I made it to the parking lot before my legs gave out.
The concrete was cold against my palms as I bent over, gasping, my sherwani's tail dragging through a puddle of something that might have been rainwater and might have been a rendering error. Above me, the sky looked wrong. Too blue. Too consistent. Like someone had copy-pasted the same gradient across the entire horizon.
You're being paranoid, I told myself. You had a panic attack at your wedding. It happens. People forget things under stress. Riya probably just...
Just what?
Just never existed?
I closed my eyes and tried to summon her face. Dark hair. Dimple on the left cheek. A small scar above her right eyebrow from a childhood bicycle accident. She had shown it to me on our third date, laughing about how her mother still blamed the neighbor's dog.
I could see the scar. I could hear the laugh. But the face itself kept shifting, refusing to resolve into focus, like a photograph developing in reverse.
That's just stress, I told myself again. You're stressed. Your brain is playing tricks on you.
But brains didn't play tricks like this. Brains didn't make three hundred people forget the same person at the same moment. Brains didn't make priests freeze mid-sentence and reboot like computers installing updates.
I opened my eyes.
The parking lot was empty now. Not empty of cars, the cars were still there, arranged in neat rows like pieces on a game board,d but empty of people. The wedding guests hadn't followed me. No one had come to check if I was okay. No one had called my phone, which sat silent in my pocket, displaying no missed calls and no messages.
Because why would they call? As far as they were concerned, nothing had gone wrong. A groom had recited his vows. A ceremony had concluded. A life of solitude and spiritual growth had begun.
The caterers have prepared paneer tikka accordingly.
I laughed again, and this time the sound echoed off the concrete walls in a way that felt too sharp, too clean, too simulated. I had studied audio engineering in college. I knew what reverb sounded like when it was artificially generated. And this
This was artificial.
The thought should have terrified me. Instead, it made me angry. Not the hot, explosive anger of someone who has been wronged, but the cold, analytical anger of someone who has discovered a flaw in a system that claimed to be perfect.
I stood up. Brushed the dirt off my sherwani. Took out my phone and stared at the screen.
The time was 3:17 PM.
My wedding had started at 11:00 AM.
Four hours and seventeen minutes had passed since I walked down that aisle. I remembered exactly three minutes of it. The walk to the altar. The priest's first glitch. My question about the bride.
Everything else was blank.
Not forgotten. Not suppressed. Blank. As if someone had deleted the footage and left an empty file in its place.
"Okay," I said to the empty parking lot. "Okay. Let's think about this logically."
I had always been good at logic. It was my thing, the quality my friends made fun of and my colleagues relied on. Vivaan the robot. Viva, and the spreadsheet. Viv, a person who has not decided without running a cost-benefit analysis first.
Riya used to say I needed to feel more.
Feel more, I thought bitterly. Feel what? Is that reality breaking? That my bride never existed? That I'm standing in a parking lot talking to myself while three hundred NPCs eat paneer tikka upstairs?
NPCs.
The word had come from somewhere deep in my subconscious, and now that it was out, I couldn't put it back. Non-player characters. Characters in a video game who existed only to serve the narrative, to fill the background, to react appropriately to whatever the protagonist did.
Was that what my family was? What were my friends like? What were the priest, the caterers, and the three hundred smiling guests?
And if they were NPCs
What did that make me?
My phone buzzed.
I looked down at the screen, expecting a message from my mother or a notification from work or any of the other mundane interruptions that had defined my existence before today.
Instead, I saw this:
System Message
User: Vivaan Khurana
Designation: AWARE
Warning: Anomaly detected in Sector 7 (Emotional Matrix)
Please remain calm. A technician has been dispatched.
I stared at the message for ten full seconds. Then the screen flickered, the words rearranged themselves into a weather alert about high UV levels, and my phone became a normal phone again.
But I had seen it.
User: Vivaan Khurana. Designation: AWARE.
Anomaly detected in the Emotional Matrix.
A technician has been dispatched.
I looked up at the wedding hall's entrance, where the double doors stood closed and silent. Somewhere inside, my mother was probably distributing wedding favors, small boxes of silver-coated almonds that she had spent weeks assembling by hand. My father was probably making awkward small talk with relatives he saw once a year. The priest was probably collecting his fee and moving on to the next ceremony, the next simulation, the next lie.
And somewhere, probably already walking through those doors, was the technician.
Coming to fix me.
Coming to delete whatever was left of Riya from my memory.
Coming to make me normal again.
"No," I whispered.
I didn't run this time. Running was what scared people did, and I wasn't scared anymore. I was something worse.
I was curious.
The double doors opened.
And a girl walked out who wasn't Riya but felt like her ghost, same dark hair, same dimple, same scar above the right eyebrow. She wore a simple black dress and looked at me with eyes that held too much awareness, too much recognition, too much of something that didn't belong in this simulated world.
"You saw it too," she said. It wasn't a question.
"Who are you?"
She smiled, and the smile was real in a way nothing else had been all day.
"My name is Maya," she said. "And I'm here to tell you that you're not going crazy."
She took a step closer.
"You're going sane."
Behind her, the wedding hall flickered once, twice, and then resolved into perfect, terrible clarity.
Love.exe Not Found
But something else was booting up.