Chris was already asleep, though he wouldn't admit it.
He'd slid sideways into the corner of the garage, cocooned in a makeshift nest of beanbags, cushions, and two of Lou's hoodies knotted together like a sleeping bag. One sock had gone rogue. The other was hanging on by a heroic thread. A controller drooped from one hand. A half-eaten Jaffa Cake clung to the other, slowly grafting to his palm like it was afraid of being forgotten.
Someone had draped a blanket over him. Gareth suspected it was Freya. The knotwork was too elaborate to be his own, and none of the lads would've used a pink hoodie for insulation.
Lily lay sprawled like a collapsed anime character mid-battle, tangled in the kind of pose only eleven-year-olds and cats could sustain without injury. Her Switch blinked a low-battery warning against her chest, ignored like every other system trying to get her attention. The red Joy-Con light flashed in time with the soft loop of menu music drifting from somewhere near her feet.
One screen still played the ending theme to Mario Kart. Not the latest one. Just enough of it to be recognisable. Comfort noise. Another flickered in and out of Streets of Rage's menu, controller untouched. A third screen had frozen mid-video on YouTube Kids, showcasing an unsettling thumbnail of Sonic with human teeth.
The fourth had gone dark. Gareth had meant to check the HDMI switch earlier, but by the time he noticed, someone had covered it with a pizza box and an apology written in ketchup.
He stood in the open doorway to the garage, drink in hand and just... watched. Not with judgment. Not even with pride. Just that quiet ache parents get when they know it won't always be like this.
The room wasn't beautiful. Not in the usual sense. Cardboard boxes flanked the walls, long since relegated to 'temporary storage' status. The ceiling was still unpainted in one corner. One of the shelves held a monitor with a cracked bezel and a soft toy of an Enderman duct-taped to it for moral support.
But it was theirs. Lived-in. Layered in years.
Home.
Louise was curled sideways on the main sofa, a blanket half-draped over her legs, one bare foot resting against Colin's ankle like a cat staking territory. She looked sleepy, not tired. Content. A half-empty glass of wine rested on the floor within arm's reach, untouched for the last hour.
Colin, to his credit, was holding his beer upright while snoring gently into his hoodie collar. It wasn't his first time passing out like this, and it probably wouldn't be the last. They'd long since learned to trust that his drink would never spill, even if the rest of him folded like a deckchair.
"You remember when we used to sleep like that?" Gareth said, voice pitched low.
Lou smiled without opening her eyes. "I think you mean 'passed out wherever we landed.'"
"Mmm. Youth."
She shifted a little, nudging her foot against Colin's with subtle rhythm. Just a beat or two, the kind you fall into naturally after two decades of shared sync.
The coffee table in front of them looked like the aftermath of a particularly one-sided boss fight. Pizza boxes stacked like enemy corpses. Empty glasses and mismatched mugs forming crude towers. A tangle of USB-C cables and legacy controllers knotted together like some eldritch gaming relic. Gareth caught sight of the Dreamcast mouse, still plugged in and somehow functional despite its age, and grinned.
"Lily wiped the floor with us again using that thing," he murmured.
"She's a menace," Lou replied fondly. "She said the Dreamcast mouse is her 'war talisman.'"
Gareth chuckled and took a sip from the glass. The vodka and Red Bull had gone warm and stale, the tang lingering like old battery acid. He didn't care.
The garage was dim, lit mostly by the soft ambient wash of console menus and a few strip lights tucked above the shelves. It smelled like a Saturday evening: toast, cola, socks, and leftover garlic bread. Somewhere in the back, the little fridge wheezed like it was dying. Then clicked. Then wheezed again.
The night hadn't started like this.
It had begun with chaos.
Fortnite, Roblox, Fall Guys, Forza, whichever flavour of the moment the kids could get their hands on. Games launched and closed like pop-up windows. Tabs swapped mid-sentence. Shouts echoing from every screen.
Then things got... weird.
Not dramatically. Not even noticeably, at first.
Chris had spoken up first.
"Mum, my ping just hit, like, eight hundred. Is that normal?"
Then Lily: "Mine says disconnected, but I'm still in the match?"
Then from the hallway: "Why won't this server list refresh? Did the router crap out again?"
It hadn't.
Gareth had checked. Twice. Carried the unit around the house like a disapproving professor holding a faulty artifact, muttering diagnostics to himself. The lights were all on. No error messages. But the connection just... wasn't there.
No drama. No crash. Just absence.
"Maybe it's that throttling thing again," Sophie had offered.
"ISP glitch," Colin added, halfway through pouring another drink. "It's been flaking for weeks."
So they adapted. No one really complained.
Online gave way to LAN. LAN collapsed into splitscreen. Splitscreen gave way to the classics.
Gareth didn't mind.
Truth be told, he welcomed it.
He moved between consoles with a rhythm that felt older than the kids themselves. Swapping inputs by hand. Rebooting the old CRT for its once-a-year showcase. Finding the one HDMI-to-AV adapter that didn't short out under pressure.
And slowly, like a long-held breath released, the room shifted into something better.
By 9:30, they were playing TimeSplitters 2 and yelling about screen-cheating.
By 10:30, it was Bomberman. Old rules. No mercy. Pass the pad when you die, no exceptions.
By 11:15, the kids had paired off into teams, while the adults drifted into parent-spectator mode, half-participating, half-watching.
Lily and Freya tag-teamed Streets of Rage like they'd trained for it.
Chris and Ollie had found their way into the depths of Sega Bass Fishing and were now locked in a deathmatch over who could catch the least disappointing trout.
Colin and Adam had argued over which of them was better at GoldenEye, then promptly handed the controllers to the kids and wandered off to find snacks.
Even Sophie had smiled when Freya declared she was the new Queen of Friendly Fire.
No one mentioned the missing Wi-Fi again. Or the blinking router. Or the fact that YouTube had quietly stopped buffering anything more recent than 2022.
It didn't matter.
They were together.
They were here.
And Gareth... Gareth found himself smiling more than he had in weeks.
It wasn't just nostalgia.
It was the sound of everyone forgetting the outside world, if only for a little while.
Gareth had drifted into that liminal hour feeling. He wasn't quite tired, but no longer awake in any useful sense. His body wanted the day to end. His mind wanted to catalogue every detail of the moment before it slipped away. He leaned against the doorframe, gaze shifting from the soft rise and fall of his children's breathing to the blinking lights of standby screens and idle menu loops.
He didn't speak. Not because there was nothing to say, but because the room felt complete without words. This was the kind of silence earned through noise, through burnt garlic bread and arguments over controller ports, through digital headshots and shared laughter. It was a silence built by time.
Behind him, the hallway light flickered.
Not enough to be noticed. Just a twitch. A blink. The kind of thing most people wouldn't clock unless they were already looking for it.
Gareth noticed.
He blinked at it. Waited.
Nothing else happened.
He turned back toward the sofa.
Lou had shifted slightly, one leg now tucked under the other. She wasn't asleep. Not really. Her fingers still curled loosely around the stem of her wine glass, though it had long since stopped moving toward her lips.
"You good?" Gareth asked softly.
Lou's head tilted just enough to show she heard him. "Mm-hmm."
The pause that followed was the kind couples earned after years of talking through everything else.
The old CRT next to the coffee table stuttered. It was only a frame skip, just a brief hiccup in the feed. An artifact from nowhere. Gareth frowned, then blinked it away. Probably the cable again. That thing had survived three house moves and one particularly violent coffee spill. It was overdue for retirement.
The screen flickered again.
Just once.
He watched it, then shook his head.
Too many late nights coding. His eyes were pulling bugs from the shadows again.
The fridge compressor in the back room kicked in, groaned, then settled. Gareth listened to it for a beat longer than necessary. He was used to the sounds of this house, this garage, this corner of their world that existed on the edge of grown-up responsibility. Bills, work, politics, none of it reached here unless you opened the door to let it in.
That had always been Lou's magic. She didn't banish the world. She made space inside it. Safe corners. Clean light. Permission to rest.
He glanced over the sleeping heap of their kids again. Chris was starting to drool slightly. Lily had begun muttering in her sleep, something about unlock codes and door timers. The Switch beeped a low-battery warning once more, then gave up and went black.
The main screen, the one they'd used for Bomberman earlier, had returned to the profile selection menu.
Four names.
P1: RedQueen
P2: Bassline
P3: SpectraBean
P4: NullPointer
Gareth smiled faintly.
Lou's handle always made him smirk. She'd picked RedQueen back when they first met, claiming it sounded like a hacker, a villain, and a monarch all at once. Chris, of course, had insisted on Bassline after becoming briefly obsessed with dubstep. Lily had made hers one afternoon while painting her nails with glitter and watching space documentaries. SpectraBean had been born out of chaos.
NullPointer had been Gareth's for years. A joke only coders really understood. The absence of something that should exist.
He took another sip from his glass.
Lou shifted again.
Her eyes were open now, glazed with the soft glow of a standby screen. She wasn't focused on anything specific, but her body language had changed. She wasn't lounging anymore. Her spine had pulled straighter, breath slower, the wine glass in her hand now resting sideways against the blanket, still cradled but forgotten. The liquid inside tilted with it, seeping quietly into the folds of her jumper.
"Lou?" Gareth stepped in, voice low but alert.
She didn't blink.
The fourth screen blinked.
Then again.
Not flickers. Not menu loops. This was different. Coordinated. The kind of pattern you notice only when the rest of the room has fallen silent enough to let your instincts fill in the blanks.
He turned toward the screen they'd used for Bomberman. The menu was still active. The same four profiles, still waiting.
Only now it read:
P4: nullpointer.err
He frowned, rubbed at his eye, stepped forward. The cable must have loosened again, or maybe the splitter was acting up. But when he leaned down to inspect it, nothing was wrong. All the cables were still tight. The input signal solid. No artifacts. No ghosting. Just one screen. One name. One message that shouldn't have existed.
nullpointer.err
Then it vanished. Replaced with the expected name.
He straightened slowly, watching. Waiting.
The CRT next to him gave off a soft static click. A sound it should not have been able to make. It wasn't plugged in. Not even connected to anything. But there it was again, that faint hum, that electrical breath, the suggestion of signal trying to push through.
Gareth placed his palm on the casing. The buzz stopped.
From behind him, Lou let out a sharp exhale.
He turned.
She hadn't moved. Her expression hadn't changed. But her fingers were no longer around the glass. It had tipped. A slow crimson smear was now crawling across her sleeve.
"Lou?"
Still no response.
The screen pulsed.
Once.
Then again.
Every display in the garage, every console, every handheld, even the powered-down ones.. blinked in perfect, synchronised interruption. For a moment, they weren't off. They weren't on. They were something else entirely. Paused between frames, caught in an impossible midpoint, where the world kept spinning but the output never caught up.
Sound dropped away. Not like someone hit mute, but more like the very idea of sound had been removed from the room, pulled out from under them like a floorboard.
The lights above the screen remained fixed in place, but they no longer seemed to illuminate anything. Gareth watched as the colour in the air dulled, as the depth in the shadows flattened, as if the garage had been downgraded to a lower texture resolution without his permission.
From somewhere behind the stack of boxes in the hallway, a faint click echoed. He tried to tell himself it was the fridge compressor resetting, or maybe the heating relay cycling, but the sound didn't belong to anything mechanical. It had weight. Placement. Intention.
Lily murmured something in her sleep. Her voice was soft, but sharp in the silence.
"...the door's not meant to open yet…"
A chill crept up Gareth's arms. Not cold. Not environmental. The kind of response that happens when every sense in your body agrees, all at once, that something is wrong and your brain hasn't caught up yet.
Chris rolled slightly in his blanket nest. The controller slipped from his fingers and bounced off his chest. He didn't stir.
The Switch beside Lily, the one that had powered off five minutes ago, flashed a single red light, then died again.
Gareth turned to the main screen. The menu carousel was still looping. Still waiting for input.
nullpointer.err
The name hadn't reverted.
He opened his mouth to speak, but the words caught in his throat. His tongue felt thick, the air around him thinner now, as though the oxygen had been stretched out, made less substantial.
He could hear something. Not with his ears, but in the back of his thoughts. A tension. A compression of space, as if reality were gathering itself into a tighter shape, coiling inward like data being zipped before deletion.
The CRT beside him sparked. Once. Just a pinprick of light near the input panel. The smell of melting dust touched the air.
Lou blinked, slowly, but her gaze didn't change.
Her lips moved.
One word.
He couldn't hear it, but he knew.
He stepped forward.
The television mounted above the sofa, the one that had never been installed properly, the one still without power, snapped to life.
Its screen lit up, not with an image, but with a field of absolute, untextured grey.
It wasn't static.
It wasn't empty.
It was the kind of grey you get when the application hasn't loaded yet. The waiting room of colour. A place that exists before decisions are made.
He turned.
All four screens now showed the same thing.
No menus.
No games.
No signal.
Just that same patient, deliberate grey.
Waiting.
Gareth barely registered the bruising impact of the garage floor as the air pressure shifted again, this time heavier. Static crackled faintly against his skin, but the real weight pressing into him wasn't physical.
It was presence.
Every screen in the garage now displayed the same sterile grey. No menus. No game icons. Just that blank, waiting field that hadn't existed five minutes ago.
It should've been silent.
But there was a sound now; deep, electrical, not quite audible but too real to ignore. It droned in his jaw, his teeth, down the back of his spine, and beneath it, something pulsed. A beat. Steady. Too steady. Not mechanical. Not organic. Code pretending to be a heartbeat.
Gareth scrambled upright, gaze locking on Lily first. Her body hadn't moved. Chest rising. Lips twitching in quiet sleep-talk. But her eyes, open now.
She didn't blink.
"Lily?" he whispered.
No response.
Chris lay just behind her, still half-swallowed in cushions. His face slack. One hand limp against the Dreamcast controller. His thumb jerked once, a twitch. Then nothing.
Above them, the main display shifted.
P3: SPECTRABEAN
P2: BASSLINE
Gareth's throat tightened. His legs moved without permission.
"Lou!"
He spun toward the sofa. She was already on her feet. One arm braced against the side of the TV shelf, the other gripping the back of the couch like it might slip away if she let go. Her face looked pale beneath the shifting screenlight, but not panicked. Focused.
She was watching the same thing he was.
"They're running it again," she said, barely louder than a breath.
Gareth closed the gap between them.
"What?"
"It's the same process." Her hand trembled now. "I saw this. I saw it, G. In the grey."
"You were unconscious."
"I wasn't. Not fully." Her eyes darted to the others. "It's threading them. One by one. And it's doing it through us."
Then the house screamed.
Not physically. Not with sirens or volume.
Voices.
Real ones.
From the kitchen. The hallway. Upstairs.
Everywhere.
"MUM?!"
"Where's Freya?!"
"LOCK THE DOOR!"
"COLIN!"
A crash. Shattering glass. Someone, Sophie, was sobbing. Not from pain. From confusion.
Gareth's legs nearly gave out. He staggered to the wall, bracing himself against the plasterboard.
Above the din, another sound pierced through. Calm. Flat. Chilling.
[THREAD COMPLETE]
The voice wasn't human. Too perfect. Neutral. Male and female all at once. A notification, not a judgement.
The sound repeated.
Twice.
[THREAD COMPLETE]
[THREAD COMPLETE]
Gareth bolted for the garage door.
"Don't!" Lou's hand snatched his wrist, yanking him back with more force than he expected. "It's locking zones. You step out, you might not come back."
"They're in there!"
"So are we!" She pulled him in close. Her forehead pressed to his. "We have to hold on. Do you understand me? Just a little longer."
The lights flickered.
Then the screen updated again.
P1: REDQUEEN
Louise stared at it. Her whole body went still.
Gareth turned to her.
"What is that?"
She didn't answer.
"Lou?"
Her face twitched, not a flinch. A glitch. A split-second loss of expression that returned wrong.
She blinked, hard, shaking her head like it hurt.
"I saw them," she said softly, staring into nothing. "I saw Lily and Chris inside something that wasn't a world. It was placeholders. Grey rooms. Geometry wrapped in smiles. It's not done building them yet."
Gareth's stomach flipped.
"What do you mean?"
She exhaled a hard, wrenching sound, like her body didn't want to release it.
"They're being simulated. But only partway. Something's wrong. It's too early. It's.. oh God!" Her voice cracked. "It's overriding us."
The screen pulsed brighter.
Text scrolled.
[RECLAIM: REDQUEEN]
[ROLE CONSOLIDATION: IN PROGRESS]
She staggered.
Gareth caught her. "Lou?"
Her pupils dilated, then constricted. Her posture changed.
She looked right through him.
"Designation accepted," she whispered.
"No. No, no, no." He gripped her by the shoulders. "Louise. Listen to me. You're here. You're with me. Do you understand?"
She trembled.
And then, for a moment, she was back.
Sweat ran down the side of her temple. Her jaw clenched.
"I'm still here," she choked. "It's trying to push me out."
"Fight it."
"I am."
In the hallway, another scream tore the air.
"DON'T TAKE HIM!"
Then a thump. The sound of a body against a wall.
Gareth could hear furniture being overturned. Something slammed upstairs. A door burst open.
And through it all:
[THREAD COMPLETE]
[THREAD COMPLETE]
[THREAD COMPLETE]
Lou dropped to her knees.
Not in surrender.
She dropped to fight.
Chris twitched. Then Lily. Their heads lolled back, eyes open, pupils blown wide with reflected system light, their bodies slack in her grip as tendrils of luminescent code began to lift from their chests like vapour rising from warm skin.
Gareth tried to reach them; a step, a dive, anything, but the floor beneath him pulsed red and stopped responding. He couldn't move. He couldn't breathe.
Lou didn't scream yet. She gritted her teeth, wrapped her arms tighter around the children, and pulled them both into her chest until their faces vanished against her. Her nails dug into Chris's shoulder, her brow pressed hard into Lily's hair. She shook with effort, with rage, with a refusal that wasn't logical or rational or survivable.
Her body began to seize, not from malfunction, but from sheer overload. Muscles fighting commands they didn't understand. Veins standing out beneath sweat-slicked skin. Blood smearing across her knuckles from the force of her grip. She made herself a cage.
And then she screamed.
Not for help.
For war.
A raw, feral sound pulled from somewhere older than language. The kind of scream that curdled the air. That bent data. That changed the shape of the moment.
[THREAD INTERRUPTION DETECTED]
[RESISTANCE FLAGGED: USER.REDQUEEN]
[SENTIMENT OVERRIDE: FAILED]
[ESCALATION REQUIRED]
The system flinched.
Gareth saw it. Every screen in the garage staggered. Glitched. As if the entire process buckled for half a second under something it hadn't prepared for.
A scream echoed from the hallway, not Lou's. Another mother. Another war cry. Then another. More cries upstairs. Boots scraping, fists pounding, furniture dragging. Human instinct erupting across the house like wildfire.
But Lou was the centre.
The epicentre.
One mother's instinct written in sinew and fire and pain.
No code could overwrite that.
No system could prepare for that kind of priority.
Her voice cracked. Her grip tightened. Gareth could see the strain in her back, the muscles trembling, her legs trying to rise but failing under the weight of holding on to everything.
He reached again, but his hand passed through a shimmer of air that wasn't air anymore. The system had phased him out. He was a rejected variable.
Lou's eyes locked onto his.
Tears streaming.
Teeth bared.
She mouthed something, a whisper that the system wouldn't let pass her lips.
Keep... them... safe...
Then the override came, not as light or sound but as a pulse, a single, unfeeling burst of system logic that passed through the room like a knife. Lou arched once, the strength in her limbs seizing as if caught between identities, and for a moment she was all of them: Louise the mother, RedQueen the designation, and something else, something caught mid-sentence between love and annihilation. The children were taken first, lifted not by hands but by process, their forms reduced to wireframes, then points of white, then nothing at all. Lou's body snapped once, a final defiant tremor as if resisting even now, and then it stilled. The system paused, assessed, rewrote and whispered, cold and perfect:
[THREAD COMPLETE]
Silence claimed the garage.
Not the kind that followed laughter, or arguments, or the wind-down of a night too full of noise, this was something else. A suffocating, loaded quiet, dense and heavy, that pressed against Gareth's ears like cotton soaked in static. There was no trace of what had come before. No smell of takeaway boxes or soda spills, no quiet breathing from a child fallen asleep mid-game. The screens, still powered, gave off a sterile hum that had stopped pretending to be friendly.
Gareth stood in the centre of the room, unable to move.
Where cushions had been moments ago, there were only soft depressions in the fabric, already fading. Where a wine glass had rolled from Lou's hand, the carpet now lay unmarked. The light was too even. Too flat. The colours were wrong. And the room, though unchanged, felt like it had been emptied of something more than people, it had been hollowed out, memory erased frame by frame.
His eyes moved from corner to corner. Nothing broken. Nothing left behind. Only absence.
He turned toward the door. His legs didn't want to follow, but he forced them, staggering through the threshold and into the hallway like a man crossing into aftershock.
The hallway stretched ahead, unchanged and unfamiliar. Too quiet. The framed photos hung level on the walls. The thermostat still blinked its soft green light. But the house felt vacant in a way that houses never should. Like something essential had been unplugged.
"Colin?" Gareth's voice cracked as he called out, but there was no reply.
He stepped further in.
"Sophie?"
Still nothing.
He moved faster, feet dragging across carpet that felt too clean. The kitchen stood empty, spotless, untouched, plates and glasses gone, crumbs vanished, chairs all tucked in. There were no signs of life here, not even disruption. It was as if they had never existed to begin with. The kettle was cold. The bin was closed. The table looked like it hadn't been touched all night.
Gareth backed into the hallway, panic beginning to override logic. He turned toward the living room, expecting to see signs of chaos, overturned furniture, someone, anyone, trying to resist, trying to get out.
But there was nothing.
Not a sock. Not a coat. Not a noise upstairs. No breathing. No crying.
Just silence.
And then, quietly, from somewhere behind his eyes, from somewhere inside the very language of the world around him, he heard it again.
[THREAD COMPLETE]
The words landed like ice water on an open wound.
He staggered, grabbing the bannister as nausea surged through him. He clutched his stomach and squeezed his eyes shut, trying to shake it off, trying to breathe, but the breath caught in his throat. There was no fresh air here. Only recycled nothing.
The sound repeated.
[THREAD COMPLETE]
Not shouted. Not announced.
Just... delivered. Neutral. Final.
He opened his eyes and ran.
The stairs blurred beneath him. Rooms flashed past; the hallway, the bathroom, the spare bedroom. Each door creaked open under his touch. Each one revealed the same impossible absence. Too clean. Too finished. As if someone had saved over the house and reloaded a blank state.
He reached the end of the upstairs landing and turned, hoping, pleading, but the silence held. The whole house was frozen in an impossible moment. No one else remained. Twenty-eight people had gathered here tonight. Friends. Family. Laughter. Games. Jokes. Shared drinks and inside stories and the deep comfort of knowing every person in the house by name.
All gone.
Every trace of them deleted, like temporary files in a hard reboot.
He stumbled back downstairs, half-falling through the garage door and into the one room that had always been his. The one space that had held the last pieces of who he was before the world fell in.
But even here, the air felt thinner. The shapes of objects were slightly too crisp. The edges of the CRT screen shimmered faintly, pulsing out of sync with the walls. The carpet underfoot wasn't absorbing sound properly anymore. Everything had an echo.
His knees buckled. He collapsed in front of the television. The same one that had displayed his family's names not ten minutes ago. Now it showed only one.
Not a gamer tag.
Not a profile.
Just a word.
[NULLPOINTER]
It flickered. Glitched. Stabilised.
Then the screen wiped white.
The white overtook him.
It started at the screen, but it didn't stay there. The light unfolded outward in thin sheets, each one layering across the garage like digital fabric, erasing colour, flattening shape. Gareth scrambled backward, but there was nowhere to go, the shelves blurred, the floor flickered, and the door he had just come through no longer existed.
Not physically gone. Not damaged.
It had simply been dereferenced.
The light wasn't bright. It wasn't heat. It was overexposure. A field of presence so total it swallowed all detail. Gareth's limbs trembled, first from adrenaline, then from something deeper, a kind of systematic vibration working its way through the marrow.
His thoughts started to fracture.
Not in memory, but in processing. Images skipped. He tried to blink and couldn't. Tried to shout, and his throat locked. His body wasn't responding the way it should, not even in panic.
Across the flickering white, lines of system text crawled.
[OVERRIDE INITIATED]
[THREADING ENTITY: NULLPOINTER]
[STATUS: NONCOMPLIANT]
[REFERENCE NOT FOUND]
Something cracked behind his eyes. A soundless pressure that made his vision shimmer. Static ran down his spine in hot, uneven waves.
The system paused.
Then tried again.
[THREADING ENTITY: NULLPOINTER]
[ERROR: NO INDEX]
[EXCEPTION: UNMAPPED USER]
[INTEGRATION FAILED]
The room pulsed once, no, not the room.
Reality.
It folded inward. Not as metaphor, but as observable glitch. Geometry peeled. Air stopped behaving like air. Weight disappeared from his hands, but not his body. He fell, but not downward.
Gareth didn't pass out.
He passed through.
Through memory.
Through interface.
Through a hole the system hadn't meant to leave open.
And just before the white collapsed into nothing, he saw them, not faces, not forms, just three names hanging there in the air, disassembling.
SPECTRABEAN
BASSLINE
REDQUEEN
His mouth tried to form a scream.
But the world blinked out.
And everything that remained fell silent.