Eira

  Chapter Four - Truth is a Liability

  We’re looking for clean, confident visuals that reassure.

  No distortion, no jitter, nothing that suggests instability.

  — Client feedback, internal recap

  The banner was lying. That was the problem.

  Eira Knox zoomed in on the keyframe and watched the animated text slide across her monitor for the hundredth time. The letters were big, calm, and earnest. They glowed just enough to look expensive. They said:

  ALWAYS ON. ALWAYS THERE.

  Behind them, the background eased through a soft gradient of blues and golds, an abstract suggestion of dawn. A subtle particle layer drifted up from the bottom of the frame like hope.

  It made her teeth itch.

  “Again,” Sandra said over her shoulder. “From the top?”

  Eira scrubbed the playhead back to zero and hit space.

  In the reflection on the dark edge of the screen, she could see her creative director watching the composition with what looked, to the untrained eye, like patient interest. Eira knew better. That was the expression Sandra wore when she had already decided what she was going to say and was just waiting for the evidence to catch up.

  The banner played through: logo, tagline, little flare of light sweeping across the Helios sun mark.

  At exactly the same frame it had bothered her before, Eira paused it.

  “There,” she said. “It’s too smooth.”

  Sandra blinked. “Too smooth?” she repeated.

  “Feels fake,” Eira said. “Like we’re lying harder than usual.”

  “Lying is the business model,” Sandra said. “We lie aspirationally.”

  From the row of desks behind them, someone snorted a laugh and then pretended it hadn’t happened.

  Eira pinched the bridge of her nose.

  Helios paid well. That was the thing she kept trying to remind herself. Helios bought whole campaigns, stacked six figures on top of six figures, scattered buzzwords like confetti and walked away with clean, reassuring visuals that told people their world was in good hands.

  It should have been a dream client.

  Instead, every time she had to make that sun logo glide serenely in a sky that looked untouched by smog, she wanted to break something.

  “They sent another round of feedback last night,” Sandra said. “Did you read it?”

  “I skimmed it,” Eira said.

  “‘Less visual noise,’” Sandra quoted. “‘Less digital distortion. No glitch effects of any kind. Our brand needs to feel stable and restorative in uncertain times.’”

  She said the last part in the soft, faux-empathetic tone of a brand manager explaining why you owe them your soul.

  Eira’s fingers hovered over the keyboard.

  “It’s a grid company,” she said. “Their whole product is electricity and data. You can’t tell me glitch isn’t the most honest thing we could do with them.”

  “I could,” Sandra said. “But then you would quote that back at me in a Slack channel and I’d have to pretend it was an actionable insight.”

  She sighed.

  “I love your work,” she added, lower now. “You know that. The Hexcore launch you did? Chef’s kiss. The Radiant City promo? Beautiful. But that was before every bus sign in the city started having a nervous breakdown. They don’t want anything on screen that reminds people of that.”

  “The bus signs are not my fault,” Eira said. “I would’ve made them flicker in more interesting patterns.”

  “You are not helping your case,” Sandra said.

  They shared a look. The kind that said: we are both aware this is ridiculous, but only one of us has to talk to Marco, the account director.

  “Try the version without the distortion pass,” Sandra said, straightening. “No flicker on the logo. No chromatic anything. Just warm, smooth gradients and that little light sweep on the tagline. Make it feel like a hug.”

  “A hug from a multinational,” Eira said.

  “Exactly,” Sandra said, and moved away, sharp clicks from her heels hitting the polished floor.

  Eira watched her go, then turned back to the screen.

  She’d already made the “clean” version days ago. It sat on a muted track in the timeline, waiting like a rebuke. No glitch overlays. No rhythmic flicker. No hint that the world sometimes stuttered.

  She killed the track that held her experimental passes and brought the safe one to life.

  The banner played again.

  ALWAYS ON. ALWAYS THERE.

  Helios sun. Lens flare. Fade to logo.

  She muted her speakers and stared.

  Across the open office, beyond the rows of monitors and standing desks and carefully curated plants, the windows looked out over downtown. From Eira’s seat, she could see a slice of Woodward, a hint of Campus Martius, and, if she craned her neck, the top floors of the Helios regional tower.

  Even from here, the tiny LED crown was visible. Bright, unwavering, spelling out the corporate name against the daylight.

  She resisted the urge to flip it off.

  A Slack notification bloomed at the corner of her screen.

  Sandra: client wants to see a cut in 30. that toast animation is locked, right?

  Eira: locked-ish. i can polish while it renders.

  Sandra: no more new ideas. just make it smooth. :)

  The smiley felt like an insult.

  “Make it smooth,” she told the banner. “Make it pretty. Make people forget the street outside keeps lagging.”

  It hit her after rereading Sandra’s last message for a third time.

  Phrases like “everyday reliability” and “reassuring sense of continuity,” really started to dig at Eira. The kind of language that treated the last month like a tiny PR wrinkle instead of the city physically twitching under everyone’s feet.

  Helios wasn’t going to say it. The agency sure as hell wasn’t. Sandra had a mortgage and three kids. Marco had a bonus tied to “client satisfaction.” Everyone had a reason to file the edges off reality.

  Eira stared at the keyframes on her screen and realized, with a cold, simple clarity, that nobody in this chain was ever going to tell the truth on purpose.

  If anything real was going to slip through, it would be because she put it there.

  Her hand moved before she’d fully decided.

  She resuscitated her experimental passes back on the timeline. Layers blinked back into place: background, logo, tagline, particle drift. All the bits that had been carefully smoothed over so they wouldn’t scare anyone who signed checks.

  She zoomed into the moment where the tagline settled and the little light sweep kissed the last letter.

  Two frames.

  That was all she stole.

  In those frames, she left a tiny distortion and removed everything else glitch-related, a micro-stutter in the glow, a hairline fracture across the sun mark, the barest suggestion of the grid pattern she kept catching in the wild.

  Not enough to flag in a review on a laggy conference call. Enough that, if you watched it on a good screen in a dark room, some part of your brain might flinch.

  “Fine,” she murmured. “If I can’t say it, I’ll smuggle it.”

  They wanted “reassurance.” They were getting one, tiny, honest crack.

  She hit render.

  While the progress bar crawled, she opened a new tab and pulled up the news.

  GRID ADVISORY: HELIOS PROJECTS HIGH SUMMER LOAD, PROMISES “UNINTERRUPTED SERVICE”

  CITY CONTINUES INFRASTRUCTURE UPGRADES AHEAD OF EXTREME WEATHER SEASON

  FLINT RESIDENTS REPORT “BLINKS,” HELIOS SAYS “NO CAUSE FOR CONCERN”

  She closed it before the headline font could make her angrier.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  Her phone buzzed against the desk. The name on the screen instantly made her heart loosen. It was her mom, Rosa Knox. Rosa was her whole world, her last steady constant, her reason to keep moving.

  Mom ??: You at work?

  Eira: yup. making lies pretty. u?

  Mom ??: Ha. At home. Lights flickered earlier. Only for a second. You see anything?

  Eira flicked her gaze automatically to the office fixtures. The long, recessed LEDs hummed along, white and steady.

  Eira: nothing here. probably just load juggling. remember what the tech said?

  Mom ??: That I should stop watching the breakers like a hawk.

  Eira: yes. and that they have backups. and backups for the backups lol

  Mom ??: You believe that?

  Eira hesitated. Looked back at the Helios banner. The tagline she was polishing.

  Eira: i believe they don’t WANT your tv to cut out. that’s the best i can do.

  Mom ??: Comforting. ??

  Eira: charge your phone. i’ll call after work.

  She set the phone face down and poked at the render queue.

  Twenty-eight percent.

  She opened After Effects in another window and brought up a different project. One of hers, not the agency’s. A personal file she’d labeled with something bland in case anyone ever went snooping.

  personal_reel_v3.aep

  It was the opposite of smooth.

  Short clips of glitch art filled the timeline. A bus stop LCD sign whose content had smeared sideways into jagged color bands. A security camera feed from the alley behind her building that had dropped frames in a way that turned pedestrians into stretched ghosts. A crosswalk symbol with half its outline missing.

  None of it was captured directly. She wasn’t that reckless. She shot everything on her phone, off-screen, distance and angle distorted enough that nobody at Helios could scream about NDAs.

  But still.

  She scrubbed through the footage and froze on a single frame.

  The bus sign on Gratiot, the one by the corner where she caught the ride out to her apartment, had glitched three days ago. The route information had snapped to full white, then reassembled itself not as letters and numbers, but as a blocky pattern.

  She’d paused there long enough to get a five-second clip before the sign jerked back to normal.

  Now, paused on the frame, she could see it more clearly.

  Not random blocks. A shape.

  A central square, four short bars radiating out, each with a little break in the same place. Like a symbol designed by someone who only half remembered geometry.

  She took a screenshot and saved it.

  Then, on a whim, she opened a new plaintext document on her desktop.

  Untitled.txt

  She stared at the blinking cursor for a moment, then typed:

  bus sign, gratiot / st. antoine, 3 days ago

  Below it, she pasted the screenshot.

  Her render dinged.

  She flipped back to the Helios banner, checked the output, adjusted a couple of easing curves, and exported a client-ready file.

  “Thirty minutes,” Sandra had said. They were ahead of schedule. She shot the file into the shared drive and pinged the link off to the Helios channel.

  Eira: latest cut uploaded, “toast_clean_v3”

  A few seconds later, the account manager replied with a string of praise hands and a THANK YOU in all caps.

  A tiny smirk sprouted on her face.

  She minimized Slack and looked back at the empty text window with the single glitch screenshot and line of description.

  You’re stalling, she told herself.

  She added a second line.

  looks intentional. repeating spacing / angles.

  She saved the file as strange_symbols.txt before she could overthink it.

  They watched the Helios spot in the conference room ten minutes later.

  Lights dimmed. Screen bright. Sound up.

  The cityscape, flawless. The sun logo, pure. The taglines, carefully focus-grouped. There was no room for error codes, no room for bus signs quietly losing their minds.

  “This is what I’m talking about,” the Helios brand rep said. Her name was Kara, and her blazer probably cost more than Eira’s rent. “Calm. Confident. No visual noise. Our testing shows people are very sensitive to anything that looks like… instability right now.”

  She didn’t look directly at Eira when she said it.

  Sandra smiled with a level of professionalism Eira both admired and feared.

  “We’re aligned,” Sandra said. “We’ll keep the visual language as clean as possible. The safest thing we can do for your audience is give them a sense of continuity.”

  Continuity, Eira thought. Sure. Until something pops.

  She glanced around the room.

  The conference table was the usual agency spread: laptops, notebooks, a few too-many-branded pens. Someone had left a half-eaten muffin on a napkin near the projector remote. Out beyond the glass walls, the office buzzed with headphones and keystrokes.

  Above the far bank of desks, one of the overhead TVs quietly scrolled headlines on a news channel. Its colors were tuned down, sound off, closed captions marching across the bottom of the screen.

  GRID OPERATORS ASSURE PUBLIC: “NO SYSTEMIC RISK”

  HCI ANNOUNCES “BREAKTHROUGHS” IN COGNITIVE LINK INITIATIVE

  Eira filed the acronyms away without interest.

  “How are things in your sector?” Sandra asked Kara, because that was what you said to keep clients talking.

  “We’re busy,” Kara said. “We’re always busy. With the way weather’s been, more eyes than ever on stability. The board loves your last batch of work, by the way. The more we can steer the narrative toward confidence, the easier everything else is.”

  Narrative, Eira thought. That’s one way to describe whether people die when a substation pops.

  She tried not to let the thought crawl across her face.

  Attention floated around the table for another ten minutes: revisions, rollout schedules, cross-platform adaptations. She took notes where she was supposed to, nodded in the right places, made small talk about color gamuts and accessibility.

  When it was over, people peeled away in different directions: Kara to another meeting, the account team to their Slack channels, Sandra back toward the creative pit.

  Eira lingered just long enough to be the last one out, then detoured to the kitchen.

  The agency kitchen was a rectangle of white cabinets, fake wood counter, and the kind of coffee machine that had its own training session. Someone had stuck a HELIOS CARES ABOUT CREATIVES! sticker on the refrigerator door. No one had owned up to it.

  She poured herself terrible coffee into a mug and leaned against the counter, letting her shoulders sag for the first time that day.

  She shouldn’t have looked.

  The TV on the far wall was still tuned to the news channel, closed-captions carving across the bottom.

  “…local residents report brief flickers and ‘stutters’…”

  The lower third read: HELIOS CALLS GLITCHES “MINOR,” SAYS “NO CAUSE FOR ALARM.”

  Her eyes drifted up to the B-roll.

  Footage of a substation, chain-link fence in front. A Helios worker in a hard hat walking past a row of transformers. Cut to a shot of a digital billboard showing a Helios ad, the same campaign she was cutting, then fuzz, then static, then black.

  The station cut back to the anchor before the glitch resolved.

  She took a sip of coffee, winced, and set the mug down.

  Her phone vibrated again.

  Mom ??: News said there were “events” downtown. You sure you’re okay?

  Eira: i’m fine. here it’s just clients being dramatic.

  Mom ??: Lights flickered here again. Neighbor says it’s “the big one warming up.”

  Eira: your neighbor still uses tinfoil as a decorating choice. don’t take grid advice from her.

  Mom ??: She has opinions.

  Eira: i’ll call you after i escape powerpoint hell. maybe facetime so i can judge your circuit breaker personally.

  Mom ??: Deal. Be safe.

  She slipped the phone back into her pocket and headed for her desk.

  On the way, she passed the row of big wall monitors. Two played ongoing client work on mute. A third looped agency highlight reels. The fourth mirrored the news channel.

  As she walked by, all four glitched.

  It was nothing dramatic. A half-second smear, a hiccup in the feed. The kind of thing you’d dismiss as a buffering issue.

  Except it happened in sync.

  All four screens smeared to white blocks at precisely the same beat. All four snapped to a black-and-green grid of shapes. All four held, just for two frames, on a configuration that made the hairs rise on the back of her neck.

  Then they were fine. Video resumed. Logos spun. Anchors gestured.

  “Did you see that?” she asked the nearest coworker.

  He slid his headphones partially off his ears. “See what?” he asked.

  “The screens,” she said. “They—” She gestured, frustrated. “Never mind.”

  He shrugged and went back to his project.

  Eira stopped between the monitors and squinted.

  If it had been any other day, in any other office, she would’ve let it go. Tech hiccups happened. Cables were loose. Somebody’s streaming window was fighting with the building’s internal video system. She knew the list.

  But the shapes she’d glimpsed in that two-frame flash weren’t random noise.

  She felt sure of that in the same unreasonable way she felt about good typography: you didn’t have to know the rules consciously to recognize when something obeyed them.

  She went back to her desk, sat down, and pulled up the security camera feed on the monitor nearest her. The agency streamed a grid of internal cameras to a hidden page for “visibility and safety.” She’d bookmarked it months ago because she liked having references for how people actually moved in spaces when they didn’t know they were being watched.

  Most days, it was boredom in nine squares.

  Today, she scrubbed back through the last thirty seconds of the kitchen camera.

  There it was.

  Two frames where the image broke. Not full white this time, just a harsh wash of desaturated rectangles. Freeze, zoom, enhance, not actually enhance, just pixelate until the pattern was clearer.

  A central block. Four bars radiating out. Little breaks in each bar.

  She exhaled slowly.

  It wasn’t exactly the same as the bus sign screenshot from Gratiot. Angles were a little different. But the structure felt… related.

  She pulled up strange_symbols.txt and added a second entry.

  office tv wall, after client meeting, 11:23am

  pattern similar to gratiot bus sign. rotated? different aspect ratio?

  She attached the new screenshot.

  Her cursor hovered.

  She considered adding: might be losing my mind. Decided against it.

  She’d stayed later than she meant to. Sandra had needed a last-minute variation of the Helios banner for a different market, and then someone else had panicked about key art for a downtown festival that might or might not happen if the grid advisories got worse.

  By the time she shut down her workstation, the office was mostly empty. The cleaning crew’s cart squeaked softly near the back. The sky outside had shifted to that diluted blue-gray that meant the day was stubbornly refusing to commit to evening.

  She rode the elevator down alone, watching the floor numbers light.

  At the lobby, the doors slid open onto the building’s shared entry: marble, plants, three fritzing art installations that claimed to be “interactive light sculptures” and mostly just gave people headaches.

  Near the revolving door, a digital directory board stood against the wall. Company names. Floor numbers. A tiny Helios logo near the bottom, because of course they had office space in their own tower’s shadow.

  As she crossed in front of it, the screen jumped.

  The list of companies smeared sideways. Lines of text folded over each other. For a heartbeat, the whole thing became an abstract geometry: bars, nodes, a jagged grid.

  She stopped dead and turned toward it.

  The pattern held long enough for her to know it wasn’t just her imagination. The same repeating structure. Center point, radiating bars, breaks.

  “Come on,” she whispered. “What are you?”

  The directory snapped back. Company names. Buttons. A cheery little WELCOME, PLEASE SELECT YOUR DESTINATION.

  A security guard by the turnstiles glanced up.

  “You alright, ma’am?” he called.

  “Yeah,” she said automatically. “Just… thought I saw my ex on the list.”

  He chuckled and went back to his phone.

  She walked out to the sidewalk feeling like static had settled under her skin.

  On the bus home, she claimed a window seat and tried not to stare too obviously at the digital sign over the driver’s head.

  NEXT STOP: GRATIOT / CHENE

  NO FOOD OR DRINK

  The sign twitched once.

  Her thumb hovered over the camera icon on her phone.

  The sign behaved.

  Fine.

  She opened strange_symbols.txt instead.

  bus sign, gratiot / st. antoine, 3 days ago

  office tv wall, after client meeting, 11:23am

  lobby directory, just now, same structure?

  She added:

  no one else seems to notice. or they notice and don’t say anything.

  The bus rattled over the constant barrage of potholes. Out the window, Detroit flickered past: empty lots, murals, tiny businesses, Helios logos on every corner it seemed.

  Her phone buzzed.

  Mom ??: Power stayed on. Breakers behaving. Proud of them.

  Eira smiled despite herself.

  Eira: tell them i said good job.

  She stared at the blinking cursor in her notes file.

  After a moment, she typed one more line.

  call it: strange_symbols.txt

  She saved it properly this time.

  Onscreen, the filename settled into place. Plain, unassuming, just another text document in a folder full of client briefs and half-finished motion tests.

  Outside, a Helios van turned onto the cross street ahead, hazard lights blinking.

  The bus slowed. The overhead lights dimmed for a fraction of a second, then brightened again.

  No one else on board reacted. A toddler in the front row kept chewing on a plastic ring. A guy with earbuds in bobbed his head to a beat only he could hear. A woman in scrubs scrolled her messages.

  Eira looked from the Helios logo on the van to the route sign above the driver.

  The sign held steady.

  For now.