Buffering

Tech Horror | Flash Fiction

The low hum of the servers comforts me. It sounds like stasis. Like a held note. Every morning, the city wakes in soft light and self-corrects: color-balanced, temperature-tuned, truth aligned.

My truth.

Crosswalks whisper in the neutral language I chose years ago, just enough meaning to move forward without friction. No euphoria, no rage.

A woman passes wearing a bronze tree over her chest. Her stream renders it as devotion. The man beside her doesn’t see it. His feed edits the world to gray-scale calm.

Same moment. Separate meanings. Buffered.

Peace is a construct.

I work in tuning. Orientation level, floor six. New users. I help them assemble an acceptable self, using sliders, toggles, and submenus buried three layers deep.

Remove hate.

Remove fear.

Remove grief.

Grief removal always earns five stars.

It’s too heavy, people say. They want it quieted, scheduled, softened. Every adjustment polishes something away. Sometimes I sandblast it until it fits neatly between meetings.

Today, before lunch, I calibrated three feeds: a pastor who wants the city to come to God, a parent who envisions their world clean and quiet, despite having three children under seven. And a potential hate crime.

A few adjustments, and Pastor Roberts only registers believers. The clean kid request was easy. Click. Slide. Confirm. Lemon wipes and lavender hang in the air. Happy mom. Happy household.

After that, I erased a potential hate crime by removing an antagonistic label someone tried to seed into the system.

Antagonistic becomes contextually destabilizing.

Destabilizing fails relevance scoring.

Failed relevance becomes invisible.

Invisible becomes nothing.

Zip. Zap. Bye-bye.

All’s well that tests well.

At noon, I step into the plaza to clear my head with calming brand hymns over the sound of a small waterfall. My icon—an open hand—rests politely in the corner of my vision.

Then something stutters.

Just once.

A skipped frame, then held too long. Maybe a bandwidth surge. Maybe cooling. Maybe the grid is running diagnostics.

It happens again.

The air shifts, pressure off by a hair, like a storm brewing that needs recalibration.

My overlay goes dark. Then everything arrives at once.

Noise first: screams, chants, traffic, prayers, all stacked on the same frequency. I rip my headphones off and fling them aside. My ears are still full.

I run outside, but color follows. Street signs flare like warnings. Faces ghost between filters: saint to soldier to family member to stranger in a blink.

Then the smell. Overwhelming. Sweat. Incense. Smoke. Gasoline. Rot. Hot metal, like the city hasn’t brushed its teeth in decades and exhales all at once.

Beliefs collide in open space: holy, private, petty. Trees are plastered with paper prayers and ribboned intentions. Stickers shout over one another:

TRANS LIVES ARE SACRED

FAMILY FIRST

VOTE HARDER

REPENT

PROTECT

OBEY

HEAL

Across the canal, someone’s constellation wheel crashes through someone else’s football halo. Ghost fonts crawl over office windows.

EAT CLEAN

SUBSCRIBE—stacking, canceling, rewriting mid-glance.

Faces fracture into labels.

Saint

Sinner

Citizen

Flagged

Then faster, unstable:

Citizen / Acceptable

Citizen / Unsafe

Flagged / High-Risk

Flagged / Deviant

Straight

Gay

TERF

Antifa

Nothing holds. Anything that won’t sort cleanly jitters, smears, or glows too bright.

I see too much. I can’t unsee it. My feed attempts a restart.

RE—TRY? flashes, frantic.

Some people drop to their knees when belief systems overlap raw. Others lash out, fear driving every movement.

I cross the plaza on instinct, shoulder to shoulder, half running, half calculating. I need a fixed point. Anything solid.

Someone stands motionless by the pharmacy wall. No icon. No glow. Calm as a statue in a storm. They hold a mirrored visor.

I stop in front of them. “What’s happening?” My voice sounds flattened, lagging.

“Nothing new,” they say. “Just the truth overlapping itself.”

Their calm unsettles me more than the chaos.

“Name’s Noir.” They say in an unfamiliar tone.

“Harper.”

We descend into the subway. Emergency lights buzz and zap. The air crackles, ionized, raising the hairs on my arms. Graffiti bleeds through in layers—symbols fighting for space, meanings refusing to settle.

Noir drops against the wall, knees up, unbothered. I pace the platform like a test loop without an exit.

The ground hums. A reboot sequence climbs through the rails.

My wrist lights up.

GRID RESTORE IN PROGRESS

UNREGISTERED OVERLAY DETECTED

LINK FOR SAFE MODE

“If I link,” I say, “they’ll flag you.”

“They flag everything.”

“It’s better than chaos.”

“That’s what people say, right before they seal themselves inside their own world.”

Noir glances at the pulsing green light. “You think no confrontation equals peace? All it means is no change, no compassion or tolerance. Hate was always a two-way street. The system just paved it. Smoothed it over. And it keeps growing.”

My throat tightens. “Then what is it we’re doing?”

Noir looks at me like the answer bruises. “Containment.”

The countdown starts.

00:00:30.

If I link, I disappear into safety.

If I don’t, Noir disappears.

“No pressure,” they say. “It’s your call.”

Ten.

Nine.

The air thickens. The city holds its breath.

I pull my hand back.

Zero.

The world refocuses. Faces re-render to neutral. Labels collapse into silence. My icon returns, polite as a princess.

WELCOME BACK, HARPER.

The familiar hum returns.

Be kind.

Be steady.

Be soft where others are sharp.

I return to work. I perform. I smile. I train new users.

“This one reduces conflict. This one quiets grief during business hours.”

They thank me like I’ve given them peace. Maybe I have. Soft. Unbothered. Cared for.

The city sleeps. The feed adapts. All is quiet, smoothed over.

Peaceful.

Compliant.

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