The void wasn’t black. It was blisteringly, relentlessly white—a blankness so aggressive it had texture, like skin scrubbed raw with lye. For an instant, Alice floated, weightless and naked, every sense reduced to nothing but the scream of pure signal.

  Then the world snapped into violent motion.

  A river of data—wider than any corridor, deeper than any well—howled beneath her, dragging her down in a torrent of crushed packets and throttled bandwidth. There was no air, no up or down. Just the pull.

  Somewhere in the current, the Rabbit drifted, his porcelain mask bobbing serenely above the maelstrom. He adjusted an invisible cufflink, offered Alice a final bow, and stepped backward into the data stream.

  “Your cooperation has been most illuminating, Miss Kingsley,” he called, voice Dopplering as he vanished into the flow. “I do hope you survive what comes next.” Then nothing—just the click of code and the faintest scent of citrus, gone as quickly as it arrived.

  Alice spun, tumbling end over end through the river, battered by waves of corrupted routines. The air (if it could be called that) was thick with artifacts—broken subroutines, half-rendered error states, glitching UI fragments. Some took the shape of hands, snatching at her legs and arms. Others were faces, stretched and screaming, their mouths wide enough to swallow her whole. She flailed, searching for a purchase, but the flow was absolute. The force of it bent her back, threatening to tear her into fragments. Her mind, already soft from the corridor’s recursive abuse, began to slip—thoughts blinking in and out like dying LEDs.

  Hold on Alice!

  She braced herself, pulling her limbs in tight, and forced her eyes open against the onslaught. Every blink revealed a new HUD. One second, she was in a cockpit, handling a manual override on a failing airlock; the next, she was in her childhood bedroom, the walls throbbing with waves of static and disapproval. It was as if the system was running her whole life in parallel, hunting for a weakness to exploit.

  A face rose from the current, huge and hungry. It looked like her father—a memory she’d tried to patch out years ago—but the eyes were made of spinning code, and the mouth was filled with recursive error messages.

  “User #7749, authentication failed,” it screamed, voice layered a hundred times over.

  The jaws unhinged, and a cloud of jagged packets shot out, aimed straight at her. She twisted hard, muscle memory taking over. Her left hand made the old Threadmancer gesture—index and middle fingers splayed, ring and pinky curled, thumb pressing into the palm. She slashed it through the air, and the cloud parted, packets scattering like startled birds. For half a breath, she was clear. But the current never let up.

  Hold it together!

  Shards of corrupted code battered her from all sides, each strike stinging like an electric shock. Her suit’s seams flared with blue light as it attempted to compensate, but the protections were minimal, almost placebo. The next attack was a tangle of hands—dozens of them, clawing at her face and chest, each one more desperate than the last. She bit down on her tongue and spun, flinging the hands away with a sweep of her arm. But one caught her by the ankle and pulled. There was a wrenching pain—a crackle in her knee, a sensation of splintering—and her left leg went completely numb, replaced by a sensation like ants crawling through frost.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Argh!

  The world stuttered again, skipping frames. Suddenly she was upright, standing on a thin, glassy shelf hovering over the river of code. The transition was so abrupt she nearly vomited. She swayed, arms windmilling, as the shelf bent under her weight. Below, the hands and faces clambered upward, climbing over each other in an endless, hungry ascent. They screamed her name, or at least the names she’d left behind:

  “Alice!”

  “Kingsley!”

  “User #7749!”

  Each call was an accusation, a demand, a plea. None of them sounded human. She scanned the horizon for anything that looked like escape. And then she saw it. A single node, pulsing faint blue at the edge of vision. It looked like an old-school terminal, half-melted into the code-stream, flickering with promise. She didn’t hesitate. She ran—at least, tried to. Her left leg dragged, unresponsive, but the shelf’s surface was slick with logic, offering almost no resistance. She skated forward, arms spread for balance, the current of faces and hands screaming just beneath her. A rogue packet—a chunk of red-hot code—slammed into her right side, pitching her off-balance. She tumbled and rolled, landing on her elbows. The shelf cracked under the impact, spiderwebbing out from her point of contact. Instinct took over: she clawed at the break, grabbed the sharp edge, and pulled herself forward. She reached the node as the shelf gave way entirely. She slammed her hand onto the terminal surface, praying for a prompt, a field, a command line—anything. The node responded instantly, encasing her hand in a sleeve of cold light, locking her in place.

  For a split second, the world was silent.

  A menu appeared in her mind’s eye. Not a pretty GUI—just raw, monochrome text, scrolling too fast to read. But she knew the pattern. She’d written this code once, or something like it. This was the failsafe, the backdoor every Threadmancer kept in their pocket for when reality went off the rails.

  She forced the menu to slow, focusing her entire mind on one word: “STABILIZE.”

  The node quivered, fighting her, but she pressed harder. The world around her began to decelerate. The river of code slowed from rapids to a mere surge. The hands and faces below stilled, their mouths frozen mid-scream. Her suit’s blue seams flickered and went steady.

  She took a breath, real, for the first time in what felt like years.

  The terminal offered a new line. This time, it wasn’t a command prompt. It was a question:

  RESOLVE CONFLICT? Y/N

  Alice hesitated, her hand still glued to the node. She remembered the Rabbit’s words: “Resolution is final. There are no appeals.” But here, at the edge of deletion, she felt a clarity she’d never known before.

  She jabbed the “Y” with all her will.

  The world crashed.

  For an instant, everything was nothing. Then, with a gentle boot-up chime, reality rebuilt itself around her. She was alone, standing in a perfectly still corridor, the walls clean and sharp, the air humming with quiet energy. No Rabbit, no hands, no screaming faces. Just her, the terminal, and the faint, persistent taste of lemon at the back of her tongue.

  On her HUD, a single message blinked, calm as a sleeping baby:

  AUTH TOKEN: ACCEPTED

  USER: ALICE KINGSLEY

  INSTANCE CONFLICT: RESOLVED

  She slumped to the floor, drained and shaking, the sense of victory muted by the certainty that this was only the first of many rounds. But for now, she existed. For now, she was real. She closed her eyes, and for the first time since the patch, the inside of her skull was quiet.