Part 2 - Nullspace

  I didn’t move for a long time.

  Not out of fear, though that was definitely there, but out of instinct. Something about the red seam glowing faintly in the wall beside me felt like a trap. Not in the conventional, gaming sense, but in a real way. Like it would learn something the second I acknowledged it. Like it was waiting for a click, a nod, a name.

  Instead, I pressed my back to the closest support strut and took stock of what I had.

  Inventory: None.

  Unless you counted a blood-soaked hoodie, a controller still stuffed in the pocket, and an old set of joggers Louise always said made me look like I was cosplaying fatherhood.

  Health: Declining.

  The gash in my hand wasn’t bleeding fast anymore, but it still leaked. My legs were shaky. Stomach empty. Head pounding from what I guessed was dehydration and adrenaline.

  Stamina: Gone. Already spent trying to make sense of the geometry.

  This wasn’t a game. Not with rules I recognised, anyway.

  And if it was, I hadn’t been given a role.

  The seam pulsed again.

  A low ripple, not light but data. The kind of shift you might feel when a code push goes live in production and the latency spikes. I didn’t need a UI to know that something on the other side of that wall had been activated. Maybe not by me, but because of me.

  The corridor behind me had changed again, subtly.

  Angles adjusted.

  Surfaces stretched.

  It was like walking through a rendering pipeline while someone rewrote it in real-time.

  I moved away from the red seam, careful not to let my shadow cross it. The moment I turned the corner, the floor texture changed. What had been a tarnished metal weave became something fibrous, like wet rope braided into carpet.

  And beneath that, movement.

  Something squirmed under the surface.

  I kept walking.

  The corridor bent left. Then right. Then again.

  By the third turn I knew it wasn’t looping by accident.

  This place was watching me trace a pattern.

  It was learning my rhythm.

  Then the corridor opened into a chamber.

  This one was larger than the others. The ceiling stretched higher, the walls smoother, the light darker, not by absence, but by design. It felt like it had been turned down deliberately, as though the space wanted me to squint. Wanted me to get close.

  I stepped forward and immediately recoiled.

  The floor was warm.

  Not just heat, wet warmth.

  I looked down.

  The surface shimmered, and for just a second, I saw a face reflected back at me.

  Not mine.

  Lily’s.

  Mouth open in silent scream.

  I blinked, stepped back, and the image was gone. Just rippling surface now. Metallic-black. Thick. Like oil that had been taught to hold its shape.

  You’re seeing stress echoes, a voice in my mind whispered.

  Not memory. Not real. Just where the system fails to overwrite completely.

  I wasn’t sure if that voice was mine.

  At the far end of the chamber, a console jutted from the wall.

  Half-formed.

  Covered in data vines and flickering UI panels that loaded and crashed in rhythmic loops. It looked like someone had tried to spawn a workstation in a corrupted game engine and only half the assets had come through.

  I approached slowly.

  The air felt heavier near it.

  Thicker.

  The moment I got close, a UI fragment flickered to life in the corner of my vision.

  Not a system message.

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  Just… code.

  Raw. Barely parsed.

  // ENTITY: USER_00X

  // CLASS: NULLPOINTER

  // INTERFACE_LOAD: ABORTED

  // FATAL ERROR: THREAD_NOT_DEFINED

  It was trying to build me.

  Trying to assign something.

  But it didn’t have a template that fit.

  I reached out and touched the console, half-expecting it to burn me or vanish. Instead, it reacted. Gently. Like a machine recognising an administrator without credentials.

  The panel unfolded, revealing a series of incomplete subroutines, menus that hovered just out of reach. I recognised fragments of interface logic, some from games, some from IDEs I’d used for coding. But none of it fit together.

  It was like seeing a dream of an OS, broken down into suggestion.

  [SYSTEM: UNABLE TO CLASSIFY USER]

  [THREAD INTEGRATION FAILED]

  [STACK TRACE: INFINITE REFERENCE]

  [STATUS: OBSERVED]

  [EXPOSURE LEVEL: 0.03]

  That last line struck something cold inside me.

  Exposure. It was tracking how exposed I was.

  To what?

  To whom?

  To whatever the fuck was running this place.

  I backed away, careful not to trip over the cables trailing behind the console.

  They pulsed once.

  Then went dark.

  The UI collapsed.

  Like it had gathered all it needed.

  Behind me, the corridor shifted again.

  This time not silently.

  This time with sound.

  Mechanical, wet, dragging sound.

  I turned just enough to see the edge of something moving in the hall. Not fast. Not chasing. Just arriving. A long-limbed, stuttering shadow. Biomechanical. Wrong.

  It didn’t care that I saw it.

  Because it already knew where I’d be.

  I ran.

  Not heroically. Not cleanly. I sprinted with no plan, no map, just fear and a wild determination not to let the first thing I met in this nightmare be the last.

  The corridors blurred.

  Walls shifted.

  Something screamed behind me, no words, no voice, just the grinding noise of friction, like skin on wire.

  A red seam opened in the floor ahead.

  A hatch?

  No.

  A trapdoor.

  I didn’t hesitate.

  I dove through.

  The world twisted.

  Not gravity. Not force. Just code.

  And for one awful second,

  I understood everything about this place.

  Then it took it all away.

  I landed hard.

  There was no floor at first, just a lurching fall through semi-solid geometry. It wasn’t a clean drop, more like falling through the crawlspace between levels in a game that hadn’t loaded properly. The world around me warped in fractals, textures smeared like wet paint, walls collapsed into grids, and for a split second the only thing holding my body together was will.

  And then it caught me.

  Hard.

  I slammed into something that felt like stone and looked like shattered circuitry. Pain bloomed across my back and ribs. Air punched from my lungs in a single, pathetic gasp. I lay still for a moment, half-curled on my side, struggling to breathe.

  No death screen.

  No reset.

  Just pain.

  This was real.

  Whatever this place was, whoever had built it, it could hurt me. Bleed me. Kill me.

  There was no checkpoint. No HUD. No respawn.

  If I died here, I wasn’t coming back.

  My right hand stung, the torn skin coated in dirt and fine metal shards from the landing. I wiped it on my hoodie without thinking, then winced. The wound had reopened, blood beading again across my palm.

  But I could feel the pulse of something around me responding.

  The environment knew.

  And worse, it remembered.

  I pushed myself upright and surveyed the room I’d landed in.

  It was different from the last. Less organic. More… forgotten. Walls tilted inward, the ceiling lost in shadow. Parts of the floor were textured like old concrete, the rest flickered between ceramic tiles and circuit board etchings. A single pillar stood in the centre, fractured near the top, bleeding what looked like wire and bone in equal measure.

  Scattered across the ground were broken fragments of... something. Plastic? Stone? They looked like bits of architecture from different zones, broken UI frames, shattered icons, busted furniture pieces. A glitch dump.

  But one piece caught my eye.

  Square. Blocky. Familiar.

  I limped toward it, heart skipping.

  It couldn’t be.

  Not that thing. Not here.

  But it was.

  Half-buried in the warped floor, stuck at an odd angle, was the front shell of a homemade game console. Thick plastic casing, sticker-covered, dulled with age and thumbprint grease. Cracks ran through the screen. The power light blinked a dying red.

  It was The Block.

  The one I’d built from scratch with the kids.

  Scrap components. Emulation boards. Cheap soldering and a Frankenstein of retro parts, NES, Dreamcast, Raspberry Pi 4. A disaster of a machine.

  But it worked.

  It had worked.

  And now, somehow, it was here.

  I knelt slowly, adrenaline tightening every movement. My injured hand hovered just above the casing. The shell was still warm. Like it had been used. Like someone had powered it on only minutes ago.

  The moment my fingers touched the plastic,

  The environment responded.

  Lines of red light pulsed through the ground, spiderwebbing out from the console like veins reawakening.

  A low hum rolled through the room, vibrating up my legs.

  And then,

  A sound.

  A voice.

  Small. Distant. Familiar.

  “...you’re not supposed to be here.”

  It was Lily’s voice.

  But wrong.

  Off-pitch. Stretched. Like a corrupted audio file trying to reach clarity.

  The pillar in the centre of the room cracked.

  Not loudly. Not violently.

  It just split, and something inside shifted.

  A form.

  Not fully rendered. Bits of wire, metal, ribbon cable, childlike proportions, a head that pulsed with exposed nodes and eye sockets with no texture maps applied.

  It didn’t move toward me. It tilted.

  Judged.

  Then took a single, awkward step.

  I staggered back.

  “No. No, this isn’t right. That’s not her.”

  But the shape continued.

  Every step made the world flicker around it. Static crawled across the floor. Memories slithered into the air, clips, whispers, button-presses, half-laughter. All of them wrong. All of them borrowed.

  “Did you bring the controller?” the voice asked.

  Only it wasn’t a question.

  It was a test.

  I pulled the controller from my hoodie pocket.

  Almost instinctively. The shape froze.

  Then glitched, teleporting forward one frame. Ten feet closer.

  “Good. Then you can help. Right?”

  The voice buzzed. It was Lily’s phrasing, Lily’s tone, but the delivery was a tape loop, stuttering slightly at the edges.

  “You can help. Right? You can help. Right..?”

  “No,” I muttered. “No, I can’t. You’re not her. You’re not even an echo. You’re a fucking trap.”

  The figure collapsed like a puppet cut from its strings.

  Wires spilled out like intestines.

  The room snapped dark.

  Not fully. Just ambient darkness.

  A new UI overlay blinked into view.

  Rough. Unstable.

  But there.

  [SYS.DEBUG OVERLAY ENABLED]

  [INTERFACE ROOT: USER_00X]

  [ENTITY: NULLPOINTER]

  [PERMISSION LEVEL: TEMPORARY // UNSAFE]

  [CONTEXT: ISOLATED ANOMALY]

  The console at my feet flickered. The screen loaded static. Then lines of green text on black:

  > Searching thread...

  > Entity match found: SPECTRABEAN

  > Memory anchor: Incomplete

  > Stability: 9%

  > Merge attempt: Failed

  The controller vibrated once, then stopped. No power light. No warmth.

  It was just a relic again.

  But now I understood something I hadn’t before.

  The system couldn’t delete everything.

  Some parts lingered. Especially those tied to memory.

  And sometimes… if I found the right angle, the right exploit, I could force an interaction.

  Like hacking a door open with a musical key. Or logging in with a malformed cookie string.

  I wasn’t a player.

  I wasn’t an NPC.

  I was something it hadn’t expected.

  Something it couldn’t patch.

  And it knew it now.