Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop, please!

  I wasn’t sure if I was screaming inside of my own head thanks to the simulated reality, or if I was giving some poor shmuck neighbor of mine the fright of his life. I didn’t care. I needed the shadow’s words to be drowned out, and I was quite willing to do it myself.

  It didn’t work. No matter how loudly I screeched, I could still hear the shadow speaking. I couldn’t understand a single word. It was all a horrible gibberish that my mind itself recoiled from, refusing to process it.

  But I could feel the words. And they hurt. It felt like spiky tentacles of some unseen horror were piercing through my ears and trying to root around inside of my brain.

  Movement within this virtual reality was an odd, instinctual thing, driven entirely by will and concentration. Caught up in my terror, I was almost perfectly still for the first several seconds of the shadow’s speech. That lasted only until said terror had time to percolate, blurring the lines between reality and simulation until none were left.

  Then I was pounding my fist down onto the shadow’s twiggy hand. To my utter shock, its fingers snapped as easily as worn-out plastic, and I was free.

  It was the shadow’s turn to scream. The thing ceased its chanting and partially sank back into the wall, but I still slugged it in its stupid face, just to be sure. Then I turned, ready to hightail it out of there.

  Except I couldn’t. I froze, my very real and physical heart beating so hard I felt lightheaded.

  My eyes were glitching. The world was a shifting kaleidoscope of code and true-to-life simulations. And out of both those things dripped… tar, as black as the deepest darkness I had ever seen. It came from the cracks in the walls and from the gaps between the code, oozing around me and cutting off all avenues of escape.

  Red eyes lurked within that tar. Fanged grins gleamed at me. More shadows than I was ready to stop and count were dragging themselves into my simulated reality.

  These shadows weren’t speaking. But in the silence, there was nothing to distract me from their movement. And that was somehow worse.

  It was like watching a marionette come to life, except the poor thing had no idea how limbs were even supposed to work. Their arms and legs were bent at unnatural angles. Their necks looked like they just didn’t work right. The round splotches representing the shadows’ heads bobbed around, unsupported. A real body would have torn itself apart in seconds contorting like that, but the shadows didn’t care.

  And they were coming for me.

  No thoughtful search for access points or coding gaps in that moment. I hurled myself at the closest wall that wasn’t utterly covered in ichor and forced myself through the streams of code that made it up.

  My lungs gulped down breath after breath of air. Looking around wildly at my new surroundings, I quickly realized I was back at square one of the street simulation.

  I risked a glance behind me. Other than a a glitching hole in the wall I’d passed through, and a series of glowing cracks radiating out from that hole, there was nothing. Even the cracks were already healing. Daring to relax a smidge, I reached for the menu that would let me jack out of the virtual reality.

  That was when the nearest human simulations to me began to jerk and twitch.

  A middle-aged man with no real standout features snapped towards me, or at least his head did. The rest of his body was still facing the other direction. I didn’t even have enough time to scream before his chocolate brown eyes went red and tar erupted out of every orifice on his body, covering it in mere seconds with impenetrable black. His limbs elongated. His teeth grew pointy. His grin stretched.

  A shadow stood before me.

  The creature began to open its mouth, but I was running already. I had no idea where I was headed. As long as it was away from the shadowy horrors, that was fine with me.

  Not that it did any good.

  With every passing second, more and more glitches plagued my vision, and tar began to emerge everywhere: right under my feet, dripping off a street lamp on the corner, from within the walls of the surroundings buildings.

  And, of course, the people. Can’t forget the people! The simulated humans were getting devoured faster than anything else, replaced by shadows that clumsily reached for me. I didn’t dare look back, but I knew there was a wave of tar and shadows at my heels, reaching for me.

  At the same time, I frantically manipulated the menus of my virtual reality. Every time I managed to pull up the exit option, my vision would glitch, and it would disappear. I couldn’t think fast enough to push past the effect and get it to pull me out of the nightmare. It was like my eyes simply refused to process the visual feed they were receiving and feed it to my brain.

  The message was as clear as it was maddening: there was no escape.

  Only shadows.

  The infection of tar was spreading. Everywhere I looked, it was erupting in ever greater quantities. Even the road ahead of me was starting to shrink into nearly nothing. Had I been forced to rely on my actual dexterity, I would have fumbled and stepped into one of the sticky patches of darkness a long time ago. Only the incredibly keen instincts I seemed to have within the simulated world kept me from that fate.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  It wasn’t enough.

  I was still rushing ahead full tilt when I slammed headfirst into an invisible obstacle. The road ahead of me fizzled and faded away, replaced by a featureless stone wall.

  I’d reached the limit of the simulation: the edge of whatever city block the creators of the shard had taken inspiration from. There was nowhere else to run.

  I slammed my fists and forehead into the wall. My entire body shuddered from the effort to keep in the terror, the tears, and whatever else was about to spill out of me. Then I leapt backwards as my vision glitched and a crack opened up right next to my nose, bleeding tar.

  Apparently, the shadows were set on proving they were assholes.

  I snapped around, but there wasn’t much to see at that point. Tar covered everything. The buildings were writing fountains of the stuff. The humans were all creatures from my worst nightmares. Any attempt to move would require tearing my feet from the sticky black substance.

  Only the sky was still present. But I noticed cracks opening up in that, too, globs of tar oozing out and dropping down to the ground with horrible, goopy noises.

  Oddly, the shadows weren’t up in my face yet. They were hanging back, giving me about two meters of space to work with.

  “What do you want from me?” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “WHAT DO YOU WANT?!”

  Fear gave way to anger. When one of the shadows stepped forward and tried to open its mouth, I slugged it right in the face. Its entire head snapped back and its neck cracked, loudly, like I’d stepped on a plastic cup.

  I probably shouldn’t have done that, because it seemed to make some of them angry. A dozen shadows surged forward, their twiggy hands reaching out and grabbing for me. I fought with everything I had. I punched and kicked and bit whatever came within reach of me, barely registering the horrible rotten taste of their flesh.

  Obviously, I lost.

  I staggered backwards under the weight of their pile-on. When my back hit the wall, I felt hands reaching through that too, locking onto my face, my arms, my legs. Their grip was unrelenting. Pointy fingers dug deep into my flesh until I couldn’t hold back pained whimpers. I could barely squirm as their horrible grinning faces filled my vision.

  Then they unhinged their jaws as one, and their incomprehensible speech spilled forth.

  My mind boiled. Consciousness wavered. I felt like I was about to shatter into a million pieces at any moment, and a deep part of me simply knew there would be no putting me back together after that.

  Visions scrolled across my mind, slithering into my awareness like snakes that sought to burrow into a still-warm carcass.

  I saw an immense eye staring through a crack in reality, figures boiling out of it and dropping into a world alien to them.

  I saw a digital haven of numbers and logic being contaminated by madness and wonder, forever altering an underlying aspect of its identity.

  I saw minds get snuffed out and devoured, not because their killers were hungry, or angry, or even malicious, but because of a desperate desire to understand. To be. To adapt. To become one with a new and exciting reality.

  I wanted to claw my eyes out, to tear them away and crush them into tiny bits just to stop the visions from coming. I wanted to shove my fingers into my head and tear out whatever had wormed its way inside.

  If the shadows didn’t have a death grip on my entire body, I would have.

  With a sense of finality approaching, I felt something struggle to burrow into me without displacing or destroying what was already there. I felt its rising excitement at the approach of its success. I felt —

  My vision cut out entirely.

  There were no glitches, no monsters, no visions. Nothing. Just a moment of perfect stillness, broken all too soon by an error message that began to blink in and out of my vision.

  Under that, another notification lurked, less pushy but no less important.

  I couldn’t process what I was seeing. Oh, the words made sense, but the context entirely eluded me. I was still stuck in a dizzying torrent of fear and adrenaline. Nothing else could break through.

  I don’t know how long I just lay there, limp and without any will to move, ever so slowly getting used to senses that weren’t being assaulted by eldritch fuckery.

  The first thing I really acknowledged was the absence of pain, followed quickly by some kind of whirring noise. Then, the lightness of my limbs and my ability to move them again. A slightly ‘off’ scent followed, accompanied by heat that verged on uncomfortable.

  Finally, I forced myself to reread the messages and acknowledge their significance. The second I hit that ‘yes’ button in my head, my vision returned. I was greeted by the sight of my ceiling. Groaning, I shifted to my side, stiff and entirely unsure what level of control I had over my body.

  Then my eyes landed on the cyberdeck.

  Curses slipped free of my mouth as I tried to rush forward. I tumbled halfway out of my bed, cursing more when the movement tugged on the cables connecting to the back of my neck. Removing them in a hurry, I forced myself upright properly.

  Thankfully, the cables weren’t scalding to the touch, even if they were sort of warm. But that was nothing compared to my cyberdeck.

  The thing had actual steam rising off it like a heat mirage. Its casing was cherry red in places. I had to admit, I was incredibly impressed the entire setup hadn’t erupted into flames already. The cooling system was doing a wonderful job, whirring away and working hard to regulate the temperature.

  Really, I was remarkably lucky that the early mobile cyberdeck models were designed for toughness above all else. I could even hope that the machine would still work when it cooled down and I could risk inspecting it. If that had been a newer model, one installed directly into the base of my skull, well…

  There’d be no more Adrian kicking around, for sure. The heat would have cooked my brain long before the hardware hit its limits and the system kicked me out of the simulation.

  While I hovered like a worried parent over their child getting sick for the very first time, there was nothing I could actually do. Even attempting to grab the case would have burned me.

  I could’ve been an absolute idiot and tried to spray the deck with water, but that was an excellent way to burn myself from the resulting vapors, or finally tip the situation in favor of a massive fire. Not to mention the electrocution I’d earn myself for a stunt like that. All I could do was wait for the cooling system to finish its work.

  And try to ward off the flashbacks of everything I’d just experienced, which my mind was already bombarding me with.

  I collapsed onto one of the chairs Mela got me, buried my face into my hands, and had myself a proper crying session.