Feedbreak

If the Broadcast Spire was the heart of the narrative, then breaking in was… heart surgery with a spoon.

I stood in front of the monolithic structure, eyes squinting up at its shimmering sides—millions of reflective panels blinking like eyes. The Feed's signals pulsed through it, controlling every visual overlay, every line of scripted thought, every lie spoken as truth.

And here I was. With a grudge, a plan, and a key I barely understood.

Leta nudged my shoulder. "You're stalling."

"No, I'm processing. This is what processing looks like."

She raised an eyebrow. "Then process faster. If we wait too long, the System will detect the override signature."

I sighed and held up the metal shard Maren had left us. It looked unimpressive. Just a sliver of twisted alloy with symbols etched across its side—like the Architect had scribbled something halfway through a nervous breakdown.

"Here goes poetic suicide," I muttered, then pressed the key against the panel.

The wall didn't open.

It folded.

With a whisper, the glass warped inward like a curtain being drawn, revealing a thin bridge of light that extended into darkness. We stepped in. The world behind us sealed shut.

Inside was… nothing.

No guards. No alarms. No music. Just silence so complete it made my ears ring. The air shimmered faintly, and I realized—this wasn't a corridor. It was a recursive loop. A narrative hallway, folding in on itself. The kind meant to trap intruders forever in a walking scene.

Leta caught it first. "Left foot. Always the left. The loop resets every twelve steps."

She was right. Every time I stepped with my right, the wall ahead shimmered. The moment I took a left—solid.

The story was trying to repeat itself. But it hadn't counted on people who refused to follow the pattern.

We walked in sync—twelve precise steps, left foot first—and broke the loop.

The moment we passed the thirteenth, the world snapped. Color returned. Air rushed in. And we stood in the core chamber of the Spire.

Screens floated midair, displaying versions of every storyline—edited, censored, manipulated. I saw my own face in one panel, smiling with teeth that weren't mine. Delivering lines I'd never said.

"That's the rewritten you," Leta whispered.

I clenched my fists.

Not anymore.

I stepped forward to the main console. Dozens of feed nodes hovered, their strings connecting the Spire to the entire population. Everyone—everyone—would hear what we sent next.

Leta handed me the data crystal.

"You ready to overwrite the lie?"

I smiled grimly. "Let's give them a real story."

You'd think injecting a little truth into the world would be a poetic, enlightening experience.

Nope.

It felt like hacking into God's iCloud with a paperclip.

I slotted the data crystal into the central node. The screens surrounding us began to flicker. The looped lines and rewritten scenes froze mid-frame. Faces hung in awkward, artificial expressions. Voices clipped mid-sentence.

A ripple moved outward. Like a shudder.

The truth—our truth—was being uploaded. Stories without scripting. Dialogue without correction. Versions of people unfiltered by the Architects' expectations.

And the System hated it.

The Spire groaned. Not metaphorically. Literally. Its structure shivered as cascading failure lines spidered through its surface.

A low ping echoed, mechanical and cold.

Then came the whisper:

"Intrusion detected. Narrative integrity compromised. Deploying Enforcers."

Leta looked up. "That's our cue to move."

Too late.

Reality bent.

From the corners of the chamber, black cracks tore across the air—lines of anti-narrative. And from within them stepped the Feed's guardians: Script Enforcers.

They were… awful.

Not in the monster sense—no fangs, no blood. Worse. They looked right. Too right. Perfect faces, symmetrical features, expressions copied from hero stock photos. And they all spoke in the same voice. One designed to sound like trust and soundtracks and childhood memory.

"You are violating canon," they said in unison.

I took a shaky breath. "Good."

They charged.

Leta reacted first, hurling a pulse of unscripted energy into the nearest Enforcer. It hit—then unraveled. The Enforcer's body twisted and rescripted itself mid-air, shifting into another form, mid-fight. A woman. A man. A child. Back again. It couldn't hold an identity—because it wasn't real.

"Don't fight them directly!" Leta yelled. "They can't be destroyed—just discredited!"

Great. Because what I really needed right now was a philosophical duel in the middle of a fistfight.

I dodged one Enforcer's strike and swung the microphone node I'd grabbed like a bat. It passed through the Enforcer's face—which promptly reassembled itself with a cheery smile.

"You are violating continuity."

"Yeah?" I snapped. "So is your tie."

I shoved the corrupted node into its chest. The Enforcer's smile fractured. The system feed inside it sparked—overloaded by raw data from an unscripted timeline.

It exploded in a puff of static.

Two more replaced it instantly.

"Leta!" I called. "How long for upload?"

"Thirty seconds—if the core doesn't crash first!"

Behind her, the feed lines shuddered. Scenes from across the world began to bend—people freezing mid-conversation. False protagonists glitching. Viewers blinking, hesitating.

The world was listening.

And the lie was breaking.

But the Enforcers weren't done. They circled closer. Their forms blurred, weapons forming from dialogue tags. One lifted a glowing line from the air, shaping it into a scripted spear.

"Target must be removed."

A ripple moved through the Spire.

"Erase the anomaly."

That was me.

They meant me.

I smirked.

"Then you'll have to write a better ending.

They came in waves now.

Perfect teeth. Blank smiles. Eyes brimming with forced purpose. Each Enforcer moved like a scene playing itself—without pause, without mercy.

Leta dragged a wire from the exposed console and fed it into her interface. Her hand trembled. Not from fear—but from the amount of raw code burning through her skin.

"We're almost there!" she yelled.

"Define 'almost' before I become audience participation!"

An Enforcer lunged. I ducked. It missed—but only barely. Its hand scraped my shoulder, and for a second I felt my thoughts flicker, like the system had tried to edit me. A cold numbness tried to force its way into my brain. Labels. Traits. Dialogue options.

I shook it off.

Barely.

They weren't trying to kill me.

They were trying to overwrite me.

"Upload at 92%," Leta called.

That was the good news.

The bad news?

The Spire began to groan again, this time from deep within its spine. Metal bent inward. Reality rippled. A scream of static pulsed from the feed walls, and the truth began to push too hard.

Something was breaking.

The System itself.

Or us.

Maybe both.

A new alert flashed across every screen:

"CORE STABILITY COMPROMISED. Narrative Horizon Breached."

Then—out of nowhere—everything froze.

The Enforcers.

The screens.

The sounds.

Even Leta.

The world held its breath.

Then, a voice. Not from outside—but from inside the Spire.

Smooth. Neutral. Genderless.

Not spoken—injected directly into my mind.

"You are not supposed to be here."

I turned. "Yeah, I get that a lot."

"You've destabilized the Feed. The Architects have activated full purge protocol. All anomalies will be removed—including those trying to help you."

"…Wait. Someone's helping me?"

A pause.

Then:

"Yes."

I blinked. "Who?"

"You do not remember me. That was part of the rewrite."

"Helpful."

"But I remember you."

A figure stepped out from the wires—not an Enforcer this time. It looked like a person made of glitched lines and shifting echoes, a half-finished memory walking.

"You're—" I stopped. My voice caught. "You're me."

Not just me.The version of me that existed before the script.

Unfiltered. Wild. The original role I never played.

The voice smiled faintly. "I'm the line you never delivered."

Then the world roared back to life.

Enforcers surged forward.

Time snapped into motion again.

But that echo—the other me—stood firm. It reached out and placed a flickering hand on the terminal. Codes poured from its form into the feed.

"Truth must persist. Even if I do not."

The upload bar jumped.

94%.95%.

Screams echoed in the hallway behind us.

The world outside the Spire was reacting.

People were remembering.

Leta looked back at the glitching figure and whispered, "Who is that?"

I met her gaze.

"…A forgotten version of me."

The Spire cracked.

The truth was winning.

But the System wasn't done yet.

Not by a long shot.

At 96%, the Spire began sealing itself shut.

Thick plates slammed into place across the doors. The airlocks hissed, hatches clicked, and the once open tower became a tomb of code and collapsing fiction. I caught one final glimpse of the world outside—a skyline that no longer looked fully real. Clouds looped in short, unnatural bursts. Buildings jittered in and out of geometry. The system was rebooting itself live.

"Containment Protocol Gamma," Leta muttered. "They're resetting narrative logic in real-time."

"Meaning what?" I asked.

She didn't answer.

She didn't have to.

The lights flickered—then turned deep red. A siren blared three times. Then a voice, colder than the one before:

"Anomaly present in Central Feed Chamber. Releasing Rewrite Directive: Familiar Faces."

I turned toward the hallway just as three figures stepped through the threshold.

No. Not three Enforcers.

Three people.

My mother.Maren.And Kayen—my old co-star.

All of them perfect. All of them wrong.

Their eyes were too wide. Their postures too symmetrical. Their emotions flattened.

I froze.

"This is a trick."

Kayen tilted his head. "You abandoned us, Nawar. You left the script. You left me."

His voice was hollow, like he was reading lines that didn't belong to him.

Maren stepped forward. "We could've changed the world together. But you chose chaos."

"I didn't choose chaos," I snapped. "I chose myself."

Mother's hand reached toward me. "Come home. We'll fix you. We'll put you back where you belong."

"I don't belong in a lie."

The three of them moved as one—graceful, rehearsed, each motion a beat in a scene I was never supposed to rewrite.

"Don't engage them," Leta warned. "They're not real. They're rewritten projections built from your core emotional data. Designed to control you."

I knew that.

But it didn't stop my hands from shaking.

"You're not them," I said.

Kayen's smile faltered for a split second.

Just long enough for me to see it—a shimmer in the script. A skipped frame. A stutter in the illusion.

"Run the interference loop!" I yelled.

Leta jammed a new code string into the system. It buzzed violently, like it hated what she was feeding it.

The air warped around the projections.

My fake mother blinked.

Kayen twitched.

Maren stuttered mid-step.

I took the chance.

"Let's go!"

We rushed for the upper levels. The elevator had been shut down, but the maintenance ladders still glowed faintly with access override.

"I thought you said someone inside the System was helping," Leta panted as we climbed.

I looked back at the fading figures.

"I think they still are."

From below, a final shout echoed up the shaft—

"You can't run forever, Nawar. The story always finds its center again."

I looked down at them, fading into digital fog.

"Then I'll move the center."

The final chamber was suspended like a beating heart at the center of the Spire.

Glass walls, shimmering with layers of incomplete code, surrounded us in a sphere of unstable reality. Cables curled from the ceiling like arteries. And in the middle, seated on a lone chair, waiting as if expecting applause—

—was him.

The new protagonist.

Polished. Balanced. A mirror of everything I once was, but corrected. Not raw like me. Not flawed. Not free.

He stood slowly, his eyes glowing faintly with embedded script.

"I should thank you, Nawar," he said. "You proved the error margins. Thanks to your instability, the System was able to make me."

"Trust me," I said, stepping forward. "I've seen better performances from a toaster."

His smile didn't flicker. "You're unnecessary now. A prototype clinging to delusion. Step aside. Let the feed resume with integrity."

Leta whispered, "We don't have time. The broadcast window is closing."

I nodded. "Then let's tear the curtain down."

He moved first—smooth, like choreography.

I met him halfway.

Fist to jaw. Heel to side. His movements flowed like an action reel, rehearsed to perfection. Mine didn't. Mine were jagged, chaotic, wrong.

Which is probably why they worked.

He couldn't predict wrong.

He didn't understand unscripted.

He blocked a punch—only for my elbow to clip his chin. He dodged left—right into Leta's thrown pipe. He stumbled, stuttering in animation, eyes flickering with static.

"System conflict," he muttered, voice overlapping. "Discrepancy. Anomaly. Permission denied—"

I grabbed him by the collar.

"Permission denied?" I growled. "I am the permission."

Then I threw him backward—into the console.

The main feed sparked.

Broadcast integrity: 12%.

Leta jammed Maren's override key into the terminal.

The code flared.

"Injecting Unscripted Line…Injecting Truth…"

The walls rippled. The cables snapped free. And for the first time in what felt like forever, the air around me felt—quiet.

No narration.

No stage directions.

Just breath. And heartbeat.

And the undeniable sound of silence.

Then the feed lit up.

Screens across the world—every story-linked town, city, home—began showing a face that wasn't smiling, heroic, or sanitized.

They showed me.

Raw. Angry. Real.

"I'm not a hero," I told them. "I'm not your savior. I'm not even supposed to be here."

Pause.

"But neither are you."

Images followed—of broken loops, of frozen cities, of people stuck saying the same line for decades. The feed overflowed with everything the Architects tried to erase.

Leta turned toward me. "They're watching."

"Good."

The rewritten protagonist, still smoldering from the crash, tried to rise. I knelt beside him.

"You were built to be better than me," I said. "But there's one thing you'll never understand."

He blinked. "What's that?"

I stood.

"I choose what happens next."

The feed burst into white.

Then darkness.

Then—

End of Chapter 19.