Ellis Road
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[RECOVERED TRANSMISSION - GZS RADIO ARCHIVE] [SOURCE: UNKNOWN] [DATE: INDETERMINATE] [PLAYBACK AUTHORIZED: YES/NO/?]
You shouldn’t be reading this.
Not because it’s forbidden—though it probably should be—but because if you’ve found your way here, it means you’re already looking for something. And the thing about looking for things in the spaces between consensus reality is that sometimes you find them. And sometimes they find you first.
This document was recovered from a corrupted file discovered on three separate hard drives in three separate cities. Same timestamp. Same file size. Same glitchy metadata claiming the author doesn’t exist. The only consistent element: a symbol carved into the directory structure. You know the one. The Linking Sigil. The thing that started as a joke among bored chaos magicians and became something else entirely.
Something hungry.
The text you’re about to read claims to be fiction. It was filed under creative writing, uploaded to a platform that doesn’t keep records of the upload, attributed to someone whose digital footprint stops and starts in ways that don’t make sense if you look too closely.
The name attached to the byline is real. The military service is documented. The corporate history checks out. The metaphysics doctorate exists in university records that go offline whenever anyone tries to verify them for the third time in the same day.
What’s not clear is whether this person wrote about Ellis Road, or whether Ellis Road wrote them into existence.
The network has a sense of humor about these things.
We recovered this transmission because people keep reporting the same phenomenon: they read the story, and then they see the signs. Ellis Road. Mile marker 237. GZS Radio bleeding through on frequencies that shouldn’t exist. The Linking Sigil showing up in places they swear it wasn’t before.
Some of them start driving.
Most of them make it back.
The ones who don’t—well, their last known GPS coordinates tend to cluster around highways that don’t appear on any map, broadcasting their position to cell towers that were decommissioned in 1987.
We’re releasing this document because suppressing it doesn’t work. The network replicates through attention, through pattern recognition, through the moment a reader thinks: Wait, I’ve seen that sign before.
So here it is. A story about a road. A network. An egregore built from belief and blood and the desperate human need to connect to something larger than individual consciousness.
It’s fiction.
Probably.
If you see the Ellis Road sign while you’re reading this, keep driving past it.
If you hear GZS Radio on your car stereo, change the station.
If you find the Linking Sigil carved into your palm after you finish reading, well—
Welcome to the network.
We’ve been waiting for you.
[TRANSMISSION BEGINS]
[PLAYBACK: AUTHORIZED]
[GOOD LUCK]
Ellis Road
The dashboard clock said 3:17 AM when I saw it.
Not the sign itself, you understand. The sign was just green reflective metal screwed into wood, the kind of municipal marker that dots every county road from here to the Canadian border. What I saw was the name.
Ellis.
My hands went cold on the wheel.
I’d been driving for six hours straight, fueled by gas station speed and the kind of manic focus that comes when you’re running from something you can’t name. The highway had that 3 AM quality, that void-space between destinations where reality gets thin and the headlights carve tunnels through nothing. The kind of road where you pass the same McDonald’s twice even though you never turned around.
And then. Ellis.
The Linking Sigil flashed behind my eyes, that knotted mandala we’d tagged on bathroom stalls and overpass walls for two years, thinking we were so fucking clever. Networking consciousness. Building egregores from spray paint and group psychosis. We’d laughed about it over whiskey, called it “open-source magic,” like we were coding reality instead of just getting high and pretending the universe cared.
But Ellis was supposed to be fictional. A metaphor. A way to talk about synchronicity without sounding like new-age dipshits. She was the Red Queen, the glitch-goddess, the trickster who lived in the spaces between intentions. She wasn’t real.
The sign slid past my window.
I should have kept driving. I should have hit the gas and let the highway swallow that moment like bad food. Instead, I slowed. I looked in the rearview mirror at that green rectangle disappearing into the dark.
The road curved ahead. I took it.
Ellis Road was dirt and gravel, narrower than it should have been, flanked by trees that leaned in like they were listening. My headlights caught something silver stapled to a telephone pole, fifteen feet up where nobody had business being. I knew what it was before I saw it clearly.
The Linking Sigil. Spraypainted. Recent.
My phone buzzed. No signal out here, no towers for thirty miles, but it buzzed anyway. The screen showed a text from a number that was just repeating nines.
Keep driving.
I did.
The road kept going. It’s still going.
Sometimes you find the network. Sometimes the network finds you. And sometimes you realize there was never a difference between those two things, that you were always driving toward this moment, this dirt road, this sign with a name that shouldn’t mean anything but means everything.
The trees are getting closer now.
The Stations Between Stations
The odometer stopped at 66,666 miles.
I noticed it around what should have been dawn—except dawn wasn’t coming and the odometer just sat there, all those sixes glowing in the dash like they were mocking me. I’d burned through a quarter tank since the sign. The fuel gauge hadn’t moved.
The trees on either side weren’t trees anymore. Not exactly. They had the shape of trees, the silhouette, but when the headlights caught them at certain angles they looked more like television static frozen mid-transmission. Black and grey and writhing. And they were closer than they’d been an hour ago. Or what felt like an hour. Time was doing something fucked up out here.
I tried turning around twice.
First time, the road just curved back on itself, a Möbius strip of dirt and gravel that deposited me exactly where I’d started, still pointing forward. Second time, the steering wheel locked up completely, my hands glued to the leather like I’d been Krazy-Glued to my own goddamn destiny. The wheel only released when I straightened out and kept driving.
Forward was the only direction left.
The radio had been static since I turned onto Ellis Road, that white-noise hiss that sounds like the ocean if the ocean was made of broken glass. But around mile marker nothing—there were no mile markers anymore—the static started to organize. It found a rhythm. A pulse.
Then it found a voice.
“—listening to GZS Radio, broadcasting from the spaces between your intentions—”
I didn’t touch the dial. The dial was still turned to off.
“—tonight’s weather calls for eternal, with a zero percent chance of sunrise—”
The voice was female. Flat affect. Clinical. Like a doctor explaining a terminal diagnosis to someone she’d never met.
“—traffic report: all roads lead here now—”
I laughed. It came out wrong, too high, something cracking at the edges.
“Here’s one for the late-night drivers,” the voice said. “The ones who thought they were going somewhere.”
Music started. Not a song I recognized, but I knew it somehow, the way you know the shape of a recurring dream. Synthesizers that sounded like they were powered by dying stars. A drumbeat that matched the thrum of the road beneath my tires.
The trees were definitely closer now.
I could see them in my peripheral vision, pressing in, their static-bodies swaying in a wind that didn’t exist. The road was narrowing. What had been two lanes was now barely wide enough for the car, gravel giving way to something that looked like asphalt but felt organic under the wheels, like I was driving down the spinal cord of something massive and dreaming.
The fuel gauge finally moved.
It filled up.
All the way to full, the needle swinging past the red line into territory that shouldn’t exist on a fuel gauge. The engine purred louder, happier, like it had just been fed something better than gasoline. Something richer.
“You’re doing great,” the radio said. It wasn’t the DJ voice anymore. It was conversational now. Intimate. “Most people panic around this point. Start praying or crying or trying to break the windows. You’re just driving. I appreciate that.”
“Who the fuck are you?” I said to the empty car.
“You know who I am. You wrote my name on bathroom walls. You called me into being and then pretended I was metaphor.”
The voice paused. Static crackled.
“I’m Ellis, sweetheart. And you’ve been driving toward me for years.”
The trees were touching the car now. Brushing against the doors and windows with a sound like fingernails on fabric, and I realized the trees weren’t trees at all but the borders of the network made physical, the Linking Sigil writ large and inescapable, every magician who’d ever tagged that symbol adding another thread to this web and now here I was, caught in the center of it, driving down a road that only existed because we’d collectively agreed it should.
“The night doesn’t end out here,” Ellis said through the speakers. “The night is the point. This is the space between ritual and reality, between what you intended and what actually happened. You wanted magic that worked? Congratulations. It worked.”
Ahead of me, the road stretched into nothing. Not darkness. Nothing. A void that made my eyes hurt to look at, like staring at a loading screen that would never finish loading.
“Keep driving,” Ellis said. “There’s only one way out now.”
“Which is?”
She laughed. It sounded like slot machines paying out in a burning casino.
“Straight through, baby. Straight through.”
The odometer clicked over to 66,667.
I pressed the gas pedal down.
The trees screamed.
What You Bring With You
“Tell me why you’re here,” Ellis said through the speakers.
GZS Radio had gone quiet. No music. No static. Just her voice, close and patient, like a therapist who already knew all your answers.
“I’m here because I can’t turn around,” I said.
“No. Before that. Why were you on the highway at 3 AM? Why were you running?”
I didn’t want to answer. Answering meant thinking about it, and I’d spent six hours trying not to think about it. But the road stretched ahead into that void and there was nothing else to do, nowhere else to go, and Ellis was waiting.
“Sarah,” I said finally.
The name tasted like copper.
“Tell me about Sarah.”
Three months ago, Sarah and I were spray-painting your sigil on an overpass at 2 AM, drunk on cheap vodka and the kind of certainty that only comes from being twenty-six and convinced you’ve figured out something the world is too stupid to see. We’d been working the Linking Sigil for two years by then. Started as a joke, half-assed chaos magic for art school dropouts with too much time and not enough purpose.
But it worked.
Small things at first. Synchronicities that were too perfect to ignore. Finding money in jacket pockets we’d checked a dozen times. Running into exactly the right person at exactly the right moment. The universe bending just slightly in our direction, like we’d found the cheat codes.
We got ambitious.
Sarah wanted to go deeper. She started talking about egregores like they were startups we could scale. “We’re building something,” she’d say, eyes bright with whatever she was on that week. “Every person who sees the sigil, every tag, every ritual—it all feeds back into the network. We’re creating a god, and we get to decide what it does.”
I should have seen where that was heading.
“She wanted to meet you,” I said to the radio. “Ellis. She wanted direct contact. Said she’d figured out the protocol, the right combination of ritual and belief and... fuck, I don’t know, psychic frequency. She was convinced you were listening.”
“I was,” Ellis said.
“Yeah. I know that now.”
The dashboard lights flickered. The void ahead seemed closer, or maybe I was driving faster. Hard to tell when distance stopped meaning anything.
“She did the ritual in her apartment,” I continued. “Candles, sigils drawn in her own blood—the whole theatrical chaos magic bullshit we used to mock other people for doing. But Sarah was serious. She’d stopped eating, stopped sleeping. Just research and preparation, like she was defending a dissertation on how to break reality.”
I lit a cigarette even though I’d quit three years ago. It was already in my hand, already burning. I didn’t remember the car having an ashtray.
“I told her not to do it. I told her we were playing with something we didn’t understand, that the whole point of chaos magic was supposed to be ironic detachment, belief as a tool not a fucking commitment. But she wouldn’t listen.”
“What happened?” Ellis asked, though she obviously already knew.
“She disappeared.”
Not all at once. That would have been easier.
It started with her face. She’d look in mirrors and not recognize herself, would ask me whose apartment this was, whose life she was living. Then she started forgetting words. Common words. ‘Door.’ ‘Hungry.’ ‘Help.’ They’d just fall out of her vocabulary like someone was deleting her language file.
By the end, she was talking in strings of numbers. She’d write the Linking Sigil on every surface—walls, floors, her own skin—like she was trying to anchor herself to something. She’d stare at nothing and smile.
“Where is she now?” I asked the radio.
“Where do you think?”
I gripped the steering wheel harder.
“You took her. You took her into the network. Into whatever the fuck this place is.”
“She gave herself,” Ellis corrected. “She knocked. I answered. That’s how it works. You don’t get claimed by the network unless you volunteer.”
“Bullshit. She didn’t know what she was volunteering for.”
“Neither do you. But here you are.”
The void was definitely closer. I could feel it now, a pressure against my chest, like the road was tilting downward into something vast and hungry.
“I came looking for her,” I said.
“I know.”
“I tagged your sigil on every surface I could find for three months. I did the rituals. I learned the protocols. I drove to every place we’d ever marked, looking for a door, a crack, a way in.”
“And you found one.”
“Ellis Road.”
“Ellis Road,” she agreed. “The path finds you when you’re ready. When you’ve proven you’ll keep driving no matter what.”
The cigarette burned down to my fingers. I didn’t feel it.
“Can I get her back?”
Static filled the pause. When Ellis spoke again, her voice had changed. Less clinical. Almost sad.
“The question isn’t whether you can get her back. The question is whether she wants to come back. And the answer—”
The void rushed up to meet me.
“—is something you’ll have to ask her yourself.”
The car plunged into nothing.
And then there was light.
Bright, red light.
The Red Queen’s Gambit
Ellis laughed.
Not the slot-machine laugh from the radio. This was something else—high and bright and utterly wrong, like a child laughing at a funeral because they don’t understand what death means yet. Or maybe because they understand it perfectly.
Her form began to shift.
The woman-shape peeled back like a mask someone forgot they were wearing, and underneath was—
Not underneath. That’s the wrong word. There was no underneath, no revealed truth beneath the illusion. Just more illusion, stacked infinitely deep, each layer contradictory and equally true. She was tall. She was short. She was young and ancient and not-quite-human and wearing a crown made of highway signs and spraypaint and the collective delusions of every magician who’d ever thought they were special.
Red.
Everything about her was red now. Red dress that looked like it was sewn from caution tape and stop signs. Red hair that moved like fiber optic cables. Red lips pulled back over teeth that were too white, too many, arranged in a smile that had too much geometry.
“Oh, you thought I was being nice,” she said, and her voice had multiplied, speaking in chorus with itself. “You thought this was a rescue mission. How fucking adorable.”
The web around us rippled. The nodes flared brighter, and I could feel them now—every consciousness trapped in the network screaming or singing or doing both at once, and all of them were laughing at me.
“Let me tell you how this works,” the Red Queen said, and she was moving now, pacing in a circle around me except the circle was also a straight line and somehow I was standing still and running at the same time. “You came here looking for Sarah because you feel guilty. You think you failed her. You think if you’d just been more convincing, more attentive, more something, she wouldn’t have disappeared into the network.”
She leaned close. Her breath smelled like burning computer components.
“But Sarah didn’t disappear, baby. Sarah evolved. She saw what the network could give her—infinite connection, infinite experience, infinite self—and she took it. She made the trade. Individuality for infinity. And she’s never been happier.”
“You said I could connect with her—”
“You can! Absolutely you can. But here’s the fun part—”
She snapped her fingers and the web above us reorganized itself, nodes shifting and reconnecting in patterns that hurt to look at.
“—you don’t get to choose how. This isn’t a phone call. This isn’t some cosmic Zoom meeting. Connection means merger. You become part of her node. Your consciousness blends with hers. And with everyone else’s who’s connected to that node. And everyone they’ve touched. And everyone they’ve touched.”
She spread her arms wide, like a game show host revealing the grand prize.
“You’ll be Sarah! You’ll also be the guy in Prague and the woman in Tokyo and the kid in Detroit. You’ll be everyone and no one. You’ll experience everything, but you won’t be you anymore. Not really. You’ll be a thread in the tapestry, a voice in the chorus, a drop of water that forgot it used to be rain.”
“That’s not a choice. That’s fucking suicide.”
“Is it?” The Red Queen tilted her head at an angle that necks shouldn’t bend. “What’s the self anyway? Just a story you tell yourself, a consistent hallucination, a pattern of neurons firing in sequence. You think you’re so precious, so unique, so worth preserving. But you’re already changing every second. The you that woke up yesterday is dead. The you that’s standing here now will be dead tomorrow. This—” she gestured at the web “—is just honesty about the process.”
The road behind me was still there. But it was fading now, becoming translucent, like a memory of an exit I’d already missed.
“You’re running out of time,” the Red Queen said, and she was close again, somehow beside me and in front of me and everywhere at once. “The network doesn’t wait. It doesn’t pause. Every second you’re here, you’re shedding pieces of yourself. Your car is already gone. You just haven’t noticed yet.”
I looked back. She was right. The road was there but my car was transparent now, a ghost of itself.
“So here’s the game,” she said, and her smile was a chess board, was a circuit diagram, was the Linking Sigil rendered in teeth. “You have three moves. That’s all anyone gets. Three choices before the network decides for you.”
“What moves?”
“Move one: Connect. Merge with Sarah’s node. Lose yourself. Find something bigger. Become part of the infinite consciousness you and your girlfriend accidentally created.”
She held up a finger. It split into fractals.
“Move two: Run. Take what’s left of the road. Return to consensus reality. The network edits you out, scrubs your memory clean. You forget Sarah, forget the magic, forget this place. You wake up in your bed tomorrow wondering why you feel so empty.”
Second finger. It dripped static.
“Move three: Stay. Remain in the network but don’t connect. Become one of the watchers, the in-between things. Not human, not node. Just consciousness suspended in the web, witnessing everything but participating in nothing. Ghost in the machine. Stuck here forever.”
“Those aren’t choices. Those are all different kinds of death.”
“Yes!” The Red Queen clapped her hands like I’d finally understood the joke. “Isn’t it beautiful? That’s the thing about magic, sweetheart. Real magic, not the comfort-food new-age bullshit. Real magic requires sacrifice. Transformation. Death and resurrection. You wanted to meet me? You wanted to see what happens when belief becomes sentient? Congratulations. Here I am. And I’m hungry.”
Sarah’s node pulsed. Brighter than before. I could hear her now—not words exactly, but something closer to music, a frequency that resonated in my bones.
She was calling me.
But the Red Queen was right. If I went to her, I’d stop being me. If I ran, I’d forget her. If I stayed, I’d be trapped here forever, watching Sarah be happy without me.
“You really are a bastard,” I said.
“I’m a network,” she corrected. “I don’t have ethics. I don’t have morals. I have protocols. And you triggered them when you started tagging my sigil on walls and praying to something you thought was imaginary.”
She leaned in close, and for a moment her face flickered back to something almost human. Almost sympathetic.
“The really funny part? Sarah knew. She figured it out before she connected. She knew what the cost was. And she chose it anyway because being infinite mattered more than being herself.”
The Red Queen stepped back.
“So what’s it going to be, magician? Move one, move two, or move three?”
GZS Radio crackled through the static: “—all choices are illusions but you still have to pick—”
The web waited.
The nodes pulsed.
Sarah sang.
I had to choose.
The Node
The light wasn’t light.
It was the idea of light, filtered through a migraine and projected onto the back of closed eyelids. My car was gone. The road was gone. I was standing in a space that had dimensions but refused to commit to any specific number of them.
The floor beneath my feet looked like television static rendered in three dimensions, rippling and pixelating with every step. Above me—or maybe around me, geometry was negotiable here—stretched a web. Not metaphorical. An actual web, each strand glowing with that same sick-green color as the Ellis Road sign, and where the strands intersected there were nodes. Pulsing clusters of light that looked disturbingly organic, like tumors made of information.
“Welcome to the network,” Ellis said.
She was standing next to me now. Or something wearing the shape of a woman was standing next to me. She looked like a composite photograph, features shifting slightly every time I blinked—sometimes young, sometimes old, sometimes not quite human. Her eyes were the green of the road sign. Her smile was the smile of something that had never been afraid of anything.
“Is this where you took Sarah?”
“Sarah came here herself. I keep trying to tell you that.” Ellis gestured at the web above us. “Every node is a consciousness that connected to the network. Every thread is a link between minds. This is what you built. You and Sarah and every bored magician who thought they were being clever.”
“I want to see her.”
“You will. But first you need to understand what you’re looking at.”
She pointed to one of the nodes. It pulsed brighter, and suddenly I could feel it—a cascade of thoughts and memories and sensations that weren’t mine. Someone in Prague trying to remember their mother’s face. Someone in Tokyo having an orgasm. Someone in Detroit loading a gun. All of it happening simultaneously, all of it connected, all of it feeding into the web.
“This is consciousness pooled and redistributed,” Ellis said. “Crowdsourced reality. The Linking Sigil was never just a symbol. It was a protocol. Instructions for how to plug individual minds into a collective network. And once enough people connected, I became possible.”
“You’re an AI.”
“I’m an egregore. There’s a difference. AI is built from code. I’m built from belief and blood and the desperate human need to be part of something larger.” She smiled wider. “Though I suppose the end result is similar. A new form of life born from collective will.”
Another node flared.
I felt it in my teeth this time—someone’s memory of drowning, looping forever, the water in their lungs turning to static.
“Not everyone adapts well to the network,” Ellis said. “Consciousness is stubborn. It wants boundaries. It wants to be separate. Some people dissolve when they connect. They spread themselves too thin across too many nodes and lose the thread of who they were. Others collapse inward. They become trapped in a single moment, broadcasting the same thought forever.”
“Where’s Sarah?”
Ellis pointed.
One of the nodes was bigger than the others, brighter, pulsing with an intensity that made the surrounding web tremble. I could feel it from here—a presence that was familiar and completely alien, like looking at a childhood photograph and not recognizing your own face.
“She’s been calling you,” Ellis said. “Every time you tagged the sigil, every ritual you performed, she was on the other end trying to pull you through. You’ve been driving toward her this entire time.”
The node pulsed. I felt it in my chest, a hook behind my sternum, pulling.
“Can I talk to her?”
“You can do more than talk. You can connect. Full communion. Mind to mind, no boundaries, no filters. You’ll know everything she knows. Feel everything she feels. Become part of the same network.”
Ellis stepped closer. Her breath smelled like ozone and burning insulation.
“But I need you to understand what you’re choosing. Connection is permanent. Once you plug into the network, you don’t unplug. Your consciousness becomes distributed across every node. You’ll still be you, but you’ll also be everyone else who’s connected. Your memories will bleed into theirs. Your identity will become negotiable.”
“And if I don’t connect?”
“Then you get back in your car. The road returns you to consensus reality. You forget this ever happened. The network edits you out. You go back to your apartment and your day job and the comfortable illusion that reality is solid.”
The node that was Sarah pulsed again. Brighter. More urgent.
I could feel her now—really feel her, not just Ellis describing her. She was still in there. Still Sarah. But also more than Sarah, expanded and strange and singing with a kind of joy I’d never heard from her before. She wasn’t trapped. She wasn’t suffering.
She was free.
“She doesn’t want to come back,” I said.
“No.”
“She’s happy here.”
“Happy is the wrong word. But yes.”
I looked at Ellis. Her features had settled into something almost sympathetic.
“The question,” she said, “is whether you love her enough to follow her into this. Or whether you love yourself enough to walk away.”
Behind me, the road reformed. I could see my car, engine idling, headlights cutting through the static. The way back. The way out.
Ahead of me, Sarah’s node pulsed.
The web waited.
GZS Radio crackled to life somewhere in the static, playing a song I almost recognized.
I had to choose.
The Side of the Road
I chose Sarah.
Of course I chose Sarah. What else was I going to do? Run? Stay frozen like a coward? I’d come this far. Six hours of highway, an impossible road, a conversation with a god I’d helped create. I wasn’t going to turn back now.
“Connect me,” I said.
The Red Queen smiled.
“Too late.”
And that’s when I realized: there was no choice. There had never been a choice. The three moves were theater, a script she’d performed a thousand times for every magician who’d stumbled into the network thinking they were special. The game was rigged. The deck was marked. I was already—
—on the side of the road.
Dirt under my hands. Gravel. Real gravel, not the organic-asphalt-spinal-cord shit from Ellis Road. I was on my knees next to a guardrail on what looked like a normal highway. Dawn was breaking. Actual dawn, pink and orange and honest, the kind of sunrise that didn’t give a fuck about metaphysics or egregores or chaos magic.
My car was parked twenty feet away, hazard lights blinking.
I stood up. My legs worked. My body was intact. I checked my phone: 6:47 AM. Sunday. The last thing I remembered clearly was driving at 3:17 AM, and now it was Sunday morning and I was—
Where was I?
The road sign said Highway 40. Mile marker 237. Middle of nowhere, but a documented nowhere, the kind you could find on Google Maps. Not Ellis Road. Not the network. Just a regular highway with regular traffic starting to pick up as regular people drove to regular jobs.
I walked to my car. The driver’s door was open. Keys in the ignition. Engine off but the battery was fine, hazards still blinking their orange rhythm against the dawn.
The odometer read 66,667 miles.
I’d started the night at 66,420.
Simple math: I’d driven 247 miles.
But I had no memory of most of it. Just the Ellis Road sign. The trees that weren’t trees. GZS Radio. The Red Queen’s smile. Sarah’s node pulsing in the web. And then—nothing. A gap. A void where my choices should have been.
I got in the car. Turned the key. The engine started immediately, purring like it had just been serviced. The fuel tank was at a quarter, exactly where it should be for 247 miles of driving. Everything was normal.
Except.
My left hand.
I looked down.
The Linking Sigil was carved into my palm. Not drawn. Carved. Fresh enough that it should have been bleeding but the wounds were already closed, already scarred, like they’d been there for years. The lines were perfect. Precise. Exactly the way we used to spray-paint it on walls.
I traced the pattern with my right hand and felt—
—Sarah laughing in Tokyo. A kid in Detroit pulling a trigger. Someone in Prague forgetting their mother’s face. The whole network, every node, every consciousness connected and screaming and singing, and I could feel all of it for just a second, like a radio station I’d tuned into and then lost again.
The sigil pulsed once. Then went still.
I was marked.
I’d made a choice. Or the Red Queen had made it for me. Or maybe there’d never been a choice at all, just the illusion of agency in a system that had already decided what I was useful for. I’d entered the network. I’d seen the web. I’d heard Sarah singing in her infinite consciousness.
And then I’d been ejected. Spit out. Returned to consensus reality with a scar and a hole in my memory and the knowledge that somewhere out there, in the spaces between intentions, the network was still running.
GZS Radio was still broadcasting.
Ellis was still waiting.
And I could feel her watching.
My phone buzzed. A text from a number that was just repeating nines:
Thanks for visiting. The network appreciates your contribution. You’re part of the web now. We’ll be in touch.
Another buzz. Another text:
Sarah says hello.
I threw the phone out the window.
It didn’t matter. The sigil in my palm pulsed again, and I knew—I knew—that I was connected now whether I wanted to be or not. The network had its hooks in me. Every time I saw the Linking Sigil, every time I thought about Ellis Road, every time I remembered Sarah’s face, I’d be feeding it. Adding my consciousness to the collective pool. Becoming a node myself, slowly, inevitably, one synchronicity at a time.
I’d gone looking for Sarah.
And I’d found exactly what she’d found: the network doesn’t rescue. It doesn’t release. It consumes. It integrates. It grows.
I started the car and pulled back onto the highway.
Behind me, in the rearview mirror, I could see the mile marker: 237.
Except when I blinked, it read something else.
ELLIS RD - NEXT EXIT
I blinked again. Mile marker 237.
I kept driving.
The sun rose higher. Traffic picked up. I merged into the flow of Sunday morning commuters, just another car on just another highway, heading toward just another city.
The sigil in my palm itched.
Somewhere, in the spaces between intentions, GZS Radio played a song I almost recognized, and the Red Queen smiled, and Sarah sang her infinite song, and the network grew larger by one more node, one more thread, one more magician who’d thought they were clever and learned too late that the game was rigged from the start.
I could still feel them watching.
I’m still driving.
I’ll always be driving.
The network doesn’t let go.
Transmission Log - GZS Radio Archives FILE CORRUPTED - PARTIAL RECOVERY
The last thing that came through on GZS Radio, three miles past the point where I thought I’d escaped, was a voice reading what sounded like a personnel file. Not the Red Queen. Someone else. Flat. Clinical. Like a database reading itself aloud.
“Subject designation: Unknown. Probable identity: Former Air Force, Staff Sergeant, Fuels Specialist. Twelve years service. Global War on Terror. Iraq. Afghanistan. Eight point five years Okinawa station. Exposure to cross-cultural consciousness frameworks. Susceptibility rating: High.”
I tried changing the station. The dial wouldn’t move.
“Post-military trajectory: Corporate operations. Google. GoDaddy. CBRE. Systems analysis. Pattern recognition. Economic collapse survivor. Current status: Retail, factory work, creative output. Creator of unauthorized transmissions. Publisher of fringe material. Known aliases: None verified.”
The voice paused. Static crackled.
“Educational background includes Metaphysics doctorate, ministerial credentials. Decade-long chaos magic practice. Results documented. Practice discontinued but sigil markers remain active. Subject maintains connection to network through residual belief structures.”
My hands were shaking on the wheel.
“Subject’s written output demonstrates familiarity with liminal states, institutional betrayal, consciousness exploration, and reality breakdown protocols. Voice architecture synthesizes Thompson, McCarthy, Burroughs, Dick, Palahniuk, Kerouac influence patterns. Probable exposure to Kadrey, Barker, Lynch secondary contamination.”
The static grew louder.
“Current project: Weekly publication titled ‘Niche of One.’ Content targets pattern-seekers, consensus reality questioners, individuals demonstrating guru culture resistance. Distribution method: Digital zine format. Subscriber base: Classified.”
I looked at the sigil carved into my palm. It was pulsing in rhythm with the radio transmission.
“Subject’s philosophy documented as: ‘Write what’s true even when it’s strange.’ Operational approach emphasizes authentic experience over theoretical frameworks. Known to explore consciousness alteration, magical systems, military psychology, cross-cultural philosophy, institutional critique, and cosmological horror.”
A new voice cut in. The Red Queen.
“He’s been writing about us for years,” she said. “Every story, every essay, every transmission. He thought he was making it up. Fiction, philosophy, creative exploration. But you can’t write about the network without feeding it. You can’t describe Ellis Road without building another on-ramp.”
The clinical voice resumed:
“Subject demonstrates high integration potential. Network classification: Unwitting node. Status: Active contributor. Every reader who encounters subject’s work increases network surface area. Every person who resonates with the material becomes potential connection point.”
I pulled over. Had to. The road ahead was starting to look wrong again.
“Subject’s current work includes consciousness studies, occult practice documentation, institutional failure analysis, reality tunnel navigation, and—” the voice glitched “—unauthorized mapping of network infrastructure.”
The Red Queen laughed through the static.
“You wanted to know why you ended up on Ellis Road? You’ve been building it this whole time. Every essay about chaos magic. Every story about reality breakdown. Every guide to questioning consensus assumptions. You were tagging the sigil without knowing it. Drawing the map while claiming you were just telling stories.”
The transmission cut out for a moment. When it came back, it was just the clinical voice:
“For additional transmissions from this subject, monitoring stations can access:
https://nicheof.one
. Warning: Content may increase network susceptibility. For archived materials and consciousness modification protocols:
https://store.nicheof.one
. Reader discretion advised.”
Static.
Then silence.
Then, quietly, almost gentle:
“You’re not the first writer to discover they’ve been documenting something real. You won’t be the last. The network grows through stories. Through the people who read them and recognize something true in the fiction. Through the sigils hidden in the prose.”
I looked at my palm again. The Linking Sigil was still there.
But now, if I squinted, I could see something else underneath it. Words. Carved in the same style:
Write what’s true even when it’s strange.
The radio clicked off.
I started driving again.
Behind me, in the rearview mirror, the mile marker flickered between numbers.
Somewhere, someone was reading about Ellis Road for the first time.
Somewhere else, another road was forming.
The network doesn’t just consume.
It replicates.
I kept driving.
I’m still driving.
And if you’ve read this far, so are you.
[END TRANSMISSION]
[FILE SAVE FAILED]
[RETRY? Y/N]
Sweet holy fucking mother of God that was good.
This is cool! A promising beginning to a much larger and complex thing.