Part 2 – Desync Detected

  Gareth barely registered the bruising impact of the garage floor as the air pressure shifted again, this time heavier. Static crackled faintly against his skin, but the real weight pressing into him wasn’t physical.

  It was presence.

  Every screen in the garage now displayed the same sterile grey. No menus. No game icons. Just that blank, waiting field that hadn’t existed five minutes ago.

  It should’ve been silent.

  But there was a sound now; deep, electrical, not quite audible but too real to ignore. It droned in his jaw, his teeth, down the back of his spine, and beneath it, something pulsed. A beat. Steady. Too steady. Not mechanical. Not organic. Code pretending to be a heartbeat.

  Gareth scrambled upright, gaze locking on Lily first. Her body hadn’t moved. Chest rising. Lips twitching in quiet sleep-talk. But her eyes, open now.

  She didn’t blink.

  “Lily?” he whispered.

  No response.

  Chris lay just behind her, still half-swallowed in cushions. His face slack. One hand limp against the Dreamcast controller. His thumb jerked once, a twitch. Then nothing.

  Above them, the main display shifted.

  P3: SPECTRABEAN

  P2: BASSLINE

  Gareth’s throat tightened. His legs moved without permission.

  “Lou!”

  He spun toward the sofa. She was already on her feet. One arm braced against the side of the TV shelf, the other gripping the back of the couch like it might slip away if she let go. Her face looked pale beneath the shifting screenlight, but not panicked. Focused.

  She was watching the same thing he was.

  “They’re running it again,” she said, barely louder than a breath.

  Gareth closed the gap between them.

  “What?”

  “It’s the same process.” Her hand trembled now. “I saw this. I saw it, G. In the grey.”

  “You were unconscious.”

  “I wasn’t. Not fully.” Her eyes darted to the others. “It’s threading them. One by one. And it’s doing it through us.”

  Then the house screamed.

  Not physically. Not with sirens or volume.

  Voices.

  Real ones.

  From the kitchen. The hallway. Upstairs.

  Everywhere.

  “MUM?!”

  “Where’s Freya?!”

  “LOCK THE DOOR!”

  “COLIN!”

  A crash. Shattering glass. Someone, Sophie, was sobbing. Not from pain. From confusion.

  Gareth’s legs nearly gave out. He staggered to the wall, bracing himself against the plasterboard.

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

  Above the din, another sound pierced through. Calm. Flat. Chilling.

  [THREAD COMPLETE]

  The voice wasn’t human. Too perfect. Neutral. Male and female all at once. A notification, not a judgement.

  The sound repeated.

  Twice.

  [THREAD COMPLETE]

  [THREAD COMPLETE]

  Gareth bolted for the garage door.

  “Don’t!” Lou’s hand snatched his wrist, yanking him back with more force than he expected. “It’s locking zones. You step out, you might not come back.”

  “They’re in there!”

  “So are we!” She pulled him in close. Her forehead pressed to his. “We have to hold on. Do you understand me? Just a little longer.”

  The lights flickered.

  Then the screen updated again.

  P1: REDQUEEN

  Louise stared at it. Her whole body went still.

  Gareth turned to her.

  “What is that?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Lou?”

  Her face twitched, not a flinch. A glitch. A split-second loss of expression that returned wrong.

  She blinked, hard, shaking her head like it hurt.

  “I saw them,” she said softly, staring into nothing. “I saw Lily and Chris inside something that wasn’t a world. It was placeholders. Grey rooms. Geometry wrapped in smiles. It’s not done building them yet.”

  Gareth’s stomach flipped.

  “What do you mean?”

  She exhaled a hard, wrenching sound, like her body didn’t want to release it.

  “They’re being simulated. But only partway. Something’s wrong. It’s too early. It’s.. oh God!” Her voice cracked. “It’s overriding us.”

  The screen pulsed brighter.

  Text scrolled.

  [RECLAIM: REDQUEEN]

  [ROLE CONSOLIDATION: IN PROGRESS]

  She staggered.

  Gareth caught her. “Lou?”

  Her pupils dilated, then constricted. Her posture changed.

  She looked right through him.

  “Designation accepted,” she whispered.

  “No. No, no, no.” He gripped her by the shoulders. “Louise. Listen to me. You’re here. You’re with me. Do you understand?”

  She trembled.

  And then, for a moment, she was back.

  Sweat ran down the side of her temple. Her jaw clenched.

  “I’m still here,” she choked. “It’s trying to push me out.”

  “Fight it.”

  “I am.”

  In the hallway, another scream tore the air.

  “DON’T TAKE HIM!”

  Then a thump. The sound of a body against a wall.

  Gareth could hear furniture being overturned. Something slammed upstairs. A door burst open.

  And through it all:

  [THREAD COMPLETE]

  [THREAD COMPLETE]

  [THREAD COMPLETE]

  Lou dropped to her knees.

  Not in surrender.

  She dropped to fight.

  Chris twitched. Then Lily. Their heads lolled back, eyes open, pupils blown wide with reflected system light, their bodies slack in her grip as tendrils of luminescent code began to lift from their chests like vapour rising from warm skin.

  Gareth tried to reach them; a step, a dive, anything, but the floor beneath him pulsed red and stopped responding. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t breathe.

  Lou didn’t scream yet. She gritted her teeth, wrapped her arms tighter around the children, and pulled them both into her chest until their faces vanished against her. Her nails dug into Chris’s shoulder, her brow pressed hard into Lily’s hair. She shook with effort, with rage, with a refusal that wasn’t logical or rational or survivable.

  Her body began to seize, not from malfunction, but from sheer overload. Muscles fighting commands they didn’t understand. Veins standing out beneath sweat-slicked skin. Blood smearing across her knuckles from the force of her grip. She made herself a cage.

  And then she screamed.

  Not for help.

  For war.

  A raw, feral sound pulled from somewhere older than language. The kind of scream that curdled the air. That bent data. That changed the shape of the moment.

  [THREAD INTERRUPTION DETECTED]

  [RESISTANCE FLAGGED: USER.REDQUEEN]

  [SENTIMENT OVERRIDE: FAILED]

  [ESCALATION REQUIRED]

  The system flinched.

  Gareth saw it. Every screen in the garage staggered. Glitched. As if the entire process buckled for half a second under something it hadn’t prepared for.

  A scream echoed from the hallway, not Lou’s. Another mother. Another war cry. Then another. More cries upstairs. Boots scraping, fists pounding, furniture dragging. Human instinct erupting across the house like wildfire.

  But Lou was the centre.

  The epicentre.

  One mother's instinct written in sinew and fire and pain.

  No code could overwrite that.

  No system could prepare for that kind of priority.

  Her voice cracked. Her grip tightened. Gareth could see the strain in her back, the muscles trembling, her legs trying to rise but failing under the weight of holding on to everything.

  He reached again, but his hand passed through a shimmer of air that wasn’t air anymore. The system had phased him out. He was a rejected variable.

  Lou’s eyes locked onto his.

  Tears streaming.

  Teeth bared.

  She mouthed something, a whisper that the system wouldn’t let pass her lips.

  Keep... them... safe...

  Then the override came, not as light or sound but as a pulse, a single, unfeeling burst of system logic that passed through the room like a knife. Lou arched once, the strength in her limbs seizing as if caught between identities, and for a moment she was all of them: Louise the mother, RedQueen the designation, and something else, something caught mid-sentence between love and annihilation. The children were taken first, lifted not by hands but by process, their forms reduced to wireframes, then points of white, then nothing at all. Lou’s body snapped once, a final defiant tremor as if resisting even now, and then it stilled. The system paused, assessed, rewrote and whispered, cold and perfect:

  [THREAD COMPLETE]