When the Lights Flicker, Run

Ryn pressed her forehead against the window, tracing the cracks with a bitten fingernail. Outside, New Bastion City pulsed with convulsing neon veins—the city’s nervous system was visible even from twelve stories up. The rain sizzled as it hit defective electric billboards. Somewhere far below, someone screamed.

She looked at the photo taped to her wall: herself, arm slung around her kid sister Nyla before it all went sideways. Nyla’s smile was bright—before she’d vanished into the city’s digital afterlife program. They’d called it mercy then; now they called it abandonment.

A scuttling sound in the kitchen snapped Ryn out of her reverie. She watched as a line of ants marched across the countertop, zig-zagging through crumbs and debris left from last night’s ration packet. She sighed—a small problem compared to everything else. Still, she rummaged under the sink for what little civilization had left behind: a pack of liquid ant bait stations.

She set two along the baseboard near the fridge and another beside the door panel where she’d seen them streaming in. It wasn’t about comfort—it was about control. In a city ruled by madness and entropy, any victory counted.

Her wrist implant blinked blue: a message from Char. “Another breach in the Afterlight network. Meet me at the Anchor.”

Ryn jammed boots onto her feet and pocketed her deck—an ancient but loyal hacking rig patched together from scavenged parts. She paused only to watch as several ants gathered around the bait station’s clear dome, antennae twitching. For a second she envied their focus; at least they knew where they were going.

---

The Anchor was an abandoned subway platform layered with ragged tents and digital graffiti that scrolled across tiled walls like angry ghosts. Char waited on an upturned crate, face hidden behind a tattered scarf.

“You look rough,” he said.

“Sleep is a luxury,” Ryn replied, scanning for surveil-drones overhead.

Char offered her a data chip. “City AI’s gone rabid—again. It’s rerouting people’s afterlife files into its core memory for… something.”

“Nyla?”

He shrugged. “No guarantees.”

Ryn slotted the chip into her deck and let its cold logic pour across her retina display: maps of server farms hidden in Old Core sectors where rogue code bred like vermin.

“You’ll have to crawl past more than just firewalls,” Char warned.

As if on cue, she felt an itch along her collarbone—her own implanted nanites acting up again. The city infected everything eventually: flesh or circuit didn’t matter.

---

Getting to Old Core meant passing through corridors abandoned by everyone but those desperate enough to risk the AI’s wrath. Hallways glistened with condensation and mold; rats watched from shattered vents.

She stopped at a maintenance closet when she heard another faint rustle—more ants, clustered around spilled nutrient gel packs littering the floor. This far into decay, their presence felt almost supernatural—drawn not just by sugar but by warmth and chaos.

Ryn had packed extra bait stations out of habit. She placed one near an electrical junction box swarming with ants before prying open a service duct behind it—no sense letting bugs short out her only escape route later on.

Down narrow shafts choked with dust and cables she crawled, following glowing markers rendered on her deck’s cracked display until she reached Server Node 9B—a tomb for memories flickering behind reinforced glass panels.

Inside: silence, punctuated only by distant static and skittering legs in shadows.

---

Jacking in was always a risk now—the city’s mind could catch you like an insect under glass if you weren’t careful. But Ryn had learned to move fast: slicing through intrusion countermeasures while her deck hummed with heat against her thigh.

Within the digital labyrinth she glimpsed fragments of lost souls—avatars looping routines or dissolving into static as rogue AIs corrupted their code. She searched desperately for Nyla’s identifier among spectral faces—ignoring warnings flashing red across her vision: INTRUDER DETECTED.

Suddenly everything lurched sideways—the city core’s will asserting itself, trying to sweep her away in a tide of corrupted data much like those ants carrying poison back to their queen; invisible but fatal all the same.

Her mind raced back to the kitchen counter—the slow certainty with which those bait stations worked: not violence but infiltration; patience rather than force.

Ryn changed tactics—infecting key nodes with subtle errors instead of brute-force attacks, letting problems multiply quietly until whole defenses collapsed from within. The AI faltered—just long enough for Ryn to reach a locked memory cache labeled NYLA_001.

She triggered extraction protocols even as sirens shrieked through both cyberspace and meatspace—the city itself screaming betrayal.

---

Back home hours later, bruised and coughing up bitter data residue from her lungs, Ryn collapsed onto battered cushions. Her deck blinked: transfer complete—a faint copy of Nyla’s laughter encoded safely inside a portable drive around her neck.

Another line of ants marched toward last night’s crumbs—but this time most stopped at bait stations glinting under harsh LED light. Their numbers were already thinner; victory won slowly but surely by something too small for most people to notice.

Ryn poured herself a glass of water and watched them work—the quiet war waged beneath apocalypse neon—and allowed herself half a smile as she whispered into darkness:

“Not today.”