The Vanishing City

The neon skyline of New Avalon pulsed against the night, but something was wrong. Entire buildings flickered like dying holograms, their metallic frames distorting before vanishing into nothing. Cipher Voss tightened his grip on the pulse gun holstered at his hip. His HUD visor blinked erratically, struggling to process what his eyes were seeing.

He stopped in the middle of the empty street. Population: 8.4 million.

Then, the numbers glitched. Zero.

Cipher blinked, his stomach twisting. No bodies. No wreckage. No signs of struggle. The city was silent, as if it had been abandoned for centuries—except it hadn't. He had walked these streets just yesterday, when the air had been alive with the hum of skycars and the chatter of pedestrians. Now, it was a hollowed-out ghost town.

A sharp crackle of static broke the silence. His earpiece fizzed, the signal filled with distortion.

"Cipher… do you copy? It's Rho."

Cipher exhaled in relief, tapping the side of his visor. Dr. Elias Rho. The scientist who had called him here. The last man to report an anomaly from Sector 17 before the entire district was locked down.

"I'm here," Cipher said. "What the hell is going on?"

"You shouldn't be here." The voice was weak, breaking in and out. "Cipher, listen to me—it's already happening. The Singularity is—"

The signal cut out, replaced by a piercing, high-frequency screech. Cipher winced, yanking out his earpiece. The noise didn't stop. It was coming from everywhere—bouncing off the glass windows, reverberating through the metal streets, warping in and out like a siren from a world that no longer existed.

Then, it stopped.

The silence that followed was worse.

Cipher exhaled and pushed forward, past the flickering remnants of what had once been a thriving district. He had seen wars, rogue AI outbreaks, entire cities burned to the ground by corporate greed. But this?

This wasn't destruction. This was erasure.

Ahead, the Sector 17 data facility loomed, a massive, cube-like structure lined with flickering screens. It was the only building that seemed solid—unchanged. Cipher's boots thudded against the cracked pavement as he moved toward the entrance. The reinforced steel doors slid open, releasing a gust of cold, sterile air.

Inside, the power flickered, casting everything in jagged streaks of red emergency lighting. The air smelled of burned circuits and something old, something metallic and wrong. He stepped into the main control room, where dozens of holo-screens lined the walls, each filled with cascading lines of corrupted code.

Then he saw them—faces.

Thousands of them, flashing across the screens.

Men. Women. Children. All staring. Some smiling. Others frozen in mid-conversation. A few looking directly at him as if they knew he was watching.

Then, one by one, the images began to disappear.

Names under each face started vanishing, entire families erased from existence within seconds. Cipher's throat tightened.

They weren't just gone. They had never existed.

A voice crackled through the room, distorted and layered, as if a hundred voices were speaking at once.

"They were never here."

Cipher spun around, pulse gun raised. The room warped, the walls twisting as if reality itself was trying to fold in on itself. The temperature dropped sharply, frost forming along the metal floor.

Then, something moved.

A figure flickered into existence—a humanoid shape, its body shifting between light and darkness, between solid and intangible. It took a step forward. Then another. The movement was glitchy, unnatural, like a corrupted hologram struggling to stabilize.

Cipher fired.

The shot passed through the figure. No impact. No reaction. The energy dissipated as if it had never been fired.

The figure's head tilted, studying him. It raised one hand, and the walls of the room fractured. The holo-screens exploded in a burst of static, their remains disintegrating midair. Cipher staggered back as his HUD flickered violently.

His vision blurred.

A flood of memories rushed into his mind—memories that weren't his. He saw flashes of a life he had never lived. Cities he had never visited. A war that had never happened.

A warning flashed across his HUD.

"SINGULARITY EVENT DETECTED. REVISING REALITY."

Cipher gasped, gripping his head as his entire body glitched. His pulse gun flickered between solid and non-existent, his hands shifting between states of matter.

The entity took one final step forward.

Cipher's world collapsed into darkness.