Location: Out of Bounds (The Recycle Bin)
Time: 04:00 AM (Server Time)
“Don’t touch the walls,” Gaz said.
He stood like a glitch given human shape textures popping, edges jittering. His shack clipped halfway through the floor of an abandoned Tube station, wedged deep in the O.O.B, the Out of Bounds.
“Why not?” Tony asked, already reaching toward a flickering brick surface.
“That’s not a wall,” Gaz snapped, smacking Tony’s hand away with a rusted pipe. “That’s a memory leak. You touch that, your left arm turns into a toaster. Or you get hard?deleted. System hates loose data.”
The team crowded inside the shack.
Outside, London was coming apart.
The sky was a sea of FILE NOT FOUND icons drifting like dead stars. The ground had collapsed into an endless grey checkerboard, stretching to the horizon like an unfinished dev map waiting for someone to remember it existed.
“We need back in,” Cameron said, adjusting his staff. “Quarter?finals start in six hours. Miss that window and we’re sold. Grey?slop tier forever.”
“You want out of the Bin?” Gaz laughed. The sound crackled like corrupted audio. “There’s one route. You ride the leak.”
He pointed through the broken wall.
The Shard hung upside down in the void, its tip buried in a roaring vortex of white light. Code spiraled inward like a drain swallowing the world.
“That’s the upload stream,” Gaz said. “Recycled assets get pulled through there, compressed, and spat back into the Core. You catch the stream clean, you’re back topside.”
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
“And if we miss?” Arthur asked, clutching his clipboard like a flotation device.
Gaz shrugged. “You get compressed. Hope you like being a paving stone.”
He paused for a moment
“Once you re-enter,” Gaz said, “the system stops pretending you’re a user.” he continued.
---
The Janitors
They stepped out onto the checkerboard.
“Movement,” Lenny whispered. His Luck stat flickered red.
Three figures emerged from the static fog.
Tall too tall. Wireframe?thin, ten feet high, faces smooth voids. Their movements skipped frames, jerking forward in broken increments like corrupted animations.
[ENTITY: DELETION PROTOCOL]
[STATUS: CLEANING]
“Janitors,” Cameron said quietly. “Not mobs. Not players. System immune response. One touch and you’re wiped.”
“I’m not getting deleted by stick figures,” Tony snapped.
He spun up the Bass?Driver. The vibration hummed, but out here the sound felt thin, swallowed by the void.
The Janitors surged forward. They didn’t strike.
They reached.
Their glowing fingers trailed faint DELETE commands through the air like smoke.
“Arthur! Shield!” Cameron barked.
Arthur stepped up, hesitant, trembling.
A Janitor’s finger brushed his sleeve.
[WARNING: ASSET CORRUPTION]
A perfect square vanished from Arthur’s arm. No blood. No pain. Just empty space, checkerboard sky visible through the missing fabric.
“My suit!” Arthur screamed. “This was a high?vis S?tier rental!”
Something in him snapped.
The paperwork died.
“YOU HAVE NO AUTHORIZATION FOR DELETION!” Arthur roared.
He yanked a heavy?duty stapler from his kit—industrial, ugly, furious. “I AUTHORIZE LETHAL FORCE!”
He charged.
---
Gold Conduction
“Lenny—battery!” Cameron shouted.
A glowing Charge cell arced through the air. Cameron caught it and slammed it into the staff’s socket.
He didn’t toggle Lead.
He didn’t toggle Tungsten.
He pulled out the circuit shard he’d lifted from Gaz’s shack.
[Au — GOLD]
“Gold carries clean logic,” Cameron muttered.
He planted the staff tip into the checkerboard floor.
“Tony,” Cameron yelled. “Crash it. Full output.”
Tony didn’t hesitate.
He brought the Bass?Driver down in a brutal arc.
CRACK—ZAP.
The vibration hit first. The charge followed. Gold carried it clean—pure signal, no noise.
The floor lit up.
A surge of True Logic ripped outward.
The Janitors stuttered.
Their wireframe legs fragmented. Their bodies unraveled into strings of ones and zeros, collapsing into static.
“Move!” Cameron shouted. “Before the system spawns backups!”
---
The Leap
They reached the base of the inverted Shard.
The vortex roared above them—white light, corrupted geometry, discarded assets spiraling upward like a cosmic drain.
“On three!” Cameron yelled.
“Wait!” Arthur shouted, staring at his missing sleeve. “What if I respawn with a different model?”
“Better than being compressed!” Lenny yelled, grabbing him by the collar.
They jumped.
The world stretched.
Their bodies elongated into bands of color. Sound collapsed into a single, piercing tone.
The Bin vanished.
The last thing Cameron saw before black was a system prompt burning into his vision:
[RE?ENTRY DETECTED]
[USER: CAMERON]
[WARNING: SENTINEL OVERRIDE — OBSERVER ACTIVE]
Cameron knew — without knowing how — that this wasn’t a warning.
The system had written him down
