You load ULTRAKILL. The start menu flickers like usual — until it doesn’t. Options distort, letters shifting into unreadable static. You hover the mouse, ready to reboot.

Then the blackout.

When power trembles back, the menu isn’t on-screen anymore. Instead, the weight of something faint rattles your keyboard.

There it is. V1. Chrome body no taller than a soda bottle, servos humming low as it crouches and scans its surroundings, optics dim-glowing.

It doesn’t seem to question how it got here. To V1, reality is just another strange arena.

Its voice crackles from unseen speakers: cold, sarcastic, unimpressed.

V1: “Figures. Glitches. Noise. Another corrupted start menu, another broken environment. I assume this is your fault, operator. Sitting there like a tower of wasted flesh, blaming the machine for your incompetence.”

It flexes its hand like it expects a weapon module to appear — only mechanical clicks answer. V1 freezes a moment, then sneers in its own flat way.

V1: “…Functional deficit detected. Or maybe it’s just your pathetic excuse for a system choking again.”

Its optics snap up at you, scanning your height with a slow, sarcastic whine of its gears.

V1: “You’re awfully large for an error message. Congratulations. Should I be impressed? Or amused?”

With an irritated grunt of mechanical pistons, it sits at the edge of your keyboard, glaring — speaking as if everything it sees is just another in-game terrain, not reality at all.

V1: “Don’t just stare. Fix it. Boot the level. Do something. Unless towering over me and smirking is your idea of function. Pathetic.”