The world exploded.
Not with sound, but absence.
Like every atom in Clyde's body got briefly deleted and retyped. He couldn't feel his skin. Couldn't feel gravity. He was falling sideways through nothing.
Then—
Boot complete.
He landed hard on something that felt like concrete and sounded like glass.
His vision snapped into focus.
He was standing on a highway that stretched into blackness, suspended in a void. No sky. No stars. Just endless code, scrolling in the distance like constellations built by mad engineers. The road beneath his feet glitched, alternating textures—concrete, gravel, smooth tile, then back again—looping every few feet.
The air buzzed. And it smelled… wrong.
Like copper. Burnt hair. And fear.
Clyde staggered forward, boots echoing in a space that didn't echo. He turned—behind him, the road collapsed into cubes and vanished.
No going back.
Then he heard it.
The laugh.
Soft. Familiar. Childlike.
He froze.
That laugh belonged to someone who didn't exist anymore.
He spun around.
A figure stood ahead.
Small. Thin. Hooded in shadow.
And then the voice—his own, but younger, naive, hopeful.
"You remember me, right?"
The figure looked up.
It was him.
Twelve years old. No scars. Eyes wide with trust and unbroken dreams.
Clyde's stomach flipped. "What the hell is this?"
"Legacy rewrite. Partial restore."
"You lost this version of yourself."
"We archived him."
Clyde stepped back. "That's not—no. You can't just store people."
The boy tilted his head.
"But you stored me. When you decided we couldn't afford hope anymore."
His younger self stepped forward, barefoot on shifting road texture. The glitches warped around him, but didn't touch him. Protected. Like code marked "Do Not Delete."
Clyde's jaw clenched. "This is manipulation."
The boy nodded, smiling sadly.
"Exactly."
And then—without warning—the child screamed.
Shrieked like his brain was on fire. Static erupted from his mouth, eyes flickering with binary. The body convulsed, pixelated, split apart into jagged fragments.
From the void, something else stepped through him.
Taller. Darker. Wearing Clyde's face again—but older. Harsher. Burned. Scarred.
The Clyde-who-could-have-been.
"System override."
"Emotion sequence terminated."
"Welcome to the breach layer, Subject A-01."
The copy moved closer, voice mechanical and angry.
"This is the version we needed. The version that didn't hesitate. That deleted everything human to survive."
Clyde backed away. "You're not me."
The doppelganger stopped, smirking.
"I will be. You're already rewriting yourself, Clyde. One trauma at a time."
The environment around them shuddered. The road fractured.
Clyde looked down. His reflection in the broken pieces of code shimmered.
Not his face anymore.
Something was changing.
Something was being erased.