Thursday, August 28th, 2042, Sumner, Portland, Oregon

  Sumner was quieter than downtown Portland, but still restless in its own way. A mixed sprawl of old brick apartments and glassy modern complexes framed the streets, their reflections warping slightly in the curved smart-glass panels designed to regulate heat. Overhead, a grid of suspended traffic lights swayed faintly in the breeze, and electric shuttles hummed past, gliding over roads mapped for automated driving. A few pedestrians leisurely walked around in the midday sun. The smell of overheating car chargers, sharp and chemical, battled with the sweet, woodsy fragrance of the trees, all overlaid by the metallic tang of ozone.

  Ryan barely noticed any of it.

  Stepping out of his basement apartment, he squinted into the blinding sunlight. The brightness hit like a slap, and his body tensed—too much, too sudden—but within moments, his eyes adjusted. The air was a crisp twenty-one degrees Celsius—cooler than expected for August—but the sunlight wrapped around him, warm and almost heavy, like the lingering comfort of his bed.

  After locking behind him, he walked south down on 89th. He was heading towards the small enclave of Maywork Park, where his parents and little sister still lived. In one hand, he steadily carried a plastic container containing his mother’s cooking; Lucia would probably kill him had he delayed his departure any longer, so he had settled on bringing the meal along with him.

  Two birds with one stone—if I eat it there, there’ll be no need to bring back the empty container later.

  As Ryan stepped into the shade of the trees lining the avenue, a creeping chill prickled across his skin, sending a shiver down his spine. Instinctively, he craved the sun’s warmth, but the moment he stepped back into the light, the heat pressed down on him, sudden and overbearing. His body wavered between craving the sun and recoiling from it, a tug-of-war that was not alarming so much as… wrong. Distracting. The sensation unsettled him in a way he could not quite name. But he had bigger concerns than sunlight.

  Kaelyn’s gone viral.

  The thought echoed, relentless. It was not surprising—he had designed her to be eye-catching. Though he had not seen the screenshots flooding the net yet, he knew they were out there. Lucia had taken plenty during their chat yesterday, different from the carefully curated picture he had sent to Megan.

  Without stopping, Ryan pulled his phone and swiped his password in.

  Wow, first page on the newsfeed! We really made it!

  A flicker of pride swelled in his chest—Kaelyn had made an impact. But he quickly rationalised it. Of course, she would appear at the top of his feed; the predictive AI in his phone knew he played the game and would flag related articles. This was just another example of an algorithm feeding him what it knew he wanted.

  The real test? Seeing if Kaelyn made the front page for people who did not play.

  I wonder if the AI knows I’m Kaelyn? But mostly, I’m dying to know what the article says about her!

  He tapped the headline: “Glitch of the Century.”

  Skimming the article, Ryan noted how the reporter framed the phenomenon—a game-breaking accident that had allowed players to rewrite their appearances in VR. They compared it to an old technological ambition, one that companies had chased fervently, before ultimately abandoning the dream. The dream had died, the article claimed, much like Augmented Reality gaming—hyped, fleeting, and, in the end, forgotten.

  Then he saw them. The pictures. With an s.

  Okay, Lucia, I didn’t know you were a paparazzo. How many shots did you share?

  The article featured Kaelyn in front of a full-length mirror in his Cyberpunk-themed Hub. One image showed her playfully swaying her hips, her tail flicking in sync with the movement. Another captured her teasingly brushing her golden blonde hair over one shoulder, lips curved in an inviting smirk. A third had her lazily waving a manicured hand, dismissing some unheard concern, her catlike emerald eyes half-lidded, framed by impossibly perfect lashes and makeup.

  And then there was the last one.

  Kaelyn stood there, her clothes hugging every exaggerated curve, fabric stretching taut over an impossible hourglass frame.

  Ryan’s breath caught.

  Okay, wow.

  Is that how Kaelyn looks from the outside? Is that how I look, when I’m inside that body? When I strut around my Hub, when I danced with Vaelith?

  He stared at the images, transfixed.

  Is that really me? Did I move like that? Did I pose like that?

  Yes. Yes, we did, and it had been so natural, so effortless.

  Kaelyn had known precisely the effect she wanted to have on people, and her body knew just how to make it happen. Even now, Ryan felt himself being drawn in. The same way others were. The same way he had been when controlling her.

  His own character had him under her spell, even though she was him. Or at least, he was her. When he was online.

  Why try to distinguish between the two? It’s all us.

  Seeing her like this was different from the sterile character creation room, where avatars stood frozen in neutral poses. These were not static renders. Kaelyn was not just an image—she moved. She exuded presence. She posed like a model in a professional shoot, like someone whose body was her canvas and knew exactly what she was doing.

  Did someone doctor those shots? Lucia, maybe? Or had the news sites enhanced them?

  Even though Ryan’s degree was not in professional photography, even he could tell none of those looked like amateur shots; this was not the work of someone just randomly hitting the screenshot button in the middle of a VR Chat.

  He quickly scrolled to the top of the article to read through it: “As a side-effect of HexakAI Inc.’s revolutionary calibration system, the in-game avatars are somehow overriding people’s VR avatars. The glitch fascinates many, but some struggled to maintain professional credibility after their transformation.”

  It went on to describe how the pictures had begun circulating from the University of Portland, and reached every corner of the globe in less than twenty-four hours, causing millions of new users to join the game if only for the chance to spice up their VR lives. People creating anything from seven-foot tall dragon men to three-foot short anthropomorphic bunnies. For many people, especially those whose career and education happened solely in VR, the glitch brought chaos as people tried to reconnect the new appearances with their colleagues, teachers, students or family members.

  Companies, such as the tech giant NEURASphere, were quick to respond to the change, promising in a public statement how they would not discriminate against employees or clients affected by the glitch. Their closing statement reminded everyone of the importance of the professional image of their company and how they had already taken measures to maintain it. The issue, they stated, only impacted a small, almost insignificant, number of their employees. There would be no impact on deliverables or quality of their product or services.

  The article continued with an interview with a professor from the University where the rumours had originated from.

  “We think that the calibration system, meant to prevent a user from feeling the usual side-effects of mismatching image of the self and their virtual avatar, led to a glitch in our VR programming. Here, the software no longer recognises the player’s real bodies as their selves, and instead keeps itself aligned to the game avatar. One theory suggests this might be an intentional move by the developers, as the calibration system isn’t instantaneous. Therefore, it is believed they meant to avoid calibration in and out too frequently whenever the user had to deal with other tasks while in the middle of gaming, like answering calls.”

  Ryan nodded along with the explanation. Of course, he had noticed the glitch when Lucia had visited yesterday, but the theory from the professor sounded reasonable; the progress bar to calibrate to Kaelyn’s form had needed a while.

  “This leads us to think the programmers might have forgotten to actually shut down the calibration system when a player properly logs off from the game. During development, their team of engineers or testers might have kept the feature disabled to avoid having to go through the lengthy process every time they ran a local test. It’s not that uncommon for a product to ship with some debug code still running. And this is doubly true when monitoring the stability of a product on launch day—having access to full debug logs and features would help address any unforeseen problem. Therefore, we assume there will be a hotfix released very soon which will address the issue.”

  That also sounded reasonable to Ryan. Some time ago, he had given a shot at making a game. He had tossed a bunch of nodes and connections, using those popular game engines and visual scripting languages that supposedly made it easy.

  Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

  Easy in relative term, maybe.

  Perhaps visual scripting was easier than coding, but after spending three weeks on a project, his script had grown into an eldritch abomination, or so his friends had teased him. Some of them had even threatened to release screenshots of his creation on some website that featured the worst examples of spaghetti code from hell.

  The memory made him blush. But it helped him put things into perspective. Forgetting to disconnect or reconnect a disabled node in a mess like that? He could totally see it.

  But Ryan remained suspicious. The interview had felt too convenient, like a perfectly orchestrated play. That sounded like a message meant to placate the public, to pacify everyone. What if there was more to it than that? What if it was no mere glitch, a silly mistake from a developer who forgot to deactivate some debug code?

  What if it was intentional?

  Were there any others who could still hear their character’s voice, in their mind, even outside of the game?

  Or am I the only one?

  He shook his head, scoffing.

  Okay, stop it with the paranoia. You simply didn’t get enough sleep, that’s all.

  He turned on Prescott Road, marking the halfway point in his trip to his parent’s place.

  He kept scrolling through the news article. The next section was an interview with his sister. The thumbnail showed her, standing in front of their parent’s house.

  Already online? What have you told them, Lu?

  Ryan debated with himself. Should he even check? A part of him told him it was probably smarter not to watch it.

  His heart tightened in his chest, and he stopped walking.

  He pushed that part away, frowning.

  I have to check. I have to be prepared for what awaits me once I get there.

  So he thumbed the video, letting it play. Holding his cell phone and food container with both hands as he focused on the small screen.

  “Lucia Porter, can you confirm you are the one who took the photographs of this blonde beauty, the one who took the entire world by surprise?”

  Ryan’s heart froze for a moment, waiting to see what his whip-smart little sister would respond to that.

  “Yeah. It was just checking on someone, but Bam! There she was. Kaelyn picked up my call instead.”

  Ryan let go a breath of relief. She was keeping things vague. No mention of his name. No mention of gender. Keeping his privacy safe. She was actually much sharper than him about things like that.

  “Can you confirm you know the player behind Kaelyn, then?”

  “Yes, yes, of course I do. Like I said, I was calling them.”

  This interview was not doing his nerves any good. Each question was killing him with stress and anxiety. The reporter did not exactly ask, but he could read between the lines. “Who, exactly, is Kaelyn IRL?”

  Lucia wanted him to come deal with those reporters? Did she have some kind of plan?

  “What can you tell us about them? Are they anything like her in real life? I mean, short of the obvious parts.”

  Lucia crossed her arms and glared at the reporter.

  “I’ll let them decide how much they’re willing to share. They never asked to be the face of this glitch, and they may not want to be out publicly.”

  Ryan let out a long breath of relief.

  Bless you, Lucia.

  But the reporter was not done.

  “Of course, that is totally within their rights. But we understand you have reached out to them and that they are on their way?”

  Lucia waved them off, clearly irritated at this point.

  “Yes, yes. Kaelyn is on her way here. We’ll see if she’ll talk to you when she does.”

  The reporter backed off, but clearly appeared triumphant.

  “So it is as you heard. The world’s most famous catgirl, the face of the ‘Glitch of the century’, Kaelyn, is on her way here. This is Chloe McIntyre, KOIN 6 News, in Maywood Park, Oregon. Updates on this story as soon as possible. Back to you, Charles.”

  Ryan grimaced. They had her character’s name. He wondered if Lucia had done that on purpose or if she had slipped.

  Maybe she fed them just enough information, so they’d leave her alone until I got there?

  He also wondered if he logged in the game now. Would online reporters be on the lookout for a blonde Half-blood felinae called Kaelyn? Would they try to interview her in the game, too? Did news channels really register accounts for their reporters to find players in video games?

  He had not realized just how quickly being popular could become a pain in the ass.

  He started walking again, soon crossing over the interstate. What was he going to do once he arrived?

  But before an answer came, his phone ringtone interrupted his thoughts.

  He looked at the caller ID. Megan. He picked up quickly, grateful for anything resembling normalcy.

  “Hey Meg.”

  “Ryan, sorry to call out of the blue like that! Are you doing okay?”

  She sounded so worried that he started to wonder if he should be, too.

  Why is everyone making a big deal out of this?

  He forced a laugh. “Heh, I’ve had better days. You?”

  He tried to play it smooth. There was no point in worrying her over this, too.

  “I worry about you, babe. This Kaelyn thing just exploded, huh?”

  Try as he might, Ryan could not prevent himself from snorting a laugh.

  “I mean, that was the idea, so mission accomplished, you know?”

  “I’m serious, though. How are you handling it?”

  Ryan hesitated. He could downplay it. Joke it off. But there was something in her tone that made him hesitate—like she could hear his thoughts, waiting for him to be honest.

  “I don’t know, Meg. I really don’t—Once I’m home, I’ll have a chat with Lucia first, before I speak to anyone else. This was supposed to just be a fun experiment in a game, you know?”

  “You got more than you bargained for, huh? And now you’re… her. Every time you log in.”

  Ryan let out a sharp breath, fingers tightening around his phone. Megan had said it so matter-of-factly. Like she had been expecting this. He ran a hand through his hair—then froze.

  Soft. Silky.

  For a fleeting moment, his mind stuck on this detail, as if it was not supposed to be.

  But soon, the moment passed, and Ryan shoved the thought aside, clearing his throat.

  I can trust Meg…

  “Yeah. And it’s not just her appearance, either.”

  He swallowed. He had not intended to say that. But now that it was out, he could not take it back.

  “Wait… How do you mean?”

  He scratched the top of his head, soothing an itching sensation he had not realised was there until now.

  “It’s like…” He struggled to find the words. How could he even explain it? “I’m way bolder when I’m in her skin. Like I know how to move that body around and be confident and sexy. It all comes so naturally.”

  A pause. A long one.

  Did I say too much?

  Ryan braced himself for laughter. For disbelief.

  “And are you okay with that?”

  “I—uh. I don’t know.” Ryan blinked. “Right now, talking about it? It feels strange. Like it’s not who I am. But the moment I’m in VR, it’s fine. I feel fine. Like it’s the most natural thing in the world.”

  His stomach twisted even as he said the words.

  Maybe Megan can help sort some of it all.

  “That’s wild.”

  Wild? Yeah, you can say that again, Meg. But still nothing as wild as the acrobatic stunt I pulled this morning. Should I let her know about that too…? Maybe keep a lid on that one for now.

  But he still had more to say. “…That’s not all, though…”

  “What’s up, babe?”

  The words felt dangerous to say out loud. He stopped walking, looking around to make sure no one was close enough to overhear him.

  “I feel like some of her is lingering around in my head, even when I’m not in VR.”

  He braced for her reaction.

  Is she going to think I’ve gone crazy?

  Ryan checked for traffic on both sides before crossing the street, then headed south on 96th.

  “Can you… Explain what you mean? What’s that’s like?”

  He wondered how he could phrase it.

  All the little oddities from this morning?

  “I feel like…” He exhaled sharply. “Like some of her is still there, even when I’m offline. Like… I can hear her.”

  “Hear her how?”

  Ryan’s heart pounded.

  “Like a voice in my head. Like if I think something, I already know what she’d say. Or what she’d do.”

  Silence. Ryan clenched his teeth.

  There. I said it. Now laugh. Tell me I’m crazy. Tell me I need to get more sleep.

  But Megan did not laugh.

  “Hmm. I think I get it.”

  Wait… What?

  Ryan slowed his pace. “You… get it?”

  “You’re on your way to your parent’s, right? To deal with the reporters?”

  Okay, not even a hint of surprise or disbelief? Really?

  That was not the reaction he expected. Megan did not even seem particularly phased. Maybe she knew something about whatever he was going through. Lucia might know, too. They were both pretty smart about things like that.

  “Yeah, just a few minutes away now.”

  “Okay, why don’t we VR chat after you’re done with them? Send me a ping when you’re done? How does that sound? I’d like to meet Kaelyn. See if I can help, if you’ll let me?”

  Ryan hesitated. The idea sent a jolt of unease through him.

  Megan meeting Kaelyn… what would that even mean? She was the inspiration for Kaelyn’s body. Her face. Her attitude. Would she recognise herself in Kaelyn?

  Would that be awkward?

  Would it be… exciting?

  He adjusted his grip on the phone, feeling a weird tingling in his fingertips. Megan wanted to help.

  Part of him felt uneasy at the idea. Sharing a screenshot yesterday had been fun. Being her magic mirror might not be as simple.

  But the idea also excited him; Megan meeting Kaelyn seemed like such a fated encounter. And Kaelyn was so adept at making people like her. Of course Megan would like her. She would love her, even.

  Ryan shook his head, frowning.

  It’s just a chat. I’m sure it’ll be fine.

  “Sure, Meg. I’ll let you know. I gotta go now. Love you, ma bella.”

  I promise you, it’ll be fine.

  “Bella? Sure. Talk to you in a bit, handsome.”

  See? She’s already on board with it.

  Ryan ended the call.

  Okay. He had not told Megan everything, but he had told her more than he ever intended. It was just so hard to lie to her when her voice was so filled with concern for his well-being.

  As soon as he turned on Mason Street, he could see the new van and people loitering in the front yard. They knew he was coming, so if he just walked up to the front door, they would immediately stop him. He walked toward the nearest fence and effortlessly vaulted on the other side, landing gracefully like a cat on the other side.

  Those cat-like reflexes and acrobatics sure are handy.

  Just don’t forget the glass of Agua de Valencia you promised.

  Sneaking past the next couple of houses, Ryan finally landed in his parent’s backyard. Glancing behind at the many weathered, split-rail fences he had crossed, their paint peeling and wood worn, he whistled, impressed by how quickly he had covered the ground.

  As discreetly as he could, he slithered up the patio stairs, and walked to the sliding door and entered, placing the container on the kitchen island for later.

  Lucia stepped into the kitchen, her arms crossed. “I see you snuck past the circus outside.”

  He smiled at her. “Look, even if I hadn’t slipped in unnoticed, they’re looking for a blonde catgirl, not a random guy carrying some arroz con pollo.”

  Lucia snickered. “For now. So, what’s your battle plan, Kaelyn?”

  Ryan glared at her.

  “Well, they do a lot of interviews in VR these days, no?”

  Lucia nodded slowly, but he could see a spark of understanding in the glint of her eyes.

  “So that’s what you’re thinking? Maybe I can let the reporter in here—no camera—so she can see that you’re the player behind the character, but we convince her to conduct the interview all in VR?”

  He nodded.

  She catches on so quick, our dear little sister.

  “They want to know more about Kaelyn, right? She’s the ‘face of the glitch’. Nobody cares about Ryan.”

  That’s right. They all want to meet Kaelyn. Not Ryan.

  Lucia considered his argument for a few moments.

  “Okay, yeah. That could work.”

  She was about to head outside when she stopped and squinted at him.

  “I didn’t know you let your hair grow out so long. Been a while since I last saw you in the flesh, bro.”

  Not to worry, just play it cool.

  “Ah yeah. It’s fairly new…”

  He cringed.

  The best lies are wrapped in layers of truths.

  Thankfully, Lucia did not appear to catch his uneasy facial expression. She walked away, waving at him. “Looking good, anyway.”

  Is this really me? Did I really move like that? Is my own OC seducing me??