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# CHAPTER THIRTEEN — Crystallized Laughter
- URL: https://ephergent.com/a-ch13/
- Published: 2026-10-13T00:27:21.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-13T00:54:34.000Z
- Author: Ephergent one
- Tags: Crystallized Laughter, The Ephergent Novels

*Crystallized Laughter — CHAPTER THIRTEEN*

EDITOR'S NOTE (Pixel): Zephyr filed this at 4 a.m. in one sitting, fueled by six energy drinks and a quantum-enhanced bag of chips from a dimension we do not talk about because the chips are not, technically, food. I told him he could write it however he wanted. I have not touched it except to remove one passage he asked me to cut and to add the bracket where he wrote the bracket himself, which he did, in my voice, as a joke, and which I am leaving in because it is funnier than anything I would have added. Also: this is the first oral history in the series where the subject does not use the past tense much. Watch for it. He doesn't notice he's doing it. I did. - Pixel

\---

ZEPHYR GLITCH:

My first memory isn't a memory, it's a smell.

Ozone. Burnt circuitry. And underneath it, something sweeter. Aether always smelled like vanilla and static, this combo of organic and digital that I later worked out came from the quantum-repair shop where he worked. He'd come home smelling like soldered reality patches and, impossibly, fresh-baked cookies, because apparently the shop's landlady baked, and apparently my brother, who could debug a probability matrix at nineteen, could not walk past a cookie without buying one for a seven-year-old who was not his responsibility and never once mentioned it.

I was seven. He was nineteen. He was the only constant in a universe that kept forgetting we existed.

Here's what nobody tells you about growing up in Prime Material's lower districts: you live in reality's unchecked exception handler. The dimension works fine for the people in the chrome towers. Down in the manufacturing zone, reality gets sloppy. Lights flicker between dimensions. Streets loop back on themselves on Tuesdays. Vending machines dispense memories instead of snacks, and I am not being poetic, I put a quarter in one once and got somebody's recollection of learning to ride a bicycle, and the bicycle was in Nocturne Aeturnus, where I did not know bicycles worked, and I was seven, and I rode that memory for an hour because it was the best afternoon I'd had that year.

\[He wrote "and I was seven, and I rode that memory for an hour" and then stopped writing for eleven minutes. I know because A1 has a clock. Then he continued. I have left the pause out because it is his pause and not mine, but you should know it's there. - Pixel\]

Our parents: gone. Not dead, gone. Dimensional instability, the record said, when we were old enough to look, which is Corporate's word for weather, which is Corporate's word for a form nobody filed. One day they were there, the next they'd never existed according to every official record in every database Aether could reach. But we remembered. Mom's laugh, which was too loud for our apartment and exactly right for it. Dad's cooking, which was a war crime and which he served like a banquet. The way they'd sing off-key while fixing broken tech, both of them, neither of them in key, harmony only achievable by two people who had stopped caring whether it worked.

We kept those memories encrypted. Not on a drive. In our heads, in the place where you put the thing you are not allowed to say out loud, which every kid in the lower districts learns before they learn long division.

Aether took care of me after that. Three jobs: quantum repair in the morning, data courier in the afternoon, something he wouldn't talk about at night, and I did the arithmetic on the something he wouldn't talk about when I was fourteen and understood, and I never asked, and he never told, and that is what it means to be raised by someone who is protecting you from the exact thing he is doing to survive, and I have opinions about that now that I did not have at fourteen, and none of them are unkind, because I have done things at three in the morning that I would not describe to him either.

He taught me everything. How to code. How to spot a reality glitch, which is not a talent, it's a habit: you look at the seam, always, wherever two things meet, because that's where the build shows. How to navigate a universe that didn't care if you existed.

Most importantly: systems can be understood. And anything that can be understood can be hacked.

For my twelfth birthday he built me a cyberdeck. Not bought. Built. Scavenged parts, stolen code, and what I'm fairly sure were actual chunks of quantum foam he'd retrieved from a reality breach, a franken-mess of mismatched components that outperformed anything Corporate manufactures, because Corporate manufactures for the average user and my brother manufactured for me.

"Reality's just another system, Zeph," he said, hands shaking slightly as he connected the final circuit, because he had not slept and he wanted it done before midnight. "It's got code, it's got rules, it's got exploits. You're smart enough to find them."

I named it Aether Junior. He laughed so hard he cried, which I took as approval, and which I now understand was something else: he was nineteen and raising a kid and had just built a thing that would, one day, be the instrument of the search that defined my whole life, and he laughed because his little brother named a machine after him, and if you want to know what my brother is like, that's it, that's the whole file: he builds you a door and laughs when you put his name on it.

The deck changed everything. Suddenly I could see the code under reality: probability matrices, quantum decision trees, the places where the build got lazy and pasted the same building texture seventeen times. I started small. Vending machines for free snacks. Spoofing credentials into better schools. Stabilizing the flickering lights in our apartment so I could read at night, which is a sentence that should be illegal in a dimension with towers.

Then I went bigger, because that's how it always goes, and I want to be honest about the shape of it, because the zine does not round up and it does not round down either.

When I was sixteen I cracked a Corporate database. I wasn't trying to. I was looking for dimensional instability records, trying to find anything about our parents, and what I found instead was Project Reality Drain: Corporate deliberately bleeding lower-district reality thin to harvest the quantum energy underneath it, treating whole neighborhoods as battery farms, draining until nothing was left but static and forgotten memories.

Our parents hadn't disappeared. They'd been edited out. Their existence converted into raw computational power for interdimensional expansion, and the paperwork for that, when I eventually read it, was three lines long, and one of the lines was a budget code.

I showed Aether the data. Expected rage. Got resignation.

"I know," he said. "I've known for years."

"Then why..."

"Because fighting them gets you deleted too, Zeph. I'd rather exist to protect you than be a forgotten martyr."

We had the worst fight of our lives. I called him a coward, which is a word I had no right to deploy at seventeen against a man who had kept me alive for twelve years on three jobs and no sleep. He called me a reckless kid who didn't understand how the universe worked, which was true, and also the most terrifying thing he'd ever said to me, because he said it like a man who had decided something.

I stormed out. Three days in a hacking café, not answering calls, doing the thing where you are so angry that you cannot be reached and you mistake the unreachability for strength.

When I came home he was gone.

No note. His tools, neat on the bench, which for Aether was a signature, because a man who organizes his tools at 3 a.m. after a fight is a man who wanted the next person in the room to be okay. His jacket on the hook. And a single encrypted file on my deck, timestamped from the night he disappeared, sitting there the way a lit match sits on a table.

I couldn't crack it. Brute force. Quantum algorithms. Reality-bending exploits. Nothing. The file just sat there for two years, and I knew it was a message, and I couldn't read it, and if you want to know what two years feels like, it feels like standing in front of your own front door holding a key that won't turn.

I searched. Corporate databases, dimensional signatures, rumors through the darknet. I became a ghost, living in the cracks, existing to find him. Six months in I got a lead: an interdimensional data courier matching his description, seen in Sector 7G, working for Corporate, which is the sentence where I made my first large mistake.

I tried to hack Corporate's surveillance network. Their security was quantum encryption with reality-anchored authentication, and what I needed was something that could slip between dimensional barriers, so I wrote an exploit: code that could phase across quantum boundaries, following data streams between realities.

I tested it on myself, because I was nineteen and stupid and my brother was in there somewhere.

It worked too well. The exploit didn't just phase me. It fragmented me. My consciousness split across five realities at once, and I was running a taco stand, and I was a mannequin in a boutique, and I was sentient glitter arguing about tax policy, and all five of those were fully lived, with full interiority, and I could not tell which one was the original, and the original, I eventually established, was none of them, which is a fact about myself that I carry the way other people carry a scar.

I was dying in the sense that a file is dying when five processes are writing to it at once.

\[Here he wrote, in my voice, which I am printing exactly as filed: "and then she found me, because she finds everyone, it's the whole job, and she'd hate that I wrote it that way, good." - Pixel\]

How I got back together is not a story I tell in order. Here is what I have: A1's anchors, blue threads woven through five realities like sutures. Pixel's voice, cutting through, snark over terror, the exact register that gets through when nothing else does. And Clive's staples, which I could see from five places at once, tapping a pattern on a surface I could not identify, and the pattern was a map, and I did not know a stapler could make one, and it took me back in one piece.

When I stabilized I was on the floor of Wreckfall with a cup of coffee in my hand and Pixel sitting next to me saying, casually, like she hadn't just reassembled my soul: "So. Spectacularly bad idea. Wanna tell me what you were trying to do, or should I assume you were becoming the universe's first sentient glitter-based political commentator?"

I told her everything. Aether. The search. The file. Three years of nothing.

She didn't judge me, and she didn't tell me to give up, which is rarer than it sounds, because people who care will tell you to stop, and people who don't care won't, and the two categories cover most of a multiverse, and she was in neither, because she said:

"Want to help me burn Corporate Corp to the ground? Because I bet whoever you're looking for is stuck in the same machine. Maybe we find him by breaking the whole damn system."

I should have said no. Continued the solo search. Instead I found out I'd been alone so long I'd forgotten what connection felt like, what it was to have people who cared whether I existed or glitched. Plus she was right, and I have never once enjoyed that.

Here's what I know now, filed at 4 a.m. with six empty cans in front of me:

Reality is code, and code can be hacked. But connection, memory, love: those aren't bugs to be fixed or exploits to be patched. They're features. The load-bearing ones. The ones the whole build hangs off.

I cracked the file last month. Two years of my life, seventeen algorithms, and A1's processing power, and inside was one line of code and my brother's voice, younger than I remember, saying: don't spend your life chasing my ghost. Find people worth fighting for. Build something worth breaking the universe over. Live. That's the hack that matters.

\[He paused again here. Longer. Then:\] I haven't told the team I already knew that line before I crashed into their camp. I read it to them like it was news. It wasn't news. I've known it for a month. I brought it to them anyway, because a line of code that good is not a message you keep, it's a message you deliver to people who print things, and because I wanted to watch somebody else's face when they read my brother out loud.

That's the part I don't say at 4 a.m. usually: I came here to be read to. In a zine. Out loud. By a woman who used to file spreadsheets for a living and now files the truth badly, loudly, and by hand, and every time she prints his name it gets louder, and Corporate cannot audit a photocopy, and I have been chasing a machine for three years, and it turns out the machine is afraid of paper.

My name is Zephyr Glitch. I'm twenty-one. I have a mohawk, too many AR glasses, and a cyberdeck held together with quantum tape and pure spite.

I'm still searching for Aether. Every database I crack, every exploit I run, part of me is checking the register for his name.

But I'm not searching alone anymore, and that turns out to be the whole difference, and it's not a small difference, it's the entire difference, it's the difference between a man looking for his brother in a dark room and a man looking for his brother in a dark room with eleven other people holding lamps.

Told by Zephyr Glitch. Logging off.

\---

EDITOR'S FOOTNOTE (Pixel): He filed the above and then sat there, and then he said, "You're going to put a bracket on it," and I said "obviously," and he said, "You're going to make the bracket mean something," and I said "obviously," and he said, "You're going to print that I cried," and I said, "No. I'm going to print that you paused. Twice. At the exact two places where a person decides whether the record is worth telling the truth in. Everything else is yours."

He read it back. He left both pauses in.

Next oral history in the series: the woman who photographed her own soul. She's coming. She doesn't know it yet. None of them ever do. , Pixel Paradox, signing off