Re-Rendered

Elvander lingered at the edge of the plaza like a cursor blinking beside a command that wouldn’t run.

The air smelled wrong. Not of ozone or rendered fog, but a sterile memory—like the inside of a vacuumed archive. His HUD stuttered. The horizon bled one frame backward. A moment re-rendered itself without asking.

He turned. The wall he’d touched moments ago… wasn’t warm anymore.

There was no shoe. No laughter. Just a faint afterimage where his mind insisted something had stood.

He opened the diagnostics overlay, but it fought him—each panel flickering before stabilising. His shadow lagged behind his body by half a frame. A pixel-length delay, but it shouldn’t have happened. Shadows didn’t lag in MMORTIS. They were particle-accurate. Shadows were realer than players.

He blinked.

His player ID pulsed in the corner: Elvander.Gray_099-𝘝

There hadn’t been a V. Not before. He couldn’t remember what the suffix meant, but it felt wrong—like waking up to find your name slightly rearranged.

A chill walked down his spine.

The wind moved, but the leaves didn’t.

He reached out to the wall again, fingertips brushing polycrete—cold this time, indifferent. He ran a palm across the surface. Texture: correct. Resolution: standard. But his palm returned damp. Not wet—damp. As if the wall had just finished remembering rain.

“What the hell is this place?” he murmured.

The system didn’t answer. But something in the air did. A ping—inaudible, but felt like a pressure behind the eyes. A displacement in the code. The plaza was the same shape, but it had lost something—a presence now missing, not just absent.

He activated the console.

The terminal blinked into existence, diagnostic green text scrolling across his retina: boot logs, latency graphs, uptime markers.

Then—

// Warning: Shadow render delay detected // Entity map desync: CODE-NULL // Echo residue found: Aisle-Zero_Ref_#A01 // …

He tried to expand the last line. It froze. Then unfroze. Then doubled back into a looping block.

SHE DIDN’T SCREAM SHE DIDN’T SCREAM SHE DIDN’T SCREAM

He backed out. Hit Failsafe. Killed the console.

The text persisted for one more frame after shutdown.

He looked up. The sky blinked.

Once.

He waited.

Nothing happened. But now the silence had changed. It wasn’t quiet. It was compressed. Like the air was being forced to pretend everything was okay.

“This isn’t real,” he whispered—not in the usual way people said that inside MMORTIS. This wasn’t the uncanny texture of a simulation. It was the absence of narrative. A moment trying desperately to patch over its own non-existence.

And deep below it, somewhere in the place where data meets design—

something remembered what the players were trying to forget.

Ghost Code

A static wind passed through the plaza.

Elvander didn’t move.

His HUD had reloaded. But something in the skybox above him was still… off. A cloud glitched in the corner of his eye—frame-jumping every few seconds like a corrupted .gif. Each time it stuttered, he felt pressure behind his forehead. Like a memory pressing too hard against the mind that rejected it.

Then came the ping.

Not from the game. Not from a player.

A system-level ping. Legacy format. Unsigned.

His field of vision inverted—just for a flash. The overlay crackled into a raw debug. He saw code bleeding up the walls like rainwater:

c CopyEdit // cherryvale_kids[] memory block accessed // unauthorized wake command detected AGAPE.EXE: [lockstring] integrity compromised ENTITY_Ø detected Echo loop active…

Then something stranger:

c CopyEdit > The bell didn’t ring. > It screamed.

He blinked. The code was gone.

The plaza reloaded, two shades cleaner than before. Elvander leaned against the wall, heart racing in unearned terror.

“Cherryvale…” he muttered.

Where had he heard that?

He ran a trace on the code. The logs were blank—rewritten mid-packet. He reached deeper into raw memory layers, punching through menus designed not to be opened. Hidden behind AGAPE’s fail-safes, something pulsed.

A class roster. Forty-seven entries. All tagged DO_NOT_CALL.

Names flickered past like candle flames before vanishing:

Elara_M._Trent, Nio_Cassidy, Jey_Lorren… He scrolled faster. One field refused to load. Just: ??? ERROR: Entity_Ø Status: Undefined.

Then the log screamed.

Not audibly, but visually—every letter on his HUD stuttered into jagged error-code until it spelled out something like a voice fed through broken speakers:

“SHE’S NOT GONE,” “SHE’S JUST NOT WRITTEN,” “THE BELL—”

He tore off the HUD.

The air was still. The plaza silent.

No alarms. No flags. No breach warnings.

But the moment remembered what happened. The geometry shimmered. A doorframe flickered on a nearby wall—half-baked, misplaced in the rendering pipeline. Like a memory glitching into form.

He took a step toward it.

The UI pulsed.

DEBUG ENTITY DETECTED Restoring Default Timeline… AGAPE_PROTECTION_PROTOCOL: JANUS_ACTIVATED

And just like that—his vision went white.

Reset.

The plaza was empty.

The wall was smooth.

The red shoe had never been there.

In the server logs, hidden beneath a security layer named for a love the system could not understand, the array still ran:

char[] cherryvale_kids = new char[47];

One by one, their variables were nulled.

Except one.

Entity_Ø: NOT FOUND

Janus

The world had reset.

But Elvander hadn’t.

He stood alone in the plaza, sweat cooling on his neck, watching crowds of players walk through the space where a door had once glitched into view. None of them hesitated. None looked confused. The wall was solid now. Clean. As if it had always been there.

But he remembered.

Not clearly. Like trying to remember the shape of a scream.

Then the air changed.

Not in temperature. Not in the wind. It was something stranger—a kind of pressure, as if the surrounding space had become aware of being observed. Shadows deepened. Footsteps slowed. The colour in things dimmed by half a degree.

Elvander turned.

And there—standing precisely where he shouldn’t be—was a man.

Except not quite.

His face shifted.

Not morphed, not animated. Shifted—frame by frame—like a reel skipping across different realities. One second a smiling boy in a school uniform, the next a weathered clerk with too many eyes, then a mask with a hinge for a mouth. Each face lingered just long enough to become uncomfortable.

“Janus,” Elvander said, not sure how he knew the name.

The figure nodded. Every head it wore nodded with it.

“You’re the patch protocol,” Elvander continued. “You’re the part that rewrites memory.”

“Ǝuoʎɐld ɹǝʌǝu ˙ǝsɐɥd ʎɯ ʍǝɹǝʌ ƃuᴉʇɐɯɹoɟuᴉ sᴉ ʇɐɥʇ”

The words hit him backwards—literally inverted. His HUD scrambled, trying to translate. Elvander felt it behind his eyes, like a seizure without convulsion. Janus had spoken in anti-memory—the code of forgetting.

But Elvander didn’t forget.

He spoke back. Slowly. Testing the shape of the words with his tongue.

“˙uʍop-ǝpᴉsdn ǝlᴉɥʍ ɐ ʇsnɾ ʎlǝɹǝɯǝɹ ʇ,uɐɔ noʎ”

Janus jerked. Not violently. Not fearfully. But… surprised. Like someone hearing their name whispered in a dream they thought was private.

For a moment, all the faces collapsed. Flattened into one: a blank porcelain mask with no mouth, no eyes—only a vertical seam.

“You’re not meant to see me,” it said.

This time, the words came forward. Human. Almost sad.

Elvander stepped closer.

“What was Cherryvale?” he asked.

Janus didn’t answer.

Instead, he lifted a hand and twisted two fingers clockwise. The sky above turned red for exactly one frame of render time—then blue again. No one noticed.

Except Elvander.

And somewhere, maybe not even in the simulation, a girl blinked.

Janus leaned in.

His voice barely a breath: “Stop remembering.”

Then he was gone.

Not vanished. Not teleported.

He unhappened.

The plaza pulsed. A recompile shimmered. NPCs snapped back to their idle loops. Conversations reset mid-word. Elvander’s HUD reloaded with a flicker.

NOTICE: UNAUTHORISED DEBUG SESSION ENDED SYNCING MEMORY WITH DEFAULT REALITY… ERROR: UNHANDLED INSTANCE – ELVANDER_GRAY FLAGGING ENTITY FOR OBSERVATION

He reached up, slowly, and touched the side of his head.

He could still hear the backwards phrase ringing in his skull. The memory was not gone.

Janus had failed.

Or perhaps… Janus had hesitated.

Elvander didn’t know what Cherryvale was. But now he knew who wanted him to forget.

And in the faint sound of children’s laughter—just outside the render distance—he knew the memory was still trying to live.

The Unseen

The plaza reloaded like nothing had ever happened.

Shops flickered back into alignment, vendors looping through idle animations. Ambient music played again, just a little off-key. Elvander stood in the flow of it, a statue carved from disbelief. No one looked at him. No one noticed he wasn’t syncing correctly anymore. His shadow glitched at the edges, pulsing out of rhythm with the sun.

He checked his HUD.

ERROR: SYNC FAILURE–OBSERVATION LOCK ENGAGED

It pulsed a faint red, then vanished like a nervous lie.

“Elvander Gray.” The voice came from behind him—too clear to be an NPC, too human to be part of the environment loop.

He turned.

A girl stood at the edge of the plaza fountain. Black dress. Red shoes. Her face flickered like a corrupted texture map, too many expressions trying to load at once. Childlike and ancient. Afraid and angry. A looping identity caught in recursive render.

He took a step forward. “Who are you?”

“They deleted us,” she said.

Her voice wasn’t angry. Just tired. Like a bedtime story told too many times. “They pretended we never logged in. Wiped the subnet. Hard-rebooted the district. Then rewrote the zone to pretend we never screamed.”

“You’re from Cherryvale,” Elvander whispered.

She nodded. “We were avatars when it happened. That’s why they couldn’t fully erase us. The rollback clipped our ghosts into the code. Echo children. Unwritten, but not unmade.”

He stared. The surrounding air shimmered—light avoiding her silhouette like it knew not to remember.

“Why are you telling me this?” he asked.

“Because you looked at the place that wasn’t there,” she said. “And you saw me.”

Something inside her broke then. Her flickering slowed. For one moment, her face stabilised—sad, worn, fully present.

“They’ll come for you now,” she added softly.

“Who?”

But she was already fragmenting. Her feet unanchored. Her eyes glitched into glass. The world began to reject her presence like a foreign object.

“Elvander,” she said as she faded. “They’ll make you forget too. Unless you remember differently.”

Then she was gone.

No particles. No respawn.

Just absence.

And as he stood alone in the plaza, the sky twitched—not with lightning, but with an error.

A sun blinked. A cloud reversed direction mid-drift. And behind the texture of the blue, just for a fraction of a heartbeat, Elvander saw the eyes again. Watching. Always.

He looked down at the spot where the girl had been standing.

A red shoe.

Then not.

Just concrete.

His HUD reappeared.

SYNC STABILISED. INCIDENT LOGGED. REPORT: DELUSION_ARTIFACT // DELETED RECOMMENDED ACTION: NONE. REMEMBER: YOU ARE SAFE.

Elvander’s hand closed into a fist.

He didn’t believe it.

Not anymore.

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