? Are you hurt?"

Her eyes snap open.

They're gray. Storm-cloud gray. But something's wrong with them—they flicker, like a display struggling to maintain refresh rate. The gray bleeds to static-white for a fraction of a second, then back.

"You—" she gasps. Her gaze locks onto him with desperate intensity. "You're not supposed to—the records say—but you're here—"

Her voice fractures mid-sentence, overlapping with itself. Swan hears her speak the words once, then echo half a second later in a slightly different pitch, slightly different cadence. Like reality can't decide which version of her is real.

"I don't understand," Swan says. "Let me help you. Should I call someone?"

"No!" The word comes out sharp, panicked. "No one else can—they don't see—they never—"

She sways. Swan reaches out instinctively, catches her shoulder to steady her.

The world snaps into focus.

It's subtle—he wouldn't notice if he wasn't already hyperaware of wrongness, if his perception hadn't been fractured since the adjudicator's chamber. But the moment his hand makes contact, something settles. The girl's eyes stop flickering. Her breathing evens out. The overlapping echo in her voice vanishes.

She stares at him, wonder and fear mixing in equal measure.

"You feel it too," she whispers. "The world. It's... it's stable when you're touching me."

Swan keeps his hand on her shoulder, afraid to break whatever fragile equilibrium they've found. Around them, the campus continues its crisis management protocols—containment team members in hazmat gear coordinate via AR displays, automated drones sweep for residual corruption, students record everything for their feeds.

Nobody looks at them. Two people collapsed in the middle of the quad, and nobody so much as glances their way.

"What's your name?" Swan asks quietly.

"Elara. Elara Vance." She touches her nose, pulls her fingers back, stares at the blood like it's a foreign language she's trying to decode. "Cognitive Science major. Junior year. Memory research track. I remember. I remember, even when—"

She stops. Looks at him with those flickering-not-flickering eyes.

"You don't exist," she says. Not an accusation. A statement of observed fact. "Your student ID was nullified at 17:23. Records purged across all institutional databases. Physical property reassigned. Social network nodes severed. I watched it happen in real-time. Watched the erasure propagate through the system like a virus."

Swan's hand tightens on her shoulder. "How can you possibly know that?"

"Because I remember the before." Her voice cracks. "I remember when you existed. And I remember the world changing to pretend you never did. Everyone else just... accepts the new version. Their memories rewrite themselves to match. Seamless. But mine—"

She touches her temple where blood has dried in a thin trail.

"Mine don't rewrite. They stack. Contradiction on top of contradiction until my brain can't process which reality is true. That's what you felt. What I'm feeling right now, every second. The weight of conflicting timelines."

Swan withdraws his hand—an experiment, testing.

Elara immediately gasps, her pupils dilating. The flicker returns to her eyes. Her fingers fly to her bracelets, touching each one in rapid sequence—a grounding ritual, maybe, or a mnemonic device.

"Shit," she breathes. "Don't—please don't—"

He touches her shoulder again. Stability returns like someone adjusted a monitor's contrast settings.

"What am I doing?" Swan asks. "Why does this work?"

"I don't know." Elara pushes herself to her feet, and Swan rises with her, maintaining contact. They must look absurd—two strangers standing too close, his hand on her shoulder like they're posing for an awkward school photo. "But you're... I think you're an anchor point. Something fixed in the flux. When you touch me, reality stops shifting. For both of us."

She looks at him fully now, really seeing him in a way no one has since the erasure began. Her gaze is intense, clinical, searching.

"Swan," she says, and the sound of his own name nearly breaks him. "Your name is Swan. You're a third-year student. Scholarship program. Dorm room 413. You were appealing your academic probation status when the Daemon rift occurred."

"How—"

"I remember. That's my curse. That's my..." She laughs, bitter and breaking. "The research program called it a gift. Enhanced mnemonic retention. Neural architecture resistant to standard memory manipulation protocols. They thought it would make me the perfect cognitive researcher. Instead, it made me a prisoner of every version of reality that's ever existed."

The containment barrier flickers behind them. Swan watches light play across Elara's face—blue, then red, then that sickly green of corrupted code. Her bracelets catch the light, and he realizes they're engraved. Each one has a date, a name, a fragment of information etched into silver.

"You write things down," he says. "On your wrists. In your notebook."

"External memory storage." Elara's smile is fragile. "When your internal memories can't be trusted, you have to root yourself in the physical. Every bracelet is a truth I can't afford to forget. Every page in this—"

She holds up the notebook. Its cover is worn, edges rounded from constant handling. Bloodstains mar the corner—not fresh, but numerous. A history of nosebleeds and migraine-induced collapse written in rust-brown spatters.

"—is an anchor. Proof that I'm not crazy. That the world really does shift when no one's looking."

Swan thinks about his empty dorm room. His erased student ID. The stranger wearing his life like a borrowed coat.

"It's not just memory manipulation," he says slowly. "It's reality manipulation. The system didn't just delete my records. It rewrote history so I never existed in the first place."

"Yes." Elara's voice is soft, almost gentle. "And I'm the only one who remembers the original version. The only one who knows you're a ghost walking through a world that's closed around the space where you used to be."

A security drone passes overhead, its sensors sweeping the area. Swan tenses, remembering the adjudicator's chamber, the cold certainty of imminent violence.

The drone continues past without slowing. Doesn't register them at all.

"We're invisible," Elara says. "You because you've been erased. Me because... I think I'm in the process of being erased. The system is trying to delete me too. Slowly. Every time I notice a contradiction, every time I hold onto a memory I shouldn't have, I become more anomalous. More... glitched."

She touches her nose again, checking for fresh blood. Finds none.

"But when you're touching me, the erasure stops. Like I'm borrowing your... your null state. Existing in the space outside the system's ability to track."

Swan looks at his hand on her shoulder. Thinks about touching the drone's code, freezing it mid-execution. Thinks about the data-snow falling from a corrupted sky.

"I did something," he admits. "During the rift. I saw the code. The actual underlying structure of... of everything. And I changed it. Just a little. Just enough to stop a security drone."

Elara's eyes widen. "You can perceive the substrate layer? The base code?"

"I don't know what I can do. I don't know what any of this means." His frustration bleeds through. "Six hours ago I was a student facing academic probation. Now I'm a coding error that reality is trying to debug, and apparently I have some kind of glitch-vision that lets me hack drones by thinking really hard."

"Not a glitch," Elara says quietly. "A feature. You're Recoded, Swan. Or you're in the process of Recoding. I've read about this—urban legends on the dark nets, conspiracy theories in the memetic underground. People who fall through the cracks of the system and come back changed. Able to manipulate the code that underlies consensus reality."

"That's insane."

"You're literally erased from existence and still walking around. We passed 'sane' about a mile back."

Fair point.

The containment barrier pulses, and Elara flinches. Her hand flies to her bracelets, fingers moving in that same rapid sequence—counting, checking, grounding. Swan feels her shoulder tense under his palm.

"Déjà vu?" he asks.

"Always." She closes her eyes. "I've lived this moment three times already. Each time slightly different. In one version we're having this conversation near the library. In another, you never came to help me. The timelines blur together, and I can't—I don't—"

Her breath hitches. Swan moves his other hand to her other shoulder, grounding her fully.

"Stay here," he says. "This version. This timeline. Right now."

Elara's breathing slows. Stabilizes. When she opens her eyes, they're clear—no flicker, just solid gray.

"Thank you," she whispers.

They stand like that for a moment, two anomalies holding each other upright in a world that's trying to delete them both. Around them, Blackwood Institute continues its mechanical functioning, students and drones and containment protocols all playing out with algorithmic precision.

"What do we do now?" Swan asks.

Elara looks at her notebook. At the blood-stained pages filled with her cramped handwriting. At the bracelets that map her history in engraved silver.

"We survive," she says. "We document. We figure out why the system is erasing people like us, and we find a way to fight back. Because I'm tired of being broken. And you—"

She meets his gaze.

"—you're tired of being deleted."

Swan nods slowly. Feels something solidify in his chest. Purpose, maybe. Or just the desperate human need to push back against the void.

"I need to go home," Elara says. "Well, not home. My dorm. Document this while the memories are fresh. Before the contradictions pile up and I lose the thread."

"Will you be okay? If I'm not touching you?"

"No." Simple honesty. "But I've never been okay. I've learned to function through the pain. And now that I know you exist, now that I've felt what stability feels like..."

She touches one of her bracelets—the newest one, still bright silver, not yet tarnished.

"I'll manage. Because I have to."

Swan removes his hands from her shoulders. Immediately, Elara sways, her eyes flickering once, twice. But she stays upright. Stays present.

"Meet me tomorrow," she says, already backing away. "The coffee shop on the edge of campus. The one with the broken neon sign. Seven AM. Before classes. Before the system fully wakes up."

"How will you find me if I'm erased?"

She taps her temple. "I remember, Swan. I remember everything. That's my curse and my gift. Just be there."

Then she's walking away, one hand pressed to her temple, the other clutching her blood-stained notebook. Swan watches her disappear into the night—another damaged thing trying to navigate a world that's too sharp, too bright, too determined to enforce its version of truth.

He looks down at his own hands. Imagines he can still see the ghost of code clinging to his fingertips.

Tomorrow. Seven AM. A girl who remembers him.

It's not much.

But it's more than he had an hour ago.

Later, in a dorm room across campus, Elara Vance sits cross-legged on her bed, surrounded by notebooks. Blood has dried beneath her nose. Her head pounds with the rhythm of contradictory memories. But her hand is steady as she writes:

October 7th, 2025. 20:34.

Subject: Swan. No last name in accessible records (Paradox: I remember a last name, but can't access the memory—erasure incomplete or corrupted?)

Observation: Physical contact creates stability field. Glitch-state neutralizes my Anchor effect. For 4 minutes and 37 seconds, I experienced singular timeline. No overlap. No contradiction. No pain.

Hypothesis: Swan exists outside system architecture. Null state allows him to manipulate substrate code. My mnemonic resistance + his null state = temporary immunity to reality manipulation.

Side effects of contact: Immediate cessation of nosebleeds. Visual stability restored. Auditory hallucinations ceased. Heart rate normalized. Pain index dropped from 8/10 to 2/10.

Her hand trembles. She presses harder, leaving deep impressions in the paper.

Personal note: Something breaks every time I see him. The world fractures a little more. My head splits with the weight of remembering what everyone else has forgotten.

But I'd rather be broken than blind.

She closes the notebook. Adds a new bracelet from her drawer—this one engraved with a single word: SWAN.

Around her, the dorm room flickers. Just slightly. Just enough.

Elara doesn't notice anymore.

She's learned to live in the spaces between stable realities.

[END OF CHAPTER]