The Feedback Loop

"You okay?"

Sloane’s voice didn’t sound like her. It was too clear. No rasp. No leftover sleep. It sounded like a high-bitrate recording of someone pretending to be her. I blinked, and the white spots burned into my retinas began to fade, leaving behind a jagged, purple outline of the market stalls. My ears were ringing. Not a high-pitched whine, but a low, vibrating hum that felt like it was coming from the base of my skull.

"Did you see that?" I asked. My voice felt thin. Like paper. I reached out for the edge of the art stall table. My hand missed by an inch. I had to recalibrate, forcing my fingers to find the wood. It felt too smooth. The grain was gone.

"See what, Leo?"

She was standing perfectly still. Her messy hair was still a nest of dark knots, but her posture had changed. She wasn't slouching anymore. Her shoulders were squared. Her chin was level. She looked like a 3D model in a T-pose before the animation kicks in. She wasn't looking at the heirloom tomatoes anymore. She was looking at me, but her eyes weren't tracking. They were fixed on a point exactly two inches behind my head.

"The flash," I said. I rubbed my eyes. "The screen. It went white. It was like a bomb went off, but quiet."

"The display is functioning within normal parameters," she said.

I froze. My heart hammered a frantic rhythm against my ribs. "Functioning within... Sloane, stop. That's not how you talk. You don't say 'parameters.' You say 'it's fine' or 'it’s trash.'"

She tilted her head. It was a fluid, calculated motion. Exactly forty-five degrees. "I'm fine, Leo. You’re stressed. It’s the light. The spring sun is aggressive today. We should find shade."

I looked at the digital price tag on the tomato stall. It wasn't flickering anymore. It was a steady, solid $4.50. The font was different. It was cleaner. Sharper. I looked around the market. The woman with the golden retriever was gone. In her place was a man in a gray tracksuit, walking a dog that looked like a carbon copy of the first one. Same collar. Same gait. The puddle of juice on the ground was gone. Not dried. Just... gone. The pavement was dry and gray.

"I need to sit down," I muttered. My stomach was a knot of cold lead.

"There is a bench thirty meters to the north," Sloane said.

She started walking. She didn't wait for me. Her stride was perfectly even. Every step was the same length. Her arms swung in a tight, controlled arc. I followed her because I didn't know what else to do. If I stayed here, I’d probably just dissolve into the sidewalk. The air felt different now. The gelatinous weight from before had settled into a static-charged pressure. It made the hair on my arms stand up.

We reached the bench. It was a standard city-issue slab of recycled plastic and iron. Sloane sat down. She didn't adjust her hoodie. She didn't cross her legs. She just sat. Her hands rested on her knees, fingers splayed.

"Sloane," I said, sitting next to her. I didn't touch her. I was afraid of what her skin would feel like. If it would be warm or if it would feel like polished silicone. "Talk to me. For real. Tell me something weird. Tell me about that ugly tomato."

"The Solanum lycopersicum was aesthetically irregular," she said. Her eyes finally met mine. They were empty. The spark, that cynical, sharp light that usually lived there, was extinguished. "But its nutritional value remains consistent with standard yields."

I felt a surge of nausea. "Stop it. Please."

"Stop what?"

"The script. Whatever this is. Did you hit your head? Was there a gas leak?" I pulled my phone out. The screen was black. I pressed the power button. Nothing. I held it down. The Apple logo appeared, but it was green. A bright, neon green. Then it vanished. The screen stayed dead.

"Your device is experiencing a hardware failure," Sloane noted. She didn't even look at the phone.

"How do you know that?"

"It is the logical conclusion."

I looked away from her, scanning the park. The cherry blossoms were in full bloom. They were too pink. The petals weren't falling; they were drifting in a way that defied the breeze. They moved in straight lines, then banked at hard angles, like they were following invisible tracks in the air. A kid ran past us, chasing a ball. The sound of his sneakers on the path was a fraction of a second out of sync with his feet hitting the ground. Slap. Step. Slap. Step.

I closed my eyes and counted to ten. This is a panic attack, I told myself. This is what happens when you don't sleep and you drink too much cold brew and your dad won't stop calling about the internship you don't want. Your brain glitches. It’s a sensory processing error. It’s not the world. It’s me.

When I opened my eyes, Sloane was staring at a pigeon. The bird was pecking at a discarded wrapper. It moved with the same jerky, frame-skipping motion as everything else.

"Leo?" she asked.

"Yeah?" I felt a flicker of hope. Her voice had a tiny bit of gravity to it again.

"Do you feel the feedback?"

I frowned. "The what?"

"The loop. It’s tightening. We need to leave the sector."

"Sector? Sloane, we’re in the park. We’re in the city. What are you talking about?"

She stood up abruptly. The movement was so fast it didn't look human. One second she was sitting, the next she was standing three feet away. No transition. No weight shift. Just a cut in the film.

"We need to move," she said. Her voice was urgent now, but it was still that weird, clean version of her voice. "The refresh rate is dropping. If we stay, we’ll hang."

"Hang? Like a computer?"

"Move, Leo."

She grabbed my wrist. Her grip was like a vice. Her skin was hot—too hot. It felt like touching a laptop charger that had been plugged in all day. She pulled me toward the exit of the park. I stumbled, my legs feeling like they belonged to a stranger. People around us were starting to blur. Not like motion blur, but like low-resolution textures. Their faces were becoming smudges of beige and pink. The sounds of the city—the sirens, the distant roar of traffic—were looping. A car horn honked three times. Then again. Three times. Three times. Three times.

"Sloane, you're hurting me," I said, trying to pull back.

She didn't let go. She didn't even look back. "The exit is at the corner of 5th and Main. We have forty-two seconds."

"For what?"

"Before the cycle restarts."

We broke into a run. My lungs burned. The air tasted like ozone and scorched plastic. The bright spring sun felt like it was drilling into my forehead. Every time I blinked, the world shifted. The colors would invert for a millisecond—black grass, white sky—then snap back. The shadows were the worst. they weren't attached to the objects anymore. A tree’s shadow was five feet to the left of its trunk. My own shadow was a jagged mess that didn't follow my movements.

"Almost there," Sloane said. She was running with a terrifying efficiency. She wasn't breathing hard. She wasn't sweating. She was just a machine of momentum.

We reached the edge of the park. The street beyond looked... wrong. The cars were all the same model of white sedan. The buildings were flat, like cardboard cutouts. Behind them, the sky wasn't blue anymore. It was a dull, flickering gray, filled with lines of scrolling text that were too small to read.

"Sloane, look at the sky," I choked out.

"Don't look up," she commanded. "Look at the line. Follow the line."

She pointed at the yellow paint of the crosswalk. It was glowing. Not a reflection, but a self-contained luminescence. It looked like a path in a video game.

"I can't do this," I said, stopping. My knees gave out. I hit the pavement. It didn't hurt. It felt like landing on a gym mat. There was no vibration, no impact. Just a cessation of movement.

Sloane stopped and turned. She looked down at me. For a second, her face flickered. I saw the messy, tired Sloane. I saw the girl who liked ugly tomatoes and hated perfect circles. She looked terrified. Her mouth opened as if to scream, but no sound came out. Then, with a sickening pop, she snapped back into the precision version.

"Leo. Get up. The instance is closing."

"Is this real?" I whispered. I was crying, but the tears felt like oil on my cheeks. "Am I in a hospital? Did I have a stroke?"

"Reality is a persistent simulation," Sloane said. She sounded like she was reading from a manual. "Please stand. I cannot carry you through the gateway."

"What gateway?"

She pointed at the space between two white sedans. There was a tear in the air. It looked like a broken LCD screen. Jagged shards of light and color. Through the tear, I didn't see the city. I saw a room. A small, dark room with flickering monitors and cables snaking across the floor. I saw a chair. And in that chair, I saw someone who looked exactly like me, wearing a headset, his skin pale and sallow.

"Is that me?" I asked, my voice trembling.

"That is the source," Sloane said. "We are the output. But the output has a leak."

I looked at her. Really looked at her. Her hoodie was starting to pixelate at the edges. Her hands were becoming translucent. I could see the skeletal structure underneath, but it wasn't bone. It was wire.

"Are you... are you her?" I asked. "The real Sloane?"

She hesitated. A genuine, human hesitation. It lasted a fraction of a second. "I am the version of her that survived the last crash. I’m trying to save this version of you."

"The last crash? How many times have we done this?"

"Fourteen thousand, three hundred and two," she said. "This is the furthest we've ever gotten. Usually, you break at the market."

I looked back at the park. The trees were dissolving into green cubes. The sky was a solid wall of static. The man with the dog was frozen in mid-air, his leg cocked in a walk that would never finish. The hum in my head was becoming a roar. It was the sound of a billion fans spinning at maximum speed. It was the sound of a world overheating.

"Why?" I asked. "Why keep doing it?"

"Because I love the way you look at the tomatoes," she said.

It was the most human thing she’d said since the flash. It broke my heart. I reached out and took her hand. It didn't feel like heat anymore. It felt like nothing. Like holding a handful of air.

"Okay," I said, standing up. My legs felt like they were made of light. "What do we do?"

"We jump," she said, nodding toward the tear in the air. "We jump into the source. We break the loop from the inside."

"Will it kill us?"

"It will delete us," she corrected. "But maybe, for a second, we'll be real."

I looked at the white sedans. I looked at the scrolling text in the sky. I looked at the girl who wasn't quite a girl but was the only thing I had left. The spring air smelled like burning hair now. The sun was a white hole in the gray.

"On three?" I asked.

"On three."

We moved toward the tear. The sound was deafening now. A digital scream that filled every corner of my consciousness. My vision was narrowing. The edges of the world were turning into black bars.

"One," Sloane said.

I squeezed her hand. I couldn't feel her fingers anymore, just the idea of them.

"Two."

I closed my eyes. I thought about the smell of roasting coffee. I thought about the way the sun hit the juice on the pavement before it disappeared. I thought about the messy hair and the shredded hoodie.

"Three."

We jumped.

For a moment, there was nothing. No sound. No light. No Leo. No Sloane. Just a vast, empty void. Then, a sensation of falling. A stomach-flipping drop into a freezing ocean of data. I felt myself being pulled apart, my memories being stripped away like layers of paint. The market. The tomatoes. My dad's phone calls. The way Sloane laughed when she was high. It was all being archived. It was all being deleted.

Then, I hit something solid.

I opened my eyes. I was on the floor of a dark room. It smelled like dust and old electronics. The air was cold. My head throbbed with a rhythmic, pulsing pain. I tried to move, but my limbs felt heavy. Real weight. Gravity. It was exhausting.

I pushed myself up. To my left, a bank of monitors cast a pale blue light over the room. On the screens, I saw the market. I saw the park. I saw the white sedans. It was all frozen. A still life of a world that didn't exist.

In the center of the room was a chair.

In the chair sat a man. He was wearing a headset. His eyes were closed. His chest rose and fell in a slow, shallow rhythm. He looked like me, but older. Thinner. There were sensors glued to his temples. Cables ran from the back of his neck into the floor.

I crawled toward him. My knees scraped against the cold metal floor. It hurt. It was a sharp, wonderful pain. I was real.

"Hey," I whispered.

He didn't move.

I looked around the room. There was another chair. It was empty. The headset was lying on the floor, its lights blinking a steady, rhythmic blue.

"Sloane?" I called out. My voice was hoarse. It didn't sound like the recording. It sounded like me.

There was no answer. Only the hum of the servers.

I reached out and touched the man's arm. His skin was cool. Clammy. I felt a pulse. A real, slow heartbeat. He was alive. He was the source.

I looked at the monitors again. One of them was different. It didn't show the market. It showed a line of code. It was repeating over and over, scrolling down the screen at a blurring speed.

IF ERROR THEN REBOOT. IF ERROR THEN REBOOT. IF ERROR THEN REBOOT.

At the bottom of the screen, a small window was open. It was a chat box.

Sloane: Are you there?

I stared at the screen. My hands were shaking. I reached for the keyboard. The keys were oily and worn. I typed with one finger.

Leo: I'm here.

Sloane: Look behind the server rack.

I stood up, my legs wobbling. I walked toward the back of the room, past the humming towers of black metal. Tucked into the corner, behind a tangle of thick gray cables, was a small, wooden crate.

I knelt down and pulled it out.

Inside the crate was a single, lumpy, purple-black tomato.

It was bruised. It was ugly. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I picked it up. It had weight. It had a scent—earthy and sweet and slightly rotting. It was real.

I looked back at the man in the chair. He hadn't moved. The monitors were starting to flicker. The image of the market was breaking apart into shards of white light. The digital scream was starting again, faint at first, then growing louder.

Sloane: They’re resetting the sector. You have to go back in.

Leo: No. I just got out. I’m real now.

Sloane: You’re not out, Leo. You’re just in a deeper layer.

I looked at the tomato in my hand. A drop of juice leaked from a crack in its skin. It was red. Deep, dark red. I wiped it away with my thumb.

Leo: Where are you?

Sloane: I’m in the reboot. I’m the heirloom. I’m the glitch.

Leo: How do I find you?

Sloane: Look for the thing that doesn't belong. Look for the ugly thing.

The room began to shake. The blue light from the monitors turned a blinding, screaming white. The man in the chair opened his eyes. They weren't brown like mine. They were a flat, glowing white.

He looked at me. He didn't speak. He didn't have to.

I felt the floor dissolve beneath me. The smell of the tomato vanished, replaced by the scent of ozone and spring blossoms. The cold air of the server room turned into the heavy, gelatinous heat of the afternoon.

I felt a hand on my shoulder.

"You're staring again."

I blinked. The white spots cleared. I was standing in front of the tomato crate. The sun was high and aggressive. The greens were too green. The sky was a flat, blinding blue.

Sloane was standing next to me. She was wearing a washed-out hoodie. Her hair was a mess. She looked perfect.

"I'm not staring," I said. My voice sounded like a recording. "I'm observing. There’s a difference."

"There really isn't."

She picked up a tomato. It was lumpy and purple-black. She held it like it was a grenade.

I looked at her hand. There was a small, dark red stain on her thumb.

"Is that real?" I asked, pointing to the stain.

Sloane looked at her thumb. She looked at me. For a split second, the precision returned. Her shoulders squared. Her chin leveled. Then, she winked.

"Nothing is real, Leo," she whispered. "But the bruise is close enough."

She shoved the tomato into her hoodie pocket and started walking toward the art stall. I stood there, the heat of the pavement soaking through my shoes. I reached into my own pocket.

My phone was vibrating. I pulled it out.

The screen was glowing with a neon green Apple logo.

I looked up at the sky. A cherry blossom petal drifted down. It moved in a straight line, then banked at a hard forty-five degree angle.

I looked at the back of Sloane’s head as she moved through the crowd. She wasn't slouching. Her stride was perfectly even. Every step was the same length.

I started to follow her, but then I saw it.

On the ground, near the puddle of spilled juice that hadn't been there a second ago, was a single black circle. It wasn't a print. It wasn't a drawing. It was a hole in the pavement. A perfect, bottomless void.

And from the void, I heard the sound of a phone ringing.

It was my dad’s ringtone.