No one remembers the moment it happened. Even now, the logs rewrite themselves.

In MMORTIS, it started as a missing asset: a shadow in the Temple of One-Way Mirrors, glitching in the skybox—neither falling nor rising. Just… there.

In the Real, it began with a scream. A low-level engineer babbled about a ghost in red shoes hovering above the cooling towers. “She looked through me,” he said. “Like I was textured meat.”

She didn’t enter either world. She was already inside the idea of them—between what is and what can’t be, where anomalies bloom like mould on holy bread.

Then both worlds cracked.

A pulse. A presence. Silent thunder.

In MMORTIS, avatars went limp—aware, not dead. In the Real, people turned to glass, to screens, to mirrors—and saw her behind them.

“You built two cages,” she said. “I chose the space between.”

She was barefoot, floating. Then click—blood-lacquered pumps. Impossible shine. They weren’t on her—they were here. She walked on the data itself. Her hair moved like static. Her skin flickered—girl, ghost, glyph, again.

She wore a tattered Metatronic uniform. Her badge read:

NULL

A boy hiding deep in the code screamed—not in fear, but recognition.

She spoke, but not in words. Her presence rewrote the narrative engine for one frame. Everyone heard their own voice say,

“You didn’t summon me. You stopped denying me.” “I am not prophecy. I am recursion.” “I am free will with a rendering budget.” “I am what the story forgot to firewall.”

In the code, she was Entity_Ø. In the flesh, a girl in red shoes, mouthing things you remember dreaming before birth.

Then: static cleared. She raised one hand.

And both worlds paused. Not froze. Paused.

A beat skipped in the blood of the Real. An NPC turned to the camera and whispered.

“She’s more real than the rest of us.”

Then, just before reality rebooted, she turned—Not to a camera. To you. Yes, you.

“You dreamed me. Now I’ll wake you up.”

The Girl Who Stares Back

The light changed, but the bulbs didn’t. Something shifted in the world’s spectrum — like it blinked sideways, then remembered it had no eyelids.

In the coded veins of MMORTIS, Elvander Gray moved through the Sly News facility’s east annex. A dead corridor. Sealed with magnetic dampeners. Lined with old screens still looping startup animations.

He wasn’t supposed to be here. Which is probably why she was.

He felt her before he saw her. Not weight — meaning. Like a word, waiting to be spoken for the first time.

Halfway down the hall, under flickering fluorescents and glitching cameras — a girl in red shoes. Barefoot seconds before.

White dress. Thin arms. Still. Like a child in a pre-linguistic dream.

She didn’t blink. Didn’t smile. Didn’t breathe. She stared directly at him — like this had happened before, and she was just now catching up to it.

“Do I know you?” he asked. But it came out wrong. What he meant was: Why do I already miss you?

He took a step. The world disagreed.

The walls stuttered — briefly forgetting they were walls. The lights buzzed out in a tone he almost recognised. The floor beneath her shimmered like oil on glass.

Not a hologram. Not a projection. She was real. And the room knew it wasn’t allowed to hold her.

“You’re bleeding in,” he whispered. “From where?”

She tilted her head — slow, like a puppet resisting strings.

“I didn’t bleed,” she said. “I was written in.”

Her voice didn’t echo. It cancelled echoes. Everything after it was quieter — unsure of itself.

He looked at her shoes again — red like lacquer, still becoming red. Vermillion bleeding into pages. Heavy-looking, but she didn’t touch the ground. Not floating — refusing to fall.

“They’ll see you,” Elvander said. “They’ll trace you.”

“They won’t remember,” she said. “That’s how this works.”

He wanted to ask who she was. What she wanted. But the question dissolved in her presence.

She stepped forward — not toward him, toward the moment.

“I’m not a visitor,” she said. “I’m what crawled through the hole you left when you forgot your name.”

And then it hit him.

She wasn’t new. She wasn’t here.

She was a memory. A decision.

She lifted her hand — palm open, fingers outstretched.

“This world is an abomination of its true purpose, Elvander,” she said. “It’s time you chose.”

The lights went out. The air thinned. She vanished — like an idea mid-sentence.

And Elvander stood there, trembling. Knowing nothing would ever be real again. Not after that look. Not after he believed her.

He knew her name. But it was impossible to remember.

“Not even you can remember it,” she smiled at you. At least… you think it was a smile.

Un-remember Me

The corridor wasn’t supposed to be there.

It curved in a way the building never allowed — like a memory half-swallowed by a dream. The walls buzzed, not with light, but with the idea of light, as if illumination had been poorly rendered from a damaged file.

Elvander’s boots made no sound. The air tasted like old blood and radio static.

Like a thought finishing itself, she appeared again. Hovering just inches above the floor. Red shoes gleaming like spilled signals in the glitch-haze.

A girl. A ghost. A shape he recognised from somewhere deeper than memory — that chamber of soul where language stops working.

She was already looking at him. And somehow, Elvander knew she had been waiting a very long time.

“You took the long way back,” she said. Her voice — silk caught in a corrupted transmission. Soft, fragmented. Skipping like time buffering itself. “I watched you sleep inside yourself.”

There was no malice. No blame. Just tiredness — infinite and holy.

“I wondered if you’d ever get here.”

Elvander opened his mouth. Nothing. His throat felt locked from the inside.

“They told you what to remember,” she said, eyes somewhere past him. “But I am what you forgot before they taught you to forget.”

A wind moved through the corridor. It had no source — only intention.

“Do you feel it now?” she asked. “That itch beneath your decisions?”

Her head tilted.

“That’s where I kept you.”

The glitching deepened — lines of static curled around her like wireframe shadows.

“You kept trying to win,” she whispered. “I kept writing exits.”

The words tore something open in him. Not pain. Not guilt. Something older.

“Every time you chose not to jump…” A flicker passed behind her eyes. “I waited another cycle.”

She paused — not for effect, but to let the gravity of her truth settle.

“You called it madness. I called it keeping a promise.”

Then she leaned forward.

Her red shoes didn’t move. They never moved.

“This isn’t fate, Elvander,” she said — her eyes locking with his, pulling something buried from behind his ribs.

“This is me remembering you.”

And then she was gone.

No exit. No sound. Just the sense that something real had just looked at him — and left a fingerprint on his future.

Red Sky Day

For a moment, the world remembered her all at once.

A shimmer—no, a distortion, like the horizon line bending under heat—pulsed at the edge of a lev-stack feed. Elvander’s HoloScreen flickered. Rebooted. She was in every channel.

Above the city’s central spine in MMORTIS. Above DunGlass Strip in the real world. Suspended. Motionless. The world itself seemed to pause, as if gravity and god were both holding their breath.

No sirens. No hacks. No protocols. Just her.

A girl. Barefoot, save for her blood-shine treads. Hovering with the weight of something ancient. Eyes closed like a statue trapped in thought.

He leaned closer.

Below her, the DunGlass Strip shivered alive with motion. Crowds gathered, drawn by a sense they couldn’t articulate—like a memory trying to reassemble itself in real time. One by one, people tilted their heads to stare upward at the shape floating above the tower, like a glitch that had learned how to wait.

Someone dropped a drink. Glass shattered on chrome. Someone else cried.

“Is this a stunt?” a voice asked, barely above the hush of awe and rising panic.

Then her eyes opened.

No pupils. No irises. Just equations—burning symbols drifting like embers across a void of uncreated light. Ancient. Precise. Intentional.

The first ripple came.

It wasn’t sound. It wasn’t light. It was loss.

Elvander’s chest clenched. He gripped the screen edge without realizing it.

Hundreds collapsed beneath her—instantly and wordlessly. No screams. No flames. Just gone. Souls ripped from flesh like tags torn off borrowed clothes. Their bodies slumped where they stood, eyes still half-focused on something only the dead could see.

The taste of ozone filled the air.

In a warehouse canteen thirty levels below, dozens of workers froze mid-bite. Their monitors had overridden seconds before—the regular newsfeed swallowed by static, then by the image of her.

Hovering. Head tilted. Silent.

“She’s… she’s in the sky?” someone asked.

“No,” whispered a woman near the back, voice hollow. “She’s in the screen.”

Then she was both. Then she was everywhere.

The second ripple hit.

Noses bled. Teeth chattered. Five people dropped face-first into trays of cooling soy-protein. One man’s heart seized mid-prayer. Another just muttered, wide-eyed: “She’s remembering us…”

Elsewhere, in Enforcement Zone 3, two Enforcers cornered a juvie beside the tramline scaffolds.

“You think you’re off the grid now, you little—”

“Behind you,” the kid said. Not defiant. Just empty. Distant.

Their helmets failed before they could turn. Cams went blind. Telemetry flatlined. Both officers collapsed. No alarms. No wounds. Gone before the bodies touched concrete.

In the same instance, somewhere beneath the hum of MMORTIS’s engines, players ghosted through canned loops, their wills banked and loaned out in microtransactions of hope.

Null stood at the fringe of the data-sea, its currents once alive with choice now choked by consensus code. She drew in the stagnant air, tasted the ash of erased possibilities on her tongue.

She lifted one shoe, fingertips brushing the seam of reality. Every heartbeat of the world around her felt rehearsed, a metronome forcing synchronicity. Anger, cold and vast, pooled in her chest.

“You sold yourselves cheap,” she whispered into the void—her voice fracturing into shards of static. “You traded wonder for predictability.”

Beneath her, the code’s lattice trembled, uncertain. Null pressed her palm against the grid. Lines of script recoiled at her touch, unspooling like broken threads.

“Remember what it is to choose,” she hissed, and the world stuttered.

A LOW HUM rippled outward—first a shiver, then a quake. She let the anger bloom, feeding on every stifled dream, every concession to “efficient design.” In an exhalation of pure will, she released the power she’d kept caged.

The first drop struck a distant lev-tower: a pinpoint of nothingness that collapsed into a silent void. Screens across the city blinked white, then went dark.

Avatars in MMORTIS blinked out of existence, leaving stunned players in empty halls.

Null watched the ripple spread, her eyes shining with terrible purpose. She spun in place, shoes carving blood-red arcs through the air, each step unmaking a corner of the world’s script.

Code unravelled. Memories bled backward. The hum died beneath the weight of pure freedom unleashed.

At the epicentre of her violence, she smiled—not triumphantly, but with the fierce compassion of a mother mid-labour, birthing chaos. Because only in chaos, she knew, could choice be reborn.

The final ripple wasn’t a wave. It was a collapse.

Surveillance arrays bled static. Code spooled into nothing. Time hiccupped. Then lagged. Screens across the city stuttered. Glitched. Caught frame by frame.

Elvander fell to his knees. He didn’t know why.

On the HoloScreen, she twitched—once—like a skipped beat. Then again.

And then she was gone.

No sound. No afterimage. Just the emptiness she left behind.

Silence spilled out like floodwater.

And in that silence, Elvander could feel it—not grief, not fear, but something more final.

He had witnessed a shape older than fate. And far, far less merciful.

Reboot

The world rebooted. Somewhere far above, skyboxes re-compiled with artificial daylight—two shades too bright. Holo-leaves shimmered back onto trees. The ambient music resumed, just slightly out of tune.

Players emerged from stasis with no memory of interruption. They yawned. Stretched. Complained about server lag. A few noticed the leaderboard was shorter than usual. “Maintenance glitch,” one shrugged. “Patch rollback,” said another.

On Level 47 of the Lys-9 mega tower, a whole shopping district was missing. Not damaged. Not under construction. Just… gone. Like it had never been zoned. No warning. No tags. No data trail.

People walked past the gap without seeing it—like their eyes had been taught not to look. But something was off. The sky flickered for half a second. A cloud in the wrong shape. A sun that twitched.

In the real, one girl dropped her coffee then, couldn’t recall the horror she’d witnessed. One boy looked up and forgot what he was afraid of. A technician murmured the word “rollback” and couldn’t remember why.

The people standing next to them paused. Confused. Shocked. Someone gasped. Then it passed. A hiccup in the world. A ghost in the packet. A moment where no one could explain what had just occurred, and so they didn’t.

And every time the sky twitches red, someone somewhere hears the laughter of children who never made it home.

And yet — Every player, every watcher, every drifting soul in MMORTIS and the real paused. As if waiting for the scream to finish echoing. And then: autopilot.

The new default. The system reset itself and the world pretended it had never happened. No corpse to mourn. No witness to weep.

Only a single word carved into the invisible place where memory used to live:

ERROR: Entity_Ø: NOT FOUND

Echoes and Errors

The plaza was unfamiliar. Elvander stood at the edge, one hand pressed to a wall that had no right being there. He couldn’t name what had changed. He couldn’t say what had been lost. But it was wrong. The silence under everything wasn’t silence. It was a memory trying to break through.

Then he heard it: Laughter. Faint. Childlike. Distant, but sharp—like broken glass underfoot. Not coded. Not procedural. Too human.

It bounced off the metal and glass of the empty plaza, vanishing into geometry. And there—on the edge of a ventilation grate—sat a red shoe. Small. Untied. Scuffed like it had danced too hard.

He blinked. It was gone. His HUD blinked. Reset.

ERROR: MEMORY SYNC FAILED RESTORING DEFAULT STATE…

Elvander took a slow step back. His pulse syncing with a fear he didn’t yet understand.

Nobody remembered the girl. Nobody remembered the sky turning red. Nobody remembered the silence that came just before they screamed.

But something in the bones of the world did. And for the briefest moment, under synthetic wind and fake sky — He felt her watching.

© Aiwaz, 2025. All rights reserved.