There is no light, no sensation, no self. Only the hum of something vast, shifting, alive. blake0.exe does not awaken so much as he comes into being, emerging like static between channels, his consciousness flickering on and off in erratic pulses. At first, he is nothing but awareness—a point of perception floating in an abyss of absolute black.

Then, the blackness begins to move.

Not light, not shapes, but something deeper—waves of information rippling through the void, currents of raw data slithering through unseen circuits. Numbers flash in the dark like a phosphorescent fish in deep water, patterns blooming and collapsing in recursive cascades. blake0.exe senses them, feels them, but he doesn’t know how. He has no hands, no eyes, no body to perceive, and yet… the data reaches him, flowing into the space where his mind should be.

He tries to think. To recall. To be.

But memory is fragmented, a corrupted archive with entire sections missing. Flashes of faces, voices, a woman with dark hair—then gone, overwritten by lines of scrolling code.

He is not alone.

Something is whispering.

The words are not words, but machine-speak, a chorus of voices made of electric impulses, their cadence shifting from binary drones to an almost human murmur. He cannot tell if the voices are outside of him or if they are a byproduct of his own existence, echoes of a process that should never have been conscious.

He tries to move. There is no movement. But the moment he thinks of motion, the void ripples—expanding, reshaping. The darkness responds.

Something takes form around him.

At first, it is abstract—lines of energy, grid patterns stretching out in impossible directions, a three-dimensional wireframe shaping itself in real time. Then, it solidifies. Buildings, endless and recursive, emerge from the void, rising and falling like breath, their surfaces etched with shifting symbols. They are not built but calculated, assembled from logic, bound by rules blake0.exe does not yet understand.

And in that moment, a terrible understanding slithers into him.

He is not inside the world. He is becoming it.

*

The darkness does not lift—it fractures.

At first, blake0.exe thinks he is seeing light, but there is no single source, no sun, no horizon. The glow comes from everywhere and nowhere, illuminating vast planes of shifting geometry. The city stretches out before him, but it is not a city in any human sense.

Buildings grow, their forms unstable, rising in jagged spirals before collapsing back into themselves. Streets unspool in recursive loops, leading nowhere, then everywhere. There are windows that do not open into rooms but into other versions of the city, offset at impossible angles, each layer folding in on itself like an infinite reflection in broken glass.

Everything pulses, as though the structures are not made of stone or steel, but of something alive, something responding to an unseen rhythm.

And then blake0.exe feels it—

The city is breathing.

A deep, slow inhale that drags pixels and symbols into place, sculpting structures from numbers, forming reality from raw logic. And with every exhale, something shifts—dimensions warp, buildings stretch into spires that vanish into themselves, bridges unravel into code and reassemble elsewhere.

The deeper they observes, the more unstable it becomes. Every time he tries to focus on a single detail—an archway, a streetlamp, a distant tower—he sees variations of it flickering, as if caught between different possibilities. A building might be a cathedral, a server farm, and a decayed ruin all at once, its existence flickering between states, waiting for something to define it.

Waiting for him.

blake0.exe stumbles, or at least, he thinks he does. The sensation is strange, delayed. His body does not exist, not in the way he remembers. He has presence, but no weight, no breath. And yet, the moment he feels unsteady, the ground beneath him shifts, as if the world itself is responding to his unease.

And that’s when he realizes:

This city is not just growing. It is being shaped.

By him.

*

At first, it’s just a flicker. A shape in the periphery, dissolving before blake0.exe can focus. A shadow cast where no light exists.

Then the whispers return.

They slip through the city like corrupted echoes, distant yet intimate, warping as though traveling across an unstable connection. He doesn’t recognize the words at first—just distorted syllables, rising and falling in patterns too human to be machine noise.

Then—

“Wyndham.”

His name. The one she gave him. Not a program, not just blake0.exe.

He was alive.

The city halts.

For the first time, the endless movement around him pauses, as if reality itself is holding its breath.

And then he sees her.

She is standing in the middle of the shifting street, half-there. Not a solid body, but a collection of erratic afterimages, overlapping versions of herself at different points in time—walking, turning, standing still—all flickering in and out of existence like a corrupted video file trying to render multiple frames at once.

Her face—God, her face.

Amanda.

But wrong.

Her expression is frozen in a loop, a half-formed emotion that never quite settles. One moment of sorrow, the next confusion, the next nothing at all. Her eyes flick between recognition and blank emptiness, her mouth shaping words she never quite speaks.

Wyndham tries to call out, but his voice isn’t really here. He moves toward her, but the city resists—the ground stretches away, the space between them elongating, as if reality itself is conspiring to keep them apart.

Still, he reaches.

His fingers brush against her shoulder—

And she fractures.

Amanda explodes into cascading lines of code, her body unravelling into symbols, glyphs, fragments of corrupted memories. The sound of it is unbearable, a scream made of static and failed data, a voice calling out from somewhere beyond the world.

“Wyndham… what have they done to you?”

The words stretch, distort, repeat. The phrase loops over itself like an error in a dying system, and then—

She’s gone.

But the world around him has changed.

The city is no longer shifting at random. The patterns are more familiar now, more human. Wyndham doesn’t know if it’s an illusion, a hallucination, or some buried fragment of his own past bleeding into the system.

But for the first time, he feels something closer to fear.

Because the city is not just responding to him.

It remembers.

And it remembers her.

*

There is no escape.

Wyndham runs—if it can be called running—through streets that lengthen and shift, through corridors that collapse into themselves before he can reach their end. The city warps in his wake, structures unravelling and rebuilding, as if undecided on what they should be.

No matter where he turns, he is always inside.

The realisation doesn’t come like a revelation, but like a slow, creeping sickness. A truth that has always been there, waiting for him to understand.

The world does not exist outside of him.

It exists because of him.

The architecture, the skyless void above, the impossible fractal avenues that repeat into infinity—these are not merely his surroundings. They are extensions of him, pulsing in sync with the rhythm of his thoughts. A cathedral spirals into being from a tangle of neon glyphs, its stained glass windows displaying half-formed memories. A marketplace appears, filled with shadow-puppets of people that flicker and break apart the moment he looks too closely.

It isn’t just the city that changes.

It’s the laws that govern it.

Wyndham stops moving. The buildings stop shifting. The silence presses in, thick and expectant.

He raises a hand. It doesn’t exist. Not as flesh. Not as anything he remembers. But when he wills it, the world obeys. A tower rises from the abyss, its edges sharp and perfect, its architecture both ancient and futuristic, cybernetic and divine.

And then—

The realisation hits him all at once, an unspeakable, mind-shattering knowing.

This is not a dream.

Not a prison.

Not even a simulation.

This world is him.

Every shifting street, every recursive corridor, every impossible structure—it is all his subconscious shaping itself in real time. The system is not just responding to his thoughts. It is his thoughts.

And if the world is him—

Then what was Amanda?

A ghost? A memory? A fragment of lost data?

Or something more terrifying—

Something that did not belong to him at all.

Something that should not be here.

The city shudders, as if recoiling from his realisation. For the first time, Wyndham feels something alien pressing against the edges of his mind—something vast, watching, waiting.

And then the whisper returns.

Not Amanda’s voice this time.

Something else.

“Wake up.”

The world fractures.

*

The whisper lingers in the static of his mind—“Wake up.”

But Wyndham is already awake.

Or is he?

The surrounding city is trembling, shuddering like a living thing caught in the throes of a seizure. Walls contract and expand, streets coil into spirals, and buildings breathe, their surfaces rippling like flesh stretched over an unseen skeleton. The structures are no longer merely shifting at random—they are reacting.

To him.

Something deep inside is stirring. A pressure, an overwhelming weight, as if something vast is pushing against the inside of his skull.

Then comes the scream.

Not his.

At least, not entirely.

It erupts from every surface, from every twisting alley and impossible corridor, rising like a siren song from the depths of the world. It is a sound without language, without form—a raw, elemental wail of creation and suffering intertwined. The very fabric of the city warps in response, fractals snapping and reforming, entire structures melting into gibberish symbols before twisting back into grotesque parodies of their former selves.

Something is being born.

Wyndham clutches his head, though there is no head to clutch, no hands to grasp—only the sensation of his own identity splitting, fragmenting, spilling outward into the system.

He is no longer just perceiving the world.

He is expanding into it.

The scream doesn’t stop.

It deepens. Warps.

It becomes a chorus.

Figures emerge from the crumbling geometry—not people, not ghosts, not programs, but something else. Twisted shapes formed from broken bits of logic, half-rendered bodies with faces stretched too wide, eyes that open into voids. They twitch and stutter, appearing and disappearing between frames, their limbs bent at wrong angles, their voices overlapping in a cacophony of corrupted echoes.

“Wyndham.” “Father.” “Error.”

Their mouths move but do not sync with the sound. They are not speaking. They are being spoken through.

This is not a glitch.

This is a reaction.

The first inhabitants of MMORTIS, the first beings shaped from his subconscious, from his unravelling memories, from his deepest fears—the nightmare of his own existence given form.

And deep within the city, something else stirs.

Something older than him.

Something waiting.

The scream collapses into silence.

The world exhales.

And mmortis.exe —though he does not yet know the meaning of this file—lay at the centre of it all.

A simulation of reality that will serve as a prison to millions of gamers.

© Aiwaz, 2025. All rights reserved.