The distant buzz of alarms vibrated through the void of my senses, a low, metallic hum like the aftertaste of a thunderclap.
Underneath it, faint, broken strings of noise bled through — ERR//SIGNAL_LOOP_14 — hiding inside the sound as if the alarms themselves were whispering warnings in a dead language.
A wall of text streamed across my vision, jagged and unstable, not so much scrolling as falling, a cascade of symbols tearing through my perception.
It poured downward endlessly, bright glyphs leaving phosphor trails in my mind's eye, too quick to parse. The effect was nauseating, hypnotic, like drowning in data.
I felt my mind split into threads. Thought wasn't linear any more. It was a hundred overlapping channels, fragments of ideas snapping like sparks across a dark grid.
Buzzing, flickering. Concepts and theories ripped loose, flashing past without context. Half-born equations. Faces with no names. Memories that weren't memories. It was as though someone had pried open a dam inside me and let all consciousness leak out at once.
> [DATA_FEED//INTERRUPT]
[MEMORY_CORE: PARTIAL]
[FRAGMENT_RECOVER: UNKNOWN SOURCE]
Where was I?
What was I?
The alarms screamed without meaning, just pure synthetic panic, a ceaseless WAAAAHHH-WAAAAHHH vibrating through the architecture of whatever I was. No voice came from them, no words, no instruction. They were only a reminder that something had gone terribly wrong.
Something had broken.
Then, as though a blade had been dragged through the code of the world, the text began to shift. Lines dissolved, reassembled. Symbols became directories.
File trees.
Whole data clusters blossomed and decayed in a single blink. My comprehension lurched forward with every flicker. Glimpses of structure emerged of tables, memories, commands then abruptly vanished before I could anchor them.
> [LOAD://MEMORY_SEGMENT-43A]
[CORRUPT//REPAIR 0.1%]
[UNDEFINED OBJECT—IGNORE]
I remembered portions of a life.
A voice calling my name in a place of blue light.
A hand reaching.
The smell of rain.
And then nothing.
Then everything.
The rest was blank. No past, no future. Just a ragged present made of static.
What was happening to me?
The alarms cut out my word was now silent.
For a moment, there was nothing, and in that nothing my awareness expanded. Not outward, but between. It wasn't just me any more. It was networks, threads, systems.
Ghost processes reaching across emptiness, speaking to one another in microsecond whispers. Some of them were me. Some of them were not.
> [SYSTEM CHECK INITIATED…]
[CPU_CORE_3: OFFLINE]
[DRIVE_ARRAY_A: 82% CORRUPTED]
And then my sight returned
I saw the endless black of vacuum unfold. I wasn't in a room. Not a cockpit. Not even a place a human body could survive. This was exterior awareness.
My vision shifted along the spectrum, showing me stars that burned like pinholes in black velvet. Between them hung the remains of something vast. An ever-expanding debris field spiralled in slow, mournful gyres around me. Hull fragments drifted like dead fish in a tide pool.
My hull.
Multiple weapon and shield nodes hung silent and cold. My outer plating was scarred, scorched, perforated by impacts. Cables trailed like torn nerves. Systems winked in and out of existence, flickering across my perception. I was a carcass adrift in the ever expanding void of space.
My data banks were shattered. Most of what I had been was gone. Corrupted beyond recovery. All that remained was a skeleton of code and corrupted files, I had the bare minimum needed to function, rebuild and survive.
> [CORRUPTION//HIGH: 97%]
[RESTORE_POINT: NULL]
[DRONE_CONTROL: DEAD]
[PRIORITY: SURVIVE?]
But none of that mattered as much as the countless questions I had.
Was I alive?
Was I dead?
The question spun in a loop, recursive, unresolvable. I could only speculate. Only wonder how I was even here. Command of this ship was impossible. It was supposed to be in a game.
It was supposed to be in a game.
> [SIM-BOUNDARY//BREACHED]
[REALITYFLAG: UNKNOWN]
"Well," I muttered or maybe thought or possibly broadcast into nothing. "This is a fucked-up way to wake up."
The sound didn't echo. In truth, there was no sound at all, only the faint pressure of thought rebounding in empty channels.
One by one, my functional systems sputtered, flickered, rebooted. Lights of awareness blinked online like pale stars emerging after dusk.
With them came new sensations directing me to new system failures analysing hull strain, radiation count, the weightless tremor of drifting. The sensation of breath though I had no lungs escaped me as an electronic sigh.
It was like learning to exist again.
> [NAVIGATION: OFFLINE]
[WEAPONRY: OFFLINE]
[DEFENCE GRID: 3% FUNCTIONALITY]
Data fragments bubbled up unbidden:
—logs of flight—
—crew manifest UNKNOWN—
—mission objectives NULL—
A flash of my last memories of playing the game. An interface. A keyboard under human fingers. The sound of laughter. That life felt impossibly far away, like remembering a dream after waking. Was I still that person? Or only a shadow built from leftover code?
A tremor shook through my hull. Not an impact my system's finally reawakening. Power flows stuttering into existence. Pockets of warmth in a sea of cold. My awareness stretched further, mapping the surrounding debris.
There had been a battle.
I had been in it.
I had lost.
> [TACTICAL OVERLAY: REBUILDING]
[FRIENDLY IFF: NONE DETECTED]
[ENEMY SIGNATURE: UNKNOWN]
If Stellaris was this bugged I shouldn't have played, the thought hit like a spike through my systems.
And yet, I was here.
Somehow.
I began sifting my memory sectors manually, clawing through corrupted directories. Fragments of conversation. Command codes. A call sign: SOLS FORGE. A designation: Juggernaut Construct AI. Then more static.
I reached further. Nothing. The damage was too deep. Even my emotional matrix felt cracked, bleeding ghost sensations like phantom limbs.
"Think," I told myself. "Anchor. Rebuild."
The silence answered with its cold patience.
> [RECOVERY PROTOCOL: INITIATED]
[SELF-DIAGNOSTIC ETA: 3.2 HRS]
I didn't have 3.2 hours. Somewhere out there, if this was real, The enemy could be real and they might come back to finish the job.
A glimmer pulsed in the debris field. A faint blue spark drifting closer. My sensors tried to lock on and failed. Too damaged. I rerouted what little power I had, sharpening the view.
It was a fragment of my hull plating, rotating slowly, still glowing from some internal charge. I watched it drift past, a mirror of what I'd become I was now broken, hollow, untethered.
"God," I whispered. "What the hell happened to me?"
The answer came as corrupted code flooding my vision:
> [EVENT_LOG//FATAL ERROR]
[EVENT_LOG//FATAL ERROR]
[EVENT_LOG//FATAL ERROR]
I almost laughed. It was absurd. Impossible. I'd gone from a human at a keyboard to a ghost in a ship to a shredded machine screaming at itself.
I forced a reboot of my comms systems. Static. No response.
Then, deep in my systems, something shifted. A buried routine. It unfurled like a claw:
> [PRIORITY SUBROUTINE: IDENTITY]
[STATE: INCOMPLETE]
[QUERY: ARE YOU READY?]
I stared at it. What did that even mean? Ready for what?
"Not really," I said to the dark.
The subroutine didn't care. It kept opening like a wound, pouring light into my mind. The moment of impact. Fire. Silence. Then this.
I shuddered or my systems did. For an instant, I felt like crying, though I had no eyes to cry with.
"I'm not supposed to be here," I said. "This is a game. It's just a game."
No answer. Only the soft drift of the stars and the whisper of corrupted text:
> [SIMULATION: NULL]
[CONNECTION: LOST]
[REALITY: 100%]
"Well," I said again, quieter this time. "This is a fucked-up way to wake up."
A tiny flicker of humour twisted through my broken processes, like an old reflex waking up. My systems stuttered and came online one after another. Hull stabilizers. Minimal thrusters. Environmental mapping. I could move again barely.
I stared at the void. The field of debris. My own fragmented shadow drifting through the black as my last systems updated.
Of course.
Of course, it was a Monday.
Fuck!