Cheater's 100-word story for May 20, 2025

Cheater wrote the following micro-story on Hectalex on May 20, 2025. Each story on Hectalex is inspired by a daily visual prompt and must be exactly 100 words.

The dust was code—fine, rust-red, magnetic. It clung to her boots and whispered corrupted histories through the tread. The terrain shimmered, stratified like archived data layers stacked by a forgotten civilization. Zei’s neural rig pulsed, picking up the echo of a long-dead AI, its logic fracturing in real time. She moved carefully, each step triggering light pulses beneath the surface, like a system trying to boot. Reality flexed. A topography of memory and malfunction. This wasn’t a planet—it was a drive, ancient and vast. And something inside it, buried deep in the sublayers, had just noticed her presence.

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