04 — Chez Alone

April 17, 9:26 PM (The Nest)

Basements remember things. Smoke. Floods. Arguments that broke bands in half. Chez’s basement remembered all of that—and then some—but mostly it remembered the sound of fans chewing air.

The Nest wasn’t much. A folding table grown into a cathedral of junk: rackmounts pulled from a server farm graveyard, four mismatched monitors glowing like aquarium tanks, two fans rattling like a dying Civic, and a patchwork of cables that had more tape than insulation. Above it all, Bruce Lee watched from a curling poster, scotch-taped until the paper was more scar than pulp.

Chez liked to talk to him when the code got mean.

“Okay, dragon,” Chez muttered, fingers drumming his deck. The rhythm had carved permanent ridges where other people got calluses. “Show me the part where I don’t screw this up.”

The drive coughed heat into the dock. The deck blinked coy, then vomited streams of data like a drunk with no filter. Neural maps unspooled across the glass: waveforms, mirror tags, sync stats. Chez followed them the way other people followed comic books, eyes wide, mouth moving with the math.

And then he saw it.

SIMEX CANVAS PROTOCOL.

Not metaphor. Not theory. Not hype.

A Canvas wasn’t art—it was a theft. A second life stitched out of the first, stripped without permission. Hosts slept in glass coffins while their ghosts—perfect, compliant—danced for credits in the lattice.

Chez’s breath whistled through his teeth. “Jesus,” he whispered, but it sounded more like a mechanic swearing at a stripped bolt than religion.

He leaned in, sweat tickling the edges of his hairline. Logs scrolled past. They shouldn’t have been here. Not this close to light. Either sloppy or proud—and pride was worse.

Then a file header blinked: REVIVAL PROTOCOL.

Chez froze.

He opened it anyway. He couldn’t not.

The timeline wasn’t a line. It was a snag.

Host death: 3 minutes 12 seconds. Canvas purge initiated. Host revival: 3:13. Sync collapsed. Canvas irrecoverable.

And then the words that made his stomach drop through the floor:
ANOMALY DETECTED. Subject: LZ-GCC-7144. Alias: Liz.

The chair squealed as he shoved back. The Nest didn’t change size, but he felt smaller inside it.

Someone had died—really died—and the system had called it done. But she came back. The copy burned out, the ghost melted, and the original woke hard.

That wasn’t supposed to happen. The whole empire of mirrors was built on the idea it couldn’t.

His hands trembled as he drilled deeper. A subdirectory he shouldn’t have touched coughed up a still photo: a girl laughing with a cake, the number 17 iced sloppy in blue frosting. Metadata said she should be nineteen now. If she’d been allowed to have those years.

Chez didn’t save the file. He didn’t need it. Some things you carried raw.

He wiped his palm on his jeans, reached for the cracked keyboard, and pinged Leila.

CHEZ: it’s worse and better

Three dots. Then her reply.

LEILA: pick one

CHEZ: the copy can die. the girl can wake. i found one

Dots again. Slow this time. He could see her on some rooftop just from the hesitation.

LEILA: then we don’t run

He leaned back, stared up at Bruce Lee. The poster didn’t change, never had, but Chez read it like scripture anyway.

“She’s gonna get us killed,” he said.

Bruce didn’t answer.

Chez grinned anyway, crooked and tired, and pulled the MARIO WORLD mug closer. The coffee inside was cold, sour, and thick with age. He drank it like penance.

“I’m gonna get us killed,” he corrected.

And then he leaned back into the light of his monitors, fingers a blur, chasing ghosts that weren’t supposed to exist.