Dr. Bristle arrived at the edge of the glade just as the light began to flicker.
Not the usual flickering of dusk through branches—no, this was something deeper. A trembling at the corners of perception, as if the trees weren’t swaying, but re-rendering. He paused, ears twitching, bag in paw. His whiskers brushed the soft air, felt its strange rhythm. Stillness beneath motion.
It wasn’t the first oddity of the day.
He continued.
Bartram, a white rhinoceros of considerable age and even more considerable weight, had summoned him with only a one-line note: “The sickness is back.” Bristle hadn’t asked for clarification. He rarely did. Clarity, in his experience, had a way of eroding itself on contact.
Bartram lived in what was once an old meditation shrine, now repurposed as a quiet, moss-covered ruin. The stones held heat strangely, like they remembered a different sun. When Bristle arrived, Bartram was already lying on his side, eyes open, staring at the ceiling as if listening to a voice trapped in the rafters.
“It’s not a fever,” Bartram said before Bristle could speak.
The badger crouched beside him, placing his bag down gently. “It rarely is.”
Bartram’s breathing was shallow. His massive chest rose and fell in patterns that seemed rehearsed but unconvincing. As if he were mimicking breath, rather than needing it.
“The colors are wrong,” Bartram whispered. “Have you noticed? The green is too green. The shadows too clean.”
Bristle didn’t answer. Instead, he reached into his bag and pulled out a mirror—simple, round, bordered in polished wood. He held it up to the rhino’s eye.
Nothing reflected.
Not the eye. Not the mirror. Just a blank shimmer, as though both sides of the glass had agreed to forget each other.
Bristle felt a soft pressure behind his own eyes then. Not pain. More like… resistance. As if some part of the world had just realized it was being watched.
“There is no sickness,” Bartram murmured, voice so quiet it nearly dissolved into the air.
Bristle lowered the mirror.
Bartram sat up.
And glitched.
Just once. A single frame dropped from the film of the world. His shoulder flickered slightly out of alignment, then back in. The moss beneath him stuttered. A bird’s call rewound and repeated, like a tape reel skipping in an empty house.
Bristle stared.
“I woke up,” Bartram said. “I woke up, and I couldn’t unsee it. None of this is real.”
The badger tried to speak, but his voice caught—like it was buffering. He looked down at his paws. Perfect. Too perfect. Not a fleck of dirt. Not a hint of callus. The scars he’d earned over a lifetime of medicine… gone.
Then he noticed the grass beneath him wasn’t bending under his weight. It was just there. Rendered. Tiled.
“We’re programs,” Bartram said softly. “Loops. Scripts inside something bigger. I think I broke mine. The sickness… it’s just the code rejecting the lie.”
A quiet hum grew louder. The trees began to dissolve at the edges. Shapes peeled away into vectors. The sky flattened into a pale grid, stars like placeholder icons blinking out one by one.
Bristle’s heart raced—until he realized it wasn’t beating. It hadn’t for a while.
He stood. Not in panic. In reverence.
The world was vanishing, and he wasn’t afraid. Because for the first time, it was honest.
Bartram stepped forward. No longer entirely a rhinoceros—something else now, something lithe and silver, his body both form and frame, unfolding in slow, patient lines of light.
He extended a hand. Not hoof. Hand.
“Come with me. There’s more beyond the code.”
Bristle hesitated. Then nodded.
And together, they walked out of the rendered world, into the silence that waited beyond the walls.
