It began with a click.
Not mechanical—no, Bryce was sure of that. Not the insectile snap of a hinge nor the skittering latch of some municipal lock unfastened far below. This was the click of alignment, of harmonic convergence. Somewhere in the soft tissue behind his eyes, he heard it: Click. As though a series of tumblers, rusted in place since the collapse of the electric streetcar network, had finally lined up.
The ring on his finger, the cicada with its emerald eye, warmed slightly. Not heat, precisely—more like the emotional memory of heat, like touching a sunlit doorknob in a lucid dream. It hummed. Faint. Pitchless. Suggestive of language but without vowels.
He hadn’t smoked in six months. Not really. A tincture here and there, a rogue mushroom in a breakfast taco—who could say what passed for sober anymore? But his hands were steady now, and the embroidery hoop in his lap bore witness: the thread moved clean, curves uninterrupted, each satin stitch a chant.
Then the ring vibrated again, and this time it brought a whisper:
“Sixth Street is a decoy.”
He looked up from his work. The house was still. A cat watched from the windowsill, tail tucked in, gaze fixed not on Bryce but at a spot behind him—above him.
Outside, the streetlights flickered in Morse again. Not a glitch. A message.
He flipped open his notebook, the one with the onion skin pages salvaged from the UT archives during the Great Binder Purge of ’23. Penciled glyphs lined the margins—his own attempts to transcribe the fungal democracy. But now the glyphs began to glow faintly, phosphorescent green, the same shade as the cicada’s eye.
He looked closer.
They were no longer still.
The glyphs were reconfiguring, snapping into place like airport tiles in a destination roulette. One shape emerged, repeating again and again between the margins:
ΛEON.
“Leon?” he said aloud.
No.
Not Leon. ΛEON.
It was a code. A mode. A switch flipped under the circuitry of Austin itself. A city with a split personality, its daytime grid powered by nostalgia and brunch menus, its nighttime self crawling with subroutines older than history.
The ring whispered again.
“Go to the Moon Tower.”
He laughed, not because it was funny but because the request was so inevitable. The Moon Tower. Of course. All conspiracies in Austin end at the Moon Tower—or begin there.
He packed a small bag: field recorder, embroidery floss, portable mycroscope, and a single cassette—Floravores Vol. IX. He didn’t need to listen again. He knew what it said now. Every song was a referendum.
As he biked through the warm evening toward Zilker, the cicada ring pulsed in sync with the streetlights. One green blink per revolution of his wheel. It was syncing. Calibrating. Counting.
At the base of the Moon Tower, an old woman in a parka was feeding something invisible. She nodded without looking at him and whispered:
“Three more have come before you. One left with moss behind the eyes.”
He nodded back. Words didn’t seem real enough for this encounter.
He climbed the ladder. Halfway up, he felt time thicken. Each rung a question. Each breath a decade. The cicada hummed louder. When he reached the top, he saw it.
The grid.
Not the city lights, but the real grid—phosphene-bright, spidering across his field of vision. A mesh of electromagnetic filaments, pulsing and vibrating in time with his breath. The air tasted ionic. A faint note of tangerine.
Beneath the tower, he saw lines of movement—people, yes, but also signals. Dogs carrying encrypted packets. Skateboarders bouncing pulses between storm drains. The glyphs weren’t underground anymore.
The whole city was voting.
On what, he didn’t know.
But he was part of the quorum.
He pressed play on the cassette.
The music began: not jazz, not yet. The tape unspooled like a ceremonial scroll, releasing spores of memory into the air. The embroidery hoop in his bag began to glow, threads twisting of their own accord into a new design:
A cicada mid-emergence, wings unfurling into a skyline.
And somewhere, beneath the concrete, COREMOTHER stirred.
“Abundance requires dissonance,” the ring whispered.
“Be ready to glitch.”