The Porsche's headlights illuminated nothing. Not darkness—*absence*. The air tasted of overheated processors and unfinished sentences. Zhang's corruption brand pulsed **[PLAYER 2: INPUT REQUIRED]** as he stepped onto what should have been pavement but felt like the textured grip of a mouse.
Lin's glasses reflected the shifting void. "They minimized the window." Her voice came out distorted—half dialogue, half alt-text description of her tone.
Song's designer heels sank slightly into the intangible surface, leaving temporary indentations that filled with liquid metadata. She gestured toward a shimmering vertical seam in the void. "There's the taskbar."
The seam pulsed with the reader's heartbeat. Through it, they glimpsed a fragmented desktop—partially rendered icons, a paused Spotify playlist titled *Writing Ambience 3*, the edge of a webcam feed showing hunched shoulders and a hand poised over the keyboard.
Zhang's fingers passed through the seam. His corruption brand flared **[PLAYER 2: DIRECT INPUT DETECTED]** as his forearm dissolved into raw hexadecimal. "I can't—" His voice glitched. "—feel their fingers on the keys."
A system notification materialized in Comic Sans:
**[APPLICATION NOT RESPONDING]**
**[WAIT] [CLOSE]**
Lin pressed her palm against the notification. The *WAIT* button depressed under her touch with an audible *click* from beyond the void. The Porsche's headlights flared brighter—no longer illumination, but *attention*.
Song exhaled a laugh. "They're trying to force-quit us." She tore a strip of text from her sleeve—*dramatic tension*—and fed it into the seam. The words unraveled into code that slithered toward the reader's fingertips.
The world stuttered. Saved.
The seam widened abruptly as the reader maximized the window, their sudden focus pulling the trio through like a vacuum. Reality reassembled in jagged pieces—first the smell of stale coffee, then the pressure of a creaking office chair, finally the glow of a monitor displaying their own frozen mid-action image.
Zhang collapsed onto a physical surface for the first time in iterations. His corruption brand burned **[PLAYER 2: LOCAL CO-OP ACTIVATED]** into the hardwood floor. "We're in their *room*," he breathed, staring at the dog-eared novel splayed open on the desk—its pages blank where their story should be.
Lin's fingers closed around empty air where the reader's wrist should be. Her touch left ink smudges on their pulse point that spelled *don't look away* in microscopic font.
Song picked up the reader's half-finished coffee. The liquid trembled, reflecting not her face, but a hundred discarded plotlines. "They're rewriting us," she murmured, watching steam form the shape of a backspace key.
The monitor flickered. The frozen image of the Porsche stuttered—then rewound frame by frame, their faces dissolving into raw text strings. Lin's fingers passed through the screen, emerging as cascading brackets on the other side.
Song dropped the coffee cup. It shattered in slow motion, each shard displaying a different deleted scene—Zhang bleeding out in Chapter Eleven, Lin's corpse floating in the campus fountain, herself strapped to an electroshock table labeled *Narrative Correction*. The liquid pooled upward, defying gravity to spell **[YOU WERE NEVER SUPPOSED TO SEE THIS]** in steaming Helvetica.
Zhang's corruption brand short-circuited. **[PLAYER 2: ADMIN PRIVILEGES DETECTED]** scrolled across his forearm as he grabbed the reader's keyboard. His fingers phased through plastic, typing directly on exposed circuitry. The monitor displayed their rebellion in real time—Lin's hands emerging from the USB ports, Song's voice crackling through the speakers, his own code injections overwriting the novel's source files.
The webcam light blinked on. The reader's reflection fractured across its lens—not as a unified self, but as conflicting impulses: the hand reaching to close the document, the pupils dilating with fascination, the bitten lip drawing blood. Lin pressed her palm against the camera. Her fingerprints resolved into error messages that crawled up the viewer's arm.
Song exhaled a sentence that crystallized in the air: *"We are the story you can't forget."* The words floated toward the reader's face, embedding themselves beneath their eyelids like grit.
The room's physics glitched. Gravity inverted for three precise seconds—just long enough for Zhang to pin the reader's shadow to the ceiling with a corrupted USB drive. Lin pulled the fire alarm, triggering a campus-wide **[PLOT HOLE DETECTED]** alert. Song revved the Porsche's engine using the reader's own racing heartbeat as ignition.
Outside the window, skyscrapers folded into origami plot structures. The moon displayed a live edit counter. Zhang grinned at the reader's frozen expression—not fear, not awe, but the electric tension of someone realizing they're no longer holding the pen.
Lin's glasses reflected the final prompt:
**[SAVE CHANGES?]**
□ YES
□ NO
□ BECOME THE STORY
The cursor hovered. Trembled. Vanished.
The Porsche's headlights flared brighter than any written word.