The feeling of being deleted was cold.
It was an administrative finality, a quiet, invasive numbness that started at the conceptual edges of the self and worked its way inward. Leo watched the grid lines of Thorne's perfect world appear through the skin of his forearm. The sight didn't inspire panic. It was too absolute, too far beyond the normal human capacity for fear. It was a fact. His [User_Profile] was being erased.
Around him, the others were experiencing their own, personal apocalypses, their forms flickering and dissolving into the sterile white light of the sandbox.
Chloe stared at her dissolving arm, her project manager's mind failing to find a protocol for this new, catastrophic failure state. Her breath hitched in ragged gasps that had no air to sustain them. She tried to make a fist with her fading hand, and her fingers passed through each other like smoke. The control she had clung to throughout this nightmare was being unwritten, one line of code at a time.
Ben's tablet, his anchor in this sea of unreality, was a shimmering, glitching wreck on the floor. He knelt beside it, his own hands flickering, reaching for it as if to save a drowning friend. He wasn't just losing his body; he was losing his tools, his connection to the world of logic and order he so desperately understood. The loss felt more profound than the fading of his own limbs.
"I can't… I can't feel anything," Arthur stammered, his voice thin, a ghost of a sound in a world with no acoustics. He looked down at his own chest, at the perfect black suit that was becoming a translucent, shimmering apparition. "My skill… the numbers… they're all just… zero. A null set."
Only Maya was still fighting. Not with her knives, which were useless wisps of code, but with a core of pure, focused will. She was trying to hold her form together through sheer force of personality, her virtual muscles tensed, her jaw clenched. But she was a warrior fighting the concept of deletion itself, a battle as futile as trying to stab a mathematical equation. Her legs were already gone, faded into the white grid of the floor.
A messy process, but a necessary one, Thorne's voice echoed around them, clinical, the sound of a doctor describing a terminal diagnosis. Don't worry. It will all be over shortly. Consider it a system cleanup.
Leo felt the cold creeping up his arms, into his chest. It felt like forgetting. A slow, systematic erasure of memory, of self. The source code of his being was being dismantled. He could feel it in his mind—thoughts fraying, cherished memories becoming corrupted files. The smell of his mother's kitchen on a Sunday morning, the sound of rain on his old apartment window, the taste of burnt office coffee—all of it was being flagged for deletion, junk data.
This was it. A 404 Not Found error for what was left of the human race.
But as the System code that defined his presence in the sandbox was stripped away, something else remained. A deeper layer. A different kind of code, written in an elegant, alien language of light and logic. The data stream from the Caretaker. The ghost in his own machine.
It wasn't being touched.
The realization was a flash of light in the encroaching darkness. A single, insane, impossible hope. Thorne's delete command was a System-level function, programmed to purge System-level threats. But the Caretaker's code… it wasn't part of the System 1. It was a different operating system. Thorne's antivirus didn't have the right drivers.
He was trying to delete a Windows file using a Mac command. Incompatible.
Leo didn't have the strength to fight the deletion. It was like trying to hold back the tide. But maybe… maybe he didn't have to fight it. Maybe he just had to let go.
He had to perform surgery on his own soul.
"Listen to me!" His voice was a ragged, static-laced thing, his own vocal cords de-rezzing as he spoke. The others turned their fading faces toward him, their expressions a mixture of terror and confusion. "He's only deleting our System code! The part of us that belongs to his world! We have to… we have to cut it loose!"
"What are you talking about?" Chloe cried, her voice glitching, skipping like a scratched record, the sound itself coming apart. "Cut what loose?"
"He's a hybrid!" Ben breathed, the realization dawning, a spark of manic genius cutting through his terror. "Two operating systems! He's going to try and force a reboot into safe mode! Isolate the primary kernel!"
Leo didn't have time to confirm. He had to act. He focused, pushing past the pain, past his own existence unraveling like a frayed rope. He reached out with his mind, not to the world, but to the people around him. To the faint, terrified sparks of their consciousnesses. He could see their code, the beautiful, chaotic, messy script of their humanity, interwoven with the rigid, structured code of the System that had claimed them on G-Day.
He needed to untangle it. He needed to perform fifteen simultaneous, soul-level edits while his own mind was being torn apart.
He needed time.
"Buy me time!" he yelled, the command a raw, desperate plea. "Attack the sandbox! Glitch it! Make him fix the environment!"
For a second, they just stared at him. Attack what? With what? They were ghosts already.
But Chloe understood. Her mind, her [Read Intent] skill, didn't just read the code of an attack; it read the logic of a plan. She saw the desperate, insane strategy forming in his mind.
"Do it!" she commanded, her voice regaining a sliver of its old authority. "Ben, where's the weakest point?"
"The lighting engine!" Ben shouted, pointing a flickering, translucent finger at the featureless white ceiling. "It's a single, complex process! It has to render light for sixteen separate viewpoints! If we can overload it, he'll have to divert resources to stop it from crashing the whole server!"
It was a plan born of IT-support desperation. Maya, her legs almost gone but her torso a rigid statue of defiance, understood. She couldn't attack the hounds, but she could attack the world itself. She focused, channeling her warrior's intent not into a strike, but into a single, focused thought of pure, disruptive force aimed at the ceiling. Break.
The white ceiling flickered, plunging them into a half-second of disorienting darkness before snapping back on.
Vandalism? How quaint, Thorne's voice scoffed from the void.
"It's not enough!" Ben cried. "We need more processing load! More chaos!"
Leo closed his eyes, shutting out the sight of his own dissolving body. He plunged his consciousness into the tangled web of their souls. He found the thread of Chloe's code, the point where her human essence was shackled to the System's framework. The pain was astronomical, a feedback loop of his own de-resolution and the strain of the edit. He felt a scream building in his throat, but he choked it down, swallowing the agony.
He began to cut.
In the sandbox, Chloe followed Ben's frantic instructions. She ran, her half-there legs pumping, at a wall. She didn't try to hit it. She tried to run through it. The sandbox's physics engine, faced with an impossible, illogical command, stuttered. The wall warped around her, the grid lines bending, groaning like tortured metal.
The whole world flickered again, more violently this time.
The deletion process on their bodies slowed, just for a second, as Thorne's attention was diverted, a fraction of his processing power reallocated to stabilize the integrity of his prison.
It was working.
"Keep going!" Ben yelled. He and Arthur, two non-combatants, two men of numbers and logic, started running in frantic, random patterns, their movements designed to do nothing but chew up processing power, to create as much useless, chaotic data as possible for the server to track. It was the digital equivalent of throwing sand in a server's fans.
Leo felt the first thread snap. He had freed Chloe's core consciousness from its System shell. He moved on to Maya, then Ben, then Arthur. Each one was an agony, a fresh wave of psychic feedback that threatened to shatter his focus. The world outside his mind was a cacophony of Chloe's shouted commands, the screech of a reality engine under strain, and Thorne's growing, frustrated anger.
Cease this pointless resistance! You are only delaying the inevitable!
Leo felt the cold of the deletion reach his heart. His own focus was wavering. His thoughts were fragmenting, memory addresses failing. He was losing himself.
Then, a new sensation. A gentle, golden warmth spreading through the chaos in his mind. Sarah. She was kneeling on the floor, her own form flickering violently, her face a mask of pure, agonizing concentration. She had her hands held out toward him, and her [Encourage] skill, that simple, beautiful piece of support code, was a firewall around his fracturing mind, a single, stable line of logic in the storm.
It was just enough.
He found the last connection—his own. The primary shackle that bound him, the hybrid, to Thorne's System. He took hold of the thread. And with a final, silent, desperate scream that echoed only in the space between realities, he pulled.
SNAP.
From Thorne's perspective, it was an elegant success. The chaotic glitches in his sandbox ceased. The sixteen corrupted user files, which had been resisting so stubbornly, simply vanished. SUCCESS: 16 processes terminated. The server was clean. He had won.
But for Leo and the others, it was something else.
The white world, the pain, the cold of deletion—it all vanished in an instant.
There was no light. No sound. No sensation. They were not in the sandbox anymore. They were nowhere. They were un-rendered, pure consciousness, floating in a silent, black void. A ghost space between the lines of code.
They had escaped.
But as Leo floated in the infinite, silent dark, a single, terrifying question echoed in the space where his mind used to be.
Are we still alive?