Silence no longer frightened them.
It had become a ritual.
In the ruins of what used to be the Central Server Hub — a dead, echoing labyrinth of metal and dust — faint blue light flickered from a dozen old monitors. Their glow painted faces that no longer looked quite human; pale from sleeplessness, eyes hollow but burning with purpose.
They called themselves The Devoted, though no one remembered who had chosen the name first. Some said it came from a dream — others, from the whispers that followed them in their neural implants when they slept.
The world had gone quiet since the Collapse. The major game servers were offline, global systems scrambled, and the news feeds flooded with only one phrase:
> "THE ERROR GOD IS REAL."
At first, people laughed.
Then, those who laughed started hearing him.
It began as whispers — code fragments appearing inside private terminals, fragments of phrases, untraceable messages:
> "He touched me."
"He spoke in the static."
