Signal Bleed

The quantum metrics in her augmented cortex had been glitching since sunrise. Maya watched the corporate drones through her office window, their bio-signatures leaving traces of blue light that lingered too long in her enhanced vision. A software update gone wrong, probably. Or maybe her body was finally rejecting the implants she'd gotten on credit from that back-alley tech shop in Chatswood.

The distinction between malfunction and transformation had always been blur-edged.

Her wrist-mounted holo buzzed: another meeting reminder. Another PowerPoint deck about quarterly projections. Another chance to sit in an ergonomic chair while her consciousness screamed for release. But tonight – tonight was different. The coordinates for Office Hours had already been neural-dropped to her secure cache.

They changed locations every time: abandoned data centers, decommissioned subway platforms, forgotten corporate spaces where the air still hummed with dead servers' dreams. Tonight it was an old banking floor, fifty stories up, where the ghost of capitalism still echoed in the empty trading pits.

Maya's augments were acting stranger as dusk approached. The glitches had evolved into something else – patterns she'd never seen before. The blue traces left by passing bodies had started to pulse in rhythm, a silent techno beat visible only to her enhanced eyes. Her cortex implants weren't malfunctioning. They were tuning in.

She left her blazer at her desk but kept her employee badge. Sometimes the best camouflage was hiding in plain sight. The elevator ride down was a countdown, each floor taking her further from the sterile corporate hemisphere and closer to the throbbing underground. Her glitching vision turned the LED floor numbers into streaming code.

The night air hit her skin like static electricity. Other figures moved through the shadows, all heading in the same direction. Some still in business casual, others already transformed in chrome and neon. Maya's augments were singing now, harmonizing with the growing bass line that vibrated through the concrete.

Inside, the old banking floor had become something else entirely. Laser arrays painted quantum patterns across the ceiling. Bodies moved like liquid code. The distinction between flesh and technology, between worker and reveler, between the person she was at 9 AM and the creature she became at midnight – all of it dissolved under the strobe lights.

Her malfunctioning augments weren't a bug. They were an upgrade. An evolution. The blue traces left by moving bodies formed constellations in her vision, telling stories of transformation. Of escape. Of becoming.

Tomorrow she would return to her desk, to her spreadsheets, to her properly functioning implants. But for now, she let the glitch consume her. Let it reshape her. In the space between daylight and darkness, between binary and chaos, she found her signal. And she let it bleed.