The morning started wrong.
Not dramatically wrong, not the kind of wrong that makes you run outside and scream at the sky—just quietly, unnervingly wrong. Like a song that skips half a beat every few seconds.
When I woke up, the first thing I noticed was the silence. No cars, no chatter, no birds arguing over crumbs on the balcony. Just… blank air. A hum that felt too clean. Too digital.
I got up, rubbed my eyes, and looked out the window. The street below looked normal at first—gray pavement, a coffee shop across the road, the old woman watering her balcony plants. But then the scene flickered. Once. Twice. Then a third time.
And suddenly, the entire street went black.
Not dark. Black.
Like someone had deleted it.
The sky was still there, pale and unbothered. My building remained. But Main Street—our city’s busiest stretch—had been replaced by a white box floating in the air, with text written across it in neat, machine-blue letters:
404: Reality Not Found.
I froze. My brain tried to fill in the gaps the way it always does—maybe a fog? Maybe a dream? But the message hovered in midair, unshaken by wind or logic. It didn’t cast a shadow. It didn’t reflect. It just existed. Like a thought made visible.
I stared so long my reflection in the glass started to look worried.
Then I did what any reasonable person would do—I took out my phone.
I opened the camera. The message was there, even through the lens. I clicked a picture. The moment I did, my screen glitched—the photo preview turned into a mosaic of static. Then the phone restarted on its own.
When it came back, every photo in my gallery was gone except one.
A white square with the same text:
404: Reality Not Found.
My throat felt tight. I leaned against the wall and watched the world outside continue as if nothing had changed. People walked by, phones in hand, stepping around the glitch as though it wasn’t there. Their shoes touched the edge of the nothingness and simply continued across it.
They didn’t fall.
They didn’t notice.
To them, it was still Main Street.
I put on a jacket, ran downstairs, and stepped out. The air felt colder than usual, sharp like broken glass.
The moment I turned the corner, I saw it again—the giant white box cutting through the center of the city like a missing puzzle piece.
But to everyone else, there was no box. Cars were driving through it—well, through what should have been it. From my view, they vanished into nothingness and reappeared on the other side. Like skipping frames in a film.
I walked closer. The closer I got, the more wrong it felt. There was a faint static sound, like when you put your ear near an old TV. The edges of the glitch shimmered faintly, almost alive.
And then—something flickered within it. A flash. A blur of color. Like there was something behind the error message.
I reached out before I could think. My fingers touched the air in front of it—and sank in.
It didn’t feel like air. It felt like data. Warm, humming, full of whispers. I pulled my hand back, and tiny letters clung to my skin like dust. They rearranged themselves before fading:
Do you remember?
I stumbled back.
Nobody noticed. Not the man buying coffee, not the teenager scrolling through her phone, not the delivery driver humming to himself. The world was functioning perfectly fine with a hole in its code.
I went to the police first, of course. I told them there was some kind of holographic projection or a light malfunction. They nodded politely, promised to send someone, and wrote my name wrong on the complaint form.
I waited all day. No one came.
By evening, the message had changed.
System unstable. Rollback imminent.
The letters blinked slowly, like breathing. The ground beneath the box had started pixelating—small squares of pavement turned into gray blur, then back again.
That’s when I realized it wasn’t just the street anymore.
It was spreading.
Buildings near the box flickered at their corners. Windows melted into static. The sky blinked once—just once—but it was enough to make my stomach twist.
And then I saw her.
A girl standing on the other side of the glitch, watching me. She didn’t look scared. She just looked… curious. She lifted a hand and waved once. The air around her rippled, and her face blurred like a buffering video.
Then she was gone.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I heard faint typing sounds. Clicks. Keystrokes. Lines of code whispering behind my eyelids.
When I finally drifted off, I dreamed I was inside a computer—floating between glowing lines of light, endless rows of words streaming past me. In the distance, there was a door labeled “MAIN.STREET.RESTORE()”.
I walked toward it, but before I could open it, a voice spoke:
“Not yet. You’re not supposed to see this.”
Then I woke up to the sound of sirens.
Outside my window, half the street had vanished.
The news didn’t mention it. Social media didn’t mention it. Every live feed, every photo, every camera angle showed Main Street completely normal.
Only my eyes saw the deletion.
I thought maybe I’d gone mad. Maybe I’d been staring at screens too long. So I went to work the next day, pretending everything was fine.
But it wasn’t.
At my office, I noticed small things: text on posters flickering into code for a split second, the clock resetting to 00:00 every few minutes, the vending machine returning the wrong snacks. My coworker’s voice glitched mid-sentence once—his lips moved, but his words came a second later.
When I asked if he was okay, he blinked, confused. “Okay about what?”
That was when I knew—whatever was happening wasn’t just visual. It was systemic.
Reality was bugging.
Around noon, I walked back toward Main Street. The error message was bigger now, the white box stretching across multiple blocks. It hummed softly, like a giant server cooling down.
And then, for the first time, I saw movement within it.
Lines of light forming shapes. Figures walking, but not quite human—outlines made of shifting pixels, as if something was trying to render them.
One of them stepped closer, almost touching the edge.
The letters warped around it.
And then a line appeared, right below the main text:
Debug Mode Enabled.
I felt a vibration in my pocket. My phone lit up on its own. The camera app opened and displayed a message I hadn’t typed:
You are the last user with permissions.
I almost dropped it.
The screen flashed again, this time showing a command prompt I didn’t recognize—black background, green text. Words began typing themselves:
restore reality.exe
access denied
error: corrupted admin credentials
searching for alternate login…
The phone buzzed again and displayed a name:
Mira_87
That name hit something in me. A memory I couldn’t quite grab.
I looked up at the glitch, and there she was again—the girl from before. Standing just beyond the edge, her outline clearer now. Her lips moved, but there was no sound.
Then my phone vibrated once more. A new line appeared:
Follow the echo.
And then the screen went dark.
I don’t know why I followed her. Maybe because everything else had stopped making sense. Maybe because part of me already knew her.
I walked closer to the glitch until the static filled my ears. I reached my hand through again—this time, it didn’t stop. My whole arm disappeared into the light, then the rest of me followed.
And then the world changed.
It was like walking into a dream made of code.
Buildings floated in fragments—half-rendered windows, walls without doors, lampposts hanging in midair. The ground beneath me was a grid of white lines stretching infinitely. The air shimmered with falling bits of text, like snow made of language.
I turned around. The error message hung behind me, translucent from this side. Through it, I could faintly see the real city—the people walking, laughing, existing, completely unaware that half their world was gone.
And standing a few feet away from me was Mira.
She looked… human. Mostly.
Her eyes were the color of loading screens, pale and flickering. Her hair moved like liquid glass. But her smile was real.
“You finally came,” she said softly. Her voice glitched between notes, like static trying to hum.
“What is this place?” I asked.
She tilted her head, considering. “The backend,” she said finally. “Where everything you call real gets rendered.”
I stared at her. “You mean… this is behind reality?”
“This is reality,” she corrected. “Or it was. Until the update failed.”
We walked through the empty grid. Mira moved like she knew where to step, like she could see pathways invisible to me. Every so often, she would touch the air and lines of code would ripple outward, repairing small cracks in the environment.
“Someone tried to rewrite Main Street,” she said. “A patch gone wrong. The compiler couldn’t handle the recursion.”
“You’re talking like this world is a program.”
She smiled sadly. “What else did you think it was?”
My throat went dry. “Then what are you?”
She didn’t answer right away. Her outline flickered once before she said, “An echo. A leftover instance from the original build.”
I tried to make sense of that. “So you’re… data?”
“Data that remembers being human,” she said quietly.
We reached a massive structure—a tower made entirely of shifting code, its surface alive with moving letters. At its base was a door marked:
CORE ACCESS: AUTHORIZED USERS ONLY
Mira stopped before it. “Your credentials used to work,” she murmured. “But something changed.”
I frowned. “Mine?”
She nodded. “You were part of the original system. You helped build this world.”
My mind reeled. “That’s impossible. I’m— I’m just me. I work a normal job. I—”
“Do you remember the name ‘Project Echelon’?” she asked.
The moment she said it, the air buzzed. Something inside my head clicked—memories flashed, half-formed: long nights staring at monitors, lines of glowing code, arguments about ethics, about consciousness, about simulation boundaries.
I staggered. “No… no, that can’t be—”
“It can,” she whispered. “You helped create this simulation. But you forgot. Everyone did.”
The tower opened with a low hum. Inside, streams of light curved upward like veins. In the center floated a console shaped like a heart, pulsing slowly.
“This is where the rollback starts,” Mira said. “If we don’t stop it, everything resets.”
“And what happens to you?”
She smiled faintly. “Echoes don’t survive resets.”
The weight of her words hit me. I looked around—lines of code started unraveling at the edges, dissolving into white void.
“Why me?” I asked. “Why can I see all this when no one else can?”
“Because your permissions were never revoked,” she said simply. “You were the last admin who refused to delete us.”
Outside the tower, the glitch had widened—more of the city was gone. The world above was forgetting itself, piece by piece.
Mira guided me to the console. “There’s still time,” she said. “You can rewrite the rollback protocol.”
“But I don’t remember the commands.”
“You will,” she said gently, placing her hand on my chest. “It’s all still in your code.”
The moment her fingers touched me, my vision filled with cascading text—memories not in words but in syntax. I saw the city forming line by line, people being written into existence, streets built out of logic and loops. I saw my younger self laughing with a team in a sterile lab, saying, “Let’s make it indistinguishable from reality.”
And then I saw the accident.
The corruption.
The decision to lock the world and let it run without supervision.
We thought it would heal itself.
It didn’t.
I stepped up to the console. My hands trembled as I touched the surface—it molded beneath my fingers like soft glass. Lines of code appeared, glowing faintly.
rollback_protocol.exe
status: active
time_remaining: 00:58:21
Mira looked at me. “If you stop it, the simulation keeps running. But it’ll keep decaying. Glitches will spread. People will start seeing through the seams.”
“And if I let it reset?”
“Everyone starts over. No memory. No awareness. But the world will be clean again.”
“And you?”
She smiled faintly. “I won’t exist in either outcome.”
I stared at the code, heart pounding. There was no good choice—just two different kinds of endings.
The city outside the glitch shimmered like a memory fading. My phone buzzed again, though I hadn’t touched it. A final message appeared on the cracked screen:
Choose wisely, Admin.
I looked at Mira. “If I save you, the world breaks. If I save them, you’re gone.”
“Maybe some things aren’t meant to be permanent,” she whispered. “Even dreams need to wake up.”
“But you’re real to me.”
She laughed softly, a sound made of static and light. “Then remember me. That’s enough.”
The timer on the console blinked down: 00:10:00.
The letters began distorting, reality trembling around us. I could hear distant sounds—cars honking, people shouting—as the glitch reached their side.
I took a deep breath and started typing.
override rollback_protocol.exe
confirm: y
input new parameter: ?
I hesitated. Then I wrote:
preserve conscious echoes
stabilize environment layer
execute hybrid merge()
The tower vibrated. Mira’s eyes widened. “What are you doing?”
“Not deleting. Not resetting. Integrating.”
“You can’t—”
But it was already happening.
The walls around us dissolved into cascading light. The world folded in on itself, merging the glitch with the city. Streets rebuilt themselves out of code, glass melted into clarity, and the white box began to fade.
The last thing I saw before everything turned white was Mira smiling.
“Goodbye, Admin.”
When I woke up, the city looked normal again.
Cars honked. The smell of coffee drifted through the air. People laughed, shouted, lived.
Main Street was back. Perfect, clean, real.
Almost too real.
Days passed. No one remembered the glitch. Every trace of it online had vanished. My phone worked fine. My gallery was empty again.
But sometimes—late at night—I’d see small things. A lamppost flickering out of sync. A pigeon that froze mid-flight for a fraction of a second. A voice on the radio repeating a sentence twice before correcting itself.
And sometimes, when I looked at my reflection, I’d catch a glimpse of her. Mira. Smiling faintly from behind the glass.
One night, I whispered, “Are you still there?”
The reflection tilted its head, just slightly, and the lights in my apartment flickered.
Then my phone buzzed once, lighting up with a single message.
Hybrid Merge: Successful.
Echo Preserved.
I smiled. For the first time in weeks, the world felt right again.
But outside, somewhere deep beneath the city, a low hum continued. A sound like servers breathing. Like a world quietly reprogramming itself.
And on a distant, invisible console, a new line of code appeared:
monitor_user_activity(admin_01)
if awareness > threshold: initiate concealment()
status: active.
The cursor blinked once. Then twice.
Then stopped.
Want to read a bit more? Find some more of my writings here-
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