icarus-hrgrvs

[icarus-hrgrvs]

I always liked static.

Yes, the kind of sound most people call noise. The hiss of an untuned TV, the buzz between radio stations, the hum of an overworked hard drive. To me, it felt honest, unfiltered, like the world beneath the surface was trying to speak in a language no one else cared to hear.

That was the world I preferred. A place I could vanish into. Signals and screens, hoodie up, earbuds in, fingers tapping data like second nature. People didn’t expect much from the quiet one at the edge of the room. That’s how I survived.

Until the day the world cracked.

A stutter in the lights. My phone screen flickered for no reason. Streetlights blinked in perfect sync with my heartbeat. I remember standing on the balcony of my tiny apartment in Vanderlynn, watching as every billboard downtown glitched at once. Symbols. Numbers. Then, my name.

“Number Eight, Icarus Hatch Hargreeves.”

That night, everything unraveled.

I woke up screaming—not from a nightmare, but from the noise. Digital noise. Voices layered in code. A woman whispering coordinates in Russian. A child reciting binary backwards. A deep, mechanical voice counting down from sixteen. I thought I was losing it. Maybe I stared at screens too long. Maybe my brain had finally fried.

Somehow, somewhere along the way, I’d become more than just good with tech. I could feel data moving through the air like static on skin. Signals weren’t just information, they were like sensation. I didn’t need to type or touch. My mind just linked to phones, cameras, servers, satellites. If it spoke in code, I felt it like a reflex.

And it got deeper. I started bending things, a screen glitching when I got anxious, a voicemail skipping mid-sentence. Then more. Making someone hear a voice that wasn’t there, looping their vision, interrupting memory. Reality didn’t break, their perception did.

It hurt. Headaches like alarms. Static crawling under my skin. But I’d take that over silence.

Then the files started appearing.

On devices I hadn’t touched. A folder named The Hargreeves Protocol, hidden in plain sight. Sixteen children. All born on October 1st, 2004. All marked with numbers. I was there.

I sat in the dark, staring at the screen. My heart pounded so loud it almost drowned out the low hum of the city. Then a name I didn’t recognize lit up the display like a slap across the face.

Sir Lucian Hargreeves.

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I ran.

Of course I ran. How could I not, when it was real, terrifyingly real? My body knew it before my mind did. That static buzz in my spine, the way the lights flickered in rhythm with my pulse.

One second I was just running. The next? I remembered. My power, Perceptual Hacking. The hallways. The training. The name etched in every file, every mission brief: The Sparrow Academy.

Vanderlynn wasn’t built for outrunning shadows. But I made it to the old district, near the Hotel Obsidian. Something about that building called to me, like a memory I’d never lived. The moment I stepped inside, the world shifted.

My vision fractured.

Code dripped from the walls. People moved backward. Time flickered. And at the center of it all, them. The others. The ones with numbers stitched into their bones. Some stared. Others just looked bored. I felt like I’d stepped into someone else’s nightmare.

I glanced up at the nearest security camera. It sparked, then flickered. Lights buzzed overhead. I didn’t mean for it to happen.

My heartbeat was syncing to the servers again.

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