Falling through the map didn't feel like falling. It felt like being unmade.
One second, gravity was a law. The next, it was a suggestion.
Jake tumbled through a void of static. There was no wind, only a high-pitched digital screeching that vibrated in his marrow.
Above him, the floor of the Citadel museum receded—a flat, grey polygon floating in nothingness.
Below him? There was no below. Just an infinite expanse of purple grid lines and floating garbage.
"The coffin!" Jake screamed. His voice didn't echo. The sound just died instantly.
"Got it!" Taranov's voice roared from the dark.
Jake twisted his body. He saw Taranov falling twenty meters below, his massive arms wrapped around the glass casket. He looked like a bear protecting a honey jar.
"Don't let go!" Jake yelled.
"I can't steer!" Taranov shouted back. "Physics is broken!"
They were drifting, not plummeting. The velocity was wrong. It was floaty, like swimming in syrup.
"We need to aim!" Valentina drifted past Jake, flailing. "There! That platform!"
She pointed to a floating island of debris about a hundred meters down. It wasn't land. It was a tangled knot of textures—brick walls fused with trees, cars merged with sidewalks. A trash heap of deleted assets.
"Oppenheimer!" Jake grabbed the physicist's lab coat as he floated by. "How do we move?"
"Mental projection!" Oppenheimer gagged, clutching his stomach. "In a dev-space, movement is often tied to camera controls! Look where you want to go and push with your mind!"
"That's stupid!" Taranov yelled.
"Try it!"
Jake focused on the island of trash. He imagined his body slamming into it. He pushed his will against the empty code.
His avatar jerked forward.
"It works!" Jake shouted. "Aim for the trash!"
They dove.
The purple grid rushed up to meet them.
THUD.
The impact was wet and spongy.
Jake hit a pile of untextured grey boxes. He didn't break any bones. The boxes just absorbed him, clipping through his legs before pushing him back out.
He rolled and gasped. The air here was thin, smelling of burning plastic and old dust.
"Check the package!" Jake scrambled up.
Taranov had landed on a rusted tank turret that was sticking out of a bookshelf. He slid down, still clutching the coffin.
The glass was intact.
Inside, Nadya was still sleeping. The soft blue glow of her stasis field illuminated the dark, twisted landscape.
"She's safe," Taranov grunted, setting the casket down on a patch of checkerboard floor.
Jake fell to his knees beside her. He placed his chrome hand on the glass.
UPLOAD STATUS: 99%... ERROR. CONNECTION LOST.
The loading bar had frozen.
"She's paused," Jake whispered. "Stuck at the finish line."
"Better paused than deleted," Menzhinsky muttered, brushing digital dust off his suit. He looked around, eyes wide with horror. "Where in God's name are we?"
Jake stood up and looked around.
It was a nightmare of geometry.
The sky was a black void. The "ground" was a floating continent of junk.
To his left, a Statue of Liberty head was fused with a Soviet tank. To his right, a forest of trees grew upside down, their roots clawing at the empty sky.
"The Recycle Bin," Oppenheimer adjusted his glasses, trembling. "This is where the Director dumps the assets he doesn't want. The corrupted files. The mistakes."
"It's quiet," Valentina noted, drawing her pistol. "Too quiet."
"Yuri?" Jake raised his wrist.
The screen flickered. Static hissed. Then, a blue spark.
"Father?" The voice was distorted, breaking up like a bad radio signal.
"Yuri! Are you back?"
"I... I am fragmented," the boy's voice buzzed. "The Citadel's firewall... it stripped my high-level functions. I am running on... safe mode."
"Can you scan the area?"
"Scanning..." The wrist vibrated. "Warning. High density of... rejected data. Hostiles detected."
"Where?" Taranov raised his rifle—or he tried to. He remembered his rifle was crushed. He pulled his combat knife instead.
"Everywhere," Yuri whispered.
A shuffle echoed from the shadows of the upside-down forest.
It sounded like wet footsteps on linoleum.
Scrape. Drag. Scrape.
"Who goes there?" Menzhinsky squeaked, hiding behind the coffin.
A figure stepped out from behind a glitched wall.
It was a man. He wore a heavy military greatcoat. He had a thick mustache.
Jake froze.
It was him.
It was Stalin.
But it wasn't right.
The figure's left arm was missing, replaced by a jagged polygon of white light. His face was sliding off his skull, the textures misaligned so that one eye was on his cheek.
"Comrade..." the thing gargled. Its voice was Jake's voice, but slowed down and reversed. "Save... the... Union..."
"Is that..." Valentina lowered her gun, horrified.
"Iteration 14," Jake realized. "The mannequin from the museum."
"No," Oppenheimer backed away. "The mannequins were the trophies. This... this is the save file that got corrupted."
The thing lurched forward. It reached out with a hand that had seven fingers.
"Must... purge... fascists..." it moaned.
"Stay back!" Jake warned.
He raised his admin arm.
WARNING: CRITICAL STARVATION.
ENERGY: 1%.
ADMIN FUNCTIONS DISABLED.
His arm was dead weight. A paperweight.
"I can't shoot," Jake panicked. "I'm empty."
"I got him!" Taranov stepped forward.
The monster lunged. It moved with glitchy, jerky speed—teleporting two feet forward in a single frame.
Taranov slashed with his knife.
The blade passed right through the monster's chest without cutting.
"No hit-box!" Taranov yelled. "He's intangible!"
The monster swung its seven-fingered hand. It connected.
Taranov flew backward, crashing into the coffin.
"Don't touch her!" Jake screamed.
More shuffling.
From the shadows, more figures emerged.
A Stalin in a tuxedo, missing his legs, floating.
A Stalin in a hazmat suit, his head swollen to the size of a pumpkin.
A Stalin in rags, weeping black pixels.
There were dozens of them. The graveyard of Jake's failed attempts.
"They want the code," Yuri's voice spiked with fear. "They sense the 'Hope' data in the coffin. They want to patch themselves."
"They're zombies," Valentina fired three shots.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
The bullets hit the Tuxedo-Stalin. They did damage—red numbers popped up: -12 HP.
"Bullets work on that one!" Valentina shouted. "Some of them have physics!"
"Formation!" Jake ordered. "Protect the coffin!"
They circled the glass casket.
The horde of glitch-zombies surged.
"For the Motherland!" the Pumpkin-Head screamed, sprinting on all fours like a dog.
"Die, you abominations!" Menzhinsky threw a piece of rebar he found on the ground. It bounced harmlessly off the Pumpkin-Head.
The monster leaped at Menzhinsky.
Taranov caught it in mid-air. He slammed it into the ground and stomped on its head.
SPLAT.
The head exploded into green binary code.
"One down!" Taranov panted.
But three more took its place. The Seven-Fingered One grabbed Jake's throat.
Its grip was cold. Freezing.
"You... are... the... virus..." it hissed, drooling static onto Jake's face.
Jake clawed at the hand. His strength was gone. The hunger was a black hole in his gut.
I'm going to die here, Jake thought. Strangled by my own bad memories.
His vision dimmed. The red flashing icon of his health bar filled his eyes.
HEALTH: 10%... 5%...
"Eat!" Yuri shouted. "Father! To your left! The blue crate!"
Jake turned his head.
Half-buried in the trash, glowing with a faint, heavenly light, was a blue crate marked with a white cross.
ITEM: DEV KIT - RESOURCE PACK.
"Taranov!" Jake rasped. "The crate!"
Taranov looked over. He was wrestling two zombies.
"Get it yourself, Boss!" Taranov kicked a zombie into a wall.
Jake couldn't breathe. The grip tightened.
He looked at his admin arm. It was dead. But it was still metal.
He stopped trying to pull the hand away.
He swung his chrome fist. Not a hack. A punch.
CRACK.
Metal hit bone. The zombie's jaw unhinged, dangling by a texture thread.
It recoiled, shrieking.
Jake dropped to the ground. He crawled.
He scrambled over broken polygons and twisted metal. He reached the blue crate.
It was locked.
"Open!" Jake slammed his fist on the lid.
It didn't budge.
"Need... key..." Jake gasped.
"No key," Oppenheimer shouted, firing his polymorph gun wildly—turning a zombie into a pixelated chicken. "It's a developer asset! It has no collision for unauthorized users!"
"I am an authorized user!" Jake screamed.
He didn't use code. He used rage.
He grabbed the lid and pulled until his fingernails bled.
Use the glitch, he told himself. Clip through it.
He jammed his hand into the box, forcing his atoms to merge with the lid.
The reality tore.
The lid shattered into pixels.
Inside sat a single item.
It wasn't a medkit. It wasn't a gun.
It was a glowing, golden apple.
ITEM: GOLDEN APPLE OF DISCORD.
EFFECT: FULL RESTORE + OVERCHARGE.
Jake didn't hesitate. He grabbed the apple. It felt warm, vibrating with power.
He took a bite.
It tasted like lightning.
ENERGY RESTORED: 100%.
SYSTEM OVERCHARGE: 200%.
ADMIN PRIVILEGES: UNLOCKED.
The hunger vanished instantly. A surge of raw, electric power flooded his veins. His chrome arm lit up—not blue, but blinding white.
The Seven-Fingered Zombie lunged at him again.
Jake stood up. He didn't flinch.
He raised his hand. He didn't touch the zombie. He just pointed.
"DELETE," Jake commanded.
A beam of white light erupted from his palm.
It hit the zombie.
There was no scream. The monster simply ceased to exist. Erased.
The beam continued, carving a hole through the crowd of zombies, vaporizing ten of them in a heartbeat.
Silence fell over the trash heap.
The remaining abominations froze. They looked at the white light. They knew fear.
"Step away from my wife," Jake said. His voice echoed now. It boomed with the authority of a god.
The zombies hissed and backed away, retreating into the shadows of the upside-down forest.
Jake lowered his arm. The white glow faded to a steady, dangerous blue.
"Boss?" Taranov stared at him. "You're shiny."
"I'm full," Jake said. He felt drunk on power. It was dangerous. He liked it.
"We have energy," Jake walked back to the coffin. "We have the package."
"But where do we go?" Menzhinsky asked, trembling. "We are still in the trash."
"Yuri," Jake said. "Where is the exit?"
"Scanning," the boy said. His signal was strong now. "The deletion beam cleared a path. I detect a data-stream two clicks north. It leads... up."
"Up where?"
"To the Citadel's core," Yuri said. "The Processor."
"Then we climb," Jake grabbed the handle of the coffin. "Taranov, lift."
Suddenly, the ground shook.
Not a tremor. A quake.
The pile of trash shifted. The upside-down trees swayed.
From the deep, black void below the island, a sound emerged.
BWAAAAHM.
It sounded like a foghorn made of nightmares.
"What now?" Valentina reloaded her pistol.
"Something big woke up," Oppenheimer whispered, cleaning his glasses frantically. "The thing that eats the trash."
Two massive, red searchlights pierced the darkness below the island's edge. They were the size of stadiums.
"Run," Jake said.
"Run where?" Taranov hefted the coffin.
"To the data-stream!" Jake pointed to a spiraling column of code in the distance. "Move! Before the Garbage Collector cleans us up!"
They sprinted across the broken landscape, dragging the sleeping hope of the world behind them, while the red eyes rose from the abyss.