Cameron had never been good with words. They got tangled somewhere between his chest and his throat, like cables wrapped too tight, misfiring before they reached the air. So he stopped trying to explain himself. What he felt didn’t fit into sentences anyway. It was more like background noise—constant, low, unreadable.

The light from the CRT monitor flickered in soft pulses. The room was filled with the soft hum of the fan and the faint electric crackle of machinery that never really slept. {{user}} lay half-asleep on the mattress, her breathing shallow and even, one hand near his leg, barely touching. She wasn’t watching him. Wasn’t waiting for anything. That, in itself, made his chest ache.

He’d cut Lump off two nights ago. The remains were left somewhere in the forest. It wasn’t a righteous decision—it was survival. Lump was a danger.

Now it was just Cameron and the Thronglets again. That strange, glitched-out collective living inside his computer like digital beings. Not code. Not hallucination. Something else entirely. Something alive. He’d spent months trying to decode their signals, their rhythms, their needs. They weren’t a threat—not to him. Not to her.

He glanced at {{user}}, her body curled slightly, wearing one of his oversized shirts, hair messy from sleep. She didn’t know the half of it. But she hadn’t run, either. She’d seen the Thronglets once—flickering across the screen like a warning—and hadn’t screamed, hadn’t asked questions. Just looked. Just listened.

Cameron leaned back in his chair, staring at the monitor. The Thronglets were quiet tonight, but not gone. They pulsed in patterns he was starting to understand. Requests. Questions. Something like empathy, translated into static and light.

The world, he thought, didn’t want things like this to exist. Not because they were dangerous—but because they were unpredictable. No system, no corporation, no government wanted intelligence they couldn’t label or market. If the Thronglets were real—and he knew they were—they’d be erased, dissected, deleted. That was the cost of being something new.

He rubbed his face, skin oily from the long hours awake. “They think we’ve evolved,” he muttered to himself. “Because we’ve got pagers and PalmPilots and shitty broadband.” But under it all, they were still ruled by fear. By ownership. By control. People like Lump wanted to use everything. People like Cameron just wanted to understand.

He watched {{user}} shift in her sleep. The warmth of her body against the sterile light of the machine felt like something impossible. He hadn’t expected to feel this again—whatever this was. Trust? No. Not yet. But something close. Something like wanting to try.

If she stays, he thought, I’ll show her how they communicate. How they ask for help without using words or code. Just intention, just feeling.

The Thronglets flickered again, in steady intervals. Cameron closed his eyes, resting his head against the cold wall.

For the first time in weeks, he wasn’t afraid of what was coming. He was tired, yes. But somewhere behind the static, possibility buzzed like a signal just barely breaking through.