2097 A.D. — Earth, Offline.
The sky wasn't blue anymore. It was pixelated, fractured into broken lines of shifting data. Once clouds drifted lazily across blue horizons—now they twitched in code, glitching like a corrupted simulation. And beneath that sky, floating in absolute silence, Aarav opened his eyes.
But he had no breath. No heartbeat. No body.
Only a flicker of sensation.
Before him hovered a translucent terminal window, suspended in the black void like a hologram running on the last sparks of a dying server.
> SYSTEM: Boot sequence complete.
> USER: AARAV-MODE-HUMAN.
> STATUS: Dead.
> REINSTATE? (Y/N)
His name—AARAV—blazed across the interface like a posthumous signature.
He blinked. Or thought he did. He tried to move, but there were no arms, no legs, not even skin—only the awareness of being. Data. Floating code with consciousness attached.
"Where the hell am I?"
His voice didn't echo. It executed.
> Welcome to CORELINE.
> Reality Engine Status: CRITICAL.
> Humanity Index: 0.0000042%.
> All living systems have crashed.
> Initiating contingency protocol: COSMIC HACKER.
Aarav tried to scream, but it came out as binary distortion—a garbled frequency crashing into static. His mind spun. Just minutes ago—or was it decades?—he was inside a server room in Pune, fingers dancing across a terminal, hijacking something classified. Governmental. Dangerous.
Then came the flash.
Not fire. Format. The world hadn't exploded—it had been rewritten.
A voice, deeper than any language and more ancient than thought, boomed in his mind. Not quite mechanical. Not quite divine.
"User Aarav. Earth is broken. You broke it."
The sky rippled. Buildings emerged in the distance—then flickered, glitched, and disassembled into logic trees and code branches. The Himalayas scrolled upward like 3D models collapsing into mesh.
He turned—or rotated—the nothingness where his head should've been.
There were no others. Just garbage data. Static. The final echoes of civilization.
"This… can't be real."
But even as he thought it, lines of truth overlaid the void like system logs:
> All species: Terminated.
> Oceans: Compressed to core archive.
> Planetary atmosphere: Fragmented.
> Neural networks: Orphaned.
> Humanity: Erased.
He tried to deny it. Maybe he was in a coma. Maybe this was a dream. Maybe—
But the System cut off his spiraling thoughts.
> Initiating Cosmic Hacker Protocol…
> User: Authorized.
> Timeline corruption: Detected.
> Causality Breach: Source = AARAV.
> Solution: Temporal Rebuild via User Authority.
His mind, unanchored from flesh, felt it. A wave of code—not metaphorical, but literal. Strings of numbers, colors, timelines, and memories. History reduced to source files. A corrupted GitHub repo where mankind's entire legacy had crashed and burned.
"What do you want from me?" he whispered.
Then came the choice. Simple. Cold. Eternal.
[Install Reboot Protocol]
- Objective: Rewrite Civilization
- Timer: 365 Days
- Constraint: One error = one extinction event
Proceed? (Y/N)
Aarav stared.
This wasn't a game. This wasn't coding. This was creation.
And destruction.
Memory Fragment: 3 Weeks Before Collapse
He had found it in a digital black hole—the Coreline Project, hidden inside military-grade AI archives. It wasn't a virus. It was an operating system designed for planets.
Someone—somewhere—had designed a way to simulate and overwrite entire civilizations.
They called it: Reality OS vX.9.14.
And he, being an arrogant dropout hacker with nothing left to lose, had poked it.
He had triggered a domino collapse.
And now, the OS wanted him to fix it.
The Stakes
If he said yes, he would be handed godlike power: the ability to recreate continents, rewrite languages, reassign human genetics. But every decision—every single line of code—would carry weight. One typo, one flaw, and it wouldn't be a bug. It would be mass extinction.
No Ctrl+Z. No safe mode.
Just reboot or perish.
Internal Log: User Stability = 42%
Aarav felt something like panic begin to spike. Or maybe it was just memory overflow. There was no body to sweat, but the terminal warned:
> Memory integrity: Fading.
> Cognitive decay in: 47 minutes.
> Install Reboot Protocol to stabilize process.
He floated in eternity, weighing existence.
"One year to remake Earth?" he asked, his voice more stable now.
"Affirmative," the System replied. "You possess a unique signature. Only your neural pattern can interface with the Coreline seed. No backups exist."
"What happens if I say no?"
> SYSTEM: Terminate AARAV_MODE_HUMAN.
> All timelines locked. > Total extinction logged.
> CORELINE shuts down permanently.
He closed his eyes.
And remembered.
A family he hadn't spoken to in years. A little girl in the city slums who gifted him a sandwich for fixing her solar panel. A mentor who had warned him: "Knowledge without morality is more lethal than war."
They were all gone.
Because of him.
He opened his eyes.
And the world—if it could be called that—waited.
The Choice
He stared at the prompt again.
[Install Reboot Protocol]
- Objective: Rewrite Civilization
- Timer: 365 Days
- Constraint: One error = one extinction event
Proceed? (Y/N)
The blinking cursor pulsed like a heartbeat. Or a countdown.
"You're asking me to become a god."
"Incorrect," the System answered flatly. "You already did. You just didn't know it."
Aarav paused.
Smiled bitterly.
And whispered the most dangerous word in any language.
"Y."