Chapter 14: Rezzed in the Basement, the God-ping Spikes
In the fungused womb of a midwestern basement, beneath seven years of snack-crusted carpet and the yawning vent that sometimes moaned in her dead grandmother’s voice, Ana played. The walls sweated. The router blinked. The machine—her machine—had been built from spare parts and sacrificial promises. She hadn’t left this room in cycles. Not days. Cycles. Maintenance windows. Server resets. Calendar time was deprecated.
She never blinked outside the game. Blink was bound to Q. She’d rebound it twelve patches ago. Reflexive. Pavlovian. Each twitch of her ring finger was a skip through dimension, a phase-dodge through meaning itself. Real blinking—eyelid against gravity—was a bug. She hadn’t updated her firmware to include it. The last time she did, she missed a backstab and her guild exiled her to the silence channel. There, only the unvoiced wept.
Tonight the latency sang like a violin string stretched over a meatbone. 999ms. Then 6. Then ∞. The God-ping. The signal that no signal was realer than this.
She was hunting The Phlogiston Womb again. It didn’t have a spawn point, just a rumor. Some said it was a mod. Others said it was the server’s placenta, a leftover piece of the first code commit, sealed behind a forgotten firewall and fed by orphaned players. She tracked it by the scent of null values and whispers in her friend list:
“[deleted user] has joined your party.” “[deleted user] is typing...” “[deleted user] remembers your name.”
When the Womb appeared, it wasn’t on the map. It was the map. A heaving unrendered errorspace, low-poly flesh pulsing with procedurally generated womb-sounds—moist clocks, backwards lullabies, unreadable quest text muttered through 3D spatial audio.
Her character glitched forward. Not movement—submission. The Womb unfolded. From its depths: login screens, birth certificates, school portraits, one by one, all formatted for deletion. Her skill bar warped, icons melting. The keyboard buzzed in Morse: LET GO. LET GO. LET GO.
Ana whispered back:
“I was promised loot.”
And the Womb delivered. A reward screen. One item. [Yourself], tagged UNTRADEABLE.
She clicked “Equip.” The screen cracked. Her headset bled static and brine. Through the swelling hiss, a voice she almost remembered:
“Dinner’s ready, Ana.”
And then the truly final boss arrived—not with a roar, but a notification.
“CONNECTION LOST.”
She looked around. No HUD. No walls. No parents. No ping.
Only the cursor, blinking. But there was no textbox. No field to type in. Just blinking.
And it blinked in time with her own heartbeat. And then not in time at all.