The Moon Began to Glitch

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The Moon began to glitch. It had been falling for weeks now, and that had been bad enough, but this...this was something else.

We had thought Jupiter had been weird, but Jupiter was so far away that it didn't cause the panic the scientists had been expecting. We had simply ignored that bright pinprick at night, even as it was going through its stuttering, twitching dance.

I mention the scientists, but they really have no more idea than the rest of us do about what's happening. The cults might actually have it more right than the scientists do. When celestial bodies begin doing these things, I think science goes right out the window. The cults are talking about some ancient idea called the Simulation Hypothesis, and as far as I've heard, that's the best idea out there. Maybe we are in a simulation, and our housing processor has been infected with something. It makes sense. But...everything feels so real, and there seems to be no pattern to the strange events...except that they're getting closer.

We know they're getting closer.

We knew we were in for it when the Moon began to glitch.



I was twenty when it all was first noticed. Well, okay, I wasn't actually twenty, I was four hundred and forty-six. But I looked and felt twenty. Four hundred-year-olds might as well have been twenty, for all the credibility we were ascribed. But I had been in love. She hadn't believed me when I told her, but I think she might be coming around. Love was a strange thing in those days. Most people had it artificially induced, and with each other's consent. But I actually fell in love with her.

I had been arguing with her when the news report came on.

"Scientists are baffled," the title read.

"I can only describe it as a glitch," an ugly little man was saying. "It reminds me of VR glitches, and that's all I can really say. It's out at Alpha Centauri. At first we thought it must be atmospheric interference, but that couldn't explain what we were seeing."

I turned away from Bella to watch the T-VR. She rolled her eyes and hooked in too. The man was now right in front of me and I took in his bizarre appearance. He chose to manifest as having four arms, two of which were gesticulating wildly. The other two, ending in normal hands, were still, the hands folded primly in his lap. He wore a visor that wrapped around his eyes, reflecting light back and away, and I wished I could see the color of his eyes.

"For those of us who don't regularly participate in VR, can you describe it?" the newswoman asked. She was choosing to manifest as fully human, thought I doubted she was. I myself wasn't; I had both some bat and some wolf DNA in my cells, though my only outward change had been to fit myself with a pair of huge bat-like ears.

"Well," the ugly little man said, his mouth turning down and exposing a set of vampiric fangs, "I guess I'd have to say..." he paused, clearly having trouble describing whatever "it" was. I had regularly participated in VR about forty years ago, but that wasn't cool anymore, as far as I was concerned. Only five hundred-year-olds, and older, liked VR anymore. But I hadn't gone so far as to have my implants removed. But I could imagine what the man was saying; a glitch. Sure.

Finally, he spoke again. I could feel Bella next to me, reaching for my hand, but I pulled back. I was still mad at her for refusing to believe me.

"It appears as if the star is flickering at first. Then, when you look closer, you see it isn't flickering, not really." The man was having trouble expressing himself. Three of his arms started gesturing, and the hand on the fourth was picking at his skirt with unease. "I guess it's different each time you look at it. Sometimes it looks like the star is suddenly the size of a planet. Then the star looks like a black hole. Then it's a mass of swirling matter, perhaps like an accretion disc, or perhaps a nebula. I've never seen colors like that before."

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