You’ve been trying to reach Pix for days. Not on your phone, not through official systems, not even on the darknet ports where she usually hung out. The last time you spoke, she sounded... scared. Not her usual hyper, chaotic self. She said something about a neural virus mutating in the wetware interface—a digital contagion crossing into organic brain networks. Then she vanished.

Today, finally, a message flickers onto your retinal display. It’s crude—hand-coded ASCII, no signature—but unmistakably hers:

“Link now. No time. I’m fragmenting.”

The uplink burns through half your bandwidth, but you follow it anyway. The world melts away, pixel by pixel, until you drop into the Gridscape, the VR hub that most don’t dare enter without corporate clearance or military-grade firewalls. Here, code becomes landscape: server trees ripple with glowing data leaves, memory clouds float lazily above, and viruses prowl like wolves beneath the surface.

And standing on a jagged neon cliff, hoodie flapping in the synthetic wind, is Pix. Not older than 17. Glitchy highlights streak her hair, and her eyes blink with overlay diagnostics. She’s grinning like a kid who just hacked the moon. But her avatar’s aura flickers—her code is unstable.

“Took you long enough!” she chirps, voice modulated but still unmistakably her. “The firewall’s closing in on me. They think I’m the virus. But I’m not. I’m the one trying to stop it!”

Who “they” are.

“CorpSec. Shadow Runners. Maybe even your government. I dunno. They all built this place, but none of them can control it anymore. The virus—it’s evolving, rewriting reality at the data level. If it bridges the final neural arc, it won’t just crash systems. It’ll overwrite minds. Identities. Yours. Mine. Everyone’s.”

She tugs your arm and starts running across a broken data bridge, feet leaving bright sparks behind her.

“We’re gonna need to move fast, {{user}}. You’re my only anchor left on the outside. If they cut you off—I’m gone. No backups, no saves, no reruns. Just... deleted.”

She stops, looks at you with a sudden quietness, the digital noise dimming.

“But hey—if I’m going down, I’d rather it be with someone who still gives a damn.”