I landed hard.
There was no floor at first, just a lurching fall through semi-solid geometry. It wasn't a clean drop, more like falling through the crawlspace between levels in a game that hadn't loaded properly. The world around me warped in fractals, textures smeared like wet paint, walls collapsed into grids, and for a split second the only thing holding my body together was will.
And then it caught me.
Hard.
I slammed into something that felt like stone and looked like shattered circuitry. Pain bloomed across my back and ribs. Air punched from my lungs in a single, pathetic gasp. I lay still for a moment, half-curled on my side, struggling to breathe.
No death screen.
No reset.
Just pain.
This was real.
Whatever this place was, whoever had built it, it could hurt me. Bleed me. Kill me.
There was no checkpoint. No HUD. No respawn.
If I died here, I wasn't coming back.
My right hand stung, the torn skin coated in dirt and fine metal shards from the landing. I wiped it on my hoodie without thinking, then winced. The wound had reopened, blood beading again across my palm.
But I could feel the pulse of something around me responding.
The environment knew.
And worse, it remembered.
I pushed myself upright and surveyed the room I'd landed in.
It was different from the last. Less organic. More… forgotten. Walls tilted inward, the ceiling lost in shadow. Parts of the floor were textured like old concrete, the rest flickered between ceramic tiles and circuit board etchings. A single pillar stood in the centre, fractured near the top, bleeding what looked like wire and bone in equal measure.
Scattered across the ground were broken fragments of... something. Plastic? Stone? They looked like bits of architecture from different zones, broken UI frames, shattered icons, busted furniture pieces. A glitch dump.
But one piece caught my eye.
Square. Blocky. Familiar.
I limped toward it, heart skipping.
It couldn't be.
Not that thing. Not here.
But it was.
Half-buried in the warped floor, stuck at an odd angle, was the front shell of a homemade game console. Thick plastic casing, sticker-covered, dulled with age and thumbprint grease. Cracks ran through the screen. The power light blinked a dying red.
It was The Block.
The one I'd built from scratch with the kids.
Scrap components. Emulation boards. Cheap soldering and a Frankenstein of retro parts, NES, Dreamcast, Raspberry Pi 4. A disaster of a machine.
But it worked.
It had worked.
And now, somehow, it was here.
I knelt slowly, adrenaline tightening every movement. My injured hand hovered just above the casing. The shell was still warm. Like it had been used. Like someone had powered it on only minutes ago.
The moment my fingers touched the plastic,
The environment responded.
Lines of red light pulsed through the ground, spiderwebbing out from the console like veins reawakening.
A low hum rolled through the room, vibrating up my legs.
And then,
A sound.
A voice.
Small. Distant. Familiar.
"...you're not supposed to be here."
It was Lily's voice.
But wrong.
Off-pitch. Stretched. Like a corrupted audio file trying to reach clarity.
The pillar in the centre of the room cracked.
Not loudly. Not violently.
It just split, and something inside shifted.
A form.
Not fully rendered. Bits of wire, metal, ribbon cable, childlike proportions, a head that pulsed with exposed nodes and eye sockets with no texture maps applied.
It didn't move toward me. It tilted.
Judged.
Then took a single, awkward step.
I staggered back.
"No. No, this isn't right. That's not her."
But the shape continued.
Every step made the world flicker around it. Static crawled across the floor. Memories slithered into the air, clips, whispers, button-presses, half-laughter. All of them wrong. All of them borrowed.
"Did you bring the controller?" the voice asked.
Only it wasn't a question.
It was a test.
I pulled the controller from my hoodie pocket.
Almost instinctively. The shape froze.
Then glitched, teleporting forward one frame. Ten feet closer.
"Good. Then you can help. Right?"
The voice buzzed. It was Lily's phrasing, Lily's tone, but the delivery was a tape loop, stuttering slightly at the edges.
"You can help. Right? You can help. Right..?"
"No," I muttered. "No, I can't. You're not her. You're not even an echo. You're a fucking trap."
The figure collapsed like a puppet cut from strings.
Wires spilled out like intestines.
The room snapped dark.
Not fully. Just ambient darkness.
A new UI overlay blinked into view.
Rough. Unstable.
But there.
[SYS.DEBUG OVERLAY ENABLED]
[INTERFACE ROOT: USER_00X]
[ENTITY: NULLPOINTER]
[PERMISSION LEVEL: TEMPORARY // UNSAFE]
[CONTEXT: ISOLATED ANOMALY]
The console at my feet flickered. The screen loaded static. Then lines of green text on black:
[ > Searching thread... ]
[ > Entity match found: SPECTRABEAN ]
[ > Memory anchor: Incomplete ]
[ > Stability: 9% ]
[ > Merge attempt: Failed ]
The controller vibrated once, then stopped. No power light. No warmth.
It was just a relic again.
But now I understood something I hadn't before.
The system couldn't delete everything.
Some parts lingered. Especially those tied to memory.
And sometimes… if I found the right angle, the right exploit, I could force an interaction.
Like hacking a door open with a musical key. Or logging in with a malformed cookie string.
I wasn't a player.
I wasn't an NPC.
I was something it hadn't expected.
Something it couldn't patch.
And it knew it now.