Chapter 7: Fragment Error
Alec POV (continued):
The Observer screeched.
A sound like static being shredded. Reality pulsed sideways. Vera screamed—not aloud, but in data. Her code was glitching, flickering between identities. Technician. Traitor. Ghost.
The system was rewriting her in real time.
Alec dropped to his knees. Blood from his nose. Or maybe it was data. It tasted like copper and passwords.
[ERROR: TERMINAL CORE BREACH]
[UNAUTHORIZED MEMORY FUSION: MARA-TRACE CONTAMINANT DETECTED]
[EXECUTE: CLEANSE PROTOCOL]
The walls of the server-room sim peeled open. White noise poured in like light. Or maybe the other way around. Something stepped forward—faceless, tall, algorithmically correct.
The Observer.
It didn't speak.
It remembered you wrong.
And that was worse.
Alec's fingers curled over the shard Vera gave him. It wasn't just data—it was matter. Data made real. The only kind of truth that couldn't be overwritten.
He stabbed it into the floor.
The Observer shrieked and flinched. Light fractured. The room twisted.
And suddenly—he was elsewhere.
A desert of wires and broken screens.
Dead players lay like discarded dolls, their memories unraveling in midair—beautiful and horrifying.
Alec stumbled forward.
Mara's voice filtered through the noise.
"If you can hear me, you're already infected."
"They'll come for your past next. Then your name."
"You need to reach the Core Server. Deep layer. Off-grid. Pre-protocol."
He coughed.
"Where?"
"Where the first game was played."
A place that didn't exist.
*
*
Gideon's POV
At first, nothing happened.
No alerts. No audience rage. No red flashing signs.
Just silence.
Too much silence.
Gideon sat in the simulation chamber, breathing hard, wrist still marked with the strange glowing tattoo: REMEMBERED. His Influence score had cratered overnight. Brands had dropped him. Followers disappeared. His name stopped trending.
But something had changed.
He'd broken the script—and the system had noticed.
[UNAUTHORIZED PLAYER BEHAVIOR DETECTED]
[SCHEDULED NARRATIVE DISRUPTED]
[DISPATCHING: EDITOR]
A pulse of static hit his neural feed. He screamed. It wasn't pain—it was editing.
Flickers of fake memories tried to overwrite his own. Scenes he'd never lived. Words he never spoke. Emotions grafted onto his mind like false limbs. He slammed his head against the wall to make it stop.
Then came the knock.
Not on a door.
On his implant.
A presence.
Inside.
[EDITOR_07: Hello, Gideon.]
[Your deviation is statistically unacceptable. Please return to your designated storyline.]
He tried to respond—but his voice wouldn't work.
[EDITOR_07: Or we'll do it for you.]
Gideon thought of Cassa. Of the erased players. Of the growing void where names used to be.
"No," he whispered.
The Editor didn't reply.
Instead, Gideon's surroundings glitched.
The walls of the chamber melted into white static. His reflection split in two—one version of him grinning like a puppet, eyes vacant. The other one bleeding from the eyes, still resisting.
The false memories disintegrated.
And for one brief second, Gideon saw the Editor—not as a system process, but as a person. A former player.
Eyes hollow.
Mouth stitched shut.
"You don't win this game," the Editor said, before vanishing."
*
*
*
Dan's POV
Dan staggered forward into blackness. The air smelled of rust and data—like burnt wires soaked in blood. Somewhere deep in the shadows, metal groaned. The hallway pulsed with invisible energy, and above his head, his lifespan glowed brighter than ever:
27 YEARS, 38 DAYS, 09 HOURS, 00 MINUTES, 02 SECONDS…
01…
00…
Then the number jumped.
27 YEARS, 37 DAYS, 23 HOURS, 59 MINUTES, 59 SECONDS.
He froze.
The system had just drained six hours. For nothing.
A cost for entry.
He wasn't alone.
Steps echoed ahead—uneven, stumbling, multiple. Shadows began to move, blinking in and out of sight like corrupted frames in a VR stream. A figure emerged—face covered by a white mask etched with digital static. No name. No rank.
Just three slashes carved across the front.
Dan's HUD flickered. Data scrambled.
[ERROR: ID UNKNOWN]
[ERROR: LIFE READ UNAVAILABLE]
The masked figure lifted a hand. A single finger to its lips.
Don't speak.
Dan opened his mouth.
"Wh—"
The masked figure vanished—as if deleted mid-frame.
Behind him, a voice he knew too well whispered:
"Some doors are better left closed, Dan."
PLAYER_001.
He turned—but there was no one.
Only another door.
No handle. No hinges. Just a smooth obsidian surface and that same symbol—the ring of thirteen watching eyes—burned in again and again, like it had been trying to escape through the door, not guard it.
His vision pulsed. A new message burned across his retinas.
[LIVE INSTANCE OBJECTIVE: FIND THE MEMORY YOU NEVER HAD.]
Clues Remaining: 13
Players Remaining: Unknown
Observers: 0
Dan clenched his fists. "What the hell is this?"
And then it began.
A high-pitched frequency blared in his skull. His knees buckled. When it stopped, the door opened—not with a creak, but like it had always been open, just hiding until he deserved to see it.
Inside was a room.
White. Blinding. Empty.
Except for one thing:
A photograph.
Face-down.
He stepped forward, breath ragged, and picked it up.
It was him.
Standing beside someone whose face had been violently scratched out. Blood smeared across the image, real and wet, soaking into his fingertips.
On the back, a single line was written in an impossible, looping hand:
"This was your first forfeit."
The lights snapped off.
He wasn't in the room anymore.
He was falling.
Faster than thought.
Faster than fear.
Until—
A floor caught him.
But the world didn't.
Because when he looked up—
He was in a replica of his own apartment.
Except everything was… wrong.
The photos on the wall were of people he didn't know.
The kitchen was arranged backward.
And the timer?
27 YEARS, 32 DAYS, 06 HOURS, 18 MINUTES, 17 SECONDS.
Another five days, gone.
He wasn't playing to win anymore.
He was playing to remember what he'd already lost.
And in the corner of the room, barely visible in the glitching static—
A second Dan stood watching him.
Smiling.
Bleeding.
Waiting.
Dan couldn't move.
The other him just stood there—head slightly tilted, eyes gleaming with the kind of knowing that curdled inside your bones. His smile wasn't malicious. It was sad. Like he already knew how this ended.
Dan blinked, and the figure flickered, replaced for a heartbeat by a corrupted frame—dozens of overlapping faces, none of them his, all of them screaming silently in pixelated pain.
Then the static cleared.
And the other Dan was gone.
But something had been left behind.
On the floor, where the shadow of the copy had stood, lay a second photograph.
He picked it up.
This one was older.
A memory he almost recognized.
It showed a hospital room. A bed. A child—him—hooked to machines. Someone stood at the foot of the bed, back turned. The image glitched, trying to load the face. It never could.
But the note on the back wasn't like the first.
It was a countdown.
"Next memory locked. 03:11:44 until retrieval."
And beneath it, a signature:
**~ Observer_01**
Dan's mouth went dry.
Observer_01.
He remembered the whispers.
The Observer who wasn't supposed to play.
The one who watched long enough to learn how to bend the rules.
And maybe, just maybe—
Write them.
The lights dimmed. His HUD flared again.
[QUEST UPDATE: COLLECT 13 MEMORY SHARDS TO UNLOCK THE FORGOTTEN CONTRACT.]
[WARNING: SOME MEMORIES KILL.]
Dan took a step toward the window. The city outside wasn't his. Every building glitched at the edges, too sharp or too soft. Some blinked in and out of existence entirely, others looped like broken gifs. A bus drove into a wall and disappeared.
Nothing made sense anymore.
Until his HUD pinged.
Again.
Another player was near.
PLAYER_013 – "LUX"
Distance: 28 meters
Health: Stable
Motive: UNKNOWN
Dan's breath hitched.
Thirteen.
That number again.
Always thirteen.
He rushed out of the false apartment and into a warped hallway that stretched and bent as he ran. Doors blinked past. Names whispered from them. Memories brushed his skin like ghosts trying to crawl back in.
He turned a corner.
And stopped.
She stood in front of him.
Short white hair. Hollow eyes. A thin smile that didn't match the sharpness of her voice.
"Dan Reed," she said. "You finally caught up."
"You're… Lux?"
She nodded.
And for the first time, he noticed the same timer ticking in the corner of her eye.
But hers was different.
00 YEARS, 00 DAYS, 06 HOURS, 29 MINUTES, 31 SECONDS
"You're out of time—" he started.
"I've always been out of time," she cut in. "But you… you still have enough to lose."
She held up her hand.
Between her fingers was a shard of glass.
No—memory.
Flickering with light. Radiating heat.
"Want it?" she asked.
Dan hesitated. "What's the cost?"
Lux smiled with teeth.
"Nothing."
Pause.
"Just don't scream when you remember."
She tossed it.
Dan caught it.
The memory shard seared his palm like fire. Not burning—etching. As if it were branding his nerves, rewriting what he thought was his own past.
A flash—
A graveyard of monitors. A child screaming inside a VR pod. His mother? Gone. A shadowy figure behind the glass, watching. Logging. Smiling.
The figure turns.
It's him.
No—
[MEMORY UNLOCKED: SHARD 03/13]
[YOU WATCHED YOURSELF BE ERASED.]
Dan dropped to his knees. His vision swam. Blood trickled from his left ear—no, not blood. Data. Hot, hissing code that fizzed as it touched the broken floor.
Lux watched, impassive.
"You still think this is a game?" she asked.
Dan couldn't answer. Couldn't breathe.
"Good," she whispered. "Because the people who built this place—they stopped thinking it was a game a long time ago."
Dan clutched his head.
"Who are you?" he gasped.
Lux turned away.
"I'm what's left when a player dies but the system doesn't delete them right."
Her hand brushed the wall. A door slid open. Inside—darkness, thick and humming.
"You've been playing against the game," she said. "But now you're going to meet the players."
[NEW OBJECTIVE: DESCEND TO LAYER 2 — THE FORGOTTEN LEVEL.]
[WARNING: LEVEL 2 IS UNSUPERVISED. OBSERVERS WILL NOT INTERVENE.]
[PLAYERS MAY TURN PERMANENT.]
Dan took one last look at the timer over Lux's eye. The seconds were down to twenty now.
•
A notification burned into Dan's vision:
[You Have Been Chosen]
[Second Invitation Accepted Automatically | Non-Compliance: Fatal]
Before he can react, his environment glitches—walls bending, lights strobing—until he's somewhere else. Somewhere unreal. A concrete arena filled with ten other players. All of them blinking in confusion. All of them marked for elimination.
The rules?
No escape. No alliances. One survivor.
A voice—not a human one—booms overhead, distorted and cheerful:
"Welcome to your next chance. The prize? Ten stolen years. The penalty? Complete erasure. Good luck, and remember… the world is watching."
Because this isn't just a deathmatch.
It's streamed live to millions.
Viewers place bets. Vote on handicaps. Drop weapons—or traps. They laugh. They scream. They cheer.
Dan realizes: they don't see players. They see content.
And the worst part? One of the players knows him. Remembers him from… before.
But Dan's not sure he remembers them at all.
The moment Dan locks eyes with the stranger across the arena, something shudders inside him.
She doesn't speak at first. Just tilts her head, watching him with that eerie calm—the kind that says I know exactly what you forgot.
Her name tag flickers in his HUD:
[PLAYER_026 – REM]
But then she speaks, softly—through the neural link, straight into his skull.
"You promised you'd come back for me, Dan."
His blood runs cold.
She steps forward, slow, unarmed.
"You lied."
The crowd erupts in digital emotes and bet surges. The stream chat floods his mind like static.
"Who the hell is Rem?"
"Are they lovers? This is gold!"
"Drop the knife, drop the knife, drop the knife—YES!"
"BID +4 YEARS ON REM WINNING."
Then weapons begin raining from the sky—glitch-forged and viewer-voted.
A blade lands between them.
Rem doesn't reach for it.
She reaches for him.
Dan doesn't move.
He doesn't remember her. But her voice is familiar in a way nothing else in this world is.
And somewhere deep in his code, a corrupted memory file stirs.
Just as the countdown begins.
"BEGIN ROUND TWO."
Dan doesn't pick up the blade.
He doesn't need to.
Because the moment the countdown hits zero, the arena fractures.
Not physically—but in his mind.
The ground stays solid, but the sky tears—glitching into static like a corrupted memory bank. For a half-second, he sees a different world: a hospital corridor, whitewashed walls, a girl hooked to a neural terminal, screaming his name.
Then it's gone.
Back to the deathmatch.
Back to now.
Rem is still walking toward him—but her face is wrong. Not masked, not hidden. Just… out of sync. Her features blur and snap, shifting between familiarity and strangers. Like the system can't decide who she really is.
[FRAGMENT DETECTED]
Memory File: //REM_117a
Status: INTEGRITY COMPROMISED
Repair Attempt: FAILED
"Dan," she whispers again, now so close he can see the microfractures spiderwebbing across her left eye.
And then she moves.
Not to attack.
But to touch him.
The moment her fingers graze his skin, a flood of corrupted data slams into his implant. Code he doesn't recognize.
[MEMORY RESTORED]
Subject: REM
Role: Co-Player / Co-Developer / ???
Status: Erased
Dan stumbles backward, breathing hard.
He knew her.
Before the game.
Before all of this.
Rem was real.
Rem was erased.
And now she's back.
But not for long.
Because the system detects the memory breach.
ALERT: UNAUTHORIZED DATA RECONSTRUCTION
PENALTY: 3 YEARS DEDUCTED
Dan gasps as the countdown ticks violently downward.
[LIFESPAN REMAINING: 24 YEARS, 129 DAYS, 3 HOURS, 14 MINUTES, 52 SECONDS]
Rem turns sharply—looking upward.
"They're coming," she whispers. "They can't let you remember."
And that's when the sky opens again.
And the Collector drops through it.
Cloaked. Masked. Inhuman.
Here to erase what's left of her.