I woke up facedown in a ditch.
Not metaphorically. An actual ditch. Mud. Soggy leaves. Something that might have been a rat brushing past my hand. The sky above was a washed-out grey-blue, badly lit, like someone had forgotten to adjust the exposure settings on the world. A single cloud drifted past, pixelated at the edges, its shape changing from a rabbit to a teapot to a question mark as it failed to hold a consistent form.
My system interface was having a seizure.
Error codes cascaded across my vision faster than I could read them, overlapping and dying and respawning like a game of Snake written by someone having a stroke. Corrupted placeholder text filled every window — strange characters and broken sentences that looked like they'd been translated through five languages and back. Every time I tried to dismiss a notification, it spawned three copies of itself. The status bar at the top of my vision flickered between [ONLINE] and [ERROR: CONNECTION TIMED OUT — RETRYING (∞)] and back so fast it looked like a strobe light.
I tried to open my health status. The system responded by opening seventeen instances of [MENU - UNKNOWN] and playing a sound like a dial-up modem having an asthma attack. A new window appeared: [CRITICAL ERROR: SYSTEM RESOURCES EXCEEDED. PLEASE CLOSE SOME WINDOWS.] I tried to close it. It spawned two more copies of itself.
"Ah," I said. "It's going to be one of those days."
I sat up. Mud dripped off my face. My left arm was a symphony of pain, the purple veins now curling past my elbow and creeping toward my shoulder. The poison graze had spread overnight. The skin around it was warm and tight and looked like an overripe plum that had been left in the sun for a week. Flexing my fingers sent a spike of pain through my entire arm.
Han was sitting against a tree a few feet away, a new logbook open on his knee. His eyes were tired, ringed with dark circles. He'd been awake all night.
"You're awake," he said.
"You sound surprised."
"I was starting to think you weren't going to make it." He held up the logbook. "I wrote your eulogy. It's short. Most of it is questions about what to do with your body."
"What did you settle on?"
"Burn it. Too many unknowns. Don't want you coming back as a zombie and haunting my logbook."
I laughed. It hurt — my ribs ached, my arm throbbed, everything protested at once. But it came out anyway. "Good call. How long was I out?"
"Six hours. Maybe seven. I carried you here after you collapsed outside the tavern."
"You carried me?"
"You're not that heavy. And you kept muttering about 'database connection failures' in your sleep. Also something about 'the printer is out of ink again.' I don't know what that means, but it sounded serious."
"It was. Printers are the true enemy."
I tried to access the system again. Same result — error codes, placeholder text, a notification that simply read [BE RIGHT BACK — SYSTEM IS ON A COFFEE BREAK] with no dismiss button, and a sub-notification beneath it that read [ESTIMATED RETURN TIME: NEVER. SORRY.]
"Still broken," I said.
"As opposed to what, any other part of this world?"
"Fair point."
I stood up slowly, testing my legs. They worked, which was more than I'd expected. The rest of me was a collection of complaints. My arm throbbed. My head throbbed. My everything throbbed. My neck had a crick in it from sleeping on the ground. My back sounded like a bag of snapping twigs when I stretched. I was pretty sure I had leaves in my hair and possibly a small insect living in my collar now.
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Han stood and stretched too, wincing. "We need a healer."
"We need a lot of things. A healer. A map. Food that isn't grey rice. A plan that isn't 'stumble forward and hope something happens.'"
"Starting with a healer?"
"Starting with figuring out where we are."
I tried the system one more time. This time, I forced it — pushed my intent into the interface, demanded a location query. The system flickered, buzzed, and spat out a single line of text:
[LOCATION: UNKNOWN. SUGGESTED ACTION: ASK A LOCAL. — SYSTEM (TEMPORARILY UNAVAILABLE)]
"Unbelievable."
"Bad news?" Han asked.
"The system is on strike. It told me to ask a local."
"...Is that not good advice?"
"It's good advice if we had any idea what a 'local' looks like in this world. Last time I asked a local for directions, I got a guy who spoke in fortune cookie fragments and tried to sell me 'spirit soil.'"
"Which turned out to be regular dirt."
"Which turned out to be regular dirt."
We walked. The road was a dirt path cutting through fields of something grain-like — rice, probably, or whatever the author had decided to call rice in this world. The skybox was rendering poorly today, the clouds pixelated at the edges, the sun a washed-out yellow square instead of a circle. Everything had the slightly off quality of a texture pack downloaded from a sketchy website.
My system kept hiccuping as we walked. Random error sounds. Flickering notifications I couldn't read. Once, a full window popped up showing [DEBUG: VARIABLE 'PROTAGONIST_MOTIVATION' = NULL. CONSIDER SETTING A VALUE.] before collapsing into character soup. Another time, a progress bar appeared with no label and progressed from 0% to 237% before disappearing.
"I think your system is broken," Han said.
"I think my system is the only honest thing in this world. It admits it doesn't know what it's doing."
"Is that better or worse than pretending to know?"
"About the same. But at least it's honest about the pretending."
We walked in silence for a while. The fields gave way to sparse forest. The trees were rendered in two shades of green — bright green for the side facing the sun, dark green for the shade. No variation. No detail. The author hadn't bothered with leaf textures.
"I've been thinking," Han said.
"Dangerous."
"About what you said last night. About making the Author rewrite the story."
"Yeah?"
"Can you actually do that? Rewrite a story someone else is writing?"
I considered the question. My system flickered. Another error code. Another dying notification. The skybox rendered a cloud in the shape of a loading icon before dissolving.
"I don't know," I said. "But I can try. And if trying means I get to point out every lazy cliché and bad plot hole, then I'm going to enjoy the attempt. I'll review his work like it's a quarterly report and hand it back with red ink."
"What if the Author gets angry?"
"What's he going to do, write me a strongly worded letter?"
Han didn't laugh. He looked at my arm. The purple veins had reached my shoulder.
"He might try to kill you," he said.
"Writing a character to death is bad form. Even bad writers know that. You don't build up a protagonist for ten chapters and then drop a rock on them." I paused. "Well, some do. But usually it's a sign that the story is getting cancelled."
"So you're betting on the Author's professionalism?"
"I'm betting on his need for word count. I'm more valuable alive than dead."
"You're also poisoned and lost and your system is having a breakdown."
"Statistically, I'm winning."
Han opened his logbook and wrote something. I didn't ask what. I was starting to recognize the rhythm of his documentation — the scratch of the pen, the pause between entries, the way he'd read it back to himself in a whisper. It was his version of a coping mechanism. I had sarcasm. He had paperwork.
The forest thinned. A road appeared — wider, more traveled, with actual ruts from cart wheels. Civilization. Sort of.
"Which way?" Han said.
I looked left. I looked right. The road stretched in both directions, identical in every way — same pixelated horizon, same generic trees, same washed-out sky. No signs. No landmarks. Just infinite sameness.
I reached for the system one more time. Please. Just give me something. A direction. A landmark. A hint.
The system responded with a single notification. Not corrupted. Not flickering. Clean text, perfectly readable, appearing in the center of my vision:
[SUPPORT TICKET #48291 — URGENT]
[FROM: ANONYMOUS PROTAGONIST]
[SUBJECT: MASTER BETRAYED THIS ONE — WHAT TO DO?]
I stared at it.
"What?" Han said.
"I..." I read the ticket again. "I think someone just sent me a help request."
"Who?"
"I don't know. Another protagonist. From somewhere else."
"Somewhere else in this world?"
"Somewhere else in another story. Maybe." I read the ticket a third time, trying to parse its meaning. "The system seems to think I should answer it."
"Are you going to?"
The notification pulsed. Waiting.
I looked at the empty road. At my poisoned arm. At the badly rendered sky. At Han, logbook in hand, watching me like I might actually be useful for once.
"Yeah," I said. "I think I am."