Part 1 – Local Multiplayer

  Chris was already asleep, though he wouldn’t admit it.

  He’d slid sideways into the corner of the garage, cocooned in a makeshift nest of beanbags, cushions, and two of Lou’s hoodies knotted together like a sleeping bag. One sock had gone rogue. The other was hanging on by a heroic thread. A controller drooped from one hand. A half-eaten Jaffa Cake clung to the other, slowly grafting to his palm like it was afraid of being forgotten.

  Someone had draped a blanket over him. Gareth suspected it was Freya. The knotwork was too elaborate to be his own, and none of the lads would’ve used a pink hoodie for insulation.

  Lily lay sprawled like a collapsed anime character mid-battle, tangled in the kind of pose only eleven-year-olds and cats could sustain without injury. Her Switch blinked a low-battery warning against her chest, ignored like every other system trying to get her attention. The red Joy-Con light flashed in time with the soft loop of menu music drifting from somewhere near her feet.

  One screen still played the ending theme to Mario Kart. Not the latest one. Just enough of it to be recognisable. Comfort noise. Another flickered in and out of Streets of Rage’s menu, controller untouched. A third screen had frozen mid-video on YouTube Kids, showcasing an unsettling thumbnail of Sonic with human teeth.

  The fourth had gone dark. Gareth had meant to check the HDMI switch earlier, but by the time he noticed, someone had covered it with a pizza box and an apology written in ketchup.

  He stood in the open doorway to the garage, drink in hand and just... watched. Not with judgment. Not even with pride. Just that quiet ache parents get when they know it won’t always be like this.

  The room wasn’t beautiful. Not in the usual sense. Cardboard boxes flanked the walls, long since relegated to ‘temporary storage’ status. The ceiling was still unpainted in one corner. One of the shelves held a monitor with a cracked bezel and a soft toy of an Enderman duct-taped to it for moral support.

  But it was theirs. Lived-in. Layered in years.

  Home.

  Louise was curled sideways on the main sofa, a blanket half-draped over her legs, one bare foot resting against Colin’s ankle like a cat staking territory. She looked sleepy, not tired. Content. A half-empty glass of wine rested on the floor within arm’s reach, untouched for the last hour.

  Colin, to his credit, was holding his beer upright while snoring gently into his hoodie collar. It wasn’t his first time passing out like this, and it probably wouldn’t be the last. They’d long since learned to trust that his drink would never spill, even if the rest of him folded like a deckchair.

  “You remember when we used to sleep like that?” Gareth said, voice pitched low.

  Lou smiled without opening her eyes. “I think you mean ‘passed out wherever we landed.’”

  “Mmm. Youth.”

  She shifted a little, nudging her foot against Colin’s with a subtle rhythm. Just a beat or two, the kind you fall into naturally after two decades of shared sync.

  The coffee table in front of them looked like the aftermath of a particularly one-sided boss fight. Pizza boxes stacked like enemy corpses. Empty glasses and mismatched mugs forming crude towers. A tangle of USB-C cables and legacy controllers knotted together like some eldritch gaming relic. Gareth caught sight of the Dreamcast mouse, still plugged in and somehow functional despite its age, and grinned.

  “Lily wiped the floor with us again using that thing,” he murmured.

  “She’s a menace,” Lou replied fondly. “She said the Dreamcast mouse is her ‘war talisman.’”

  Gareth chuckled and took a sip from the glass. The vodka and Red Bull had gone warm and stale, the tang lingering like old battery acid. He didn’t care.

  The garage was dim, lit mostly by the soft ambient wash of console menus and a few strip lights tucked above the shelves. It smelled like a Saturday evening: toast, cola, socks, and leftover garlic bread. Somewhere in the back, the little fridge wheezed like it was dying. Then clicked. Then wheezed again.

  The night hadn’t started like this.

  It had begun with chaos.

  Fortnite, Roblox, Fall Guys, Forza, whichever flavour of the moment the kids could get their hands on. Games launched and closed like pop-up windows. Tabs swapped mid-sentence. Shouts echoing from every screen.

  Then things got... weird.

  Not dramatically. Not even noticeably, at first.

  Chris had spoken up first.

  “Mum, my ping just hit, like, eight hundred. Is that normal?”

  Then Lily: “Mine says disconnected, but I’m still in the match?”

  Then from the hallway: “Why won’t this server list refresh? Did the router crap out again?”

  It hadn’t.

  Gareth had checked. Twice. Carried the unit around the house like a disapproving professor holding a faulty artifact, muttering diagnostics to himself. The lights were all on. No error messages. But the connection just... wasn’t there.

  No drama. No crash. Just absence.

  “Maybe it’s that throttling thing again,” Sophie had offered.

  “ISP glitch,” Colin added, halfway through pouring another drink. “It’s been flaking for weeks.”

  So they adapted. No one really complained.

  Online gave way to LAN. LAN collapsed into splitscreen. Splitscreen gave way to the classics.

  Gareth didn’t mind.

  Truth be told, he welcomed it.

  He moved between consoles with a rhythm that felt older than the kids themselves. Swapping inputs by hand. Rebooting the old CRT for its once-a-year showcase. Finding the one HDMI-to-AV adapter that didn’t short out under pressure.

  And slowly, like a long-held breath released, the room shifted into something better.

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  By 9:30, they were playing TimeSplitters 2 and yelling about screen-cheating.

  By 10:30, it was Bomberman. Old rules. No mercy. Pass the pad when you die, no exceptions.

  By 11:15, the kids had paired off into teams, while the adults drifted into parent-spectator mode, half-participating, half-watching.

  Lily and Freya tag-teamed Streets of Rage like they'd trained for it.

  Chris and Ollie had found their way into the depths of Sega Bass Fishing and were now locked in a deathmatch over who could catch the least disappointing trout.

  Colin and Adam had argued over which of them was better at GoldenEye, then promptly handed the controllers to the kids and wandered off to find snacks.

  Even Sophie had smiled when Freya declared she was the new Queen of Friendly Fire.

  No one mentioned the missing Wi-Fi again. Or the blinking router. Or the fact that YouTube had quietly stopped buffering anything more recent than 2022.

  It didn’t matter.

  They were together.

  They were here.

  And Gareth... Gareth found himself smiling more than he had in weeks.

  It wasn’t just nostalgia.

  It was the sound of everyone forgetting the outside world, if only for a little while.

  Gareth had drifted into that liminal hour feeling. He wasn’t quite tired, but no longer awake in any useful sense. His body wanted the day to end. His mind wanted to catalogue every detail of the moment before it slipped away. He leaned against the doorframe, gaze shifting from the soft rise and fall of his children’s breathing to the blinking lights of standby screens and idle menu loops.

  He didn’t speak. Not because there was nothing to say, but because the room felt complete without words. This was the kind of silence earned through noise, through burnt garlic bread and arguments over controller ports, through digital headshots and shared laughter. It was a silence built by time.

  Behind him, the hallway light flickered.

  Not enough to be noticed. Just a twitch. A blink. The kind of thing most people wouldn’t clock unless they were already looking for it.

  Gareth noticed.

  He blinked at it. Waited.

  Nothing else happened.

  He turned back toward the sofa.

  Lou had shifted slightly, one leg now tucked under the other. She wasn’t asleep. Not really. Her fingers still curled loosely around the stem of her wine glass, though it had long since stopped moving toward her lips.

  “You good?” Gareth asked softly.

  Lou’s head tilted just enough to show she heard him. “Mm-hmm.”

  The pause that followed was the kind couples earned after years of talking through everything else.

  The old CRT next to the coffee table stuttered. It was only a frame skip, just a brief hiccup in the feed. An artifact from nowhere. Gareth frowned, then blinked it away. Probably the cable again. That thing had survived three house moves and one particularly violent coffee spill. It was overdue for retirement.

  The screen flickered again.

  Just once.

  He watched it, then shook his head.

  Too many late nights coding. His eyes were pulling bugs from the shadows again.

  The fridge compressor in the back room kicked in, groaned, then settled. Gareth listened to it for a beat longer than necessary. He was used to the sounds of this house, this garage, this corner of their world that existed on the edge of grown-up responsibility. Bills, work, politics, none of it reached here unless you opened the door to let it in.

  That had always been Lou’s magic. She didn’t banish the world. She made space inside it. Safe corners. Clean light. Permission to rest.

  He glanced over the sleeping heap of their kids again. Chris was starting to drool slightly. Lily had begun muttering in her sleep, something about unlock codes and door timers. The Switch beeped a low-battery warning once more, then gave up and went black.

  The main screen, the one they’d used for Bomberman earlier, had returned to the profile selection menu.

  Four names.

  P1: RedQueen

  P2: Bassline

  P3: SpectraBean

  P4: NullPointer

  Gareth smiled faintly.

  Lou’s handle always made him smirk. She’d picked RedQueen back when they first met, claiming it sounded like a hacker, a villain, and a monarch all at once. Chris, of course, had insisted on Bassline after becoming briefly obsessed with dubstep. Lily had made hers one afternoon while painting her nails with glitter and watching space documentaries. SpectraBean had been born out of chaos.

  NullPointer had been Gareth’s for years. A joke only coders really understood. The absence of something that should exist.

  He took another sip from his glass.

  Lou shifted again.

  Her eyes were open now, glazed with the soft glow of a standby screen. She wasn’t focused on anything specific, but her body language had changed. She wasn’t lounging anymore. Her spine had pulled straighter, breath slower, the wine glass in her hand now resting sideways against the blanket, still cradled but forgotten. The liquid inside tilted with it, seeping quietly into the folds of her jumper.

  “Lou?” Gareth stepped in, voice low but alert.

  She didn’t blink.

  The fourth screen blinked.

  Then again.

  Not flickers. Not menu loops. This was different. Coordinated. The kind of pattern you notice only when the rest of the room has fallen silent enough to let your instincts fill in the blanks.

  He turned toward the screen they’d used for Bomberman. The menu was still active. The same four profiles, still waiting.

  Only now it read:

  P4: nullpointer.err

  He frowned, rubbed at his eye, and stepped forward. The cable must have loosened again, or maybe the splitter was acting up. But when he leaned down to inspect it, nothing was wrong. All the cables were still tight. The input signal solid. No artifacts. No ghosting. Just one screen. One name. One message that shouldn’t have existed.

  nullpointer.err

  Then it vanished. Replaced with the expected name.

  He straightened slowly, watching. Waiting.

  The CRT next to him gave off a soft static click. A sound it should not have been able to make. It wasn’t plugged in. Not even connected to anything. But there it was again, that faint hum, that electrical breath, the suggestion of signal trying to push through.

  Gareth placed his palm on the casing. The buzz stopped.

  From behind him, Lou let out a sharp exhale.

  He turned.

  She hadn’t moved. Her expression hadn’t changed. But her fingers were no longer around the glass. It had tipped. A slow crimson smear was now crawling across her sleeve.

  “Lou?”

  Still no response.

  The screen pulsed.

  Once.

  Then again.

  Every display in the garage, every console, every handheld, even the powered-down ones.. blinked in perfect, synchronised interruption. For a moment, they weren’t off. They weren’t on. They were something else entirely. Paused between frames, caught in an impossible midpoint, where the world kept spinning but the output never caught up.

  Sound dropped away. Not like someone hit mute, but more like the very idea of sound had been removed from the room, pulled out from under them like a floorboard.

  The lights above the screen remained fixed in place, but they no longer seemed to illuminate anything. Gareth watched as the colour in the air dulled, as the depth in the shadows flattened, as if the garage had been downgraded to a lower texture resolution without his permission.

  From somewhere behind the stack of boxes in the hallway, a faint click echoed. He tried to tell himself it was the fridge compressor resetting, or maybe the heating relay cycling, but the sound didn’t belong to anything mechanical. It had weight. Placement. Intention.

  Lily murmured something in her sleep. Her voice was soft, but sharp in the silence.

  “...the door’s not meant to open yet…”

  A chill crept up Gareth’s arms. Not cold. Not environmental. The kind of response that happens when every sense in your body agrees, all at once, that something is wrong and your brain hasn’t caught up yet.

  Chris rolled slightly in his blanket nest. The controller slipped from his fingers and bounced off his chest. He didn’t stir.

  The Switch beside Lily, the one that had powered off five minutes ago, flashed a single red light, then died again.

  Gareth turned to the main screen. The menu carousel was still looping. Still waiting for input.

  nullpointer.err

  The name hadn’t reverted.

  He opened his mouth to speak, but the words caught in his throat. His tongue felt thick, the air around him thinner now, as though the oxygen had been stretched out, made less substantial.

  He could hear something. Not with his ears, but in the back of his thoughts. A tension. A compression of space, as if reality were gathering itself into a tighter shape, coiling inward like data being zipped before deletion.

  The CRT beside him sparked. Once. Just a pinprick of light near the input panel. The smell of melting dust touched the air.

  Lou blinked, slowly, but her gaze didn’t change.

  Her lips moved.

  One word.

  He couldn’t hear it, but he knew.

  He stepped forward.

  The television mounted above the sofa, the one that had never been installed properly, the one still without power, snapped to life.

  Its screen lit up, not with an image, but with a field of absolute, untextured grey.

  It wasn’t static.

  It wasn’t empty.

  It was the kind of grey you get when the application hasn’t loaded yet. The waiting room of colour. A place that exists before decisions are made.

  He turned.

  All four screens now showed the same thing.

  No menus.

  No games.

  No signal.

  Just that same patient, deliberate grey.

  Waiting.