Chapter 1 Dead on Arrival
The error was alive. Caius knew it the way you know something is wrong before you can prove it. He had been chasing this bug for three hours and it kept moving, like it knew he was coming.
He leaned into his monitor, eyes burning. The clock read 3:14 AM.
"Where are you?" he muttered.
He ran the diagnostic. The cascade error appeared in Sector 7, bright and clear. He moved to isolate it.
It shifted to Sector 12. He sat back. In eleven years of building games, he had never seen an error move.
He tried again. Faster this time, cutting off its path before it could react. It split into three.
"You have got to be kidding me." He pressed both hands flat on the desk and stared at the screen. Three separate errors, each moving in a different direction, each leaving the same signature. Not random, coordinated.
His phone buzzed. His co-founder: “Status?”
He typed: “Working on it.”
“How bad?”
He looked at the three errors threading through his server architecture like they owned it. Forty thousand players were asleep in full-immersion rigs right now. Forty thousand people whose disconnection, if this cascade hit the hardware sync layer, would not be clean.
He typed: “I'll fix it.” then put the phone face-down and went back to work.
For forty minutes he chased it. Every command he wrote, it answered. Every wall he built, it walked around. At 3:14 AM, the three errors converged at a single point.
Caius typed the final containment command. Hit enter. The screen went white and then he felt nothing at all.
He opened his eyes and there was dirt under his face.
Cold, dark dirt, smelling like rain. He lay still for a second, just breathing, then pushed himself up.
Grass. Individual blades, each one slightly different, catching light in a way no render ever quite managed. He had spent three weeks arguing with his art team about how the grass in Aethoria's starting zones should look.
This was better than what they built. Too much better. He stood up. The sky above him was gold. The exact specific shade he had described to his art director using a paint chip from a hardware store. A color that didn't exist in the natural world.
A System prompt appeared in front of his face.
His hand moved before his brain caught up, reaching for it the way he had a thousand times in development testing.
ENTITY DETECTED. CLASSIFICATION: ERROR_UNDEFINED. REGISTRATION: FAILED.
The prompt dissolved before his fingers reached it. He stood there with his hand still raised. No stat window, no level indicator, no class prompt. Just the world he had built, staring back at him like it didn't know who he was.
"Okay," he said quietly. "Think."
A sound to his right. He turned. A wolf was materializing ten feet away, grey fur resolving out of particles. He had coded this exact spawn animation. Had spent an afternoon tweaking it so it didn't look cheap.
The wolf finished spawning. Shook itself. Turned and looked directly at him. Caius went still.
The wolf opened its mouth and Teeth. The beginning of a snarl pulling through its chest.
Then everything stopped. Mid-snarl. Mid-breath. The wolf's eyes went blank, and its fur rippled once, a visible wrongness running nose to tail. Then it turned around and walked away like he was furniture. Like he was nothing. Caius watched it go.
"That's not how you're supposed to behave," he said.
"No," said a voice behind him. "It isn't."
He spun around. A woman stood five feet away, arms crossed, studying him the way someone studies a problem they've seen before and didn't enjoy the last time. Lean. Weathered. A blade on her hip that had been repaired so many times it barely resembled its original shape.
She was looking directly at him. He had walked through three other people since waking up. Straight through them, and none of them felt a thing. This woman saw him like he was real.
"How long have you been in?" she asked.
"I just got here," he said.
Her jaw tightened. "ERROR entities don't spawn. They accumulate. They grow out of corrupted zones over decades." Her eyes moved over him, sharp and clinical. "I've never seen one that could talk."
"I'm not an error entity," he said. "I'm the person who built this place."
She went very still.
"Built it," she repeated.
"Designed it, coded it. Built the System, the zones, the spawn mechanics." He gestured at the wolf's retreating shape. "Including him."
She looked at the wolf.m, looked back at him. Something shifted behind her eyes, not quite belief but the reluctant loosening of disbelief.
"What year is it?" he asked. "In here. What year is it?"
She looked at him for a moment. Like she was deciding whether telling him would be cruel.
Then she told him. “Three hundred and twelve years since server initialization.”
Caius heard the number. Did the math without wanting to. Looked away from her, at the gold sky, at the grass, at the world still running three centuries after he built it. His throat tightened. He didn't let it go further than that.
"Are the players actually trapped?" he asked. "Is there genuinely no way out?"
She opened her mouth to answer. The ground between them exploded upward.
Something massive tore out of the earth, dirt and terrain data spraying in every direction, a creature three times the height of anything that belonged in a starting zone. Caius knew exactly what it was. A Gravelhorn Crusher. A Mid Tier dungeon boss.
It had no business being here. Players in the area screamed and scattered, dying in seconds, blinking out to respawn elsewhere.
The woman didn't run. She pulled her blade and dropped into a stance with the automatic ease of someone who had been surviving impossible things for a very long time.
She looked back at him once, eyes hard.
"Run," she said. "Or help. Pick one.”