The city was a circuit board of neon and rain, a place where your worth was measured in terabytes and your soul was a subscription service. I am Marcus, a System Purge Specialist. My job is simple: find the glitches in the social fabric and delete them.

The "glitches" were the Unlinked—the people who had opted out of the Neural Net, the ones who lived in the blind spots of the city's surveillance. Usually, they were just broken people. But then came the Zero Point.

The Zero Point was a collective of the most destitute souls in the city, led by a woman who called herself the Void-Queen. They had discovered the algorithm of the coming Migration. The Star-Walkers didn't just look at wealth; they looked at the *minimum* threshold of human existence. If the minimum was too low, the entire species was flagged as "primitive" and slated for recycling.

The wealthy elite were terrified. They hired me to kill the Zero Point, to raise the floor of human misery so the Star-Walkers would see us as "civilized."

I tracked them to a decommissioned server farm in the undercity. I expected to find shivering beggars. Instead, I found a war room.

"You're late, Marcus," the Void-Queen said, her voice a digital rasp. She was sitting in a chair made of salvaged wires, her eyes glowing with a hacked interface. "Did the Board tell you we're anomalies? We're not anomalies. We're the anchor."

"You're dying in the dirt," I replied, my weapon armed.

"Exactly," she smiled. "As long as one of us stays in the dirt, the Board stays in fear. They can't migrate if the average is too low. We are the only leverage humanity has against the gods. We are the Zero Point, and we will stay poor until the world burns."

I looked at the screens around me. They weren't just surviving; they were calculating. They were timing their deaths, coordinating their poverty to create a mathematical shield that kept the elite trapped on a dying planet.

I had a choice: execute the contract and save the "civilization" of the rich, or let the anchor hold.

I lowered my gun. For the first time in my life, I decided to become a glitch. I turned my weapon toward the surveillance drone hovering above me and fired. The signal went dark. In the silence that followed, the Void-Queen handed me a piece of real bread—rough, tasting of yeast and earth. It was the most expensive thing I had ever tasted.

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