Part 3 - Aftermath

  Silence claimed the garage.

  Not the kind that followed laughter, or arguments, or the wind-down of a night too full of noise, this was something else. A suffocating, loaded quiet, dense and heavy, that pressed against Gareth’s ears like cotton soaked in static. There was no trace of what had come before. No smell of takeaway boxes or soda spills, no quiet breathing from a child fallen asleep mid-game. The screens, still powered, gave off a sterile hum that had stopped pretending to be friendly.

  Gareth stood in the centre of the room, unable to move.

  Where cushions had been moments ago, there were only soft depressions in the fabric, already fading. Where a wine glass had rolled from Lou’s hand, the carpet now lay unmarked. The light was too even. Too flat. The colours were wrong. And the room, though unchanged, felt like it had been emptied of something more than people, it had been hollowed out, memory erased frame by frame.

  His eyes moved from corner to corner. Nothing broken. Nothing left behind. Only absence.

  He turned toward the door. His legs didn’t want to follow, but he forced them, staggering through the threshold and into the hallway like a man crossing into aftershock.

  The hallway stretched ahead, unchanged and unfamiliar. Too quiet. The framed photos hung level on the walls. The thermostat still blinked its soft green light. But the house felt vacant in a way that houses never should. Like something essential had been unplugged.

  “Colin?” Gareth’s voice cracked as he called out, but there was no reply.

  He stepped further in.

  “Sophie?”

  Still nothing.

  He moved faster, feet dragging across carpet that felt too clean. The kitchen stood empty, spotless, untouched, plates and glasses gone, crumbs vanished, chairs all tucked in. There were no signs of life here, not even disruption. It was as if they had never existed to begin with. The kettle was cold. The bin was closed. The table looked like it hadn’t been touched all night.

  Gareth backed into the hallway, panic beginning to override logic. He turned toward the living room, expecting to see signs of chaos, overturned furniture, someone, anyone, trying to resist, trying to get out.

  But there was nothing.

  Not a sock. Not a coat. Not a noise upstairs. No breathing. No crying.

  Just silence.

  And then, quietly, from somewhere behind his eyes, from somewhere inside the very language of the world around him, he heard it again.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  [THREAD COMPLETE]

  The words landed like ice water on an open wound.

  He staggered, grabbing the banister as nausea surged through him. He clutched his stomach and squeezed his eyes shut, trying to shake it off, trying to breathe, but the breath caught in his throat. There was no fresh air here. Only recycled nothing.

  The sound repeated.

  [THREAD COMPLETE]

  Not shouted. Not announced.

  Just... delivered. Neutral. Final.

  He opened his eyes and ran.

  The stairs blurred beneath him. Rooms flashed past; the hallway, the bathroom, the spare bedroom. Each door creaked open under his touch. Each one revealed the same impossible absence. Too clean. Too finished. As if someone had saved over the house and reloaded a blank state.

  He reached the end of the upstairs landing and turned, hoping, pleading, but the silence held. The whole house was frozen in an impossible moment. No one else remained. Twenty-eight people had gathered here tonight. Friends. Family. Laughter. Games. Jokes. Shared drinks and inside stories and the deep comfort of knowing every person in the house by name.

  All gone.

  Every trace of them deleted, like temporary files in a hard reboot.

  He stumbled back downstairs, half-falling through the garage door and into the one room that had always been his. The one space that had held the last pieces of who he was before the world fell in.

  But even here, the air felt thinner. The shapes of objects were slightly too crisp. The edges of the CRT screen shimmered faintly, pulsing out of sync with the walls. The carpet underfoot wasn’t absorbing sound properly anymore. Everything had an echo.

  His knees buckled. He collapsed in front of the television. The same one that had displayed his family’s names not ten minutes ago. Now it showed only one.

  Not a gamer tag.

  Not a profile.

  Just a word.

  [NULLPOINTER]

  It flickered. Glitched. Stabilised.

  Then the screen wiped white.

  The white overtook him.

  It started at the screen, but it didn’t stay there. The light unfolded outward in thin sheets, each one layering across the garage like digital fabric, erasing colour, flattening shape. Gareth scrambled backward, but there was nowhere to go, the shelves blurred, the floor flickered, and the door he had just come through no longer existed.

  Not physically gone. Not damaged.

  It had simply been dereferenced.

  The light wasn’t bright. It wasn’t heat. It was overexposure. A field of presence so total it swallowed all detail. Gareth’s limbs trembled, first from adrenaline, then from something deeper, a kind of systematic vibration working its way through the marrow.

  His thoughts started to fracture.

  Not in memory, but in processing. Images skipped. He tried to blink and couldn’t. Tried to shout, and his throat locked. His body wasn’t responding the way it should, not even in panic.

  Across the flickering white, lines of system text crawled.

  [OVERRIDE INITIATED]

  [THREADING ENTITY: NULLPOINTER]

  [STATUS: NONCOMPLIANT]

  [REFERENCE NOT FOUND]

  Something cracked behind his eyes. A soundless pressure that made his vision shimmer. Static ran down his spine in hot, uneven waves.

  The system paused.

  Then tried again.

  [THREADING ENTITY: NULLPOINTER]

  [ERROR: NO INDEX]

  [EXCEPTION: UNMAPPED USER]

  [INTEGRATION FAILED]

  The room pulsed once, no, not the room.

  Reality.

  It folded inward. Not as a metaphor, but an observable glitch. Geometry peeled. Air stopped behaving like air. Weight disappeared from his hands, but not his body. He fell, but not downward.

  Gareth didn’t pass out.

  He passed through.

  Through memory.

  Through interface.

  Through a hole the system hadn’t meant to leave open.

  And just before the white collapsed into nothing, he saw them, not faces, not forms, just three names hanging there in the air, disassembling.

  SPECTRABEAN

  BASSLINE

  REDQUEEN

  His mouth tried to form a scream.

  But the world blinked out.

  And everything that remained fell silent.