There was no sensation of falling. There was no gravity here.
I was standing on solid white nothingness. It felt like standing on a cloud that had been hardened into concrete.
I opened my eyes. The forest was behind me, looking like a flat painting hanging in the air. I could see the backside of the trees, which were transparent because the engine only rendered the side facing the player.
"Okay. Safe," I breathed out, sliding down to sit on the invisible floor.
"Safe? You call this safe? The acoustics are terrible!"
I screamed and scrambled backward, flailing my arms. My hand passed through my own chest glitch, sending a shiver of static up my spine.
Sitting cross-legged a few feet away was a man.
He was wearing a brightly colored jester’s outfit—red and yellow diamonds—and holding a lute that looked like it was made of plastic. He had a goofy, oversized feather in his cap and a mustache that was curled a little too perfectly.
I knew him. Oh no. I knew him.
"Bolin?" I stared.
The bard plucked a string on his lute. No sound came out. He frowned, plucked it again, and then mimed a dramatic sigh.
"Ah, a fan!" Bolin beamed, his mouth moving, but his voice sounding like it was coming from a radio inside my head. "Welcome to the Great White Nowhere! The drink service is slow, and the audience is nonexistent, but the rent is free!"
"You're supposed to be dead," I said, my brain trying to process this.
Bolin stood up and took a bow. "Deleted, my good sir! Not dead! There is a difference, you know. To die is to finish one's arc. To be deleted is to be... forcibly retired."
I remembered him. Bolin the Bard. I created him in the first draft to be the comic relief sidekick. But by Chapter 5, I realized he was annoying as hell. He ruined the serious tone of the dark fantasy war arc. So, I highlighted his paragraph, hit Backspace, and replaced him with a brooding brooding ranger.
"I... I didn't know you guys went somewhere," I said quietly. "I thought you just vanished."
"Vanished?" Bolin laughed. He did a little pirouette. "Matter cannot be created or destroyed, only moved to the Recycle Bin! We wait here! Hoping the Great Writer in the Sky changes his mind and pastes us back in!"
He leaned in close. His texture was fuzzy, like a low-resolution JPEG.
"Say," Bolin whispered, "you have the look of someone from the Rendered Lands. Is the war over? Did Seraphina kiss the prince? Did my joke about the goblin and the tavern wench land well?"
I felt a knot of guilt tighten in my stomach. The guilt was sharper than the stab wound.
"Bolin," I said, "I... I'm the one who deleted you."
Bolin froze. His smile didn't fade—it couldn't, it was painted on his texture map—but his eyes went wide.
"You?" He tilted his head. "You are the Writer?"
"Yes."
He stared at me for a long time. Then he strummed his silent lute again.
"Well," he said cheerfully. "You look terrible. Karma, I suppose?"
"Yeah," I rubbed my face. "Something like that."
"So, you can put me back?" Bolin hopped closer, his bells jiggling silently. "I've been working on new material! I have a limerick about a dragon with a lisp! It’s gold! Just— Control-V me back into the tavern scene! Please?"
I opened my mouth to tell him that I couldn't, that I was barely holding my own code together, when the white void shuddered.
It wasn't a physical shake. It was a drop in pressure. The bright, sterile white of the void suddenly dimmed to a sickly grey.
[System Warning: Disk Cleanup Initiated.]
[Threat Detected: The Editor.]
My blood ran cold.
"No," I whispered. "Not now."
"What?" Bolin looked around. "What is that hum? It sounds like... a vacuum cleaner?"
Far off in the infinite distance, the white floor began to turn red.
It wasn't a fire. It was ink. Thick, viscous, red correction ink. It was flooding toward us like a tsunami, moving silently but terrifyingly fast. Whatever the red ink touched didn't burn. It just... stopped being.
The unrendered white floor vanished. The concept of "distance" vanished. It was eating the data.
"What is that?" Bolin asked, his voice trembling.
"The Editor," I said, scrambling to my feet. "It scans for unused assets and purges them to save memory."
I grabbed Bolin’s arm. "We have to move. Back to the forest."
"The forest?" Bolin dug his heels in. "I can't go there! I'm deleted! If I enter the rendered zone without a plot hook, the logic engine will tear me apart!"
"If you stay here, you get wiped!" I yelled, dragging him.
The red tide was faster than us. It wasn't running; it was processing. It surged forward, a wall of jagged polygons and red static.
"Go!" I shoved Bolin toward the edge of the forest, the "painting" hanging in the air.
He stumbled. He looked at the forest, then back at his lute. "But... my solo..."
The red ink hit him.
It didn't hurt him. There was no scream.
One second, Bolin was there, looking confused and colorful. The next second, the red wave passed over him.
When the wave receded, there was nothing. No body. No lute. No pixels.
[Asset Permanently Removed: NPC_Bard_01]
He was just gone. Like he had never existed.
The red ink swirled, looking for more trash to collect. It paused. A massive, shapeless pseudopod of red static rose from the floor. It twisted, forming a single, giant eye made of error messages.
It looked right at me.
ns216.73.216.10da2
and then Add to home screen.