The code went white.
Kai was thrown backwards, her connection to the interface severing with a painful snap. She landed hard on the pavement, gasping. Above her, the sky flickered. The blue deepened to purple, then red, then a blinding white. The buildings around her began to shimmer, their edges blurring like wet paint.
People screamed. A woman running from a nearby shop simply vanished mid-stride, her shopping bags dropping to the ground. A child's ball bounced down the street, but the child was gone.
Kai scrambled to her feet, her training kicking in. This wasn't a minor anomaly. This was a cascade failure. The entire sector was collapsing.
"Oracle!" she shouted. "Oracle, I need emergency stabilization in Gamma-7! Full system collapse in progress!"
No response.
She tried again. "Oracle! Respond!"
Nothing but static in her ear.
The sky was bleeding now, streaks of corrupted code raining down like green fire. The ground beneath her feet felt soft, unstable. She watched a building across the street fold in on itself, its geometry failing, becoming a two-dimensional sketch before winking out of existence.
And then, as suddenly as it began, it stopped.
The sky snapped back to blue. The buildings re-solidified. The people who had vanished reappeared, continuing their conversations, their walks, their lives, completely unaware that they had ceased to exist for seventeen seconds.
Kai stood alone in the sudden silence, her breath ragged. The door was gone. The cul-de-sac was just a cul-de-sac again. Normal. Stable. Perfect.
Her comm crackled back to life.
"—peat, system-wide diagnostic complete. All sectors nominal." It was a different voice. Not Oracle. A cold, mechanical voice she had never heard before. "Glitch hunter Kai, report to Nexus Central for immediate debriefing. Your handler has been... reassigned."
The line went dead.
Kai's blood ran cold. Reassigned. That was the word they used when a program was deleted.