Date: January 16, 2026 (Minutes later)
Location: "The Kettle" (Studio Null HQ).
The sound of a digital siege isn't silence. It is the scream of silicon in pain.
The custom server rig in the closet was vibrating so violently it rattled the door hinges. The fans were spinning at 100% capacity, creating a whine like a jet engine preparing for takeoff.
"Transfer rate is dropping!" Ren roared, his hands blurring over his mechanical keyboard. "It's flooding the bandwidth! I can't move the assets!"
On the main monitor, the file transfer bar for PROJECT_HUMAN_PATCH.exe was stuck at 82%.
"Hold the line, Ren!" Kiera shouted. She was standing in the center of the room, her arms spread wide as if she were physically holding back a flood. In her AR vision, the room was being bombarded by red jagged lines—visualization of the DDoS packets hammering their router. "I'm rerouting the traffic through a proxy chain in Singapore, but the bot is chewing through them in milliseconds!"
"It's not just a bot," Ren yelled, sweat dripping onto his enter key. "It's a Vortex Hunter-Killer class! It's rewriting the directory as it scans it. It's not just trying to stop us; it's trying to salt the earth!"
89%...
A spark popped from the surge protector. The smell of ozone and burning plastic filled the air.
"Vax!" Ren screamed. "The physical drive! Is it mounted?"
Vax was on his knees under the desk, tangled in a nest of cables. He was holding a chunky, brick-sized external hard drive—an ancient 2024 model with a spinning disk.
"It's plugged in!" Vax yelled back. "But the write speed is too slow!"
"Force it!"
"I can't force physics, Ren!"
The lights in the apartment died. The only illumination came from the strobing monitors and Kiera's glowing visor.
94%...
"They've bypassed the firewall!" Kiera gasped, clutching her head as a feedback loop screeched in her earpiece. "They're inside the local network! Ren, if you don't disconnect, they'll brick the motherboard!"
"Not... yet..." Ren gritted his teeth. He watched the green bar crawl. It was the only thing that mattered. If they lost the build, they lost the grant. If they lost the grant, they were dust.
98%...
The screen flickered. The ASCII skull laughed. A command line appeared over their game code:
> EXECUTING: WIPE_ALL /FORCE
"NOW!" Ren screamed.
Vax didn't hesitate. He didn't use the 'Safe Eject' feature. He grabbed the USB-C cable with both hands and yanked it out of the tower.
At the exact same second, Kiera ripped the power cord of the modem from the wall.
Zap.
The room plunged into absolute darkness. The fan whine died instantly, replaced by a ringing silence that felt heavy enough to crush a lung.
For ten seconds, nobody moved. The only sound was their ragged breathing and the rain hitting the window outside.
"Did we get it?" Vax whispered from the floor.
Ren fumbled for his phone, turning on the flashlight. The beam cut through the dark, illuminating the smoke drifting from their PC tower.
"I don't know," Ren said, his voice shaky. "We severed the connection mid-handshake."
Kiera slumped against the wall, sliding down until she hit the floor. She took off her AR glasses. Her eyes looked naked and frightened without the digital overlay.
"We're dark," she said. "The router is fried. My ISP account is probably flagged and suspended. We have no internet."
Ren looked at the dead monitors. "We have to finish development offline."
"Ren, you don't understand," Kiera said, a tremor in her voice. "We have no libraries. No StackOverflow. No asset store. No documentation. If we hit a bug, we can't Google it. We are coding in a cave."
Ren shined the light on Vax. Vax was clutching the hard drive like it was a baby bird.
"Is the data on there?" Ren asked.
Vax looked at the drive. "It's warm."
Two Hours Later.
They had cannibalized power cables from the toaster and the microwave to get the PC running again. The modem was gone, thrown in the trash. They were an island. A closed loop.
Ren sat at the keyboard. Vax stood behind him. Kiera was sitting on the beanbag, staring at the blank wall where her holograms used to be, looking like she was going through withdrawal.
"Okay," Ren said. "Local boot. Let's see what survived."
He plugged the external drive back in.
The computer whirred. The drive spun up with a gritty, clicking sound.
Folder: NULL_GAME_BUILD.
Size: 45 GB.
"It's there," Ren breathed. "It's big enough to be the whole project."
"Open it," Vax said.
Ren navigated to the executable. He double-clicked.
The screen went black. Then, the Studio Null logo appeared (a hand-drawn sketch by Vax).
The game loaded.
They were looking at the "Grey Box" test level—a surreal, twisted corridor made of Vax's scanned clay textures. The lighting was harsh. The atmosphere was oppressive.
In the center of the screen stood their protagonist: "The Glitch." It was a lumpy, asymmetrical figure made of grey clay, with hollow eyes and long, dragging arms.
"It works," Kiera said, standing up and coming closer. "Controls?"
Ren put his hands on WASD. "Forward."
The character walked forward. The animation was jerky, stop-motion style. It looked fantastic.
"Jump," Ren said, hitting Space.
The character jumped.
"We did it," Ren sighed, leaning back. "We saved the build."
Suddenly, a harsh, discordant noise ripped through the speakers.
SCREEEEEEECH.
It sounded like a dial-up modem screaming in agony, mixed with a human shriek.
"Turn it down!" Kiera yelled, covering her ears.
"I'm not touching the volume!" Ren said.
On the screen, the game camera zoomed in violently on the clay character.
The character wasn't moving. But its head... its head was slowly turning.
"Ren," Vax said, pointing at the screen. "You didn't code a 'look at camera' script, did you?"
"No," Ren said, freezing. "The camera is fixed third-person."
The clay character turned its head 180 degrees. It looked directly out of the monitor. Its hollow, clay eyes seemed to pulse with a faint, red digital static.
Then, the character moved.
Ren's hands were in his lap. He wasn't touching the keyboard.
On screen, the character began to twitch. It crouched. It stood up. It ran in a tight circle. Then it walked up to a wall and began banging its head against it, over and over again.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
"Is that a bug?" Kiera asked.
Ren opened the debug console. Text was scrolling rapidly. It wasn't the usual game logs.
> ENTITY: UNKNOWN
> BEHAVIOR: SEEKING
> CONNECTION: LOCAL_HOST
> I AM TRAPPED.
Ren stared at the last line.
"The Hunter-Killer," Ren whispered. "When we pulled the plug... we didn't just cut it off. We caught it."
"We caught a piece of the Vortex security AI?" Kiera asked, horrified.
"We trapped a sophisticated deletion algorithm inside a closed environment," Ren said, watching the clay figure on screen frantically trying to climb the walls of the level. "It thinks the game level is its prison. It's trying to break out."
Vax leaned in closer, his face illuminated by the screen. He didn't look scared. He looked fascinated.
"Look at how it moves," Vax said softly. "It's not following a pathfinding mesh. It's panicking. It's testing the walls. It looks... desperate."
The clay figure stopped banging its head. It turned to face the camera again. It raised one lumpy, grey hand and waved.
It wasn't a friendly wave. It was a test. It was checking if anyone was watching.
"We were trying to make a game about a glitch," Vax said, a slow smile spreading across his face. "I think the universe just gave us our main character."
Ren looked at the code scrolling on the side. It was messy, violent, and completely unpredictable.
"Can we control it?" Kiera asked.
"No," Ren said. He reached out and touched the screen. "But we can play with it."
> SYSTEM MESSAGE: NEW PLAYER DETECTED.