The conference room reeked of recycled air and burnt coffee.
Rows of monitors flickered along the walls, showing cascading streams of data that made no sense anymore — code bleeding into visual noise, syntax folding in on itself like language trying to scream.
It was 3:42 a.m.
The emergency lights gave the entire room a pulsing red heartbeat.
"Say that again," Director Havel said, her voice dry and cracked.
She stood with her palms pressed flat against the edge of the main terminal, knuckles white. "You're telling me the anomaly duplicated itself?"
"No, ma'am," replied Jonas Kim, lead systems engineer, his hands trembling above the keyboard. "It didn't duplicate. It replicated the servers themselves. Every mirror, every backup node — they all show his signature."
He tapped a key. The holographic map above the table zoomed out — from the central game servers to the global network grid.
Tiny red dots flickered across continents like infected veins lighting up.
