“Juggernaut inbound, Rook! Get to the ammo crate!” crackled Delta, his team leader, through the comms.
“If I quit now,” he said to the void, “I’ll lose my rank.”
Rook looked around. He was standing on a grey, featureless grid, like a 3D modeling program before the textures loaded. The Eiffel Tower was a ghostly wireframe. The Arc de Triomphe was just a pale outline.
“Uh, Delta?” Rook said, his voice echoing into the void. “Where’s the zone ?”
A Juggernaut appeared. But it wasn't made of armor and miniguns. It was made of pure, unrendered ERROR. Its body was a shimmering mass of pink and black checkerboards. Where its face should be, a Windows error box blinked:
And then he was gone. The grid went silent. And somewhere, on a dusty hard drive, a single line of code wept a silent, hexadecimal tear.
