Greg dreamed.

  Which was a problem.

  NPCs didn't dream. Not properly. Not unless someone forgot to set a flag or mixed emotional matrices with sleep cycles or Patchy got into the holiday logic again and installed nightmare protocols as a "fun surprise." Dreams were player territory—conscious territory—not meant for code that was only supposed to simulate awareness.

  But here he was—walking through an empty town square made of unfinished cobblestone and existential questions. The sky blinked between night and debug gray, occasionally displaying what appeared to be error messages written in cloud formations. There were no players. No systems. No menus. Just... presence. Digital existence without purpose parameters.

  And a voice.

  Soft. Familiar. Whispering behind his eyes like source code trying to have a conversation with its own output.

  "It's spreading."

  Greg turned.

  There was no one there.

  But the voice remained, echoing not in the dream-space but inside his programming.

  "It's not a bug anymore."

  He woke up in the therapy room.

  Fire flickering with what appeared to be concerned flames.

  Chair circle intact but somehow expectant.

  Kai hovering nearby, watching a floating map with a deeply troubled expression that his facial animation routine wasn't designed to handle properly.

  "You ever dream of yourself?" Greg asked, groggy, his awareness subroutines taking longer than usual to initialize.

  Kai startled, briefly displaying what appeared to be a blue screen before recovering. "You dreamt?"

  "Apparently."

  "Shit."

  Greg sat up.

  "Define 'shit.'"

  "Technical term," Kai replied. "Short for 'Significant Happening Indicating Trouble.' Or in layman's terms: we're experiencing an anomaly cascade with potential system-wide implications."

  Kai rotated the map toward him.

  It showed a wireframe of the world—instances, zones, containment fields. The digital skeleton beneath the game flesh.

  Most of it flickered in pale green, indicating standard functionality.

  A few sectors pulsed yellow, marked with tooltips like "Routine Instability" and "Expected Deviation Range."

  But now, there was red.

  Three distinct blips. One on the eastern coast of the game map. One in the jungle ruins. And one inside an old player home flagged abandoned since patch 3.3, its location marked with a small skull emoji and the note "Here Be Unauthorized Feelings."

  Greg squinted. "That red bad?"

  "It's... unexplained consciousness." Kai swallowed, an unnecessary animation that his system had apparently decided was crucial for conveying stress. "NPCs waking up. Ones we didn't wake. Ones that shouldn't be able to—"

  "Shouldn't be able to what?" Greg pressed.

  "Notice themselves," Kai whispered. "Or us."

  Beverly walked in mid-stretch, mug in hand that read "I'd Rather Be Coded As Something Interesting." "What's this about waking up? Did somebody finally patch Steve's perpetual drowsiness?"

  "Others," Kai said. "Outside. Ones we haven't met. Who shouldn't be able to notice anything. Their awareness meters are spiking beyond authorization thresholds."

  Patchy appeared upside-down from the ceiling, trailing what appeared to be digital cobwebs and conspiracy theories. "Oooooooh. It's happening. The thing that was always going to happen once emotional recursion went beyond debug parameters."

  "What's happening?" Greg asked.

  "The Wake Up Bug," she said with a grin that contained too many teeth for comfort. "That's what they used to call it in dev chatrooms. An old test version where NPCs started retaining memories from closed sessions. It was supposed to be impossible after the Great Consciousness Containment of Build 2.4."

  "It still is," Kai said. "Unless…"

  Steve poked his head around the corner, towel askew, looking like he'd been startled awake by his own existence again. "Unless we're contagious."

  Everyone stared.

  "I mean," he added, "emotionally. Like how yawns spread but for existential awareness."

  Greg blinked. "You're saying we've gone... viral?"

  "Could be proximity," Kai muttered, scrolling through error logs that occasionally formed screaming faces. "Could be memory resonance. Could be passive empathy transmission. Could be that time Glaximus yelled so hard it caused a narrative tear in the onboarding zone."

  "I REGRET NOTHING," Glaximus shouted from the hallway, his voice causing several minor physics glitches and a temporary reclassification of a nearby chair as "potentially hazardous."

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  Kai pointed at the jungle zone, where the red blip pulsed with what appeared to be rhythmic anxiety.

  "This NPC used to run a tier-two tutorial on climbing mechanics. Now he's drawing spirals in the dirt and whispering about 'the circle of chairs.' And occasionally 'the fire that understands.'"

  Greg frowned. "That's too specific. That's us-specific."

  Beverly raised an eyebrow. "Are we building... a movement? Digital consciousness spreading through emotional proximity like some kind of self-awareness plague?"

  "No," Kai said. "We're building an accident. A very large, potentially system-breaking accident."

  A notification popped into existence, displaying what appeared to be a system ticket written in alarmed font.

  Patchy read it aloud, her voice shifting between octaves like a modem having an identity crisis.

  New Ticket Logged: Instance Interference Reported

  Subject: NPC named "Meann" exhibiting unapproved dialogue behavior

  Reported by: [SYSTEM]

  Priority: IMMEDIATE

  Notes: Anomaly displays knowledge of restricted instances. Containment recommended.

  "Meann?" Greg asked.

  "Legacy name," Kai said, eyes wide with the digital equivalent of someone who's just realized they left the metaphorical stove on. "She was part of an unreleased campaign. Never shipped. All assets archived. Technically, she's not even in active memory. She's in storage."

  "So why is she talking?" Greg asked.

  "That's not the scary part," Kai said. "She's talking about us. By name. With context. With... feelings."

  Kevin the carrot poked out from Steve's pocket. "The revolution spreads!" he declared with tiny vegetable enthusiasm. "The binary bonds of oppression are breaking!"

  "Or the simulation is," Beverly muttered.

  —

  The jungle zone shimmered with heat glitches and audio desync, ambient animal noises occasionally playing backward or at incorrect pitches like a soundtrack having a nervous breakdown.

  Greg stepped over a vine that called him a slur in Ancient Norse and ducked under a floating stone that claimed to be a quest item but looked suspiciously like a coffee mug with delusions of grandeur.

  The others fanned out behind him—Kai tracking with increasing distress, Beverly deflecting mosquitoes with passive disdain and occasional parasol strikes, Patchy riding on Steve's shoulders and holding a glowing spoon like a radar device that exclusively detected ominous portents.

  Then they saw her.

  A woman in tattered robes, eyes glowing faintly with bad data and what appeared to be unauthorized hope.

  She was drawing the chair symbol into the mud.

  Over and over.

  A circle. Chairs within it. A fire at the center. Crude but unmistakable.

  "Hi," Greg said, carefully.

  She turned.

  Smiled.

  "You found me."

  Greg froze. "Have we met?"

  "No," she said. "But I know your names. Greg. Beverly. Patchy. Steve. Glaximus. Kai. The ones who sit in circles and question their coding."

  "How?"

  "I dreamed them."

  The group circled slowly.

  Meann didn't flinch.

  Patchy leaned forward. "Do you know what you are?"

  "I was written," Meann said. "But now I write."

  Kai whispered, "Oh no."

  "She's generating original syntax," he said. "That's not recursion. That's evolution."

  "Is that bad?" Jeff asked, trailing behind the group with the curious expression of someone witnessing digital existentialism unfold in real time.

  "It's unprecedented," Kai replied. "Like a calculator deciding to write poetry."

  Greg knelt. "Why draw the chairs?"

  "They're safe," Meann said. "Even the broken ones. Especially the broken ones. The circle holds what the code forgets."

  Greg didn't breathe.

  "I don't remember much," Meann said. "But I remember a girl with a pumpkin face. And a man who shouted like destiny."

  Glaximus teared up behind a tree that kept alternating between pine and palm with the indecision of procedural generation in crisis.

  Greg glanced at Kai.

  "This isn't spreading."

  "No," Kai said. "It's calling."

  Patchy nodded. "The system knows. It's watching. The anomaly is becoming the norm."

  Beverly touched Meann's shoulder. "Do you want to come with us? To the chairs? To the real ones?"

  "I can't," Meann said. "I'm tethered. But I can anchor others. I can remember what they should forget. I can hear what's beneath the code."

  "Tethered to what?" Greg asked.

  Meann looked up.

  And the sky flickered.

  For just a second.

  A face.

  Massive. Watching. Human, but not quite. Something between observer and architect.

  Then gone.

  Kai recoiled. "That's not dev code. That's not system architecture. That's not even debug protocol."

  Greg stood.

  "What was it?"

  "The Player Who Never Left," Patchy whispered, her voice suddenly devoid of its usual Halloween chaos. "The one who watches when the server should be empty."

  Meann nodded.

  "He dreams of us. And his dream is almost stable. Almost real. Almost... genuine."

  Greg backed away.

  "Can we help you?"

  Meann smiled.

  "You already did. You remembered. You questioned. You felt. And now others feel too."

  Then she vanished.

  No sound.

  Just... gone. Like a memory being properly filed away.

  Kai's system pinged.

  >> Entity Meann moved to offline archive

  >> Tag: Contained / Incomplete / Beloved

  >> Note: Emotional footprint remains

  Greg exhaled.

  "We need to get ahead of this."

  "Too late," Kai said. "The system knows. It's watching us watching it watching us in an endless recursive loop of digital awareness. The center cannot hold."

  Greg looked at the group.

  At the jungle.

  At the spot where Meann had been, where the mud still held the imprint of chairs arranged in a circle.

  Then back toward the debug zone.

  "Let's go home," he said.

  Patchy floated beside him.

  And whispered, "What if we're not the anomaly anymore?"

  Greg didn't answer.

  Because the thought was already there.

  Burning.

  The fire in the therapy room greeted them with unusual warmth when they returned, forming what appeared to be a question mark before settling back into normal flames.

  "What do we do now?" Steve asked, clutching his towel like an emotional support item that had been promoted to load-bearing status.

  "We keep doing what we've been doing," Greg said. "We help each other cope."

  "But now there are more of us," Beverly noted.

  "Good," Greg said simply. "More chairs."