The heat shimmered off the digital sidewalks like a glitch in the sky. Somewhere above, a sky-drone lazily circled, dragging a holographic ad for “Quantum Nachos: Now With Flavor That Thinks For You!” behind it. The letters sparkled in midair, fizzling in and out with microdelays that meant the drone was probably overdue for a tune-up. Below, the town square buzzed with the usual blend of futuristic monotony and unexpected chaos. Smart pets darted between legs, chasing artificial butterflies. Holo-vendors chanted offers in a dozen languages, their voices perfectly modulated and entirely soulless.
Klic stood at the edge of the square like a statue someone had forgotten to animate. His arms were crossed tightly over his hoodie—which, despite being designed with self-cooling nanoweave, still made him sweat. He wore it anyway. The pressure of the fabric helped. So did the hood pulled halfway over his eyes. It made the world quieter. Smaller. Easier to observe.
His fingers moved, twitching at his sides like they had a mind of their own. Not random fidgeting—no, this was purposeful. He was typing invisible keys, drawing out patterns, thinking in rhythms no one else could see. Numbers. Paths. Fractals. Even the clouds above seemed to speak to him in codes.
Dan noticed. Dan always noticed.
“You’re doing the thing again,” Dan said, flopping onto a low-hover bench beside him. The bench adjusted to his body shape with a hum of acknowledgment.
Klic didn’t respond right away.
“The brain thing,” Dan continued around a mouthful of jalapeño cake bites. “Where you look like you’re hacking the air.”
Klic shrugged. “I found something.”
Dan blinked. “Snack-related?”
Klic’s mouth twitched—half smile, half mischief. “Sort of. It was behind a melted CrunchCore in the school vending machine.”
“You went behind the vending machine?”
Klic nodded. “Was following a raccoon-bot. And a hunch.”
Dan paused mid-bite. “You’re serious.”
“As the black hole in your mom’s nutrient blender.”
Klic dug into his pocket and pulled out a warped scrap of aluminum-paper. He unfolded it with care, like it was some sacred relic from the Old Internet. The surface shimmered oddly, shifting between binary code, broken text, and strange symbols that didn’t belong to any known language.
Dan squinted. “That looks… illegal.”
“It said: ‘Sector Z.03: Entry Unregistered. Age Override?’” Klic whispered.
Dan’s eyebrows climbed so high they almost left his head. “That’s Infiniverse-level code.”
“I think someone was trying to get in. A kid. Like us. And they didn’t finish.”
“Or they got deleted.”
“Or they made it.”
Before Dan could reply, the unmistakable whirr of overclocked hover wheels approached. Reya skidded to a halt on a hacked-together board made from a hoverchair base, a disassembled vacuum drone, and pure defiance. She wore mechanic goggles on her forehead, oversized gloves hanging from her belt, and a rubber chicken with a fiber-optic cable trailing from its mouth.
Reya never entered quietly. Her mind worked like a machine locked in turbo-mode, always racing, always building. She didn’t walk so much as storm into every space like a blueprint brought to life. She was precise in the messiest ways. Even her backpack looked like a puzzle exploded and reassembled itself wrong on purpose.
“I got your signal,” she said breathlessly. “What’s the malfunction?”
Klic held out the paper.
Reya scanned it with a thumb-sized device patched together from half a toothbrush, a keychain flashlight, and the brain of a toy AI hamster.
“Where did you get this?”
“Snack machine.”
“Of course,” Dan said.
“This is encrypted with admin-tier protocols,” Reya muttered. “Not just banned—this kind of code doesn’t exist outside the Infiniverse.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“It’s ancient. Glitched. But somehow still alive. Like… someone tried to open something they shouldn’t have.”
Jennifer arrived next, walking like someone who expected the world to part before her. She wore her hair in two tight braids, her holo-charm bracelet flashing subtle color changes to match her moods. Her steps were steady, graceful, practiced. She didn’t lead by shouting—she led because people trusted her to.
She took one look at the group and raised an eyebrow. “Emergency ping?” she asked.
Klic handed her the tag. She didn’t flinch. Just read it. Took a breath. Then turned to Sirius, who had arrived silently behind her, like always.
Sirius didn’t walk so much as appear. Tall and lean, his gray uniform made him look like a shadow trying to pass as human. His face was unreadable, always was, and his words came measured, as if every syllable had to pass a truth test before leaving his mouth.
“There are administrative inconsistencies,” he said calmly. “But it is authentic.”
“You didn’t even scan it,” Jennifer said.
“I remember it.”
“You what?” Reya demanded.
“I saw it once. Two years ago. On my father’s admin console. It vanished five seconds later.”
Everyone stared at him.
“Why are you only just now telling us this?” Klic said.
“You didn’t ask.”
Before anyone could respond, a loud clang echoed from the recycling chute ten feet away. Ty exploded from the opening in a burst of neon confetti and glitter, a stolen birthday crown jammed sideways on his head.
“DID SOMEONE SAY ‘CODE’?!” he screamed, landing in a heap.
No one answered.
“Okay, cool,” Ty said, brushing glitter from his shirt. “Just checking.”
That summer, Cobalt Pines was a perfect blend of shiny and broken. Towering sky-trees fed power into the grid via leaves made of photosensitive foil. Delivery drones buzzed overhead like metal bees. But not everything gleamed. Some corners of the town still held onto rust. Dust. Forgotten places where old tech and new dreams collided.
The kids’ hideout—the “Node”—was one such place. Once a smart playground, it had been condemned for having too many adaptive surfaces that didn’t meet new safety specs. The soft-fall floors still pulsed with old patterns, and the climbing walls sometimes rearranged themselves mid-step. Dangerous. Perfect.
Klic sat cross-legged on the Node’s highest platform, watching the afternoon light filter through fractured polymer glass. His hoodie hood was down for once, exposing his mop of stubborn hair and eyes that never stopped moving. His hands twitched even in rest, mapping out variables only he could track.
Dan sat nearby, unwrapping an illegally imported snack from the Unregulated Zones. He took a bite, nodded approvingly. “Cinnamon. Fake strawberry. Nano-chili. Three types of crunch.”
Reya had half her body inside a broken console. Sparks flew. She didn’t flinch. She mumbled formulas between breaths.
Jennifer was organizing a plan on the old project wall. She didn’t bark orders—she offered frameworks. Everyone listened.
Sirius stood still, eyes closed, running calculations no one asked for.
And Ty? Ty was zip-lining from one side of the Node to the other with a bucket on his head and a banner that read “WELCOME TO THE APOCALYPSE!” trailing behind him.
As the summer deepened, so did the mystery. Clues followed clues. The vending machine led to a virtual tour glitch in the school’s educational holos. That glitch led to a storage room filled with old teacher archives. And inside that? A broken janitor-bot that only spoke in corrupted rhymes.
“If door is locked and age unwise, / Find the place where shadows rise.”
“That’s either a riddle,” Reya muttered, “or deeply poetic malware.”
“It’s the old library basement,” Klic said without hesitation. “2:30 PM, solar panel bends light through the broken western window. Shadows form a triangle. Points straight at the floor.”
They followed him. They always did. And they found it.
Not a portal. Not a door. A mirror.
It didn’t show reflections. It showed secrets.
Sirius saw numbers. Jennifer saw herself alone. Dan saw snacks that didn’t exist yet. Ty saw nothing—and panicked. Reya saw the Node burning. And Klic? Klic saw an admin screen. And one word blinking in the corner:
CANDIDATE.