Chapter 6: The Taste of Static

Chapter 6: The Taste of Static

The last protein bar was gone. Elias crumpled the metallic wrapper into a tight, hard ball, the sound obscenely loud in the humming silence of the lab. He watched Lily trace a pattern onto a fogged-up beaker with her fingertip, her movements fluid and unhurried. She hadn't asked for food or water in what he guessed was two days. Her physical needs seemed to be fading, another piece of her old self she was happily shedding.

His own thirst, however, was a frantic, primal scream in the back of his throat. The lab's water purifier had given up yesterday, its filters finally clogged with unidentifiable sediment. The thirst was an anchor to the man he used to be, a biological imperative that refused to be rewritten.

“We have to go out,” he rasped, his voice a dry crackle. “We need water.”

Lily looked up from her beaker, her eyes holding that familiar, gentle pity. “The world is full of it,” she said, her voice soft as falling dust. “You just have to learn how to drink the new water.”

Her nonsensical words were a spur, driving him to action. He couldn't let himself think like her. He couldn't afford that peace. He grabbed two empty sample containers, his movements sharp and angry. “Stay behind me. Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t touch anything.”

She simply nodded and followed him to the door, a silent, graceful shadow in his desperate wake.

Stepping out of the lab was like stepping onto another planet. The city was no longer a collection of static structures; it was a single, living organism. The asphalt of the university courtyard was soft and yielding under his feet, like hard-packed moss. The skyscrapers in the distance didn't just bend anymore; they seemed to breathe, their glass and steel facades gently contracting and expanding in time with the silent pulse from the Aperture. A slow, city-wide respiration.

There were no sharp corners left anywhere. Lampposts drooped in elegant, impossible arcs. The edges of buildings had softened into smooth, organic curves. It was a world sculpted by a divine, mad artist.

“Look,” Lily whispered, pointing. A flock of pigeons sat on what used to be a straight-edged fountain. They weren’t cooing or pecking. They were arranged in a perfect, concentric spiral, utterly still, their heads cocked toward the sky.

Elias shuddered and pulled her along, his eyes scanning for their destination: a supermarket, a mundane box of concrete and glass he prayed was still mundane. It was four blocks away, a journey that now felt like crossing a continent.

The automatic doors of the “Metro Foods” were gone. In their place, the entrance shimmered, the air thick and viscous like a curtain of heat haze. He hesitated for a second, then pushed through it. The air inside felt strangely charged, vibrating with the same hum that now lived permanently in his chest. The fluorescent lights overhead weren’t buzzing; they were pulsing, a slow, rhythmic flicker that matched the parasitic beat of his own heart.

The supermarket was not empty. It was full of the Changed, maybe thirty of them, moving with the same serene purpose he’d seen in the library. But the sight that greeted him was a perversion of his desperate hopes. The aisles weren’t looted or barren. They were full. And they were being used to build an altar.

No one was eating. No one was drinking.

Instead, they were arranging the store’s contents into vast, intricate offerings. A wave of red, made from thousands of Campbell’s soup cans, flowed down the main aisle, swirling around a pillar of meticulously stacked green vegetable tins. In the produce section, apples, oranges, and lemons were not in piles, but laid out in a massive, swirling mandala on the floor. A woman was carefully constructing a spiraling pattern on a shelf using only blue and yellow boxes of macaroni and cheese. It was the library all over again, but with sustenance instead of knowledge. They were taking the very means of human survival and turning it into art for their silent, colorless god.

Elias felt a surge of rage so pure it almost made him dizzy. They were starving, and these… things… were finger-painting with their only hope.

Lily, however, let out a soft gasp of wonder. “It’s for the sky,” she breathed, her artist’s soul captivated. “They’re answering the song.”

He ignored her, his eyes scanning desperately. He saw a door at the back of the store, marked with a faded “EMPLOYEES ONLY” sign. The storeroom. There would be sealed crates of water back there. Unspoiled. Un-worshipped.

He began to move, hugging the edge of the aisles, trying to remain unseen. The Changed paid him no mind, their focus absolute. He was a ghost in their cathedral. As he neared the back wall, he saw a man in a tattered security guard uniform standing directly in front of a solid cinderblock wall, about ten feet from the storeroom door. The man was perfectly still, his head tilted up slightly. Elias flattened himself behind a pallet of dog food, waiting for the guard to move.

The man didn't turn. He didn't walk away. He took a single, calm step forward.

And walked through the wall.

Elias’s brain stuttered, refusing to process the input. The cinderblock wall did not shatter or crumble. For the instant the man passed through it, it became porous, shimmering like a hologram made of smoke and static. He saw the man’s silhouette for a fraction of a second, suspended within the solid matter of the wall, before he emerged on the other side, in the storeroom. The wall solidified behind him with a sound like a soft, final shhhhh. The sound of a television being turned off for the last time.

It was over in a second. And in that second, Elias’s entire understanding of the universe shattered.

There was no safe place.

The realization hit him with the force of a physical blow, knocking the air from his lungs. His plan to hide in the lab, to barricade himself behind walls of concrete and steel, was a child’s fantasy of hiding from monsters under the blankets. The monsters weren't trying to break down the walls. They were simply remembering that the walls weren't real in the first place.

Physical matter, the one constant he had clung to, was no longer a constant. It was a suggestion. A habit the universe was in the process of breaking.

He felt a hand on his arm. Lily. She was looking at the spot where the man had vanished, her expression not one of shock, but of quiet understanding. “Everything is becoming open,” she said.

His thirst, his hunger, his rage—it all evaporated, replaced by a cold, profound, and absolute horror. This wasn't a war. It wasn't an invasion. You couldn't fight a flood by building a wall of sand. The universe was not hostile. It was simply… updating. It was rewriting its own source code, and humanity, with its rigid bodies and its stubborn insistence on the laws of physics, was part of the old, buggy program being written over. They were being deleted, not with malice, but with the serene indifference of a programmer cleaning up obsolete code.

He numbly took Lily's hand and backed away, pulling her out of the supermarket, out of their failed quest. The journey back to the lab was a blur. The breathing buildings and curved roads no longer seemed alien or threatening. They were just the new normal.

Back inside the sealed room, he slid down the wall, the empty water containers falling from his grasp and rolling across the floor. The thirst was back, but it felt distant, unimportant. It was a feature of his old programming.

He could feel the parasitic rhythm in his chest more strongly than ever, a steady, alien pulse. And for the first time, he could feel it on his tongue. It was a faint, chemical tang, a phantom sensation that was slowly becoming real.

It was the taste of static. The taste of the air inside a machine that was being turned on. The taste of his own reality becoming porous.