The Splice Below - TUMBLEBYTE SAGA

No one spoke in the Vault. Not Calder, not Mary, not even the drone crouched in the rafters like a patient vulture. The silence wasn’t peace—it was a law older than Lornjack, older than the sound of grief.

Calder’s hand, so steady when pointing a gun, hesitated as it hovered over the blank tape. Cold static licked his palm. A flick-flick of Mary’s coat and a glint of solder-thread in her gaze said everything: If you start this, you finish it. No saves. No reboots.

He searched the altar: six decks, each tape with its own rumor, its own odd hum. Only the one with no label whispered just for him. The “Mirror.” He took it, feeling its weight—not grams, but history.

The cortex plug sat beneath his wrist, ringed in scar tissue like a failed promise. Last time, regret. This time, Ella.

He slid the tape home with the care of someone loading a bullet for a friend.
Click.
Instant cold, bone-deep. His vision did that old CRT collapse, colors narrowing to a bright point, then bursting outward into static geometry. The Vault fell away.

The memory didn’t enter—it pressed. A child’s laugh, backwards. The copper taste of dread. Static cleaned every crease in his brain, searching for loose secrets.

Then voices, snatched from electric ghosts, trespassed his thoughts.
Don’t cheat language, daddy—use your words.
His own voice, lagged by years, overlapped:
What do you want, Ella?
(Laughter. Lightning. The feeling of being remembered and forgotten in the same breath.)

He saw birthdays that never happened, doors he never opened, words he owed drowning in silence. Code bled out through the vision, lines looping, meaning overwriting meaning until only her cadence remained.

Somewhere, Mary’s hand hovered above his shoulder. She didn’t touch. If she did, he knew, he’d never come back right. Maybe that was the point.

The tape spun. Faster.
He teetered on the edge—could let go, float, become another ghost to haunt the ribbon. Or claw back, knowing he’d never be the same.

He chose neither. He chose both.

Calder came back slow, dripping with the silence of someone who’s seen the glitch at the heart of memory and lived to tell no one.

He opened his eyes. Static trickled behind vision, filling the cracks with a hum he’d learned from his daughter. The Vault altar light was still blue, but now something danced inside it—small and wild, like a heartbeat with nowhere left to go.

Mary was already collecting payment.
“Vault wants a memory,” she said, voice radio-flat, no room for bartering. “Give it something worth the trade.”

He fished for the hurt that hurt deepest: a day by the river, Ella tracking ripples with her finger, whole sky bruised purple in reflection. He pressed it into a fresh cassette. As the tape spun shut, he felt something unlatch behind his eyes. Light as mercy, sharp as loss.

Mary set the tape with the rest, filed under the only catalog that mattered: bled-notes and barter-paid.
“All debts go to echo,” she said.

Calder rose, patched but imperfect. The glitch in his head now hummed, sweet as a lullaby. Sometimes, if he listened sideways, he could catch Ella’s laugh pirouetting inside the silence—guiding him, haunting him, neither ghost nor memory, but both.

Upstairs, the jukebox played something new.
Not a song.
An afterimage—the shape of noise, gentled by hands that remember how to rewind.

He walked out of the Vault lighter than law should allow, carrying a wound wound tight in tape. Outside, in the unending hush, the wind remembered his name.

In Lornjack, silence might not be peace.
But it was proof he wasn’t alone.

End sequence. TUMBLEBYTE style. Signature: glitchwave prose, mythic empathy, Western groove, lingering static. Splice again anytime, and the world loops onward. By GHOSTWRITER PRO.