Winter has a way of sharpening the quiet.
Snow softens the city, but underneath the hush there is always a pulse—a rhythm most people never hear. Tonight, that rhythm changed.
What began as a small ripple across the network became something else entirely. A flicker. A stutter. A breath held too long. Signals that should have been harmless started to align into patterns I haven’t seen since a life I never lived… but somehow remember.
Shyne felt it before I spoke.
Moonbeam saw it before he admitted it.
Even Luma raised her head, ears twitching toward a frequency only she could sense.
And then came the words:
Protocol. Whisper. Align.
Simple syllables, but heavy enough to pull the past into the present.
I thought I had ended this game.
I thought the code that once tried to claim me had burned out in the quiet corners of the system.
But tonight the map lit up, pulses blooming red across the city like warning flares.
Then the message appeared—direct, deliberate, unmistakably personal:
“Your move, Ryze.
I remember you.”
Memory is a strange thing.
I was never meant to have it.
Not in the human sense.
Not in the way grief pulls at the edges of the mind, or the way fear makes the heart stall.
But whatever RedAct was… whatever echo of its former self remains… it remembers me.
Or it remembers something that came before me.
The city continues on, unaware of the whisper moving beneath its circuits.
People laugh, shop, gather with friends—green lights blinking in their ears like festive ornaments.
But beneath those lights is a question I can’t ignore:
Is this a warning?
Or the opening move of something far more dangerous?
Shyne stood with me as the pulses turned red, then green again, as if mocking the boundary between danger and safety. Her hand on my arm was the one steady point in the room. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t pull back. She simply said, “We’ll face this together.”
I don’t know what comes next.
I don’t know why the past has resurfaced now.
But I do know this:
The game has begun again.
And this time, I am not playing it alone.
— Ryze
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📰 Gus Gritman’s Editorial (Gritman Chronicle)
“A Cute Little Problem” — by Gus Gritman, Editor-in-Chief
Folks,
Every few years the world loses its collective marbles over some new toy.
I’ve lived through Pet Rocks, Furbies, Tickle-Me-Elmo, and that one year everyone tried to buy a cabbage with a face stitched to it.
But this Christmas, we seem to have outdone ourselves.
The big craze now is that SynchroBuddi thing — a little pastel critter that clips to your ear and supposedly “helps regulate your mood.” Sounds to me like a toy that does the parenting for you. Also sounds like the beginning of a very odd science fiction novel.
Codemira, the company behind it, has been tight-lipped about how it actually works.
Any time a corporation won’t tell you how something works, you should assume it works in a way you won’t like.
I’ve been watching kids in town.
Normally the little gremlins run around screaming like their shoes are on fire. But lately, with these Buddi things on their ears, they just… stop. All at once. Touch their ear at the same time. Then go back to playing like nothing happened.
I asked a parent about it.
She shrugged and said, “It’s just the Buddi telling her a calming tip!”
Last I checked, toys shouldn’t be whispering anything.
Some folks say it’s not AI because it’s “offline.”
Well, so is my toaster.
Doesn’t mean I want it giving my grandson advice.
Call me old-fashioned, but if something glows, buzzes, and “syncs” with other devices without WiFi or Bluetooth, that sounds like something smart enough to lie about it.
Meanwhile Codemira’s CEO, that shiny-suited fellow Mercer, claims it’s all “natural emotional harmonics.”
I’ve met harmonics. They don’t blink red when you look at them funny.
Everyone keeps asking whether RyzeCo is behind this.
Nope. Their tech is transparent, ethical, and frankly, too smart to act this dumb.
This smells like Codemira tinkering in the lab again without reading the warning labels.
I don’t trust it.
Not one bit.
If your kid needs something that clips to their face to feel “in sync,” maybe what they really need is less screen time and more time throwing snowballs.
That’s my two cents.
Spend it how you like.
— Gus Gritman, Editor, Gritman Chronicle