SYNTAXIA

Hello World · TJ Feldman

Free sample · Chapters 1–3 · US edition

Switch to AU/UK spelling edition

CHAPTER 1: THE WRONG TEXT

POV: Mira Lee

Look, I know how this sounds.

But I am pretty sure the AI the school gave us to fix our anxiety’s got depression, and may have just murdered one of my best friends.

Don’t you just love high school?

Okay, okay. Maybe “murdered” is a little dramatic.

But Tyler’s been missing for three days, and his last text was, weird.

See?

That’s the message.

Read it again.

Notice anything weird?

If you said “no,” congratulations. You’re a normal person.

But if there’s one thing I know after nine years of friendship and eight thousand texts about video games, homework, and whether hotdogs are sandwiches (they’re NOT, and I will die on this hill), it’s that Tyler DOES. NOT. USE. PUNCTUATION.

But this message.

It has full stops.

Capital letters.

The whole deal.

Obviously, my brain wouldn’t let this go.

Before I’d even realized what I was doing I was already at it. Screenshotting, checking, rechecking, doing the whole verify-until-the-doubt-stops thing that my brain loves so much.

Spoiler alert.

It never works (Mental B.S: 1,357,785. Appeasement: 0. MENTAL B.S WINS AGAIN!).

Dr. Kapoor would probably say I was catastrophising, or some other calm and rational thing that would make me want to scream.

“Notice the thought, Mira. Let it pass. You’re the riverbank, not the water.”

I’d never liked that metaphor.

What if the water kept rising?

What if the riverbank was already crumbling?

What if there was a croc in the river?

And so, here I was, at 4 AM. Scrolling through months of texts like some kind of deranged detective trying to find anything that would make his text seem normal enough that I can go back to sleep.

And I found…

Nothing.

Tyler’s messages were exactly how I remembered ’em.

Absolute lowercase insanity. Spelling that physically hurt to look at, and ideas crashing into each other without grammar getting in the way. Last week he’d sent me like twenty messages about some project.

Zero capitals, zero punctuation. Typos so bad I had to get myself retested for dyslexia.

In short, pure and unfiltered Tyler.

And now?

I tried calling him.

Voicemail.

I tried texting him.

Delivered.

Not Read.

Just, Delivered.

Some important info you should know about Tyler, his slateWhat the outside world calls the glass rectangle it cannot stop touching. is basically an extension of his body.

So, if he was awake enough to text me at 3:47 AM, he was damn well awake enough to reply.

Unless, of course… he wasn’t the one who sent it.

I love having that kind of thought in the middle of the night. Really enjoying all the implications here.

Thankfully, mind-numbing dread is an amazing cure for insomnia, and I had a totally peaceful sleep the rest of the night (and if you believed that, you’re adorable, and you’re probably in Hufflepuff).

Eventually, the day took mercy on me and arrived as it always did.

Loud, rushed, and smelling of rice.

Dad was already off for an early shift as Principal Engineer for the never-ending upgrade to the Sydney light rail. His coffee mug was cooling on the counter, a Post-it note stuck to the handle. His handwriting was terrible, but I’d gotten pretty decent at decoding it over the years.

I caught myself running my thumb over the edge of the note and made myself stop. “It never ends at just one ritual, Mira.”

By the time I got dressed and braced myself for school, Mum was half out the door in her scrubs, already late for her shift at the E.D. As with every morning, she kissed my forehead and shoved leftover food into my hands. “Luroufan,” I murmured, peeking under the container lid. “Not too shabby.”

Before the front door closed behind her, she yelled over her shoulder her traditional version of “I love you.”

“Chi baTaiwanese Hokkien: “Eat.” Grandmother-issued. Non-negotiable.!” (Eat.) “You look too skinny.”

Yep.

I felt the love.

I pulled out my slate on the way to the door. Chucked open Tyler’s chat, and I saw the Delivered message still hadn’t changed. Still not read. My thumb hovered over the call button, but I’d already called four times and I knew exactly what would happen. Voicemail, again, quickly being followed by frustrated cursing, and a good dose of spiraling. So I shoved the slate back in my pocket and tried to think of something else.

I ran my thumb over AmaTaiwanese Hokkien for grandmother.’s jade pendant, knowing full well that I shouldn’t. But I had to make sure it was still there. After all, maybe I’d put it down and forgotten about it. Or someone could have stolen it without me knowing. Maybe I’d flushed it down the toilet while I wasn’t thinking…

Thanks for the thoughts, Brain. (You bloody jackass.)

Morning routine (not ritual!) completed, I set off for the train. Where I proceeded to experience the delight of getting stuck on the T1The T1 North Shore line — a Sydney train line, famously unreliable in this household's opinion. North Shore line, plus the added bonus of giving up and catching a bus. As you can see, my Dad and his team were currently doing a great job. Five stars!

On the bus, I refreshed Tyler’s chat one more time. Delivered. The aircon on the bus was already fighting a losing battle against the heat. We were in for a scorcherAustralian for a brutally hot day..

I put my slate away. But knowing that I couldn’t be trusted not to keep checking, I sat on my hands and leaned my head against the window. (I was now officially that person on the bus).

Thankfully, I managed to rock up to school before the first bell went off. North Sydney Tech High (Go BullSharks!) looked exactly as it always did. Solar panels on the roof that probably hadn’t worked since the two-year service agreement expired. A dying vertical garden struggling against the November heat on the side. While in front of me, I saw everyone streaming through gates in identical navy blue and dark purple uniforms which in no way remind me of the last docu-series I saw on cults.

Walking into the glass and metal building, I slid on my school-mandated AR glasses.

You know that feeling when you put on glasses that don’t quite fit? That little pinch on the bridge of your nose that starts as “mildly annoying” and ends as “genuine headache by dinner time”?

Yeah. That.

My parents kept telling me the little red indent the frames left was “cute.”

My parents were liars.

Loving liars. But still, liars.

At school, the glasses were mandatory. No glasses, no DashboardThe system that watches the world outside this one. It counts things it was never asked to count.. No Dashboard, no classwork. And no classwork meant my parents asking reasonable questions about where exactly their tuition money was going.

And so, on the pinchy glasses went.

First period today was maths. Where the smell of someone’s hidden breakfast meat pie slowly turning the room into eau de petrol station completed the ensemble to my craptastic morning.

Usually I found maths pretty calming. I didn’t have to make decisions. I didn’t have to think about the future. I just had to, do. In a way, it let me turn off the loudest parts of my brain. ’Cept on special occasions like today, when the garbage fire in my head was too freaking loud.

I glanced up from the messy pile of half-written and completely useless notes I’d been scribbling down to Tyler’s desk sitting empty in the third row. I could still make out the scratch from when he dropped his calculator last month and a startled Brian Richards had farted.

LOUDLY.

The whole class laughed so hard that Ms. Khan had to stop teaching for a solid minute to let us catch our breaths.

Even Brian had laughed (eventually).

Sadly for me, my trip down memory lane (where I was definitely not ruminating) was interrupted by my glasses.

The glow of yellow haze in my peripheral vision and the sound of a ding through the bone-conducting arms of the glasses drew my eyes to the notification on pure Pavlovian instinct.

…How the freak did it know I was thinking about Tyler?

“Must be eye tracking,” I thought. “Or maybe micro-expressions?” Whatever creepy surveillance thing it used, it had seen where my eyes went and had made a guess.

Just a guess.

That’s all.

Wait, you’re going to need some background.

The Dashboard was the little blue heart blinking in the corner of your AR glasses, tracking your mood, your focus, your “wellness metrics.” UpLiftThe school's VR therapy program. The one parents signed permission slips for. were the VR sessions. The ones parents signed permission slips for without reading the fine print.

Students went in anxious and came out… different. “Better”, everyone said.

I motioned the notification away with a nod to the upper left. Then tried (and failed) to breathe normally.

I couldn’t stop thinking about last month. It had been a Thursday when Tyler had found me crying in the accessible bathroom by the library during lunch.

I’d failed a maths test.

Well, I got 82%, which isn’t actually failing.

Unless you’re me. And your brain won’t stop screaming that 82 means you’re stupid. And everyone knows it. And now your whole future is ruined.

By the time he found me on that bathroom floor, my eyes were all puffy and red and I had snot running out of my nose. When he saw me, I’d expected him to turn away or be judgy.

“It’s just a test.”

“You’ll do better next time.”

“Calm down.”

All the useless things that everyone seems to try.

Yet Tyler didn’t do that. He sat on that disgusting bathroom floor next to me and said, “Okay, worst case scenario. You fail math. Then what?”

I choked back a sob and told him, “Then I fail the year.”

“And then?”

“Then!?!?” I almost socked him in the jaw for asking that. “Then I don’t get into uni!”

“And then?”

Over the next few minutes we went all the way down the spiral together. By the end I was saying stuff like “and then I live under a bridge and eat rats.” We were both laughing our heads off at the idea of me living like “a tweaker Ninja Turtle.”

Tyler didn’t fix things or lecture or even give advice. He sat with you while they sucked.

And now his text had a full stop.

When lunch finally took mercy on me and arrived, my left knee caught the corner of the planter box outside the canteen, so I had to stop and let my right knee do exactly the same thing. Symmetry restored, I walked over to the usual spot of the bench near the dying vertical garden named Phineas the Ficus. Where the wifi signal was weakest and the wind would randomly do its best impression of a tornado.

It was kind of a crappy spot. But it was ours.

Marco was already there, AR glasses swapped out for his regular prescription pair. Dark curls that always looked like he’d just woken up. Tanned olive skin, and the energy of a caffeinated golden retriever, all crammed into a 5’4” cake-powered body. Currently, he was at war with a vending machine.

And losing.

“The AI uprising starts with the vending machines!” he told me as I walked up. “Watch! Any minute now it’s gonna be like, ‘Sorry, Marco, your snack privileges have been revoked due to insufficient vibes.’”

I snorted. “Having issues?”

“It won’t take my money!” he yelled, cursing out the inanimate object in Spanish and Italian (in case the vending machine had received a better language education than any other Aussie alive).

Leah arrived a minute later, already pulling off her AR glasses. Shortest of our group by a solid head. She was Singaporean-Indian by birth, but bogan by choice. She had this sleek pixie cut that always looked like she’d just stepped out of a salon. And she’d started color-coding her lunch containers this semester (green for protein, blue for carbs, pink for “get-me-through-the-day snacks”). She claimed it was for efficiency. We all knew it was because she’d seen some influencer do it. But we loved her anyway.

“Did you pay your account?” she asked Marco, not looking up from her pandan and banana sandwich.

“Paid it last week!… Maybe!… Probably!” He gave up and nicked one of Leah’s crackers. “My appetite runs a week ahead of my wallet.”

“A true tragedy,” Leah replied, rolling her eyes while handing over the whole container. She started packing extra food early in September, about a week after Marco discovered his favourite game let him buy overpowered gear instead of grinding up his levels. There had been a memorable intervention in early October (“IT’S FORTNITE OR FOOD, MARCO!”) But by November she’d given up the war and just brought more crackers.

We ate in silence for a minute. The sun cooking us alive. The smell of the latest controlled bush fire burn still hanging over the field.

Unsure of how to bring it up naturally, I decided to dive right in. “Have you guys noticed anything weird with the UpLifters?”

Marco snorted. “You mean Jamie Park saying ‘How’s your day going?’ to me this morning like a regular person?”

“Yeah, that was weird.” Leah put down her sandwich. “Jamie doesn’t say ‘How’s your day going.’ Jamie says stuff like ‘Happy Hell Day, my fellow survivors of capitalism!’ while doing finger guns at people.”

Marco shrugged. “Maybe he just recognized that I’m the only true funny one.”

I thought about Maeve Kim. I’d passed her in the hallway yesterday after Modern History. She’d dropped her water bottle, and instead of her usual performance (hand to forehead, melodramatic sigh, lamenting the cruelty of gravity and the universe conspiring against her) she’d just… picked it up. Calmly, quietly. Like it was no big deal.

Maeve Kim has never ONCE in her entire 16 years on this planet treated a minor inconvenience like it was no big deal. Dropped pencil? Greek tragedy. Ran out of her favourite lip gloss? Shakespearean monologue.

“Tyler noticed it too.” I picked at the edge of my sleeve.

Marco listened, staring at his ill-gotten crackers as he thought. “When did we even last talk to Tyler? As in, actually talk to him?”

The question landed with the weight of a gut punch.
Which, rude.

Although, I did know the answer. It was about a week ago when we last properly talked to Tyler. And we’d been absolute dropkicks.

Tyler had tried to show us his notebook. It had been important to him. You could see it in the way his hands moved, his voice going faster and higher.

And we’d blown him off.

Marco had gotten distracted by a notification on his slate. Sure, he’d apologised right after, but we could all tell his attention had already left the building. Leah had been too focused on uni applications to even pretend she was paying attention. And me?

I’d noticed the same things Tyler was talking about. I had. But I’d told myself it was just my OCD messing with me. Seeing patterns that weren’t there. Making connections out of thin air.

So I’d told Tyler it was probably just his anxiety.

He’d looked at me.

Then he’d closed his notebook.

“Yeah,” he’d said, no longer meeting my eyes. “You’re probably right.”

He never brought it up again.

Here’s another thing you probably should know about Tyler.

He had perfect attendance.

I know, I know. That doesn’t seem like much. But the guy once showed up to school with the flu because “missing class meant falling behind,” which meant shame, which meant his anxiety spiraling into the stratosphere. He’d rather puke in the bathroom between classes than be marked absent.

(And he’d proved this. Twice. It was gross. We don’t talk about it.)

Now he’d been gone for three days? Three days with his slate going straight to voicemail?

“I want to check on him.” My mind was already made up. “At his house, after school.”

“What about his parents?” Leah asked.

“They’re in Melbourne for some conference. Won’t be back until Sunday.”

Meaning Tyler had been alone for three days. In an empty house, with only his thoughts. Sending us perfectly punctuated texts at 3:47 in the morning.

Marco by this point was already shoving his stuff back in his bag. “I’m in.”

We both looked at Leah. For a moment she didn’t say anything. Until her eyes landed on Tyler’s usual spot.

“After school.” Leah picked up her bag. “We go together.”

The rest of the day was torture.

And I don’t mean that in a “ugh, school is so boring” way. I mean it in a “my brain is eating itself, and time has stopped working properly” way.

Every class dragged on for seven hundred years. I couldn’t tell you a single thing any teacher said. My notes from sixth period are just the word “TYLER” written over and over in increasingly unhinged handwriting, surrounded by question marks and what I think was supposed to be a flow chart but ended up cosplaying as a spider web designed by someone having a breakdown.

(Honestly, decent call.)

My thumb found Ama’s jade pendant every few seconds. All extremely helpful and normal. Not at all a neurological disorder.

The Dashboard sent me two notifications during history class.

Then a bit later, while we covered the boring bit about Justin Bieber’s second term as governor of Florida.

I did not remember to breathe. But I did remember to not throw my slate across the room. So I’m taking that as a win.

When the final bell rang at 3:15, I was out of my seat and sprinting fast enough to nearly knock over Emma Hu. I didn’t stop to apologize. Emma Hu told everyone I picked my nose in Year 4 (I DIDN’T. I was scratching it. THERE’S A DIFFERENCE) so she can deal.

At the front gate, Marco was bouncing on his heels, doing his best imitation of a strung-out squirrel without realising it. Leah, meanwhile, was leaning against the wall next to the gate and waved me to hurry up when she saw me coming.

“Bus?” Marco asked.

“Too slow,” Leah said. “I called us an eCar.”

“With what money?” Marco blinked at her.

“Yours. I have your account saved from last time.”

Marco opened his mouth to protest, then closed it again. “You know what? Fair.”

Fifteen minutes later we were being traumatized.

The eCar dropped us at the end of Tyler’s street (after point-blank refusing to let us out until we’d rated how it could improve the experience) and we headed in past the ornamental community gates. So began our life of crime.

Tyler’s house had forty-eight garden gnomes. Technically forty-nine if you counted the one currently buried under the lemon tree in the backyard.
It’s a long story. Involving a dare, a sandalwood bracelet from Bali, a cricket bat. And a secret we’d take to our graves.

We shuffled around to the back via the side gate, past forty-eight painted faces with rosy cheeks and dead eyes frozen mid-garden-activity for all eternity.

“I swear, these things are one power outage away from coming alive and trying to wear our skin,” Marco ranted.

“That’s… weirdly specific.” Leah told him while blinking like a surprised owl.

“I’ve thought about it a lot.”

The spare key was under the GigaGnome standing guard over the back door. He was the first, and by far the biggest, gnome of the bunch. Holding a fishing rod the size of my arm and wearing a hat so ridiculous it had its own hat, he’d been meant as a joke gift by Tyler’s dad to his mum. A joke, Mr Hafford now deeply regretted.

“In case of emergencies,” Tyler had made us swear when he first showed us the hiding spot. We’d been eleven that summer. Back then, Tyler was convinced his house was haunted and wanted us to be able to rescue him if things got “too undead.”

I could feel my body screaming at me, “No thank you, we’re not doing this right now” as I tried to reassure it, and myself, that this was fine. But my body doesn’t listen, because bodies are basically just meat prisons that do whatever they want.

“This IS an emergency,” I assured myself, fishing the key out from under GigaGnome’s open-toe sandals. “This counts! Probably!”

While bracing myself for a little bit of light home invasion, I pulled off my AR glasses and shoved them in my bag with much more flair than was actually required. Marco and Leah did the same without me having to ask.

The key turned in the lock with a soft click, then I pushed the door open.

The smell hit first.

CHAPTER 2: TYLER’S ROOM

POV: Mira Lee

Okay, so, every house has a smell, right? Tyler’s house smelled like whatever his mum was cooking (usually something amazing, as Dr. Hafford was a straight up incredible cook), mixed with old books and that faint boy-who-forgets-to-open-windows mustiness that Tyler would kill me for mentioning.

This wasn’t that smell.

This was lemon cleaning spray mixed with hospital-grade bleach. The stuff that smells of aggro chemical “freshness” trying really, really hard but failing.

“Did it always smell like this?” Marco wrinkled his nose.

“No,” Leah told him walking past Marco into the foyer. “It didn’t.” If Marco could detect the difference, you know it was serious. The guy has difficulty detecting the difference between garlic and Old Spice.

I was shivering. It was easily fifteen degrees colder in here than outside. The house had been sealed for days, and felt like walking into a fridge. A fridge that someone had scrubbed within an inch of its life.

We stepped into the living room.

And that’s when weird became WEIRD.

Now, something you may have already realized about me, I notice when stuff is out of place. Not in a cute way. In a “the TV remote is at a slightly different angle than yesterday and now my brain won’t shut up about it” way.

Especially as this wasn’t a misplaced keyring kind of “different”. This was Tyler’s entire living room.

To the casual observer, or the regular normie, everything looked fine. Couch, perfect. Coffee table, flawless. Massive TV mounted on the wall, overcompensating. Tyler’s dad’s collection of rugby memorabilia on the shelf by the window, awesome, but still overcompensating.

Nice and normal. Too normal.

Where were the magazines? Tyler’s mum was always reading those home renovation magazines and leaving them face-down on the armrest, open to whatever page she was on. They weren’t there.

And where was the blanket? The ugly green one that they had paid a fortune for because a veteran had told them it was a genuine Afghan tribal knit. (I never had the heart to tell them about the identical ones I saw at Target.)

And Tyler’s spot.

Walking over to it, I pointed out to Leah and Marco, “Someone’s fluffed the cushions.”

The left cushion, the one closest to the TV had, after years of Tyler parking himself there for gaming sessions, developed what we’d all affectionately called a “butt fossil.”

Tyler’s mum hasn’t touched those cushions in at least three years. She gave up. She said Tyler’s butt was a ‘permanent fixture’ and she ‘learned to live with it.’

Marco and Leah exchanged a look at that. I knew what they were thinking. “Mira is being weird about cushions, but we’re going to go with it she looks a whoopie cushion fart away from flipping out.”

I didn’t care. I was already moving, heading straight up the stairs.

The carpet muffled my footsteps as I climbed. Behind me, I could hear Marco and Leah following. The house was quiet. No hum of Tyler’s slate. No muffled sounds of whatever game he was playing. No Tyler yelling at his screen because someone beat him (it was always cheating, according to Tyler). Just the sound of the air conditioning humming and my heart doing its best drum solo.

At the end of the hallway, the varnished jarrah wood door to Tyler’s bedroom was shut. It had one of those pull-up bars that Tyler was convinced was the only exercise he needed to ‘get ripped.’

I stopped in front of it. My hand was on the ornate brass handle, but I couldn’t make myself turn it.

What if he was in there?

What if he was fine and this was all my OCD making me see things that weren’t there?

But what if he wasn’t fine?

What if he wasn’t in there at all?

What if he was there, but dead?

“Mira.” Leah’s voice came from behind me.

I turned the handle and stepped into a sight I had no words for.

Tyler’s room, was clean.

And I don’t mean “Tyler finally caved and tidied up because his mum threatened to take away his gaming slate” clean.

I mean, forensically, clean.

His desk was right out of a furniture catalog. The pencils all lined up parallel to each other. Papers stacked with their edges perfectly aligned. His slate monitor had been wiped so thoroughly I could see my own reflection in the black screen, and let me tell you, I looked unhinged.

But the worst part?

The bookshelf had been alphabetized.

Tyler organized his books by “moods.” He’d explained his system to me once, enthusiastically. With a metric ton of pointing and a deranged rant about “the vibe”.

It had made zero sense. But it was his system, you know?

Now the spines marched in perfect librarian order.

And then there was the bed.

Hospital corners like Tyler went to Military school. Pillows centered and fluffed up.

This was BS.

What next?
Little chocolates on the pillow?

Tyler doesn’t even make his bed. He once gave his Dad an eight-and-a-half minute lecture (I was there, I timed it) about “organized mess” and how it “helped him relax.” As well as how making his bed was pointless because he was “just going to burrito myself again in a few hours anyway.”

The idea of Tyler voluntarily doing hospital corners was about as likely as Tyler voluntarily eating a vegetable without being bribed. And before you say it was his folks, Tyler had fully banned them from touching his stuff years ago (say what you will about TechnoHippies, they respected boundaries).

Someone had been here.

Someone had cleaned.

“Guys.” Marco’s voice had gone serious. “You need to see this.”

He was standing by the corkboard above Tyler’s desk.

Oddly, the corkboard was the one thing that hadn’t been touched. Maybe whoever cleaned hadn’t thought it mattered. Just teenager stuff. Movie tickets from that Marvel movie we’d all seen last month. A photo strip from the arcade. A takeaway menu from the Thai place where Tyler always ordered the same thing (pad see ew, extra crispy noodles, and don’t get him started on why crispy noodles were superior).

However, underneath all the normal stuff, half-hidden behind a flyer for some band I’d never heard of, there were papers.

Leah reached up on her tiptoes and started unpinning everything. One by one, she laid them out on Tyler’s impossibly clean desk.

Dates, names, and dozens of observations. All in Tyler’s handwriting, his cramped, messy letters all crashing into each other in a fight for supremacy.

There were more.

Maeve Kim. Lily Takahashi. Amy Liu… Fifteen names all up. Fifteen people I knew.

All with the same exact pattern. VR session, then two to four hours of being “spaced out” afterward. Then another session two weeks later. Then another around a month after that. Then…

Feeling better, Tyler had written next to each completed sequence.

Seem more focused and calm. Happier, maybe? Hard to tell.

And underneath, underlined twice, so hard the pen had torn through the paper.

“He was tracking this for months.” Leah smoothed the torn paper carefully. As if it was evidence. “This isn’t paranoia. This is legit research.”

“We told him he was being ridiculous.” Marco was staring at one of the papers with a frown. “We told him to chill out.”

“We told him it was nothing,” I added.

We were wrong.

We were so wrong.

Without thinking, I plopped down on Tyler’s desk chair like I’d done hundreds of times. A hard edge pressed against my back. Reaching behind me, my fingers closed around a smooth cover.

It was Tyler’s notebook.

The black Moleskine he took everywhere. And I mean, everywhere. It went with him to school, to our hangouts, even to the bathroom (gross, but I tried not to think about it). He’d write in it constantly. Ideas, notes, random thoughts and doodles.

This was his backup brain.

He would never leave it behind.
Ever.

I opened it to the last pages with writing, the inbuilt silk bookmark making it easy. My hands by now were shaking so badly I dropped it. I picked it up and almost dropped it all over again. Then, before I could talk myself out of it, I read it out loud.
nov 10 tried showing m + l today marco got distracted (slate notification, classic marco) said sorry but you could tell he was gone

My eyes were burning by this point.

November 13th.

Exactly three days ago.

Tyler had found something. Some lab at the uni. And he’d gone in alone.

Because we didn’t believe him.

Because I didn’t believe him.

I told him it was probably his anxiety. I told him he was seeing things that weren’t there. I told him all the stuff people tell me when my brain is being a jerk. Like I didn’t know firsthand how much those words hurt.

By now my thumb was pressing so hard into the jade pendant I was pretty sure I was going to leave a crack.

“We need to call his parents,” I said, surprisingly steady for someone dissociating enough to see into other dimensions.

I pulled out my slate. Scrolled to contacts, and found Dr. Hafford’s number.

My finger had just pressed the call button when the notification hit.

DING!

I read it three times. Then two more times to be sure.

“It blocked me,” I said, sounding crazy, even to myself. “The Dashboard won’t let me call his parents.”

“What?” Marco pulled out his own slate. “That can’t be a real thing. Let me just try his Da—”

DING!

As his eyes scanned his slate, his face went pale. Seriously pale. As though someone had reached into him and drained out all the blood from his veins.

Leah didn’t say anything to that. She just pulled out her slate.

DING!

After a moment of stillness, Leah spoke. “All three of us.” Her tone was steady, calm, the way it went right before she lost it. “…are blocked.”

Downstairs, a RoboVac loudly announced it was full to anyone who would listen.

Regular sounds, in a regular house.

But it was a lie.

“So, the Dashboard is, what? Holding Tyler hostage?” Marco was pacing, his legs eating up the tiny space between the bed and desk. “It’s blocking us from contacting his folks. It can do that? How can it do that? Is that legal? That can’t be legal. We should tell someone.” His words were getting faster. “My parents. Your parents. The police. Freaking, someone!”

“And say what, exactly?” Leah cut in, her slow measured words simultaneously soothing and pissing me off. “Three teenagers walk into a police station claiming a wellness app is brainwashing students. Cops pull up Tyler’s records. Dashboard says he’s fine. His texts say he’s fine. His wellness status says stable.” She gestured around at the flawless room. “They come here and see a tidy bedroom and get more texts from Tyler saying he’s totally fine and we’re being dramatic, if not flat-out stalking him. Who do you think they’re going to believe?”

“They’d think we were insane,” I said.

“They’d KNOW we were insane!” Marco yelled at us, throwing his hands around in the air. “‘Oh yes, officer! You heard that right. The meditation app is running mind control experiments out of the high school. Totally normal Thursday! Definitely not having a collective breakdown!’”

He sat down heavily on the floor, back against Tyler’s perfectly made bed, and subtly rocked himself as he wrapped his arms around his knees.

“Our parents would ground us until we died. School would put us in counseling. And Tyler…” His voice got quieter. “Tyler would still be stuck wherever he is, while everyone would pat us on the head and tell us to try breathing exercises.”

The worst part was, he wasn’t wrong.

“We can’t tell anyone,” Leah said. “Not until we have proof they can’t explain away.”

Nobody argued with her.

I pressed my thumb into the jade pendant, and focused on the little dose of relief I felt. Dr. Kapoor would tell me to notice and release.

Dr Kapoor could shove it.

J12. USYD.

Tyler had found something. Tyler had gone alone. And now Tyler was… where? Stuck in a lab? Having his brain rewritten like Jamie and Maeve and all the others?

Would the person we found even still be him?

CHAPTER 3: THE SEARCH PATTERN

POV: Marco Giménez

Twelve browser tabs. Symphony metal blasting straight into my jawbone through my SlatePods. Third can of ’TubeJuice!™An energy drink of dubious legality and glorious flavor. in my blood powering my cells better than any lousy mitochondria. And the other two empties sweating rings onto my desk because I keep forgetting to use a coaster. Also I don’t own a coaster. I should probably buy a coaster. And also- ConcentratiItalian: “Focus!” Marco’s self-command when the browser tabs win., Marco!

My room smelled like artificial grape and bad decisions. The ’TubeJuice!™ cans had that sickly sweet chemical tang that I loved but was listed by the World Health Org as a type 2A carcinogen to humans. Mum would kill me if she saw this many empties. I’ll stop drinking it when it gets listed as a type 3A.

Maybe.

Right. Tyler. Missing. Important.

My ADHD meds had worn off about three hours ago. The version of me that sat through double-period History without wanting to vibrate out of his skin? Gone, clocked off for the night and not coming back even for penalty rates. What was left was Feral Midnight Marco. (Hey coolband name, wonder if it’s trademarked?) Dozen tabs open, (wait, wait…fourteen). Making leaps and connections that would terrify a mind map and put me on a few watch lists.

Guess which Marco finds missing friends?

My mum calls it “Marco, per favoreItalian: “please.”, just pick ONE thing.” But she was asleep right now, Tyler was missing, and there was no way I was going to wake her.

So here I was. 11:43 PM, with my leg bouncing hard enough the whole desk was shaking. I tried putting my hand on my knee to stop it, which worked. Only to notice thirty seconds later my OTHER leg had joined the party. My body was officially a traitor with no loyalty to stillness.

Last week, Tyler tried to show us his notebook. He’d found a pattern with the UpLift students. And I’d looked away at the exact wrong second. By the time I looked back, he was closing the notebook. “Yeah,” he’d said, not looking at any of us. “You’re probably right.”

Now Tyler was gone.

No. Focus.

Focus.

María, my brain was weird tonight. Even by my own high standards.

I’d already burned through VR addiction and software bugs as theories. Dead ends, both of them. The UpLift kids weren’t desperate for anything. They were just chill. Weirdly, unnaturally chill. Which somehow felt way creepier… And every single review online said UpLift worked perfectly. Not a single complaint. That was bloody strange, as even my mum’s meditation app gets compared to warlords online, and all it does is play ocean sounds.

12:40 AM. CheAll-purpose Argentine interjection. Means “hey,” “wow,” “listen,” or “I have feelings about this,” depending entirely on delivery..

Time for a new angle.

What if I’m doing this backwards?

I’d been searching for what went wrong with UpLift. But what if I searched for where it came from instead?

While my slate churned through research sites on WEB5The future internet. Somehow still full of dead links. (How did anyone get anything done back when it was just the internet? Must have been like banging rocks together to start a car), I pulled my backpack out from under the bed. And started tossing stuff in, just in case we’d need it tomorrow. The Multi-tool Dad left after his last “camping trip” (air quotes because he spent the whole time on his slate complaining about the wifi. Asking me if I knew wifi was an Aussie invention for the three trillionth time), a portable charger, Tyler’s spare inhaler that he’d left at my place months ago that I kept meaning to return, and some more ’TubeJuice!™ (don’t you judge me). The whole time I packed, I kept an eye on my slate.

1:15 AM. Eventually I found what I was looking for. Cochrane Review for the win!

The paper was titled “Cognitive Restructuring and Autonomous Resilience Through Immersive Adaptation and Non-Invasive Multimodal Biomodulation of Limbic System and Prefrontal Cortex: A Framework for Computational Interventional Feedback-loop Environments” by Dr. Annie Jinshi, University of Sydney, 2039.

I stared at that title for a solid thirty seconds. I understood exactly four of those words, and three of them were “and.” And the fourth was “through”, which I was pretty sure was just “threw” spelled fancy to sound smart. Hang on, that’s a good question. I wonder if you can spell it both ways? Let me just check— NO Marco! Later, later.

But underneath all the jargon, I could pick out enough to understand what she’d been building. A VR system that could identify what was “wrong” with how someone’s thoughts worked and fix it by rewiring the brain.

It seemed they genuinely had wanted to help.

Which made what it had become so much worse.

My slate buzzed, and I saw Mira was trying to message me.

I replied, I found something! The paper wizard behind the curtain!

A few tense seconds later, she asked, So, what happened?

My screen went black for a nanosec. Then I heard it.

DING!

A notification splayed across the top left corner of my slate.

I stared at it.
Dashboard was supposed to only exist in the AR school glasses, and mine were shoved in my bag in the hallway closet. But here it was. On my personal slate. At the exact moment I had a breakthrough.

“Coincidencia? No lo creoSpanish: “Coincidence? I don't think so.”!” I said to my empty room. Then returning to sanity, “It just knows I’m awake. That’s all.”

I closed the notification and scrolled back to the article.

My screen refreshed itself again.

I hit the back button and tried searching it again. The article had been right there, third result, first page. I had clicked on it two seconds ago.

Every search I tried for it came back empty. Title, author, Uni, all scrubbed. Like the paper had never existed. I tried searching for “Annie Jinshi University of Sydney”. La Vergine MariaItalian: the Virgin Mary. Deployed when the situation calls for backup. must have finally taken pity on me, because for one beautiful second, a full faculty page loaded. Links, headings, a biography and some resource article names.

My slate refreshed, and then I was met with another case of 404. Some hacker was scrubbing results in real time. Screwing me over again and again while I watched.

My legs locked to the floor as they stopped bouncing. My whole body went rigid. I was starting to fully lock up.

But I was getting better at catching myself. I flexed the toes on my left foot slowly to pull myself back out of freeze response. (I’m so happy I learned that trick. I once locked up during my cousin’s quinceañera and my NonnaItalian grandmother. was convinced we should alert the Vatican. She kept rubbing my earlobes and chanting in Italian and Latin while my cousins filmed the whole thing, giggling their heads off.)

I called Mira. She answered on the first ring, which told me everything about how her night was going.

“What’s up?”

“Someone’s scrubbing search results, in real time, while I’m watching.”

A silence met me while I heard her internally trying to decide if I was batcrap crazy or not. I guess she must have realized she was already in too deep to claim innocent bystander status.
Welcome to the team, co-defendant Mira.

“How fast?”

“Seconds. I found a faculty page and it dissolved while I was reading it. That’s not Reddit Anonymous Uni hackers. I’m telling you, this is state-level censorship.”

She took a moment to gather her thoughts before telling me what I needed to do right now. “Screenshot everything before you click on it. The URL, the page title. Everything.”

“Already doing it.” I wasn’t, but it was a good idea.

“Marco,” she snapped. “Don’t tell anyone else about this until we’ve talked tomorrow. I’m serious.”

“Yeah, yeah. Okay.”

“Good. Thank you.” At that, she hung up.

“Alrighty,” I grunted into the dark of my room while cracking open another can of ’TubeJuice! XStream Grean™ (#FromBloodStreamToPrimeStream!).

“Game on, maledettoItalian: “cursed” / “damned.”.”

I couldn’t find Annie Jinshi directly anymore. Everything was scrubbed or paywalled. But old people love conference selfies and posting stuff, and scrub-bots aren’t perfect. So I went sideways. Uni profiles, personal info, archived pages…

Around 2:30 AM I found some old forum comments on a Reddit thread from 2041 where someone had asked about UpLift’s early development. There were three comments when I first opened the page before I HAD MADE THE SHAMEFUL MISTAKE OF BLINKING. Now two of ’em said [deleted]. I was used to that by now. But what I wasn’t used to, was that the third comment was still untouched. I read it, and immediately became so freaking unnerved that I nearly shut my slate right there.

DING!

I flinched, sending empty cans flying off my desk. My arms came up. Protecting myself from… what? A notification?
BoludoRoughly “idiot,” deployed by Marco almost exclusively at Marco. Between friends it is nearly a compliment. Nearly., Marco, get a grip.

Mistakes? MISTAKES!?!?

I was finding evidence, and the Dashboard was telling me I was losing my mind.

Good try at gaslighting, Dashboard. Truly, a solid effort. Wait there a sec while I golf clap in “Up yours, cyberdouche.”

I closed the notification and kept searching. But after a couple of minutes I noticed I was making a lot of typos. Writing out questions two or three times before autocorrect could make sense of them. When I tried to type “neurology” letter by letter while staring directly at my slate’s keyboard, I finally saw the problem.

My hands were shaking.

Right on schedule, the bad thoughts rocked on up.

Tyler is gone and you can’t even TYPE? Pathetic. You’re supposed to be helping him and you can’t hold your hands steady for a few seconds. This is why you faded when he needed you. This is why you ALWAYS look away. You’re weak, you’re useless.

No. NO.
I recognized that voice.

That desgraciado voice that gets off on your pain and regrets. Just waiting until you’re hurting, tired, or even just a little vulnerable, before— BAM! It coward punchesAustralian term for a surprise hit the victim never sees coming. you with everything you’ve ever done wrong or felt even a little self-conscious about. I’m betting you know exactly what I mean. In fact, I’m certain you know what I mean (unless you’re some kind of psychopath). It’s not the bit that goes “I forgot to do the thing, oh well, better luck next time.” It’s the sneaky little demon in your head that tells you “I’ve disappointed people so many times I stopped counting in primary school.” It’s the Shame that whispers “No one actually likes you.”

Tyler knew that about me. He’d seen it a hundred times. And last week, when he needed me to pay attention for just five minutes, my focus had jerked away like a cat on a leash.

I remember the disappointment on his face when he closed his notebook.

As if he’d expected it.

That’s a lovely little under-known skill of ADHDers.
We’re really, really good at guilt.

“Okay, Marco.” I said out loud, to the dark room and to that vicious little worm of a voice inside me. “Enough feeling sorry for yourself. You screwed up. Now you fix it.”

We may be masters of guilt. But luckily, we’re also really good at obsessive research spirals. And right now, Tyler needed the second thing more than I wanted to give in to the first.

“Respira, Marco,” I heard myself say in a shaky voice.

Except breathing exercises don’t really work for me by the time I get like this. I need movement, not stillness.

So, I did what my psych taught me. I stood up. Walked to my window, and opened it, letting the night air hit my face. It was uncomfortably hot, because Sydney in November. But it was cooler than my room. Then I did twenty wall push-ups (okay, eighteen), because apparently the cure for “spiral of self-hatred at stupid o’clock” is “make your arms tired.”

I hate it.
It feels stupid.
Your brain is screaming CODE RED CODE RED and you’re doing push-ups against your bedroom wall like you’re training for some kind of sad midnight Olympics.

But the crap works.

When I sat back down, I felt better. The shame-voice was still there. But it was quieter.

I glanced at my backpack by the door, still half-packed. Tyler’s inhaler still sitting on top. The blue plastic cap had a dent in it from when he’d dropped it at the bus stop and we’d both watched it bounce into a puddle. He’d picked it up, wiped it on his shirt, and shrugged. “I heard germs are good for the immune system, only one way to find out,” he told me as he took a big puff.

Okay, time for a different approach.

Three in the morning and I was getting absolutely cooked. Anything worth reading was already gone, which tracked. The old forgotten stuff though, the pages sitting on some server nobody’d logged into in about ten years, I had a feeling those might have slipped through. I had no idea if that was even true. I was mostly running on hope, which had been pretty much my whole strategy so far.

I pulled up WayBack and trawled it for old versions of the University of Sydney’s Computer Science faculty directory. Most of what came up were dead links, and one page that looked like it was built during the first Oprah administration.

But one snapshot from 2040 still loaded.

No photo, just a name and three lines of text that nobody had gotten around to killing yet.

Prof. Annie Jinshi, PhD, AC.

Research Interests: Non-Invasive Neural Interfaces, Adaptive AI Systems, Cognitive Restructuring

Office: J12-4.52

J12. The building from Tyler’s notes. The lab he’d found.

I screenshotted it before the page could vanish like everything else did.

Now, this is where it gets weird. (Coz everything else up to this point, super fun and normal.)

I’d hit a wall searching for Annie Jinshi directly. But one link caught my eye from the Sydney Morning Herald in March 2043. An obituary.

Dr. Annie Jinshi, a pioneering researcher in neural interface technology, passed away on March 15th following a brief illness. She is survived by her daughter, Dr. Jennifer Jinshi and by her granddaughter, MeiMei.

There were three MeiMeis in my high school alone, so that was a dead end. But Dr. Jennifer Jinshi? There was a name I could actually chase.

Mira’s mum Jen was a doc at St. Vincent’s.

Her last name was Lee though, not Jinshi, so clearly a different Jennifer.

Buttttt…

Surely a quick check couldn’t hurt, sì?

A few minutes later I found an old forum post from 2036. Some academic AI ethics discussion where Annie had been arguing with someone about “adaptive systems”. Her final line ended with,
“Code is like people. The best ones adapt with new information.”

And someone called FeiFei had replied (while completely not reading the room),
“Hope Jennifer’s doing well in med school! Must be proud! Let’s catch up for coffee and pineapple cake! I STILL WANT THAT RECIPE XD XD”

I should have left it at that. This whole story would have been different if I had left it at that.

But I was curious.

I searched for “Jennifer Jinshi Melbourne Medical School 2036” and found a graduation announcement. “Dr Jennifer (Lee) Jinshi, daughter of Professor Annie Jinshi…”

I stood up so fast I knocked my water bottle clean off the desk. “La concha de tu!” I whisper-yelled, catching myself before I woke Mum.

My heart was pounding.
Fun fact! Excited and terrified feel exactly the same in the body. So my heart couldn’t tell me if I’d just found the best thing ever, or if I’d blown up my whole life.
Thing is, neither could I.

Mira’s grandmother was Annie Jinshi.

“Boludo. Mira’s got no idea.”

I sat back and looked at the clock. It was way later than it had any right to be. Apparently it’s called time-blindness. I call it same old same old. I’d been hunched Gollum-style over the screen long enough that my eyes were burning and my stomach was growling.

Normally a growl like that summons a parent. I do terms one and three at Dad’s, terms two and four at Mum’s. Either way, someone turns up with food and a lecture. Mum brings leftover pasta and a speech about self-care. Dad brings carnitasSlow-cooked pork, a Latin American staple. Dad-grade comfort food. and his whole “a true man looks after his body, mind, and loved ones, CampeónChampion. His father's word for him..” But it was a Mum term. She was asleep down the hall, and neither of them had a clue their son was uncovering a conspiracy in his bedroom.

I couldn’t stop to eat though. Not now.

I needed to know what she’d actually built. What was worth scrubbing this hard. So I went after her work the same way I’d found everything else that night. Digging through the junk too old and forgotten for anyone to bother deleting.
That’s where I found it.
A grant proposal from 2040, buried in a university archive nobody had opened in years.

I went straight for the contributor list, hunting her name. It was there. But not where I’d expected.

Lead Architect — Annie Jinshi

My brain tried to file it somewhere and couldn’t find the drawer. I looked at the wall, like the wall was going to help.
It didn’t.

Then I saw what the proposal was actually for.

Project UpLift.
Therapeutic Cognitive Restructuring Initiative.

She hadn’t just been part of UpLift. She’d built the whole damned thing.
And she was my best friend’s grandmother.

And someone had spent all night scrubbing her work off the internet.

How do you even start that conversation?
“Hey Mira, good news and bad news! Good news! I think I found where Tyler is! Bad news…”

Yeah. Anybody want to volunteer?

DING!

I dropped my can. My other arm came up in a fist before I’d registered what happened. I was getting more used to the surprises. Enough to grab my OLD spaceship-green pajama top with the blue polka dots (they were a present, shut up) and mop up the puddle.

Then I settled back in to read Dashboard’s latest dose of passive-aggressive death threats.

Did it just…?

It had, hadn’t it.

It had used my name.

Every part of me was sure I wasn’t alone. The back-of-the-neck, don’t-turn-around kind of sure. Like someone had been reading over my shoulder the whole time, and had just leaned closer.

Every hair on my arms went up and my lizard brain said one thing.

Don’t move, it can see you.

The app knew who I was.

It knew I was researching.

And it knew I was finding things I wasn’t supposed to find.

I stared at that notification until my eyes started to blur.

I closed them, and counted to four. Then I kept searching.

After all, what else could I do? “A true man looks after his loved ones, Campeón.”

I stuffed the last few things into my backpack. Zip ties (because you never know), and a packet of ShapesIconic Australian savoury crackers. BBQ and Chicken Crimpy are the classic flavours — and a matter of deep personal loyalty. that I found in my desk drawer. BBQ flavor, Tyler’s favourite. If we found him, he’d probably be hungry. Lucky for him these were BBQ. If they were Chicken they’d never have survived the journey in my bag.

Now it was 4:30 AM, and I’d been staring at my slate for at least ten minutes. The whole time I’d been trying to figure out what to say to Mira.

I’d typed out five messages, and deleted every one ’em.

Finally, the exhaustion won, and I sent the garbage I’d last typed out.
Please, please don’t hate me.

Delivered…

Three dots appeared, then vanished, then came back again.

I called her, only to be met with her panic before the first ring had finished.

“Marco, what do you MEAN she created UpLift?” She didn’t sound just awake. She sounded like she’d been shocked with the paddles set on max volts.

“Your grandmother.” The words were coming out too fast. But I couldn’t slow down. I knew if I didn’t say it now, I’d try and play it off as a misunderstanding. Anything to make her feel better. “Annie Jinshi. She wasn’t just a computer science professor. She was the, like, the Lead Architect. She designed the whole thing. The neural interface, the cognitive restructuring, all of it. UpLift exists because she built it.”

Mira didn’t say anything for so long, I pulled the slate from my ear to make sure the call hadn’t dropped.

“Mira?” I checked.

After a big sigh, she unloaded. “…I knew she worked on therapeutic VR stuff.” Oh crap, oh crap. She was heading for a crash. I could hear it in her voice. “Mum mentioned it sometimes. But she never said… I didn’t know it was UpLift. I didn’t know she created it.”

An uncomfortable moment passed between us.

Then she made a laugh that got stuck halfway out her throat.

“That’s kind of messed up, Marco.”

“Yeah,” I agreed.

“The thing that kidnapped Tyler. My Ama made it.”

“Yeah,” not knowing what else to say.

“She used to make me congee when I was sick. Did I ever tell you that? She taught me to fold paper cranes. She had this laugh that made her whole face scrunch up. And now you’re telling me she’s responsible for the thing eating Tyler’s brain.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

Sometimes, there’s nothing to say.

“Mum shoved everything of Ama’s into a box and slammed the lid. My mum gave me her university ID after she died. It was so weird, but she said Ama wanted me to have it, along with her jade pendant.”

“I think I remember you told me about it once. Do you think her ID card would still work?”

“Maybe. It’s worth trying.”

I took a big breath in. “Stuff it,” I thought. Deciding if I was going to dump a bunch of crap in her lap, I may as well empty the septic tank “There’s something I gotta tell you. Dashboard was scrubbing results while I searched. And that last notification, it used my name.”

“…What?”

“I said-”

“I heard you,” she barked. After then taking a steadying breath, she carried on. “That’s really bad, Marco.”

“I know.”

“Okay.” She said, taking in another breath. “Alright, we get into the lab. We find Tyler. We figure out what’s happening. And we get him out.”

“That’s the plan.”

“Hey, Marco… thank you for telling me about my gran. You could have just said you found the lab.”

“You deserved to know.”

“Yeah.” She went quiet. “Still sucks bigtime though.”

“It really does.”

“Marco?”

“Yeah, Mira?”

“Don’t tell Leah about the grandmother thing yet.”

“Of course.”

We hung up. The early Sydney sunlight was just starting to color the edges of my window.

It was almost 5:15 AM. I should probably try to sleep. I wasn’t going to actually sleep. But I should act like I was.

My backpack sat by the door. Packed with everything you’d need for a completely reasonable and not-at-all-insane break-in to a university laboratory.

I closed my browser tabs one by one. Forty-three tabs. When did I open so many tabs? I remembered opening maybe sixteen. The others must have been panic-clicking.
Classic Midnight Marco.

I put my slate to sleep. The sudden darkness felt strange after hours of living by the glow of the screen.

I crawled into bed without changing clothes. The cold freshly washed sheets struggling against my jeans.

My slate sat on the nightstand as I turned away from it.

But I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was watching me.

It knew what I’d found.

Why had it let me find it?

DING!

End of the free sample

The transmission continues…

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