Zhang came to on the physics building rooftop—except it wasn't the rooftop anymore. The concrete under his palms had the texture of a manuscript page, slightly fibrous under his fingertips. When he lifted his hand, inked fingerprints lingered for three seconds before evaporating like drying alcohol.
Lin crouched nearby, her blazer sleeves rolled up past elbows crisscrossed with equations written in something that wasn't quite ink. The characters shifted when he blinked, recomposing themselves into different formulae each time. She held a Zippo lighter upside down, letting the flame lick at the air where the proofreaders had stood moments before. The fire burned straight downward without consuming her fingers.
"Third reset today," she said without looking up. The lighter snapped shut, severing the impossible flame. "They're getting faster."
Zhang's vision doubled suddenly—for one vertiginous moment he saw two superimposed realities: the rooftop under a normal afternoon sun, and this impossible parchment-textured version where Lin's shadow stretched in four conflicting directions. He grabbed a rusted pipe for balance. His fingers passed through the metal on the second attempt, sinking into the surface like wet tissue paper before catching purchase.
Song materialized by the roof access door that hadn't existed five seconds ago, her designer heels leaving perfect circular indentations in the concrete that immediately filled with a dark liquid. She held a brokerage statement between two fingers—the numbers inverted, the totals bleeding upward. "They took another thirty thousand this cycle," she said. The paper curled at the edges, blackening as if exposed to invisible heat. "Smaller increments mean they're learning."
A gust of wind carried the scent of burning plastic. Zhang turned toward the campus quad below and saw students moving in staggered loops—the same three steps forward, two back, their laughter replaying in clipped fifteen-second samples. One girl near the physics building steps kept dropping her textbooks only to have them reappear in her arms at the exact moment of impact.
Lin followed his gaze. "Temporal stitches," she said, tapping a fingernail against her temple. The sound came out metallic. "The narrative can't decide which version of this afternoon to commit to."
Zhang's left hand spasmed suddenly. He looked down to see his fingertips turning translucent, the flesh dissolving into strings of raw code that spelled out **[CHARACTER COHERENCE: 78%]**. He clenched his fist and the digits solidified again—mostly. His pinky finger remained stubbornly semitransparent, its outline flickering like a corrupted video file.
Song grabbed his wrist, her manicured nails leaving crescent indentations that didn't fade. "Focus on my voice," she ordered. Her pupils contracted to pinpricks despite the shade. "What's the last thing you remember before the rooftop?"
Zhang opened his mouth—and froze. The memory was there, but when he reached for it, his mental fingers closed around something slippery and sharp-edged. A classroom? A dorm room? The more he chased the recollection, the faster it unraveled, leaving only frayed narrative threads that dissolved under scrutiny.
Lin exchanged a look with Song. "Worse than last time," she murmured. She pressed a hand against Zhang's chest—not over his heart, but slightly to the left, where his fourth rib should have been. Her palm came away smeared with fresh ink. "They're eating his anchors."
The ink on Lin's palm wasn't drying—it *crawled*, forming miniature versions of the brokerage statements Zhang had burned minutes or lifetimes ago. She clenched her fist and the numbers screamed silently before dissolving into her lifeline. "We need to ground you," she said, producing a fountain pen from her blazer's inner pocket. Its nib gleamed like surgical steel.
Song intercepted her wrist. "Not like that." She pointed to Zhang's flickering hand where the corruption spread upward past his wrist. "Look at the pattern—it's not random. They're targeting his transactional memories first."
Zhang flexed his translucent fingers. With each twitch, stock tickers flashed briefly across his skin—TSLA 240.50, AAPL 172.33—all prices from crucial turning points in the novel's original plot. A cold realization prickled his spine. "They're not deleting me," he breathed. "They're *shorting* me."
Lin's pen froze mid-air. Her glasses reflected the equations now scrolling rapidly down Zhang's forearm as the corruption accelerated. "Oh fuck," she whispered. "They're turning you into a derivative."
The rooftop shuddered violently. Concrete cracked in straight lines, revealing gridlines beneath—like a spreadsheet made physical. Song's Louboutins sank slightly into the suddenly porous surface. "We're in the narrative's recycling bin," she said, prying her heel free with a wet sound. "They've already overwritten this scene."
Zhang's vision blurred as two competing versions of the rooftop superimposed—one where Lin stood gripping his shoulders, another where she'd already turned to leave. His own voice echoed from both timelines simultaneously: *"I can't feel my—"* / *"—like static in my—"* The dissonance made his teeth vibrate.
Lin's pen slashed downward, carving a vertical line through the air that hung shimmering like a freshly inked margin. "Give me your hand. Now." When Zhang hesitated, she grabbed his wrist and plunged their clasped hands through the luminous divide.
The world inverted.
Suddenly they stood not on the rooftop but *beside* it—observers to their own frozen forms mid-conversation, while Song's duplicate walked backward into a rewinding scene. The original Lin still held Zhang's flickering hand, her mouth moving in silent speech as the corruption spread up to his elbow.
"Parallel commentary track," Lin murmured beside him. Her breath smelled like freshly printed pages. "We have about ninety seconds before the narrative notices the splice."
Zhang watched his other self collapse to his knees as the corruption reached his shoulder. The stock tickers on his skin had multiplied into a frenzied cascade—too fast to read, but he recognized the pattern. "They're running liquidation scenarios," he realized. "Testing which version of my erasure causes least plot disruption."
Lin's fingers tightened around his. "Then we make you indispensable."
Lin's pen slashed a vertical equation through the frozen scene—**Σ(erasure) > Σ(retention)**—before the ink crystallized into a blade. She drove it straight into the chest of Zhang's corrupted double. The figure didn't bleed; it *unfolded*, peeling apart into layers of draft revisions, each page stamped **[VOID]** in the margins.
"Quick," she hissed, pressing a scrap of paper against Zhang's flickering palm. It was a margin note from Chapter Nine—*Character shows unexpected resourcefulness*—now pulsing with fresh ink. "Own this line."
Zhang clenched the fragment. The words seared into his skin, overwriting the stock tickers. For three painful seconds, his body became pure text—every capillary a serif, each breath a paragraph break—before solidifying again.
Song materialized beside them, her blouse sleeve torn where the narrative had tried to rewrite her into a love interest. She tossed Zhang a brokerage slip dated tomorrow. "Memorize the transaction codes. They're anchors."
The rooftop trembled. Their frozen duplicates pixelated as the narrative recalculated. Lin grabbed Zhang's wrist—her touch left temporary tattoos of encryption keys. "They'll come for the heiress next. Her inheritance is the story's—"
A zipper parted midair beside them.
Not a sound—an actual zipper teeth materializing in reality, peeling open to reveal a proofreader's blank mask beneath. Its pen dripped liquid that erased the air where it fell.
Song reacted first. She slammed her stiletto through the zipper's fabric, pinning it shut. The proofreader's mask cracked diagonally, revealing a hollow space filled with scrolling edits: *...revise romantic subplot...increase protagonist's...*
Lin's pen flashed. She stabbed through the crack, twisting until the entity's form collapsed into a pile of footnotes. But more zippers were opening across the rooftop now—dozens, hundreds, each accompanied by the wet sound of pages separating.
Zhang's vision doubled again. The physics building flickered between brick and pure metadata. He grabbed Lin's shoulder—"The car"—just as the first proofreader's pen grazed Song's arm, dissolving her sleeve into **[SCENE REMOVED]** placeholder text.
They ran for the fire escape that hadn't existed five minutes ago. Its rusted steps morphed into spreadsheet rows beneath their feet, each cell calculating their probability of escape.
Behind them, the rooftop folded inward like a rejected manuscript page, proofreaders pouring through every crease. Song reached the alley first—where the Porsche sat idling with doors open, its windshield displaying **[AUTOSAVE IN PROGRESS...]**.
Lin shoved Zhang into the backseat. "Don't look at the rearview."
Too late.
The mirror showed his reflection holding a pen—not gripping it, but *composed* of it, his face rendered in perfect Courier New. The reflection smiled. "You're just an alternative draft," it whispered as Song slammed the accelerator.
The Porsche's tires left equations instead of skid marks. As they fishtailed onto the main road, Zhang watched through the rear window as the physics building collapsed into itself—not collapsing, but being *highlighted* in reverse video, the entire structure scrolling upward into a deletion.
Lin twisted in the passenger seat, her pupils swallowing the last traces of iris. "Your hand."
Zhang looked down. His fingers were typing on their own against the leather seat—not words, but stock symbols in perfect 12pt Helvetica. The letters bled through the upholstery, etching themselves into the metal beneath.
Song downshifted violently. The gearstick melted into an italicized *'no—'* before reforming. "They're repurposing your metadata," she snapped, swerving around a frozen delivery truck. Its driver sat motionless mid-bite into a sandwich that wasn't there anymore—just the *idea* of lunch hovering near his mouth.
A zipper parted across the windshield with a sound like a spine cracking. Lin reacted first, slamming her palm against the dash. The Porsche's systems stuttered—radio flipping through every frequency at once, speedometer needle spinning wildly—before the car *jumped* timelines.
For three stomach-dropping seconds, they existed between chapters. The road dissolved into manuscript margins. Streetlights became pencil sketches. Then reality snapped back with a concussive *thud*, the Porsche now barreling down a service tunnel that hadn't been on any map.
Zhang's vision doubled. The tunnel walls flickered between concrete and raw narrative scaffolding—he glimpsed the novel's original outline pinned to the girders, red strings connecting plot points that were being actively redacted. A single sentence pulsed in warning: *[Insert car chase here]*.
Song's knuckles whitened on the wheel. "They promoted us to a set piece."
Lin suddenly lunged across the console, grabbing Song's wrist just as her skin began pixelating. "Don't let it describe you!" she shouted over the rising wind—because there *was* wind now, howling through the tunnel with increasing urgency, carrying the scent of burning edits.
Zhang watched in horror as Song's designer blouse unraveled into raw descriptive text—*'her silk blouse (pale blue, size 6) clung to—'*—before Lin bit her own thumb and smeared blood across the words. The text screamed silently before dissolving.
The tunnel exit loomed ahead. Not light, but a blank page glowing with potential energy. Zhang's corrupted hand spasmed—it was compiling something, fingers folding into command prompts. He realized with dawning horror: *It's building an exit condition*.
Lin saw it too. She tore the sleeve from her blazer with her teeth, exposing forearms covered in equations that squirmed like live wires. "We crash through together or not at all."
Song didn't hesitate. She slammed the gas, the Porsche's engine howling in a frequency that vibrated Zhang's teeth into **[CHARACTER INTEGRITY: 64%]** warnings. The blank page rushed toward them—
—and resolved at the last second into a brokerage office.
They burst through the plate glass window in a hail of transactional confetti. The Porsche's hood folded around a marble column that hadn't existed three timelines ago, its surface crawling with live ticker tape.
Zhang's door dissolved before he could touch the handle. He fell onto a trading floor frozen mid-collapse—dozens of brokers suspended in various stages of shouting into phones that were just rectangular voids in their hands.
Lin landed beside him, her blazer now more footnote than fabric. She pointed upward.
The ceiling was missing.
Not destroyed—*unwritten*. Above them stretched the naked framework of the narrative engine, its gears grinding through revisions in real time. A massive counter ticked downward: **[FINAL DRAFT DEADLINE: 00:12:37]**.
Song crawled from the wreckage, one high heel missing. The remaining shoe pulsed with **[PLOT ARMOR: 12%]**. "Wrong financial district," she breathed. "This is the *first* novel's climax."
Zhang's corrupted hand twitched. The stock tickers resolved into a single flashing warning:
**[PROTAGONIST STATUS: TERMINATION PENDING]**
The frozen brokers turned their heads in unison. Their faces were blank except for embossed corporate logos.
Lin grabbed Zhang's flickering wrist. "Change of plan," she said, pressing her bleeding thumb against his pulse point. "We short the narrative."
The first broker's mouth unzipped vertically, revealing a pen nib where its tongue should be.
Song smiled. It wasn't a nice expression. "Time to crash their market."