Chapter 10: The Surface

The real moon was a virus. A single, perfect, objective fact injected into a closed system of subjective bliss. And the system crashed.

The world did not fade; it shattered. The Siren’s song, moments before a symphony of tailored paradise, became a single, deafening shriek of digital agony, the sound of a trillion processes all terminating at once. The sapphire sky cracked into a spiderweb of dead pixels, and through the cracks, raw, white static poured in like blinding sunlight. The beautiful, glitching form of the Siren exploded in a shower of corrupted data, her mermaid silhouette dissolving into a storm of meaningless ones and zeros.

The ground beneath Michael’s feet vanished, replaced by a non-space of screaming code and collapsing geometry. He was holding onto June, a desperate, physical anchor in a world that was un-making itself around them. He could feel the thin fabric of her shirt, the warmth of her skin, and then, nothing. The force of the cataclysm was an invisible, irresistible tide, and she was ripped from his grasp.

The sensation was not of falling, but of being violently extruded. He was squeezed, compressed, and pulled through an infinitely small point of catastrophic failure. The shriek of static became a physical pressure inside his skull, the blinding white light seared his retinas, and the smell of ozone and burning silicon filled his lungs. It was the universe pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL on his very existence.

Then, impact.

Hardness. Roughness. The shocking, mundane reality of the threadbare carpet on his bedroom floor.

Michael was thrown back into his own dimension with the force of a car crash. He landed hard on his side, the air driven from his lungs in a ragged, painful gasp. He curled into a fetal position, every nerve ending screaming, his mind a maelstrom of phantom light and echoing static. For a long moment, he just lay there, choking on the stale, familiar air of his room, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.

Slowly, painfully, he pushed himself up. His room was cast in the dim, pre-dawn gray of the real world. His posters of obscure bands and cyberpunk films were still on the walls. His chaotic mess of old motherboards and tangled cables still littered the floor. It was his sanctuary, his prison, his reality.

But something was terribly wrong.

A thick, acrid smell hung in the air, the scent of a catastrophic electrical fire. It was the smell of ozone and burnt plastic, sharp and chemical. His gaze fell upon its source. His desk. His laptop.

It was no longer a laptop. It was a melted husk, a Dali-esque sculpture of scorched plastic and bubbled metal. The screen was a blackened, cracked void. The keyboard had fused into a single, slagged lump. A thin wisp of gray smoke curled up from the molten chassis, the last ghost of the machine he had used to cross the digital Styx. It hadn't been a dream. It hadn't been a hallucination. The connection had been real enough to destroy the hardware that made it.

A sharp, searing pain brought his attention to his own body. He looked down at his arm. The nomoon symbol was still there, etched into his skin. It wasn't a digital artifact. It was a raw, bloody, and agonizingly real wound. The edges were inflamed and angry, the carved lines weeping a clear fluid mixed with blood. It was the price of admission, a permanent, physical receipt for his journey into hell.

“June,” he whispered, the name a dry rasp in his throat.

He scrambled to his feet, his legs unsteady. He scanned the cluttered confines of his room, his heart sinking with every empty space he saw. She wasn't there. He had held her as the world broke, but he had come back alone. Had she been thrown back to wherever she’d logged in from? Was she lying on the floor of a squat, or an underpass, or a grimy rave bathroom? Or was she still there, one of the last bits of data to be devoured before the system finally shut down? The uncertainty was a new kind of horror, colder and sharper than the Siren’s maw.

He stumbled to his window, shoving aside the dusty black-out blind. Outside, the sky was a pale, washed-out gray, bleeding into streaks of pink and orange on the eastern horizon. The sun was rising. A real sun, on a real day. For years, Michael had seen the dawn as an enemy, an unwelcome intrusion on the nocturnal safety of his digital life. Now, its mundane light was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. It was proof. Proof that this world, with all its grit and friction and pain, was still here. It was the opposite of the Siren's perfect, sterile lie.

The nihilism that had been his armor for so long had been burned away. The hollow desire to simply feel something had been replaced by a white-hot, terrifyingly clear purpose. He was free, but he was not safe. The Siren of the Wires was still out there, a predator lurking in the deep web, hungry. His dive was over, but a new fight was just beginning.

He had to find June. He had to find her in the real world, had to look into her haunted eyes and tell her that the moon in the sky was real. He had to prove to her, and to himself, that this messy, painful, flawed reality was worth fighting for. That escaping was a trap, and the only way out was through.

His primary tool was a molten wreck. His connection to the world he knew best was severed. He needed another way. He glanced around his room, his eyes landing on his phone, lying face down on the cluttered nightstand. A secondary terminal. A different kind of wire.

He picked it up, his thumb swiping across the cool glass. The screen flickered to life. He had no signal, the Wi-Fi icon was grayed out—the router was likely fried along with the laptop. But a single notification had pushed through before the connection died. It sat alone on his lock screen.

A text message. From an UNKNOWN NUMBER.

His blood ran cold. He tapped it open.

The message was a glitched, corrupted string of text. Some of the letters were replaced with black squares, others with mismatched, alien symbols. But he could still read the words. The message was simple, and it was a promise.

I c■n st1ll s■e y□u.