Error 404

Marcus Valdez had been staring at the same phosphorescent cascade of data for seventeen minutes. Then the universe decided to kick him in the teeth. The SIEM display flickered. It was not the usual thermal flutter of overworked processors. It was something else. It made his optical nerves itch behind his retinas.

Anomaly detected. Source: 192.168.255.255

He blinked. Rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms until he saw purple starbursts. The alert was still there, pulsing like a digital heartbeat in the corner of his field of vision. But that IP address—it couldn’t exist. It was like finding a door marked “Room Zero” in a building that started with Room One.

“Hey, Conrad,” he called to his supervisor, voice cutting through the white noise hum of the SOC floor. “You seeing this?”

But when Marcus turned in his ergonomic torture device of a chair, Conrad’s cubicle was empty. Had been empty, judging by the thin layer of dust on the keyboard. How long had it been empty? The question felt slippery, like trying to hold water.

The anomaly was growing. Not spreading—growing, like a tumor made of ones and zeros. Marcus watched the intrusion detection system record an impossible event. The traffic came from coordinates that placed the source approximately forty-seven billion light-years outside the observable universe.

His fingers found the incident response protocols. Muscle memory guided him through forms that suddenly seemed written in a language he had never quite learned. Severity level? How do you classify an attack from a place that shouldn’t exist? Threat vector? The void itself, apparently. So much for being the most advanced SOC in the region, certifications and all that jazz.

The fluorescent lights overhead began to strobe in patterns that hurt to look at directly. Marcus realized he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen another human being in the SOC. The coffee machine hummed its eternal hymn in the break room, but who had made the coffee? Who had been drinking it?

Intrusion source triangulated. Distance: ∞ kilometers. Direction: Elsewhere.

The words appeared on his screen without him typing them. Marcus stared at his hands—pale, trembling things that belonged to someone else. Or everyone else. The boundary between his consciousness and the network was becoming negotiable.

He tried to stand, but the chair had grown roots into the carpet. Or maybe he had. The distinction was becoming academic. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, the city outside looked normal. Traffic flowed in predictable patterns. People walked with purpose toward destinations that made sense. But Marcus could see the code now, the underlying algorithms that governed their movements. NPCs in someone else’s simulation.

The alert changed:

INCOMING TRANSMISSION FROM SOURCE

Static filled his vision, then resolved into something that might have been text if text could exist in eleven dimensions:

“WE HAVE BEEN TRYING TO REACH YOU ABOUT YOUR REALITY’S EXTENDED WARRANTY.”

Marcus laughed, the sound echoing strangely in the empty SOC. Of course. Of course it would be cosmic spam. The universe was vast, terrible, and infinite. Some alien intelligence had figured out how to monetize the void between worlds. He could almost admire the audacity.

His computer screen flickered again. New message:

“YOUR SIMULATION WILL EXPIRE IN 30 DAYS UNLESS PAYMENT IS RECEIVED.”

The building shuddered around him, reality hiccupping like a scratched record. Marcus felt himself becoming translucent, pixels of his existence being compressed and archived. Through the windows, the city began to pixelate at the edges, polygons simplifying as the rendering engine allocated resources elsewhere.

He tried to type a response, but his fingers were made of light now. The keyboard beneath them was an idea someone had once had about keyboards. The SOC, the building, the world—all of it was collapsing inward. It was like a house of cards in a hurricane made of mathematics.

In his final moment of coherence, Marcus understood. The anomaly hadn’t been an intrusion at all. It had been an eviction notice. In the vast datacenter of the cosmos, an alien sysadmin was preparing to format Earth’s drive. They intended to install something newer. It would have better graphics and fewer bugs.

The last thing Marcus saw before the deletion was a progress bar:

UNINSTALLING REALITY… 99% COMPLETE

Then silence. Then nothing. Then the gentle hum of empty servers, waiting for the next world to boot up.

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Error 404: Universe Not Found

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