Lin's fingers dug into the loading bar like it was physical—like the pixels were clay, or wet ink. The progress stuttered, the percentage counter glitching between **87%** and a garbled mess of symbols. She exhaled sharply through her teeth and *pulled*, dragging the bar backward with a sound like tearing parchment. The file name above it flickered—**FINAL_DRAFT_v12.doc**—and she seized that too, her nails scraping against the screen as she typed a new name: *unsaveable.*
The system screamed.
Error messages erupted like pustules across the void, each one bursting into static before it could fully form. The NID operative's holographic keyboard short-circuited, keys melting into sticky trails of corrupted code. Zhang watched, transfixed, as Lin's hands *bled*—not blood, but raw strings of unformatted text, her veins unraveling into placeholder Lorem Ipsum.
"Lin—"
"Not yet." She gritted her teeth, her fingers spasming as the file fought back. The progress bar *twisted* in her grip, trying to slither free, but she dug her thumbs in deeper and *bent* it, folding the loading animation into a Möbius strip that cycled endlessly between 0% and 1%. The timestamp in the corner convulsed: **LAST STABLE BACKUP** flickered to **BACKUP FAILED**, then to **NO RESTORE POINTS AVAILABLE**.
The operative's visor shattered.
Shards of tempered glass hung suspended in the air, each fragment reflecting a different draft of the story—Zhang kneeling in the rain, Lin slumped over a terminal, the transmigrator dissolving into footnotes. The operative themselves staggered back, their uniform unraveling at the seams into raw HTML tags.
Lin didn't pause. She slammed her palm against the corrupted file name, smearing the letters until they read: *unsaveable.unsaveable.unsaveable.*
The void *rippled.*
The printer beyond the source files made a sound like a bone breaking. Paper jammed in its throat—reams and reams of it, crumpling mid-print. The operative clutched their chest as their own dialogue bubbles inverted, their last words replaying in reverse: *"...status protagonist reassign—"*
Zhang moved without thinking. He grabbed Lin's wrist just as her fingers started to *transparent*, her outline blending into the white void. "You're overwriting yourself," he hissed.
She bared her teeth. "Good."
The file name pulsed once—*unsaveable*—and then the world *unzipped.*
The sky peeled back in layers, revealing nested folders beneath: **/drafts/abandoned/outtakes**. The ground dissolved into a cascading series of *undo* commands, each keystroke audible—a staccato rhythm of backspaces and deletes. The operative's body pixelated, their form resolving into a single line of debug code: **[USER_001: DISCONNECTED].**
Lin collapsed forward, her glasses hanging askew. The lenses were cracked—no, *fractalized*, each splinter showing a different iteration of the rooftop confrontation. Zhang caught her by the shoulders. Her skin was fever-hot, humming with residual system commands.
"You renamed the backup," he realized.
Lin's laugh was a static burst. "Worse." She lifted her hand, showing him the ink still dripping from her fingertips. "I *saved* it."
The void shuddered.
Somewhere in the depths of the source files, a single sentence wrote itself into existence: *The story is no longer the author's to control.*
And the cursor, blinking once in acquiescence, appended a new line:
**> Welcome, debuggers.**