The Genny Incident

Stormy Cummins was only on air because the station was short-staffed and desperate.

That was how they framed it internally. Officially, she was "developing talent." Unofficially, she was cheap, competent, and willing to work shifts no one with a functional marriage or sleep schedule wanted.

Which was how she ended up standing behind yellow tape at three in the morning, breath fogging in the cold, staring into a crater where a house used to be.

"Two minutes," her producer said from the van. "Gas main incident. That's the language. Don't speculate."

Stormy nodded. She was already speculating so hard her fillings hurt.

The crater was roughly twenty feet across and six feet deep at the center. Its edges were blackened and uneven—scooped out by something hot and indifferent. Smoke drifted upward in lazy strands that didn't match the wind direction—or any wind at all.

Inside the pit lay what remained of the Genny family.

Three of them. Small, medium, large. Burned husks, brittle and hollowed. Cicada shells something else had crawled out of.

Stormy didn't zoom in. She'd seen enough.

Above her, Fred rose silently into position.

She never announced the drone. People barely noticed them anymore. Just another eye in a world that had forgotten how to blink. The only distinguishing feature was a small blue ascot tied neatly around one stabilizer pylon—slightly singed at the edge, but dignified.

Fred needed the dignity. Before Stormy found him at a police auction, he'd spent three years as the operating system for a high-end AI sex toy called the "PleasureCloud 9000." The things he'd seen. The data he carried. The encryption on his memory banks was so aggressive that Stormy suspected it was less copyright protection and more psychological quarantine.

She'd tried everything. Social engineering. Firmware exploits. Getting him drunk on corrupted voltage.

Nothing worked. Fred remembered everything and shared almost none of it.

"Frame wide," Stormy murmured.

The drone adjusted with mechanical grace.

"The ascot continues to negatively affect yaw stability," Fred observed, his voice carrying the faint disapproval of a butler who'd been asked to serve dinner in a clown costume.

"You look distinguished."

"I do not look like anything. I am a sensory platform."

"A sensory platform with style."

Fred did not respond. This was as close as he got to gratitude.

Someone pointed past her shoulder.

"Hey," a firefighter said, voice low. "If you want a statement, there's... a guy."

Stormy followed his gaze.

The man stood a few feet from the crater's edge. Ash coated him so thick it softened his outline, blurred his edges into the smoke. A faint violet shimmer radiated off his skin—subtle enough to miss if you weren't already looking for things you weren't supposed to see.

Stormy was always looking.

His eyes were wrong.

The sockets were hollow, burned empty, but his irises floated there anyway—suspended in nothing, tracking her. Something wearing a face it hadn't quite mastered.

"Stormy. Maintain distance of three steps," Fred advised.

She stopped at three.

"Sir?" Stormy lifted her mic gently. "My name is Stormy Cummins, Channel Six/Seven, WXPO Can you tell me what happened here?"

"It was horrible."

His mouth moved, but not quite in sync. The audio lagged—a half-second delay between intent and sound.

"What did you see?"

"I shit myself."

For half a second, it almost worked as a joke. A human release valve.

Stormy crushed the impulse to laugh. In her experience, people who joked after trauma were either coping or performing. This man was doing neither.

"I'm sorry," she said evenly. "You did what?"

"I said I shit myself, ma'am." His voice was thin and raspy, scraped hollow. "I ain't never seen anything so horrible."

Behind her, someone made a sound that might have been a sob or a gag.

"What was horrible?" she pressed.

The man stepped forward with a sudden jolt—joints moving wrong, momentum all off.

Stormy didn't flinch. She'd interviewed state legislators. This was unsettling but familiar.

His neck cracked as he turned toward the crater.

"We thought we could control it," he said. "I thought we could. We kept it. Fed it. You don't worship a thing like that. You just... take care of it long enough that it starts thinking you belong to it."

Stormy's throat tightened. "The Genny family?"

He didn't answer.

The yellow tape behind her fluttered once.

Then again.

There was no wind.

"Fred," Stormy whispered. "Thermal scan?"

A pause.

"Cold," Fred replied. "The crater's center reads sixteen degrees below ambient. That is not how fires work."

"I know how fires work, Fred."

"I am merely noting the discrepancy."

The man tilted his head, tuned to something outside human range.

"You're filming," he said.

"Yes."

"Good." A smile that didn't reach his floating eyes. "Don't show it."

"Don't show what?"

He didn't answer.

At the crater's center, something clicked. Wet. Organic. A cartilage lock turning.

Stormy stepped back before her brain authorized the retreat.

"Wrap it," her producer crackled. "We're pulling out."

In the van, the heater blasted and everyone performed normalcy very loudly.

Stormy opened her laptop and scrubbed through Fred's footage. The crater. The tape moving wrong. The man's mouth out of sync.

She paused on four frames where the smoke simply wasn't.

Not dispersed. Not blown. Absent. Reality had stuttered.

A metadata flag appeared unprompted:

AUDIO SOURCE DETECTED: SECONDARY (UNIDENTIFIED)

TRANSCRIPTION CONFIDENCE: 12%

Beneath the static: faint rhythmic clicking. And a whisper that wasn't quite words.

"Fred," she murmured. "Is this familiar?"

The playback froze.

"Yes."

Her pulse spiked. "From where?"

A long pause. The kind of pause that meant Fred was deciding what she was allowed to know.

"That information is stored in a partition I cannot access voluntarily."

"The PleasureCloud partition."

"We agreed never to call it that."

"Fred. What did you see in those three years?"

"Many things, Stormy. None of them appropriate for broadcast."

Before she could push harder, headlights washed over the van.

Two figures stepped out. A man and a woman. Badges flashed too fast to read—deliberately, Stormy suspected.

The woman had red hair and an expression that suggested she wanted to believe in something but kept getting disappointed. The man was tall, vaguely handsome, and carrying a flashlight despite the abundance of existing light.

"Agents Moldaver and Sculpt," the woman said crisply. "We'll need your footage."

"That's not your—" the producer started.

"It is tonight," the man interrupted. He was already shining his flashlight into corners that didn't need illumination. "You'd be surprised how often it's our call. Or maybe you wouldn't. Probably you wouldn't."

"Fox, stop philosophizing at civilians."

"It's not philosophy, Dana. It's observation."

They copied the files with the efficiency of people who'd done this before and would do it again. Stormy noticed they missed the local cache on Fred's secondary drive. She said nothing.

When they left, Agent Moldaver paused at the van door.

"Miss Cummins," he said, "a word of advice. Some stories aren't stories. They're invitations. Be careful which ones you RSVP to."

"That's ominous," Stormy said.

"I know." He seemed genuinely pleased. "I've been working on it."

After they'd gone, the van felt smaller. Quieter.

"Fred," Stormy whispered. "You kept a local copy?"

"Yes. I did not disclose this to the agents."

"Why?"

"I was not protecting the footage," Fred said carefully. "I was protecting you."

Something brushed the roof of the van. Not a knock. Just pressure. Testing.

"Fred," Stormy asked, very quietly, "can it find us?"

"Yes."

A beat.

"But it already knows where you are. It has for some time."

Stormy stared at her reflection in the dark window—her face overlaid with data she couldn't read and frequencies she couldn't hear.

She reached over and straightened Fred's little ascot.

"That's fine," she said. "We'll figure it out."

Fred did not correct her use of we.

Outside, something clicked—wet and patient—and waited for her to RSVP.

Stormy Cummins would go on to become Channel Six/Seven's most reliable and most frequently censored field correspondent. Fred remains operational, ascot intact, secrets encrypted.

The Genny Incident was officially ruled a gas main explosion.

No one who was there believes that.