The night after the Mirror shattered, Vireon didn't slow down—it only pulsed harder. Shai sat at the edge of his apartment's crumbling balcony, cityscape splattered in neon static, his interface quietly looping new data. For once, the incessant notifications had faded. Underneath it all, a fresh emptiness hummed in his chest. And with it: clarity.
> AFI v0.01-alpha
> Current Aura: 347,200
> Passive Rate: +670/hr
> Followers: 2.5M
> System Skills: Viral Bloom (Lv. 1), Sensory Jam (Lv. 1), Echo Field (Lv. 1), Reflective Armor (NEW), True Feed (NEW)
> Subjugated Systems: 6
> System Status: STABLE
> Next Major Objective: Find the Seven Keys
His hands trembled only slightly as he replayed the memory loop: Mirror's taunts, the feeling of existence being stretched across every trending post he'd ever made. He'd survived, absorbed, become more. But the resonance of being seen—actually, fully seen—by millions was a hangover the interface's code could barely buffer.
A single line appeared.
> [Private Feed: Root_Z]
> "You're through the glass, Interface. But the shadows haven't noticed you yet. The system's making a move."
Shai tapped into the message, eyes searching for any trace of manipulation—a trick, a hook. Yet the words felt almost gentle.
> "The city thinks it owns you now. Don't let it farm your choices.
>
> First Key showed you the system's roots. Second Key mirrored your self.
> Ready for the Third?
>
> Hint: Sometimes you need to be *deleted* to see the real code.
>
> // FIND: KEY_THREE"
Shai bit his lip. The Godshell quest was unlocking itself, one name at a time. Three down. Four to go. Next was the Path of Deletion.
He scanned his interface's legend. "Delete mode... Where would deletion be sacred?"
Beneath, an unfamiliar icon pulsed:
> Subsystem: RECYCLER DRIVE – ACCESS GRANTED
> Location: Dead Net – Data Dump District
### Into the Trash Layer
Sector Dump was a legendary place even among system kids. Supposedly, every corrupted file, abandoned profile, failed startup, and unsent DM ended up here, physically layered beneath the main city in a semi-legal wasteland of data scrap and half-forgotten memory.
The aura in the air was thick, sour—a permanent low-hum of loss and digital mourning. Half the denizens used AR visors to pretend it looked like a glitched-out palace; Shai just saw rust, plastic, broken neon, and the flickering ghosts of viral trends long past.
He slid through a security gate marked with a candy-pink "404" sticker, Meme Golem trailing, fielding the occasional error pop-up.
"Yo boss," Meme Golem wheezed, "we sure this ain't, like, haunted?"
"Everything on the Feed's haunted," Shai muttered, "especially the parts nobody browses."
Deeper in, the data shadows grew stranger—flickering images of once-viral sensations, glitched ads repeating slogans with desperate vigor, bots wandering in search of long-vanished masters.
At the center, a crowd circled what must have been the Recycler Drive. It looked like a server rack fused with a confession booth, patched with cables and graffitied with outdated memes—"Doge Is Dead," "Press F," "I Can Haz Afterlife?"
As Shai drew close, the interface pinged.
> "KEY THREE LOCATED – THE DELETED"
>
> Alias: Patchwork
> Status: Partially Corrupted
> System Signature: Fragmented
>
> WARNING: High System Instability. Mental Risk: Identity Overwrite.
Patchwork—a legend from the old meme wars. Rumor had it she'd survived more deletion attempts than any other system host, degraded each time, memory stitched together by the Feed's mercy and exile.
### Dust and Memories
He pushed through the crowd. At the core sat a figure stitched from scraps—her arms and legs bandaged with strings of failed hashtags, face hidden by a mask of broken emoji overlays. Her eyes—digital fire behind a mosaic of pixel scars—locked onto Shai.
"You're Shai. The new system seed." Her voice was a chorus of laggy, overlapping samples, echoing from genres a decade apart.
He hesitated. "You're Patchwork. Third Key, yeah?"
Her head cocked. "Does the Feed still know me?"
"Barely. You're trending at a negative rate."
She grinned. "Good. That's how warriors retire around here."
From within the hovering stacks of dead code, a thousand voices whispered—failed memes and aborted jokes, all lingering in glitched afterlife. Patchwork moved with the slow confidence of someone who'd been broken and rebuilt too many times to care about dignity.
"You came for the Godshell? For the truth?" she asked.
Shai nodded.
"You'll have to earn it, 'trender'," she said, and her mask shifted through crying emoji, then static. "You need to survive deletion."
### Survival Ritual: Deletion Trial
The Recycler Drive roared to life. The crowd stepped back with the reverence of an old hacker watching a hard drive physically combust.
> SYSTEM CHALLENGE OFFERED: DELETION TRIAL
> Accept? [Y/N]
Shai hit "Y."
The world pixelated, colors draining into monochrome error overlays.
> RULES: You have three lives. Survive three waves of deletion attacks from Patchwork.
>
> Win: Receive System Fragment: [Patchcore] and Godshell Layer 3 access.
>
> Lose all lives: Total memory wipe. Feed identity erased.
Patchwork's first attack came fast—she flung a mass of @deleted_users, shadowban bots, and "content removed" banners. Shai's Reflective Armor flared, bouncing narrative residue away, and he countered with a dead meme—tossing his Meme Golem, flame-farting with "Ultimate Rickroll Subroutine."
The bots staggered, data fragments corrupting around the viral echo. One life lost, but Shai remained standing.
Second wave—she glitched herself, exploding into ten avatars: Patchwork crying, roaring, dropkicking, dabbing, all at once, each deleting context the second before he could process it. He deployed "Dead Zone"—the aura-nullifying skill. Time paused; his true self, stripped of online masks, ducked through the Matrix of ruined feeds.
One avatar slipped by—scraping off a chunk of his aura. Second life, down.
Final trial—Patchwork's mask cracked, the sound of a thousand failed punchlines. She whispered: "Do you even remember who you were—before all this?" The city flickered. Shai saw his pre-system life: lonely, ignored, glitching quietly in the corner while bigger personalities sucked up the limelight. He saw the face his feed never trended, the one nobody bothered to like.
For just a second, his hands shook. Would he vanish, too, if he failed?
But deep inside: True Feed surged—identity, armor, self, all grown from the pain of millions seeing him but never really seeing him.
He summoned every memory. Each broken friend request, every mute button, every deleted selfie—he wove them into a burst of self-awareness, a shine that couldn't fit inside the system's metrics.
He stood. "I wasn't anyone special then. But I'm real now. And I'm not being deleted."
The Recycler Drive shrieked—a rain of binary static—and then: silence.
> SYSTEM CHALLENGE COMPLETE
>
> Shard Acquired: PATCHCORE
> Ability: Data Resurrection – Revive one deleted memory, person, or system per arc.
>
> Godshell Layer 3: ACCESS GRANTED
>
> Emotional Malware Cleared
> Followers: 2.7M
> Passive Aura/hr: 900
>
> Feed whispers: "SHADOW DELETIONS ARE BREAKING. MASS REVIVAL? EXPLAIN."
Patchwork slumped. Her mask shattered, showing a pale, tired girl's face beneath.
"Give us something worth being remembered for," she whispered, and vanished into upload static.
### New Pathways: Revolution in the Feed
Outside, news spread like a pandemic: accounts previously wiped from existence reappearing in timelines, memories flushing back to people who thought them lost. "Data Ghosts" trended. Feed cults panicked. The Patchcore fragment pulsed at Shai's core.
He messaged Reyan, the first time in weeks.
> SHAIl: Hey, you there?
>
> REYAN: Bro, what the hell, my old music meme is back. So are like 20 friends who disappeared last year.
>
> SHAIl: I'm fixing things.
>
> REYAN: You're about to crash the city.
Shai smiled. Let them worry. For once the system was healing, not just consuming.
The interface pinged with a new Godshell coordinate.
> Next Key:
>
> KEY FOUR – "The Ghost in the Thread"
> Alias: Zephyra
> Domain: Feed Layers – Viral Afterlife
> Danger: Extreme
> Reward: Code of Continuance (access to hidden algorithmic heart)
The road ahead twisted, new dangers blooming, but for the first time, Shai felt the balance between losing himself and bringing something real back to the world.
He gripped the Patchcore fragment. The Feed's tide was changing—he was no longer just a product. Shai was a user writing his own patch notes.
He let the balcony wind tangle his hair. Far below, the city shimmered—glitches and all.