The color white usually meant peace. Snow. Clouds. Blank paper.
This white was none of those things. It was the color of a dead channel. It screamed.
Jake Vance didn't feel his body. He felt like he was being pulled through a straw. His atoms were stretching, snapping, and screaming as they were ripped from one reality and pasted into another.
"Hold on!"
He didn't know who yelled it. It sounded like Taranov, but the voice was distorted, slowed down like a warping record.
Then, gravity returned.
It didn't come back gently. It slammed into him like a falling safe.
THUD.
Jake hit something hard and flat. The air left his lungs in a painful wheeze. He rolled over, retching dryly.
He pushed himself up. His hands touched the ground.
It wasn't grass. It wasn't concrete. It wasn't even glass.
It was a grey grid. perfectly flat, extending endlessly in every direction.
"Sound off!" Jake croaked. His throat felt like he had swallowed sandpaper.
"Here," Valentina groaned. She was lying ten feet away, clutching her head. Her flight suit was smoking.
"Alive," Taranov grunted. The big man was on his knees, checking his hands. "I think. My fingers are vibrating."
"Oppenheimer?"
"Fascinating," the physicist whispered. He was standing up, staring at the sky.
There was no sun. Just a flat, ambient light that cast no shadows. The sky was a light grey dome with a faint hexagonal pattern.
"Where are we?" Menzhinsky whimpered, crawling into a ball. "Is this the Gulag? Is this Hell?"
"It's the Clipboard," Oppenheimer said, spinning in a circle. "The Buffer. We are between files."
Jake ignored the physics. He scrambled to his feet, ignoring the dizziness that made the world tilt.
"Yuri!" Jake screamed.
His voice didn't echo. The grey void swallowed the sound instantly.
"Yuri! Son!"
He ran to the spot where they had landed. There was a scorch mark on the grid—a black, jagged burn in the shape of a lightning bolt.
But no boy. No white suit.
"He's gone," Valentina whispered, standing beside him. She put a hand on his shoulder. "Jake... he touched the Source Tree. He burned."
"No," Jake snarled. He shoved her hand away. "He's code. He just moved. He didn't delete."
He looked at his own arm.
The blue, transparent corruption was gone.
In its place was metal.
His right arm, from the shoulder down, was now a sleek, matte-black chrome. It wasn't a prosthetic. It was his arm, transformed. The skin had calcified into hard data.
He flexed his fingers. The metal joints clicked softly. Perfect precision. Zero pain.
"He patched me," Jake realized. "Before he uploaded. He fixed the bug."
"Boss," Taranov warned, pointing at the horizon. "We have a problem."
Jake looked.
The grey horizon was rippling. A massive wall of static was moving toward them. It looked like a tidal wave made of TV snow.
"The Wipe," Oppenheimer shrieked. "The memory clear! We're temporary files in the buffer! If we don't paste into the new server, the system flushes us!"
"Where is the new server?" Valentina yelled. "There's nothing here!"
"We have to render it!" Oppenheimer grabbed his hair. "We need to observe it to make it exist! Quantum mechanics!"
The wall of static was fast. It was dissolving the grid floor as it came.
"Yuri!" Jake yelled at the sky. "If you can hear me, drop the map! Load the level!"
Nothing happened. The static wave roared closer. It was a hundred feet high now.
"He can't hear you," Menzhinsky sobbed.
"He's not dead," Jake said. He raised his chrome arm. He pointed it at the sky. "He's just buffering."
Jake focused. He didn't think about code. He thought about home.
Not the 2025 apartment. That was gone.
He thought about the Moscow he had built. The neon lights. The brutalist towers. The smell of ozone and snow.
"Load," Jake commanded.
The chrome arm hummed. A beam of green light shot from his palm into the grey sky.
ACCESSING...
A voice boomed from the heavens. It wasn't God. It was Yuri.
But it wasn't the voice of a six-year-old boy. It was the voice of a titan. Amplified, echoed, layered.
"INSTALLATION IN PROGRESS," the Sky-Yuri announced. "PLEASE WAIT."
"We can't wait!" Taranov screamed. The static wave was fifty yards away. "We're going to get scrubbed!"
"DOWNLOADING ASSETS," the sky boomed.
Above them, a shape began to form.
It was massive. A floating island of rock and concrete.
"It's dropping!" Valentina grabbed Jake. "Run!"
CRASH.
The world fell on them.
It wasn't a smooth transition. It was a collision.
Trees popped into existence instantly, knocking Taranov over.
A concrete wall materialized out of thin air, missing Oppenheimer by an inch.
Ground—mud, snow, dirt—slammed upward to meet their feet.
The grey grid vanished, replaced by a dense, freezing forest.
The static wave hit the edge of the new forest. It sizzled against the trees, unable to cross the boundary.
Jake fell face-first into the snow.
It was cold. Wet. Real.
He gasped, sucking in air that smelled of pine needles and diesel.
"Status!" Jake yelled, rolling onto his back.
"Solid!" Taranov laughed, punching a tree trunk. His knuckles bled. "I bleed! I'm real!"
"We made it," Valentina breathed, looking up.
The sky wasn't grey anymore. It was a deep, twilight purple. A massive moon hung low on the horizon—too big, too close.
"Where are we?" Menzhinsky asked, brushing snow off his coat. "Siberia?"
Jake stood up. He looked through the trees.
In the distance, he saw lights.
But it wasn't a village.
It was a city.
But it was wrong.
Skyscrapers twisted like corkscrews. Highways looped into the sky like rollercoasters. The architecture was a glitchy mix of Soviet brutalism and American art deco, fused together in a chaotic mashup.
"Procedural generation error," Oppenheimer whispered, awestruck. "The assets got mixed during the transfer. The map is... confused."
"Is it Moscow?" Valentina asked.
"No," Jake said, staring at the impossible skyline. "It's New Moscow. Or Old New York. It's both."
A sound tore through the air.
SCREEEEEE.
It sounded like a hawk, but metallic.
A shadow passed over the moon.
"Drone," Taranov identified instantly, raising his fists instinctively. "High altitude."
"Whose drone?" Jake asked. "We left everyone behind."
"The copy," Oppenheimer said grimly. "We copied the world state, Jake. That means we copied the war."
"But who is fighting it?"
"The NPCs," Oppenheimer said. "Without the Archivists to manage them... the AI factions are running wild."
"WELCOME, USER."
The voice came from Jake's arm.
He looked down. A holographic display had popped up from his chrome wrist.
A small, pixelated face appeared. It was Yuri.
"Yuri?" Jake whispered. "Are you in there?"
The pixel-face flickered.
"I am everywhere, Father," the wrist-Yuri said. "I am the Operating System now. But I am fragmented. My core processing is locked in the Citadel."
"The Citadel?"
The wrist-hologram pointed a tiny arrow toward the twisted city in the distance.
"The Administrator Tower," Yuri explained. "You must reach it. You must perform a manual reboot. Until then, the world is unstable."
"Unstable how?"
The ground shook.
Not an earthquake. A heartbeat.
The snow around them began to float upward. Gravity was fluctuating.
"The physics engine is in beta mode," Yuri said. "Expect bugs."
"Bugs I can handle," Taranov grunted, grabbing a heavy branch to use as a club.
"Also," Yuri added calmly. "I detected a second transfer signal."
Jake froze.
"A second signal? Who else came through?"
"The file signature matches the entity known as Hoover," Yuri said.
"Hoover is dead," Jake said. "I fed him to the train."
"You deleted his avatar," Yuri corrected. "But his corrupted data persisted in the cache. He was copied along with us."
"So he's here," Jake said. He felt the cold metal of his new arm. "And he's broken."
"He has spawned in the West," Yuri said. "He is currently assimilating the local assets."
Jake looked at his team. They were battered, unarmed, and standing in a broken world ruled by glitch-physics.
"We have a mission," Jake said. "We get to the Citadel. We reboot the boy. And we delete the President. Permanently."
"We need weapons," Valentina said.
"Look around," Jake gestured to the floating snow and the twisted trees. "The world is broken. That means the rules are broken."
He walked over to a tree. He punched it with his chrome arm.
CRAFTING MENU AVAILABLE.
A holographic list appeared in the air.
- Wooden Spear
- Club
- Kindling
Jake blinked.
"It's not just a simulation anymore," Jake realized. "It's a survival game."
He selected Wooden Spear.
The tree trunk dissolved. In Jake's hand, a perfectly sharpened spear materialized.
Taranov's eyes went wide.
"Magic," the soldier whispered.
"Mechanics," Jake corrected. He tossed the spear to Taranov. "Gear up. We're going hunting."
They began to march toward the twisted city, leaving footprints in the snow that glowed faintly in the purple moonlight.
The Cold War wasn't over. It had just been patched.