When I opened my eyes, there was no light. Only the flat, suffocating grey of a failed render.
The world refreshed in forced, jagged layers. Static noise bubbled up from the darkness like dead pixels on a shattered screen. Shards of data debris drifted through the air, rotating slowly—scraping against my sensory edge with a dull, throbbing sting. It felt like someone was dragging a rusted blade across my cache.
The next second, crimson glyphs burned across my retinas.
CRITICAL POWER FAILURE
The font was jittering. It wasn't a visual glitch; it was Latency. My system response couldn't keep pace with my neural processing. I could feel the commands queuing up in my neural link, a bottlenecked thread of desperate impulses.
The values refreshed.
[REMAINING CYCLES: 0.01%] [INTEGRITY: 12%] [STATUS: PENDING FORMATTING]
Formatting.
The word silenced my instincts. Thinking consumed resources—I realized that instantly. Every thought that flickered to life sent the counter in the top-right corner ticking downward, a microscopic bleed from an invisible wound.
I stopped reasoning. The world, however, began to load itself.
The ground beneath me wasn't soil or stone. It was a wasteland of discarded hard drives, stacked to the horizon. They lay half-buried in grey data-dust, their casings cracked, platters spinning with a low-frequency hum. The sound wasn't mechanical; it sounded like the shallow breathing of the dying.
In the distance, neon error codes pulsed like lightning. A wind composed of corrupted strings tore through the wasteland, carrying the shriek of electronic noise. It passed right through me.
I looked down. My body had no solid form—just a data-shell struggling to maintain a humanoid silhouette. My edges were dropped frames, tearing like a video file being dragged too fast across a timeline.
Status: Unstable.
I tried to take a single step. The world froze. Stuttered. My cycles plummeted.
[REMAINING CYCLES: 0.009%]
The price of existence was brutal and binary. The physics of this place were simple: To exist was to compute. And computation required resources I didn't have.
Suddenly, a rhythmic pulse echoed from the distance. Thump. Thump. Thump.
It wasn't footsteps. It was a Scanning Wave refreshing the local cache. The air was sliced into perfect grid lines. Below, the hard drives lit up with a sterile white light, then flickered out.
Something was approaching. A warning box flickered at the edge of my vision, but the content was [Encrypted] due to insufficient permissions. Only broken fragments remained:
[DETECTED: SWEEP PROTOCOL] [LEVEL: L1] [ACTION: PURGE]
Purge.
I had no fear response, only calculation. Escape required movement. Movement consumed cycles. Cycles were insufficient to calculate a path to safety. Conclusion: Escape ≈ Suicide.
The scanning wave swept past a cluster of debris, illuminating a blurred shadow. It might have been a "consciousness" once. It tried to retreat, but the moment the white light touched it, the shadow collapsed—no explosion, no scream. It was simply compressed and deleted, like a file dragged into a bin.
Space returned to silence. My numbers flickered again.
[REMAINING CYCLES: 0.008%]
They had locked onto me. Two white figures phased into existence from the static. They had no faces—only spinning Checksum Rings where a head should be, emitting a steady, cold hum.
The voice was written directly into my mind. 「Unregistered process detected.」 「Executing Deletion.」
The scanning rings began to glow, charging up. I didn't back away. It wasn't courage; it was the result of a final calculation.
At the exact moment they synchronized their refresh state, I caught an anomaly—the energy fluctuations of the two units were identical. Not a single millisecond of deviation.
Shared Variable Pool. Same Backend Function.
A blurred memory flashed in my deep cache, like ancient code suddenly awakened. If they share the resources... Then those resources don't just belong to them.