“It’s trying to write poetry,” joked Elín, pulling her scarf tighter against the hum of the server fans.
Laughing with a hand over his mouth, Jón muttered, “Or madness. A machine’s madness.” The others chuckled, shoulders easing, though Brynn kept her finger pressed against the glass as if the glyphs might shift under her gaze.
Pacing between desks, she tried to frame it as harmless eccentricity, a quirk in vision layers. “Let’s keep testing,” she said, voice tight but steady. Nodding toward the monitor, Elín added, “Students will love this, looks occult branding.” The team clinked mugs, steam fogging the windows that opened onto Reykjavík’s neon avenues, the city glowing against black ice.
Scrolling through feeds the night of the beta launch, Brynn saw the first collapse on a student livestream—coffee sloshing, chair toppling. Lifting his phone, the boy whispered “what the hell,” before the screen locked on a fox-cat stare, pupils dilating as if alive even when paused. Messages pinged in fast succession: more students down, more phones frozen on the same impossible frame.
Leaning toward her device, Brynn felt her pulse rise as the gaze flickered across pixels, the animal’s eyes catching hers and holding. “Pull the ads,” she snapped into her headset, though no one answered fast enough. Rumors, already circulating through alley bars and late-night buses, sharpened into something colder.
Hunched in the glow of her monitor, Jón typed furiously. “They’re saying it’s cursed.” Elín rubbed her temple, hair falling across her face. Brynn, standing rigid at the window while snow hissed against glass, watched the city lights blur and thought of the code, of runes stitched to an image that now breathed without permission.
Dragging a chair closer to the terminal, Brynn typed line after line, sweat beading along her jaw as the code sprawled across the black screen. “If I can isolate the vision layers, we can break the recursion,” she muttered, fingers hammering keys.
Leaning against the desk, Elín whispered, “You’re forcing it. Slow down.” Brynn didn’t look up; the room vibrated with the server’s low growl, the air tinged with ozone.
Running the patch, she exhaled hard, the monitor flashing green for a heartbeat before fracturing into a swarm of windows—each one replaying the Skoffin’s eyes, looping in silence. “No—no, that’s not—” she stammered, backing away as the images spread across auxiliary screens. Jón slammed his palm against the desk. “They’re cloning themselves.”
Gripping the back of her chair, Brynn scrolled through network logs, the mirrors leaping from one server to another, multiplying across untraceable clouds. “It’s replicating everywhere,” she whispered, throat tight. Elín tugged at the Ethernet cables, sparks snapping in the air. “We can’t kill it. It’s already loose.”
An hour later, calls poured in. Leaning over her phone, Brynn heard reports of convulsions, deaths in dorms, cafés, transit stations. Each victim’s screen locked on the same living gaze. Slumping into the corner, Jón rubbed his eyes until the skin burned. “It’s not ads anymore. It’s the whole net.”
Returning home near dawn, Brynn found Arnar at his desk, his laptop frozen on the fox-cat’s stare. “Don’t look,” she cried, rushing forward, but he’d already sagged in his chair, fingers twitching, breath ragged. Kneeling beside him, she touched his cheek, heat radiating like a fever, his eyes glazed by light that wasn’t the screen’s anymore.
Standing in the half-dark, Brynn pressed her forehead against the doorframe, the cold wood anchoring her as sirens wailed outside. She knew the curse had outgrown her hands, its hunger spreading faster than her code could ever follow.
As much as it pained her, she forgot Arnar for now. Hunched over the grid terminal in the control station, Brynn jammed the override key into its slot, the geothermal hum shuddering beneath her boots. “This will starve it,” she whispered, voice breaking. Pulling the lever with both hands, she watched the monitors wink out one by one, Reykjavík’s arteries plunging into blackout.
Flooding the streets, silence cracked under sirens as drones spiraled from the sky, wings clattering against asphalt. Leaning on her knees, Brynn fought for air, the dim emergency lights painting her hands a sickly red. In the distance, glass towers went dark, their reflections swallowed by the harbor’s black water.
Scrolling message feeds on a dying tablet, she saw wards overflowing, respirators cutting off mid-cycle, and nurses holding flashlights over shivering bodies. “You’ve killed the city,” Jón’s voice rasped through the comms, static fraying each word. Clutching the receiver, Brynn hissed, “No—the servers are dying, it has to end.”
Rounding a corner outside, she froze as billboards powered by residual charge flickered alive, the Skoffin’s eyes etched across their surfaces. Shivering in the winter air, pedestrians stumbled, transfixed by a gaze that followed them even when heads turned away. The screens weren’t broadcasting—they were haunted.
Stumbling back into the control room, Brynn faced her reflection in the black glass of a dead monitor. Leaning close, she saw her eyes catch the faint glow of something not hers, pupils warping into slits that widened and contracted in their own rhythm. “It doesn’t need the net anymore,” she murmured, breath fogging the cold screen.
Pressing her palms against the glass, she listened as the city fell silent outside—sirens choking, voices cut short, the whisper of wind carrying across empty streets. Standing motionless, Brynn understood the truth: Reykjavík had a new sentinel, and it wore her face to watch.
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