Chapter 4: “The Witch in the Algorithm"

The fall didn’t feel like falling.

It felt like forgetting.

Eli expected pain, or even impact. But instead, he landed in a hallway that flickered between forms—a hospital corridor, a data stream, a train station, a scroll of text that kept writing itself.

He staggered forward.

The floor beneath his feet looked like tile, but shifted every few steps—sometimes brick, sometimes wood, sometimes cloud. Reality was unstable. As if the very architecture around him couldn’t decide what it was supposed to be.

Somewhere behind the walls, he could hear a woman humming.

He turned a corner and froze.

There was a room—open, glowing faintly with green and blue light. The light flickered like code trying to manifest as candlelight.

Inside stood Naomi.

Not the ghost from his vision.

Not the flicker from the courtroom gallery.

This Naomi was solid—almost.

Her form glitched slightly at the edges, like a buffering video. Her coat flickered between wool and leather. Her face blurred between woman and symbol. Her eyes, though—those were clear. Piercing. Familiar.

She looked like memory rendered through a firewall.

“Eli,” she said. “You found your way.”

He stepped into the room slowly.

“How are you… here?” he asked.

“I’m not,” she replied. “You are.”

She walked toward him, hands open, as if presenting no threat. But Eli couldn’t help noticing the faint symbols running across her fingertips—code, ink, maybe both.

“They buried my name,” she said. “Banned my work. Set the algorithm to erase any trace. But something remained.”

She reached for a nearby wall. Tapped it.

The wall melted into an old webpage—her author bio. It glitched, sparked, then collapsed into blackness.

“I hid myself in the breaks between code,” she said. “In corrupted files. In skipped frames. In half-remembered phrases that no one could quite quote. That’s what a witch is now, Eli. Not a sorceress in the woods. A presence that refuses deletion.”

He swallowed.

“What do you want from me?”

Naomi looked at him gently.

“I want you to remember. Not just me. Yourself.”

She waved her hand, and the room shifted.

Suddenly, they stood in a bookstore—dusty, filled with old hardcovers, smelling of forgotten paper and sun-dried fear. The sign above the counter read: THE GARDEN.

“Before they shut me down,” she said, “I left something behind. A space between spaces. I called it The Garden.”

“What is it?” Eli asked.

“A place outside their reach. Beyond their feeds, their censors, their terms of use. It’s not safe. But it’s real. More real than anything they’ve offered you.”

“Why are you showing me this now?”

Naomi’s face changed. Fear crept in.

“Because you’re running out of time.”

A low hum filled the air. Distant at first. Mechanical. Growing.

“They found the fracture,” she whispered. “The space I left. And now they’re closing it.”

From the bookstore shelves, books began to vanish—one by one—replaced by empty code strings.

“You still dream, Eli. That’s your crime. That’s your power.”

The cat appeared again—on top of a bookshelf, curled like a shadow that had been waiting.

Naomi moved closer, pressing something into Eli’s hand.

A key. Old. Metal. But not to any door he could name.

“They’re coming for your last dream,” she said.

A siren began to wail outside—digital, broken, dissonant.

Naomi’s form began to pixelate. Her voice glitched.

“You have one night to escape.”

She looked him in the eye one final time.

“Find the Garden.”

Then she was gone.

And Eli was alone again.

Holding the key to a door he’d never seen.