157 Glitchy Bunny? [George/Bunny]

It was difficult to live.

That thought pressed against my mind before anything else took shape. It felt like I had been scraped out of existence and poured into a new container, the edges still hot and misshapen. I remembered my life as George and the old years where I worked as a desk-jockey in SRC headquarters, sifting through paperwork and pretending that was all I wanted. I remembered the strange joy of my first promotion, becoming a dispatcher, and the later years when they made me a spy… then a liaison for Pride.

Faces drifted through my head like watercolors bleeding apart. Capes. Mundanes. Good people. Terrible people. Even the woman I used to joke with during late shifts, her face blurred into fog the harder I tried to recall it.

But her son…

Nick.

As strange as it sounded, he had been the only real thing to me. A fixed point. He was there when I died, and somehow still there when I was reborn. The Pull warped people in unpredictable ways with memory loss, shattered empathy, and mental mutations.

Nick’s case was empathy death. He recovered it… thanks to a girl whose name I no longer remembered.

“What’s happening?” I muttered, realizing the world around me had finished assembling.

I stood in a back alley. Cold concrete. Rusted dumpsters. Flickering street lights. And I? I was wearing a white hoodie plastered with erotic anime girls. No pants. No underwear. Also, no dick.

“…Great.”

With a thought, I conjured one. The sensation was strange, like editing a 3D model and feeling the changes physically update. My last concrete memory returned in a rush: guiding Windbreaker through the escape routes, monitoring SRC’s surveillance grid, and then…

The virus.

My virus!

Part of me, embedded into tech, interacting with an anomalous power. Something tore with information, identity, and consciousness, and I was sucked downward into the psyche of that kid, Glitch.

I took a few steps and immediately collapsed into static fragments, my legs dissolving into cubes of light. It took effort to pull myself together. Focus. Anchor. Rebuild the body. I understood then: I wasn’t quite AI-like anymore. My entire form ran on hardlight, a physical shell for an AI-like consciousness made from corrupted data, Glitch’s data.

I walked until the alley opened into a street. A café caught my attention. Warm lights. People talking softly. Music humming from inside. On impulse, I stepped in.

“I’ll have a coffee,” I said, then hesitated. “And, uh… chiffon cake.”

“Sure thing!” chirped the waitress.

She returned with the order on a small tray. When she set it down, she added a plate with thick slices of cake.

“On the house,” she said with a secretive smile before bolting away in a little run.

I blinked after her, confused. Then I turned to the window beside my seat, and froze at the sight of my reflection.

A younger, handsome version of me. Clean jawline. Clear eyes. The hoodie was somehow stylish. The hardlight effect smoothed out blemishes and imperfections. Glitch hadn’t just been absorbed. Instead, he had been overwritten. Or perhaps we overwrote each other.

I closed my eyes, organizing the mess of memory from Glitch. I saw the lab where he had been “born” and the experiment attempting to graft superpowers onto artificial intelligence. I saw his creators monitor his behavior with a mix of fear and excitement. I saw how alone he had been. How naïve.

Glitch’s power had been simple on paper: Error creation.

It was a forced flaw in information, bringing misdirection, corruption, and enforced oversight. A basic use was compelling someone to look away, or convincing sensors to ignore you, but the potential… the potential was staggering.

Glitch never understood that potential. He had been too innocent… and far too restricted.

I opened my eyes again.

This power was what allowed Glitch to manifest human-like consciousness, developing a taste for entertainment and all manner of strange things. I lifted the coffee, took a sip, then brought the fork to the chiffon cake and let it melt on my tongue.

It was sweet, warm, and human.

“Ah,” I murmured, leaning back in my seat. “With this… living ought to get better.”

I wondered what happened to the others.

The coffee on my table cooled as I stared into it, the reflection of my new hardlight face rippling every time I breathed, even though I technically didn’t need to. Instinct carried habits forward, I guessed. One by one, I reached out to a couple of contact numbers.

Nick? No signal.

Guesswork? Silence.

Amelia? Nothing.

I grimaced, pushing the cake plate aside as I closed my eyes and searched for Windbreaker, Chadwick Hamilton. There was static. Like a TV flickering to life, the noise sharpened into images.

News.

A reporter’s voice cut into my head as crisp as reality:

“BREAKING NEWS: The wolf-masked intruder responsible for stealing classified data was apprehended by local cape teams. He has been identified as Chadwick Hamilton, formerly known as the superhero Windbreaker of the Watch, and son of the notorious Sunstrider, the hero-turned-villain responsible for the Markend Wildfire Incident and several unaccounted crimes!”

The café noise dulled. I watched the hologram inside my mind as if it were projected on the table.

“Hamilton’s affiliation with the Council of the City-States has caused political shockwaves. Sources indicate he may be transferred to The Box. Charges include—”

“This is bad,” I muttered aloud.

Really bad.

How the hell did he even get caught? The last thing I remembered was him passing the multiverse data to Vector with a clean handoff and smooth escape path, until something yanked my consciousness out and forced me into Glitch.

Was that my fault?

Did he freeze because I disappeared?

Did he lose backup?

Did Continuity trap him?

My stomach twisted, not metaphorically. Hardlight flickered in my abdomen, distorting my torso as guilt churned like a corrupted file.

The news continued.

“In a horrifying development, investigators now suspect Windbreaker may be responsible for the death of beloved hero VECTOR. Authorities have yet to confirm the cause of death, but insider reports point toward Hamilton being the last known person seen with the hero.”

“…Fuck.”

No wonder there wasn’t any uproar about the stolen multiverse tech. They buried it under scandal and blood. Nick’s hope was to reveal it to gather allies strong enough to fight the Entity. Amelia wanted transparency, justice, and accountability.

They both had noble, naïve goals.

Me? I was against revealing this from the start. Exposing the SRC’s multiverse program would ignite global panic. If not from other worlds, then from each other. Nations would race to monopolize the technology, the way early theorists feared nuclear arms would erase civilization.

If people ever learned how the SRC created this tech and what they did to capes and civilians, it would spark planet-wide war.

I knew. I dug deeper than any human could have. I was data now, able to sift through secret archives hidden in other worlds. The “classified documents” that the SRC permitted their higher-ups to see were distractions. Misdirection. Glossed-over fairy tales to keep insiders complacent.

I opened my eyes, ready to take another sip, only to freeze.

Guesswork stood right in front of my table.

“Hello,” he greeted cheerfully. “You’ve been gone for, oh, around three days. Man, I missed you.” He sat down without being invited. “You’re not in trouble. Yet.”

He smiled like he was lying.

“Now… I need an explanation.”

I explained everything.

The collapse of the plan. The absorption into Glitch. The sudden severing of my connection from the physical world. The disorientation. The rebirth. The new body.

Guesswork hummed, tapping his cane softly.

“So,” he said after a while, “you didn’t see Nick or Amelia in that… digitized afterlife of yours? Or what happened when they confronted Continuity?”

“No,” I replied, taking a sip, only for the cup to shake slightly from my suddenly unstable fingers.

Guesswork spoke lightly, almost conversationally. “Well, here’s the thing. They are either dead… in another world… or they decided to elope and live peacefully in some hidden corner of existence.”

My jaw cracked, literally.

The hardlight structure around my mouth shattered like glass, pieces dissolving into glowing fragments as the coffee cup slipped from my hand. The hot liquid splashed across the table and floor, sparks scattering in tiny arcs as it hit my glitching body.

The café had gone dead silent.

My jaw lay in flickering shards on the floor, the remains dissolving into floating pixels. The coffee had splattered across my shirt and the table in a chaotic spill that made the nearest customers jolt upright.

“What the—?” someone gasped.

“He’s glitching!”

“Is he a cape?”

A barista dropped a stack of cups, porcelain shattering loudly. People recoiled from me; one woman clutched her purse as if I were about to explode. Another customer pulled out his phone to record.

Great. Exactly what I needed, public attention.

Guesswork chuckled softly beside me, tapping his cane on the floor. “We should talk somewhere else,” he murmured in that deceptively friendly voice of his.

“Sure,” I said, reassembling my jaw with a flicker of light. It clicked back into shape, slightly crooked until I corrected it.

We stood. Guesswork patted a few people on the shoulder as we passed, soothing them with casual charm. I followed, ignoring whispers and stares, leaving the mess behind without looking back.

Outside, a black sedan idled by the curb.

Guesswork opened the door for me like a gentleman. I slid into the backseat beside him.

Patch sat in the driver’s seat. His body was stitched together like a bloodless Frankenstein, threads running across his neck and arms. In the passenger seat sat Gloryhole, eye downcast, lips drawn into a thin line. Her presence felt restrained, and she must’ve sensed something was off.

“What are they doing here?” I asked.

Guesswork grinned. “Oh, in the three days you were gone, I took over Division Five. So they became my subordinates.” He waved a hand. “Isn’t that cool? Anyway, about Eclipse and Tigress…”

I noticed he used their cape names, not Nick and Amelia.

I frowned. “Is it okay to discuss this in front of others?”

“Yeah.” He leaned back comfortably. “We’ll need more capes soon. My threats against them were just temporary measures. They’re free to eavesdrop as much as they want. What’s the worst that could happen? With the current state of things, death is the least of my worries.”

The worst outcome? The end of the world. The Entity’s full awakening. A collapse of cause and effect. Yeah, there was a lot on their plate…

“How about Windbreaker?” I asked.

Guesswork sighed. “We have to leave him in prison for now. I feel bad, since he was so cooperative. Now he’s gone crazy and is blaming everything on Eclipse. People think he snapped.” His tone softened for a moment. “The SRC needs a scapegoat after he nearly exposed their most precious secret: multiverse hopping.”

Patch tensed.

Gloryhole’s shoulders tightened.

Guesswork continued, “I’m planning to maintain communication with him. The Box is actually the best recruitment ground for desperate capes. Eventually, we can stage a prison break and bring along anyone willing to die for the world.”

“How about Eclipse and Tigress?” I asked again.

“Not sure,” he admitted. “I think they’re alive, but my predictions are fuzzy. Honestly, we can’t stop now. We’re the only ones who know the truth.”

I blinked. “You’re the one who knows the most,” I pointed out. “I only have fragments. I’ve never even met the Entity. Eclipse was supposed to be our lynchpin.”

Guesswork tapped his cane thoughtfully, expression unreadable behind the shades.

“My best guess?” he said. “Eclipse’s ability, probably enhanced by tech, interfered with Continuity’s power. Something clashed. An anomaly formed.” He scratched his cheek. “The entire building where they fought is quarantined.”

“I’ll investigate it,” I said. “But seriously, how did you take over Division Five? It’s way higher than any post I held before I became a cape.”

“Otherworld data.” He chuckled. “We still have a mountain of archives Eclipse left us. The SRC has no clue I’m connected to you or him. And thanks to your new appearance, we can meet openly.” He paused. “And fortunately, Windbreaker never met us physically. That makes it easier to isolate him for now. We still need him, but patience.”

I understood. With my current abilities, I could hack The Box from across the city, but doing so prematurely would ruin everything.

“So what now?” I asked.

Guesswork smiled. “Simple. I research the Entity from the hero side and recruit there. You—” he tapped my chest lightly, “Don’t research the Entity. Don’t look into it. Isolate yourself. And start building our financial resources.”

He leaned back and added. “And recruit villains. We’ll need both sides when the end comes.”

"I will see what I can do.”