The white void didn't last. It rendered.
One moment, Caleb was screaming in a basement; the next, he was standing on the roof of the OmniBank Spire. But it wasn't the roof he had visited in the rain.
The sky was a perfect, cloudless cerulean blue. The sun was locked at a perpetual "Golden Hour" angle, casting long, dramatic shadows that didn't flicker. The city below wasn't the grimy, neon-choked sprawl of St. Lazarus. It was gleaming. White marble skyscrapers, parks filled with identical green trees, roads with traffic moving in mathematically perfect synchronization.
It was St. Lazarus: The Remastered Edition.
[LOCATION: SYSTEM LOBBY]
[PING: 0ms]
[FRAME RATE: UNLIMITED]
Caleb looked down at his hands. They were smooth. The scar on his thumb from a soldering iron accident was gone. He touched his chest—his fractured rib didn't hurt.
"It's beautiful, isn't it?"
Caleb turned.
Standing near the edge of the roof was a man. He wore a sharp grey suit that fit too well—the texture of the fabric was high-resolution, hypnotic. His face was handsome, symmetrical, and completely forgettable. It was the face of a stock photo model.
Above his head, a golden tag floated:
[ADMINISTRATOR]
[GOD MODE: ACTIVE]
"You're the killer," Caleb said. His voice sounded synthesized, cleaner than his real voice.
"I am the Developer," the man corrected. He didn't walk; he glided, his feet not quite touching the floor. "And you, Caleb... you are a fascinating error."
The Admin gestured to the pristine city below.
"Look at it. No traffic jams. No crime. No poverty. I deleted the homeless encampments in Sector 4 because they were dragging down the property value algorithms. I paused Arthur Sterling because his greed was causing an inflation bug."
"They're people," Caleb said, stepping forward. "Not code."
"What is the difference?" The Admin smiled, but his eyes didn't crease. "DNA is just biological code. Neurons are just logic gates. The world is a messy, unoptimized operating system running on legacy hardware. I'm just... patching it."
He teleported. Instantly, he was standing inches from Caleb's face. Caleb flinched, but his body didn't move as fast as his mind wanted to.
"I tried to delete you," the Admin whispered. "In the car. But the system rejected the command. Do you know why?"
Caleb didn't answer. He was trying to bring up his own HUD, but it was gone. He had no overlay here. He was naked in the code.
"Because you're not a User," the Admin said, tilting his head. "And you're not an NPC. You're a Fatal Exception. A glitch that somehow gained read/write access."
The Admin placed a hand on Caleb's shoulder. It felt cold, like liquid nitrogen.
"I can't delete you without crashing the sector. But I can reformat you."
The world shifted.
The blue sky turned blood red. The marble buildings began to decay, crumbling into wireframe dust in seconds. The ground beneath Caleb's feet turned to glass, revealing a drop into an infinite abyss of scrolling binary code.
[WARNING: REFORMATTING INITIATED]
[IDENTITY INTEGRITY: 90%... 80%...]
Caleb felt his memories slipping. The face of his mother. The code to his safe. The taste of cheap coffee. They were dissolving, turning into static.
"Join me," the Admin's voice boomed, echoing from everywhere at once. "Accept the update. Become a Moderator. We can fix this broken world together."
Caleb fell to his knees. His hands were becoming transparent.
Think, he screamed internally. This is a system. Every system has a flaw.
He looked at the Admin. The man was perfect. Invincible.
But he was standing on the roof.
Caleb looked at the ground. The glass floor.
It was a texture. A surface.
If this is a simulation, Caleb thought, fighting the static in his brain, then it follows rules. Even his rules.
Caleb focused on the glass beneath the Admin's feet. He didn't try to hack it. He didn't try to break it.
He tried to overload it.
In his mind, Caleb screamed every line of junk code, every paradox, every logic loop he had ever learned. He weaponized his own broken brain. He projected the chaos of his hallucinations directly into the floor.
Infinity. Divide by zero. The set of all sets that do not contain themselves.
[ERROR: UNEXPECTED INPUT]
[MEMORY LEAK DETECTED]
The Admin frowned. He looked down. The glass beneath his feet was flickering.
"What are you doing?" the Admin demanded.
"Spamming the chat," Caleb gritted out.
He focused harder. He imagined the chaotic, messy, beautiful noise of the real St. Lazarus. The smell of rain. The sound of arguments. The grit.
The perfect simulation couldn't handle the noise.
CRACK.
The glass shattered. Not under Caleb, but under the Admin.
The Admin's eyes widened. For a split second, the stock photo face flickered, revealing something else underneath—a glimpse of a pale, scarred human face in a dark room.
"You—"
The Admin fell. He dropped through the floor into the binary abyss.
The simulation destabilized. The sky tore open like wet paper, bleeding static into the perfect blue. The ground dissolved into pixels.
[SYSTEM CRASH]
[EMERGENCY LOGOUT]
The world didn't fade to black; it slammed into him.
Gravity returned with the force of a car crash. The infinite digital horizon was instantly replaced by the crushing weight of his own skull. The smell of ozone and freezing air flooded his lungs, burning like acid.
"CALEB!"
The scream tore through the ringing in his ears.
Caleb gasped, his back arching off the metal chair violently, his muscles seizing. He ripped the headset off, throwing it across the room.
He was back in the freezing server room. The red light of the purge was gone. The massive sphere above was dark. The hum had stopped.
Maya was shaking him. "Caleb! Breathe! You stopped breathing!"
Caleb rolled out of the chair, hitting the metal grating hard. He vomited bile onto the floor.
"Did it work?" Maya asked, looking up at the sphere, her voice trembling. "The purge stopped. The lights just died."
Caleb wiped his mouth, his hands trembling violently. His vision was back to normal—well, his version of normal. The Overlay was rebooting, dim and flickering.
[SYSTEM RESTORED]
[MENTAL TRAUMA: CRITICAL]
"He crashed," Caleb wheezed, clutching his head. "I forced a crash."
He looked at the monitors on the desk. They were black. The chat log was gone.
"We need to go," Caleb said, struggling to stand. "He'll reboot. And when he does, he won't try to recruit me again."
"Recruit you?" Maya helped him up, slinging his arm over her shoulder to support his weight.
"He offered me a job," Caleb laughed, a manic, jagged sound. "Management position. Great benefits. But the retirement plan is murder."
They stumbled toward the exit, leaving the silent, sleeping brain of the server room behind them.
As they reached the blast door, Caleb glanced back one last time.
Hovering over the empty chair, faint and ghostly text remained, fading slowly in the darkness:
[USER_NULL HAS BEEN KICKED FROM THE SERVER.]
[REASON: TOXIC BEHAVIOR.]