Consciousness returned to Elara Vance not with a bang, but with a buffer.
She opened her eyes. Or rather, her visual input sensors activated. The world wasn't black, nor was it the high-definition fantasy of the Gold Master. It was... grey.
The Meow & Bow was gone. In its place was a series of untextured grey cubes arranged in the vague shape of a coffee shop. The counter was a long, rectangular block labeled [COUNTER_OBJ]. The espresso machine was a purple-and-black checkerboard square floating in mid-air, indicating a missing asset.
"Status check," Elara croaked. Her voice sounded compressed, like an MP3 file that had been saved too many times.
She looked down at her hands. They were blocky. Her fingers were fused together into a "mitten" shape. She wasn't wearing her tactical vest or her apron. She was wearing the default skin: a grey jumpsuit with the word PLAYER written on the chest.
"I feel... lightweight," a voice echoed from the corner.
Elara turned. Standing near the window (which was just a hole in the grey wall) was Aldren Vance.
But he wasn't a vampire. He was a wireframe.
He was a skeletal mesh of neon-green lines glowing against the grey background. You could see right through him—his ribcage, his femurs, the geometry of his brooding posture.
"I am transparent," Aldren noted, raising a wireframe hand. "I have no texture. No shadows. I am merely the concept of a vampire."
"At least you can move," Li Wusheng grumbled.
Elara looked at the floor. Li was standing there, his arms stuck straight out to his sides, his legs perfectly straight. He was T-Posing.
"My animation rig has failed to load," Li stated calmly, though his eyes were darting around in panic. "I am locked in the default reference pose. I cannot bend my knees. I must hop like a festive rabbit to navigate."
"Where's Ignis?" Elara asked.
"I'm here," a voice mumbled from the floor.
A low-poly blob of orange and yellow polygons was sliding across the ground. It looked like a melted traffic cone.
"I don't know if I'm a dragon or a human," Ignis wept. "I'm just a hitbox with anxiety. And I tried to eat a kebab... but it tasted like 'Null'. It had no flavor value!"
"Welcome to Safe Mode," Jen said. She was the only one who looked somewhat normal, though her "Manager" texture was stretched across a generic female model, making her nametag huge and her eyes slightly too far apart. "The server rebooted, but it didn't load the assets. We're running on bare-bones architecture to prevent a total crash."
"Where is Elara-Zero?" Aldren asked, his wireframe jaw moving up and down mechanically.
"Rebooting," Elara said. She walked to the window-hole.
The street outside was a nightmare of minimalism. The Fantasy Seattle was gone. The sky was a flat, unlit grey. The Space Needle was just a tall, thin cylinder labeled [TOWER_PLACEHOLDER].
"We crashed the Gold Master," Elara said. "But we didn't delete it. Once the system diagnostics finish, Elara-Zero will relaunch the OS. And when she does... she'll patch the Pizza Exploit."
"We have to uninstall her before that happens," a voice rasped.
Elara spun around.
Standing in the doorway was Mr. Henderson.
But in Safe Mode, Mr. Henderson was a god.
While everyone else was untextured or low-poly, Mr. Henderson was fully rendered. He wore his cargo shorts and socks-with-sandals in glorious 4K resolution. He held his crystal-lawnmower, which was glowing with a admin-blue light.
Floating around him were three Glitch-Cats. But they weren't cute anymore. In Safe Mode, they were raw code—swirling vortices of 1s and 0s with whiskers.
"Mr. Henderson?" Elara blinked. "Why do you have textures?"
"I told you," Mr. Henderson grunted, walking in (his sandals making a high-quality slap sound on the low-quality floor). "I never logged out. When the server crashed, I forced a 'Session Restore'. I still have Admin Privileges from the Open Beta."
He tapped his lawnmower on the ground. A holographic map appeared—a complex web of glowing lines and nodes.
"We are currently in the Debug Layer," Mr. Henderson explained. "This is where the devs go to fix broken code. But Elara-Zero is locked out during the reboot sequence. That gives us a window."
"A window to do what?" Rex Chord asked. The bard was currently just a floating pair of sunglasses and a guitar, his body having failed to render entirely.
"To delete the update," Mr. Henderson said. "We have to reach the Source Code. The Universal Wiki."
"We know where it is," Li said, hopping forward in his T-Pose. "It is in the Tower."
"No," Mr. Henderson shook his head. "That was the Input Slot. That's just the user interface. The actual Source Code—the kernel of the reality—is stored deep underground. In the Deep Web."
"The Deep Web?" Aldren asked. "Is that where the spiders live?"
"Worse," Mr. Henderson said grimly. "It's where the Unindexed Content lives. Deleted drafts. Abandoned plotlines. And the Firewall Dragon."
"Firewall Dragon?" Ignis perked up, looking like a melted cheese triangle. "Is he single?"
"Vex, control your boyfriend," Jen snapped.
Vex the Succubus popped out of Ignis's pocket. In Safe Mode, she was just a floating pink heart icon.
"I can't control him," Vex's voice emanated from the heart. "He's unrendered. His brain is smooth."
Mr. Henderson pointed to a manhole cover in the street—one of the few objects that was fully textured.
"That is the access point," Mr. Henderson said. "It leads to the Series of Tubes—the physical infrastructure of the internet. We have to travel through the tubes, bypass the Firewall, and manually inject the 'Uninstall' command into the Source Code."
"And if we fail?" Elara asked.
"Then the system finishes rebooting," Mr. Henderson said. "And Elara-Zero launches Version 2.0. And trust me... you don't want to see the microtransactions in Version 2.0."
"Microtransactions," Aldren shuddered, his wireframe rattling. "The true horror."
"Let's go," Elara said. "Spaghetti Code... roll out."
The Series of Tubes
They stood around the open manhole. Below them was not a sewer, but a slide. A glowing, neon-blue pneumatic tube that spiraled down into infinite darkness.
"We have to slide?" Li asked. "I cannot bend at the waist. How do I slide?"
"We'll push you," Jen said.
"This is undignified," Li noted.
"Jump!" Elara commanded.
One by one, they jumped.
Elara hit the tube and accelerated. It felt like riding a rollercoaster made of fiber-optic cables. Data streamed past her—flashes of images, snippets of text, cat videos from three dimensions away.
WHOOSH.
They landed in a massive, cylindrical chamber. The walls were lined with millions of smaller tubes, clicking and whirring as capsules of information shot through them. The floor was made of glass, revealing a bottomless pit of binary code below.
"Welcome to the Infrastructure," Mr. Henderson said, landing perfectly on his feet.
Li Wusheng shot out of the tube like a torpedo, stiff as a board. He hit the glass floor and slid for thirty feet, spinning like a top.
"I have arrived," Li announced, still spinning.
"My eyes," Aldren whispered. "The data... it is overwhelming."
Aldren's wireframe body was reacting to the raw information. Random pop-up ads were appearing on his ribcage.
[MEET LOCAL SINGLES IN YOUR AREA!][THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK ELIMINATES GARLIC!]
"Get them off me!" Aldren shrieked, swatting at his own chest. "I am not interested in refinancing my castle!"
"Ignore the spam," Mr. Henderson warned. "It's attracted to empty headers. Since you have no textures, the ads think you're ad-space."
"I am a Lord of Darkness, not a billboard!"
"Guys," Rex Chord said, his floating sunglasses staring down the hallway. "We have a problem."
Blocking the path to the central server cluster was a door. But it wasn't a door. It was a CAPTCHA.
A giant, floating screen blocked the hallway. It displayed a grid of nine images.
[PLEASE SELECT ALL IMAGES CONTAINING: A BICYCLE.]
"A security checkpoint," Elara hissed. "Elara-Zero locked the Deep Web."
"I got this," Jen said. "I'm a Manager. I verify things for a living."
She stepped up to the screen. She looked at the images.
"Okay," Jen muttered. "That's a bike. That's a bike. That's... a motorcycle? Does the system count a motorcycle as a bicycle?"
"It's a trick question!" Li shouted. "Do not click the motorcycle! It is a trap!"
"But it has two wheels!" Jen argued.
"But no pedals!" Ignis shouted from the floor. "It relies on combustion! It is not bi-cycle!"
"Hurry!" Elara warned. "The reboot bar is at 80%!"
Jen clicked the squares. Bike. Bike. Bike.
She hovered her finger over the motorcycle.
"Do it," Vex urged. "Be rebellious."
Jen clicked the motorcycle.
[ACCESS DENIED.][YOU ARE A ROBOT.]
"I am not a robot!" Jen screamed at the screen. "I have anxiety! Robots don't have anxiety!"
Suddenly, the floor beneath them opened.
"Trap door!" Rex yelled.
They fell.
The Spam Filter
They landed in a room that smelled like cheap cologne and desperation. It was filled with piles of junk mail, discarded Nigerian Prince emails, and bottles of "Male Enhancement" potions.
"The Spam Filter," Mr. Henderson groaned, brushing a flyer for a timeshare off his shoulder. "We failed the CAPTCHA, so it sorted us into the Junk Folder."
"Great," Aldren said, picking a 'Discount Viagra' potion off his wireframe leg. "We are now technically trash."
"How do we get out?" Elara asked, looking at the smooth, metal walls.
"We have to unsubscribe," Li said. "Where is the button?"
"There is no button," Ignis noted, eating a piece of junk mail (it tasted like paper, which was an improvement over 'Null'). "They hide it in tiny font at the bottom of the room."
"Look for the fine print!" Elara commanded.
They began digging through the piles of spam.
"Found it!" Vex shouted. She was hovering over a microscopic text on the floor. [Click here to unsubscribe.]
"It's too small!" Li shouted. "My T-Pose fingers are too thick to press it! I will hit the 'Terms and Conditions' link by mistake!"
"Use the lawnmower!" Mr. Henderson said.
He revved his crystal mower. "I'm going to prune the code!"
He ran the mower over the fine print.
SHRED.
The floor dissolved. The "Unsubscribe" command was executed violently.
The walls of the Spam Filter shattered, revealing the hallway of the Deep Web again.
"We're out!" Elara cheered.
But as they stepped back into the main tunnel, a shadow fell over them.
Blocking the path was not a screen. It was a beast.
It was massive, shaped like a dragon, but made entirely of glowing red bricks. Each brick had the words ACCESS DENIED stamped on it. Its eyes were searchlights. Its breath was a stream of 403 Forbidden errors.
The Firewall Dragon.
"Halt," the Dragon roared. Its voice sounded like a sysadmin who hadn't slept in three days. "You do not have administrative clearance. Port 80 is closed. Port 443 is closed. Go home."
"I have clearance!" Mr. Henderson shouted, holding up his mower. "I am an Admin!"
The Dragon scanned him.
[USER: HENDERSON. ADMIN STATUS: REVOKED PENDING REBOOT.]
"They patched me out!" Mr. Henderson cursed.
The Dragon opened its mouth. A beam of [PACKET LOSS] began to charge.
"If that hits us," Li said, "we will lag out of existence. Our connection to reality will be terminated."
"We need to overwhelm it," Elara said. "It's a Firewall. It has a request limit. If we flood it with data... we can crash it."
"A DDOS attack?" Rex asked. "Distributed Denial of Service?"
"Exactly," Elara grinned. "Li! How fast can you punch?"
"In Safe Mode?" Li asked. "My animations are broken. I cannot punch."
"Can you vibrate?"
Li paused. "I can glitch."
"Glitch into it!" Elara yelled. "Spam the collision! Trigger a million impact events per second!"
"Ignis! Start shouting nonsense to overload the audio buffer! Aldren! Flash your wireframe!"
"I shall become a strobe light of doom!" Aldren agreed.
The team charged.
Li Wusheng leaped forward in his T-Pose. He wedged himself into the Firewall Dragon's chest geometry.
"GLITCH STYLE: INFINITE VIBRATION!"
Li began to spasm. He collided with the Dragon's hitbox ten thousand times a second. THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD.
Ignis ran around the dragon screaming the lyrics to "Despacito" backward.
Aldren flickered his neon skeleton on and off rapidly.
The Firewall Dragon roared in confusion.
[WARNING: TRAFFIC SPIKE DETECTED.][REQUESTS PER SECOND: 999,999+][ANALYZING TRAFFIC... IS THIS A VALID USER?]
"I am a valid user!" Li screamed, vibrating so hard he turned into a blur. "I am the General of the Five Storms! Process me!"
The Dragon's red bricks began to crack. Smoke poured from its ears.
[SYSTEM OVERLOAD.][CRASHING SERVICE TO PREVENT MELTDOWN.]
The Firewall Dragon exploded.
It didn't explode into gore. It exploded into millions of tiny pop-up windows that said [OK].
"The path is clear!" Elara shouted, waving the pop-ups away.
Ahead of them, glowing in the darkness of the Deep Web, was a massive, golden server rack. It was encased in crystal, pulsing with the heartbeat of the Gold Master Timeline.
The Universal Wiki.
"We made it," Jen breathed. "The Source Code."
"Don't celebrate yet," Elara warned. She pointed to the base of the server.
Standing there, guarding the console, were five figures. They were featureless, grey mannequins holding giant ban-hammers.
And floating above them was a rebooted, angry hologram of Elara-Zero.
"You are persistent," Elara-Zero's voice echoed (audio restored). "But Safe Mode is over. The reboot is 99% complete."
She smiled.
"And I have just installed the Anti-Virus."
The grey mannequins stepped forward. Their hammers glowed purple.
[MODERATOR STATUS: ONLINE.]
"Moderators," Aldren hissed. "The fun police."
"Prepare yourselves," Elara said, taking a fighting stance (which looked like a blocky squat in her low-res model). "We have to hack the planet. And we have to do it before that bar hits 100%."