The debug overlay faded, but the knowledge it had granted didn't vanish. I could still feel it, thrumming just beneath my skin. Like an afterimage in thought, not visual, not textual, something deeper. Instinctual. The way a seasoned coder senses a broken function before they ever see it. I wasn't supposed to have that interface, but I'd accessed it anyway, and now I could almost feel the system watching me. Not in a paranoid, storybook sense, but in the cold certainty that every breath, every glance, every heartbeat was being logged.
Exposure.
That word had shown up in the debug string. I still had no idea what it truly meant, but I could feel it growing.
I pulled back from the shattered console and scanned the room. The echo of Lily, or whatever malformed fragment that had been, was gone. No body. No wiring. Not even the oil-stained footprints she'd left on the floor. It had all been absorbed back into the environment. That's how this place worked. It didn't just consume. It rewrote.
I didn't have long to dwell on it. Something else had started to shift.
The floor near the exit, if it could even be called that, was unfurling, peeling back like layered skin, creating an opening that hadn't been there before. Another test. Another thread to walk.
I moved to the edge of the gap and crouched low. The corridor beyond was darker than before, graphite-coloured and etched with flickering patterns that seemed to shift depending on how I tilted my head. The surface was warm. And when my blood touched it, it pulsed.
I tore a strip from the inside of my hoodie and wrapped it tight around the cut in my hand. Makeshift. Messy. But it would slow the loss, and right now, I had no idea how much blood the system needed to notice me. I just knew it didn't take much.
As I walked, the corridor narrowed and then opened into what might've once been a crossroads. The geometry was wrong. Half-formed doorways jutted from angled walls, some incomplete, others flickering between architectural styles like corrupted memory leaks. Stone turned to glass, glass to rusted metal. One corner rapidly cycled between a staircase and a vending machine alcove, unable to settle on what it was supposed to be. The system wasn't rendering a location. It was trying to remember one, and failing.
At the centre of the space stood a column, taller than me and half-submerged in the floor. It was wrapped in thick biomechanical tubing that pulsed faintly with internal light, like veins, or umbilical cords. Above it shimmered a panel, floating, stable. This interface looked more complete than the last. I stepped closer, and the projection resolved:
[UNANCHORED ENTITY DETECTED]
[USER: NULLPOINTER]
[THREAD UNDEFINED]
[RECONSTRUCTION ADVISORY: DENIED]
[EXP: 0.00]
[LEVEL: NULL]
[EXPOSURE: 0.06 // GROWING]
[MONITORING: ACTIVE]
There it was again. Exposure. And now something new, Monitoring. I read the text line by line, forcing myself not to fixate on the number. It wasn't just cosmetic. I could feel it now, like static running under my skin, a low-level hum at the base of my skull. As if the system had dialled up the resolution just enough to keep me in frame.
I wasn't just a glitch anymore.
I was a threat.
And then something laughed.
It wasn't coming from speakers. It wasn't audible in the normal sense. The sound originated inside the column, low and looping, a childlike mimicry of amusement, repeated without context, as if the system had learned laughter but not meaning. It repeated again, then glitched, slowing, pitch-warping, until it no longer resembled laughter at all. Just a wet, broken string of syllables torn through a malfunctioning engine.
Patchwork noise.
Spoken wrong.
And then something answered it.
From behind me.
I turned slowly.
A figure stood near the corridor I had come from. It was too tall, too angular, its limbs bent at impossible angles, one arm dangling from a joint that didn't follow any known anatomy. Its head cocked, not curiously, but like it was loading a protocol.
It took a single step forward. The sound it made reminded me of dragging a rake across tarmac, metal teeth skipping and catching with each staggered movement. Its legs flickered, briefly unstable, then resolved again.
There was no dialogue box. No health bar. No nameplate.
But I knew.
It was Nullspace-made. Not born of code. Born of memory. Of proximity. Of blood.
And it wanted mine.
I backed away.
It moved faster.
A glitched lunge, full-body twitch forward with no anticipation, no windup, just raw, input-to-action like a lag-spiked ghost in a broken netcode shooter. I dropped sideways, slammed into a wall that hadn't fully rendered, and rolled across a floor that couldn't decide whether it was steel or meat. It shrieked as it missed, and the sound was wrong, not synthetic. Not scripted. It carried feeling. Rage. Hunger.
I pushed myself upright, one hand gripping the column for balance. As my skin made contact, the UI shimmered again. A new line had appeared.
[EDGE CASE: HANDLER OVERRIDE POSSIBLE]
[INVOKE: DEBUG.ACTION("FORCE_RESET") ? Y/N]
I didn't hesitate. I didn't weigh risk or fallout. I pressed my palm flat and thought the word: yes.
The environment reacted instantly.
The walls convulsed outward. The floor buckled. Sound inverted, a sharp pop followed by absolute silence. The entity that had been chasing me didn't die. It wasn't even defeated. It was simply removed. Cut. Nullified.
The column collapsed. The UI shattered like brittle glass.
And the Exposure meter?
Still rising.
[EXPOSURE: 0.11 // MONITOR ENTITY DEPLOYMENT PENDING]
I slumped against the base of what was left of the structure. My breathing came hard, uneven. My hands were slick with grime, my right leg pulsed with dull pain from the dodge, and my chest still throbbed from the earlier fall. But I was still alive.
Somehow.
And I had just rewritten a rule. Not through strength. Not with a weapon. I'd found the edge case. Triggered a function the system hadn't closed off.
And now, the system was watching.