The only sounds left in the office were the soft whir of Max’s laptop and the gentle hum of the overhead LEDs—steady, clinical, and a little too bright for comfort this late at night.
Everyone else had cleared out. Or at least stopped pretending they were still working. The Slack channel had gone quiet about an hour ago. No more bug GIFs or passive-aggressive emoji chains. The digital equivalent of locking the door on the way out.
Max didn’t mind the silence. The borrowed conference room had the last decent chairs in the building—supportive enough to forget he’d been sitting for ten hours straight.
On his screen, a branching node structure stretched outward like digital kudzu—dialogue options, triggers, failsafes, reactivity layers. He scrolled down, squinted at the quest flag he’d been rewriting all week.
“You can’t change what’s done. Only what you carry from it.”
He exhaled through his nose.
“Bit much…”
He deleted it. Rewrote it. Then deleted it again.
It wasn’t that the line was wrong—it was that it assumed the player gave a shit. And Max didn’t believe that anymore. The player would be spamming buttons at this point hoping they had added a “skip” function at this point in the story. They had.
The door creaked open behind him.
“You nesting in here now?”
Max didn’t turn. “The chairs don’t bite. Yet.”
Aaron stepped inside, hoodie half-zipped, backpack over one shoulder, energy drink in hand. “I think HR’s gonna start charging you rent.”
“They’ll have to find me first.”
Aaron leaned on the back of a chair. “Trillium’s. Drinks. You in?”
Max tilted his head, eyes still on the screen. “Tempting. But I’m close to figuring out how to kill the diplomat without breaking the trade route logic.”
“Ah, the sacred quest of ‘Don’t Break the Game While Breaking the Game.’ Truly heroic.”
Max smiled faintly. “It’s what the people want.”
Aaron gave the screen a look, then raised a brow. “Is this the same node flow you were poking last night?”
“Technically, it’s evolved. Like a fungus.”
Aaron tossed his empty can into the recycling bin. “Max, you know I love you, but if you’re here when I show up tomorrow, I’m calling IT to forcibly uninstall you.”
Max shrugged. “Fair.”
“Seriously though, come out. Even for one drink.”
Max hesitated. Then shook his head. “Rain check. My brain’s still making noise.”
Aaron studied him for a second, then nodded. “Alright. Don’t let the NPCs unionize while I’m gone.”
“They’ve already formed a guild. I’m negotiating loot drops.”
“Godspeed.”
The door clicked shut.
Max sat back, staring at the tangle of logic on the screen. It wasn’t broken. Not really. It just... didn’t land. The player could technically finish the arc. The systems fired. The flags cleared.
But it didn’t mean anything.
Not yet.
He rubbed his eyes. The mug at his elbow had long since gone cold, half the paint worn off the side. The quote was barely legible: “Every story begins with a choice.”
The parking garage was mostly empty—just a few scattered cars under the dull orange glow of security lights. Max’s footsteps echoed a little too sharply as he crossed the concrete, laptop bag slung over one shoulder like a weight he’d forgotten he was carrying.
His car unlocked with a tired chirp. He slid inside, tossed the bag onto the passenger seat, and took a moment before starting the engine. Not because he was tired—though he was—but because the silence was… comfortable. Or maybe numbing.
The dashboard clock read 10:21 p.m.
He backed out and drove, windows up, radio off.
City streets at night had their own rhythm. Not quiet, exactly. Just thinned out. The kind of stillness that felt like a held breath. Streetlights stretched down the road in a procession of halos. Empty crosswalks. Closed shops. A billboard advertising a triple-A title that had pushed three release dates and still hadn’t shown gameplay.
Max didn’t miss that world. But it clung to him.
He drove in silence, letting his thoughts drift—past quests he’d gutted, systems he’d stitched together too quickly, storylines that never quite got the budget to breathe.
Somewhere around 10th and Layton, he stopped at a red light that didn’t need to be there.
No cars.
No pedestrians.
Just red.
He rested his head back against the seat and stared at the glow washing across his windshield.
His eyes burned.
Not from emotion.
From exhaustion.
When the light turned green, he didn’t move right away.
He just sat there, watching the intersection as if something might step into it.
Nothing did.
He eased forward, slowly, the world stretching out ahead of him in familiar lines. The road stretched ahead in clean, dark lines. Max’s hands were on the wheel, but he couldn’t remember the last few turns. Not exactly unusual. He wasn’t speeding. Wasn’t weaving. Just… drifting. On rails.
He blinked. Still here.
Streetlights flicked past in rhythmic intervals, each one syncing with the dull pulse behind his eyes. He rubbed his forehead absently, like trying to press a thought out through his skull.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
He couldn’t stop thinking. Not about life. Not about what he was doing tomorrow. About flag conflicts. Faction arcs. Reputation triggers. A logic loop he couldn’t crack.
It wasn’t even a hard bug—just one that refused to line up cleanly without killing the pacing. Every solution he came up with broke something downstream. Or required rewriting half the quest logic.
It’s too complicated, he thought. Feels like I’m solving for elegance instead of just solving for function.
And that’s when the memory hit.
Completely uninvited.
A QA ticket from years ago. Back when his job was to break things—not fix them. A player had somehow triggered a boss fight with no boss in it. Just a health bar and a screaming soundtrack. The arena was completely empty.
He remembered combing through prefab data for hours before realizing it was a race condition. An obscure item, activated during a cutscene load, overwrote the spawn delay and despawned the boss before the trigger finalized.
He didn’t rewrite the whole spawn system.
He added a fallback.
If no boss existed after six seconds, the system spawned one anyway.
“Cheap fix,” he muttered. “Still worked.”
He shook his head, smiling despite himself.
What does that even have to do with this? The problems weren’t the same—at all. Different systems, different stakes.
But the instinct behind them?
That felt familiar.
He was chasing perfection in a machine that just needed to run.
Maybe I’m overbuilding again. Maybe I just need a failsafe.
He blinked again. The road ahead blurred just slightly.
And then it didn’t.
A glow. Off-center. Closer than it should’ve been.
Too fast.
Too bright.
The thought didn’t even finish forming.
Just—
Light.
There was no sound.
No light.
No direction.
Max couldn’t tell if he was falling, floating, or simply suspended in place. Whatever it was, it didn’t hurt. There was no panic. Just space—vast and detached. Like something had pressed pause on the entire world and left him behind in the gap.
He wondered if this was a dream.
But he’d had dreams before. They always brought something with them—faces, places, fragments of sound. Even the strangest ones had a rhythm.
This felt different. Still. Empty in a way that felt too complete to be imagined.
Then something shifted. A sensation at the edge of awareness—quiet pressure, like standing just below the surface of water. Not painful. Just constant.
He tried to move. Nothing changed. Tried to open his eyes, and realized he wasn’t sure he had them anymore.
That realization should have been terrifying.
But it wasn’t.
Not exactly.
It just added to the weight pressing in around him.
And then—like something had been watching and decided it had waited long enough—
A memory stirred.
It formed around him with no transition. One moment, he was nowhere. The next, he was staring at a glowing monitor, surrounded by the low hum of fans and the smell of stale takeout.
His old apartment.
The cluttered desk. A notebook spread open, lines of scratched-out dialogue and tangled flowcharts spilling across the page.
He knew this moment.
Late patch cycle. The writer had burned out and walked, and Max had taken it all on himself—rewriting quest logic at 2 a.m., running on cold coffee and stubbornness.
He watched himself rub his eyes, sigh, and tap the pen against the paper.
And then it was gone.
No fade. Just—cut.
He was back in the dark.
Suspended.
But something inside felt a little less weightless.
Then the flashes came. Sharp, fast, and jumbled.
A chipped mug in his hand. Morning light through half-closed blinds. Burnt toast curling at the edges.
A coworker laughing as they lobbed a paper ball across a meeting room. “Patch it later, Cross.”
His sister holding up a birthday cake. Candles dripping wax onto the table. Someone singing off-key in the background.
The bar downtown. Dim lights. An ex-girlfriend stealing fries off his plate.
Rain on his jacket. A stranger holding out an umbrella without saying a word.
The first time he solved a bug that had stumped the whole QA team.
A playtester clicking past every dialogue box he’d rewritten three times.
They passed too quickly to hold. Not memories being recalled—just moments being extracted. Pulled from him like files being catalogued.
Then it vanished, too.
Darkness again.
The silence that followed was different.
He felt it settle in his chest.
And the thought came.
I’m dead.
It wasn’t a question. It just… landed. The pieces fit too neatly: the memories, the light, the stillness.
Too cliché, he thought.
But what else could this be?
He waited for something to prove him wrong.
No voice came. No sudden clarity.
Only the hollow weight of it all.
Not just the end of something.
The sense that he was being erased—before he ever left a mark.
The stillness stretched.
Something shifted, faint but unmistakable. Like pressure from a hand you couldn’t see. It wasn’t painful. It didn’t speak. But it was there—aware of him.
Max couldn’t hear it, but he could feel it. Not with his body—he wasn’t sure he had one anymore—but through something deeper. A quiet presence, steady and patient, as if waiting to see what he would do next.
A feeling surfaced. Not his, exactly. More like it had drifted in from somewhere else and settled inside him. It carried no shape, no words, but it asked something all the same.
He didn’t respond. Couldn’t. There was no voice to answer with, no mouth, no thoughts he could string into sentences. Just the ache that had been building ever since the memories began.
The fear of ending.
Of being erased before he made anything that mattered.
And in the space left by that fear, something moved.
The presence leaned closer—not physically, but in whatever strange shape attention took here. A message stirred loose from the dark, as if echoing from behind the veil of his own thoughts.
To vanish is nothing…
The pressure shifted around him, drawing tighter, like lines being sketched in a void.
To fade without a mark—everything.
He didn’t understand it.
But something inside him recognized the truth of it.
The space around him began to change. Slowly. Deliberately.
The darkness pulled inward, shaping around him like the edge of something solid.
A tether formed, anchoring him to a direction he couldn’t see.
He didn’t know what was happening.
Didn’t know what it meant.
But he was no longer drifting.
Whatever this was—it had already begun.
There was weight again.
It started as a sense of pressure. Not pain. Just contact—something pushing back.
Max became aware of a shape around him. Not a body exactly, but boundaries. He could tell where he began and where something else started. It didn’t feel like flesh, but it was solid. Contained.
He couldn’t tell how he was positioned. Upright, sideways, floating—none of it registered. What mattered was that he wasn’t drifting anymore.
He focused on that. On the stability. It grounded him more than anything else so far.
Then he noticed the texture.
Stone. Cold and dense. He wasn’t touching it, but it was nearby—surrounding him, maybe. He had no eyes to see it with, but the surface detail came through anyway. Rough. Uneven. Heavy in a way that felt structural.
He tried to move, but nothing responded. He wasn’t sure what he was trying to move with. Arms? Legs? The thought didn’t connect to anything physical. Still, he felt the intention ripple outward—like something had heard him.
There was a shift. Small. Internal.
It wasn’t a twitch or a pulse. Just a sense that part of the space around him had acknowledged his presence. Like it had adjusted.
That’s when he felt it.
Control.
Distant and vague, but there. Like a joint that hadn’t been used in a long time. Stiff. Unfamiliar.
He focused again—this time more carefully.
The stone nearby seemed to react. Just slightly. A change in pressure. Almost like it yielded to his attention.
That stopped him cold.
Was that me?
It hadn’t been direct. He didn’t command it. But something about his awareness—his focus—had registered.
The effect was small, but undeniable.
He waited, trying to isolate the sensation again. It felt like a limb that wasn’t there. A phantom connection. But unlike the rest of his body—whatever it had become—this part responded.
Slowly, carefully, he focused again.
And the sensation returned.
He didn’t know what he was now.
But whatever he had become—
It could act.
Something shifted in the environment. Not physically—but procedurally. A sense of order emerging from static.
Then, in front of him—or maybe just within him—text appeared.
Clean. Geometric. No flourish. Just data.
[ENTITY STATUS: ACTIVE]
[DESIGNATION: SEED - TYPE 4, ABERRANT]
[CLASSIFICATION: DUNGEON SEED]
[INTEGRITY: STABLE]
[ROOT ACCESS: RESTRICTED]
[SURFACE ACCESS: RESTRICTED]
[EXPANSION PROTOCOL: DORMANT]
[QUERY: INITIALIZATION REQUESTED]
[AWAITING SEED INTERACTION]
The text hung there, perfectly still. No countdown. No urgency.
Max studied each line, slowly.
Seed. Type 4. Aberrant.
He didn’t know what that meant. But “aberrant” stood out. Whatever this system usually expected, it wasn’t him.
Dungeon Seed.
That part struck him. It sounded like something planted—buried for a reason. Either to grow or to stay hidden.
His thoughts circled back to the flashes. The silence. The message. That strange presence, offering something he still didn’t fully understand.
He looked at the final line.
[AWAITING SEED INTERACTION]
No menu. No interface. Just a statement. Like the system was waiting for input it didn’t need explained.
Max focused on the sensation again—that phantom-limb control he’d felt earlier.
And something responded.
