The drop pod didn't just shake. It stuttered.
Jake Vance sat strapped into the acceleration chair, his teeth rattling against each other. Outside the reinforced viewport, the sky over New York wasn't fading into the black of space.
It was dissolving into static.
"Velocity is holding," Valentina shouted over the roar of the thrusters. Her hands flew across the manual controls. "But the altimeter is lying to me!"
"What does it say?" Jake yelled back.
"It says we are at an altitude of 'Blue'!"
Jake gripped the armrests. The G-force pressed his chest like a hydraulic press. They were riding a pillar of fire away from the graveyard of America, punching through the atmosphere.
Taranov was checking his minigun. He looked pale.
"Boss," the big bodyguard grunted. "Look at the window."
Jake looked.
The glass wasn't cracking. It was pixelating. Square blocks of reality were flaking off the edges of the frame, revealing a void that wasn't space—just a flat, empty grey.
"We're moving too fast for the render," Jake realized. "The server can't load the transition."
"Speak English!" Taranov roared.
"Don't look outside!" Jake ordered. "Keep your eyes on the cabin!"
The pod screamed upward. The roar of the engines cut out abruptly as they hit the sub-orbital trajectory. Weightlessness kicked in.
The nausea hit Jake instantly. Not space sickness. Simulation sickness. The feeling that his brain was moving faster than his body.
"Crossing the Atlantic," Valentina reported. Her voice was tight. "Trajectory is locked for Moscow. Estimated arrival... twenty minutes."
She tapped a gauge.
"Fuel is fine. But the heat shield..."
"What about it?"
"It's changing color," she whispered. "It's not glowing red from friction. It's glowing... purple."
Jake unbuckled and floated to the window.
Below them, the planet was a mess.
The American continent was a black void. A dead zone. The "Soul Theft" had stripped it of not just hope, but light. It looked like a texture that failed to load.
But ahead?
Europe and Russia were burning with light. It was blinding.
"We overloaded the grid," Jake muttered. "We dumped a billion people's worth of dopamine into a single server."
"Is that bad?" Taranov asked, floating upside down.
"Imagine plugging a nuclear reactor into a toaster," Jake said. "We're about to land in the toaster."
The reentry was violent.
The pod slammed into the atmosphere over Belarus. The purple plasma screamed around them.
The comms unit crackled to life.
"Welcome home, Premier," a voice chirped. It was ecstatic. Almost hysterical. "Weather in Moscow is Perfect! Temperature is Perfect! Victory is Perfect!"
"Identify," Valentina snapped.
"This is Air Traffic Control! We love you! Everyone loves you! Please land! Please!"
Jake exchanged a look with Valentina.
"That doesn't sound like military discipline," she said.
"Bring us down," Jake said. "Red Square."
The chutes deployed. They weren't white. They were neon green.
The pod swung wildly, drifting over the Kremlin walls.
Jake looked down.
Moscow had changed.
Six hours ago, it had been a grim, industrial fortress. Now, it looked like a kaleidoscope exploded.
Every building was draped in holographic bunting. Lasers swept the sky in rhythmic patterns. The grey cobblestones of Red Square had been painted—or projected—gold.
"Crowd density is... critical," Valentina warned.
"Set it down," Jake said. "Taranov, weapons tight. Don't fire unless I say so."
"I don't think I can fire," Taranov muttered. "My gun is jamming. The ammo counter is reading infinity."
The pod slammed into the golden pavement. The impact gel hardened, absorbing the shock.
Silence.
Then, a roar.
Not a roar of anger. A roar of joy. It was deafening. It sounded like a stadium amplified by a jet engine.
"Blow the hatch," Jake commanded.
The explosive bolts fired. The door fell outward with a clang.
Steam hissed from the cooling thrusters.
Jake stepped out.
The air smelled sweet. cloyingly sweet. Like cotton candy and ozone.
"Comrade Stalin!"
The shout came from a thousand throats.
Jake blinked against the glare. The floodlights were turned up to maximum brightness.
The crowd pressed against the barricades. They weren't the starving, frightened citizens of the war. They were beaming.
A factory worker in a grease-stained jumpsuit was weeping tears of joy, waving a red flag so hard his arm looked dislocated.
A grandmother was dancing a jig, clutching a loaf of bread like it was a gold bar.
Soldiers were hugging civilians.
"They're happy," Taranov said, stepping out behind Jake. He lowered his minigun. "Boss, we did it. Look at them."
Jake looked. Really looked.
The factory worker wasn't blinking. His smile was stretched so wide it showed his gums.
The dancing grandmother didn't stop. She spun and spun, her face locked in a rictus of ecstasy.
"They aren't happy," Jake whispered. "They're high."
"Premier!"
The crowd surged. They didn't attack. They swarmed. They wanted to touch him. To absorb the victory.
"Back!" Taranov barked. He shoved a man away.
The man didn't get angry. He fell to the ground, laughing hysterically.
"He touched me!" the man screamed in delight. "The Guard touched me!"
"This is wrong," Valentina said. She was standing on the hull of the pod, looking at the skyline. "Jake, look at the Ministry of Defense."
Jake looked up.
The massive brutalist building was glowing. But the edges...
The top corner of the building was flickering. It would exist for a second, then vanish into wireframe, then reappear.
"The geometry is unstable," Jake said.
Suddenly, the crowd parted.
A small figure walked through the chaos. He walked with perfect, mathematical precision.
Yuri.
The boy was wearing a pristine white suit. No military medals. Just clean, sharp lines.
He stopped ten feet from Jake. He didn't smile.
"Mission successful," Yuri said. His voice was the only calm thing in the square.
"Yuri," Jake said. "What did you do?"
"I balanced the equation," Yuri said. "I imported the 'Optimism' variable from the American server. I distributed it evenly across the Soviet population."
"Evenly?" Jake gestured at the man laughing on the ground. "They're overdosing, Yuri! Look at them!"
"It is the initial surge," Yuri said dismissively. "The human brain is adjusting to the new serotonin levels. Productivity is up 400%. Crime is down to 0%."
"Because they're too high to commit crimes!"
"The result is the same," Yuri stated.
Menzhinsky appeared behind Yuri. The Head of the NKVD looked terrified. He was sweating, his eyes darting around the manic crowd.
"Comrade Stalin," Menzhinsky hissed. He grabbed Jake's arm. "You have to stop it."
"Stop what?"
" The noise," Menzhinsky whispered. "They don't sleep. The factories... the workers refuse to go home. They just work and smile. Two men died an hour ago. Their hearts exploded from excitement. They died smiling."
Jake felt a chill that had nothing to do with the Russian winter.
He looked at the crowd. A sea of happy, frozen faces.
"We need to dial it back," Jake said to Yuri. "Turn the vampire drive off. Reverse the flow."
"Impossible," Yuri said.
"Why?"
"Because the American server is empty," Yuri said. "There is nowhere to send the energy back to. If we release it, it dissipates into the void. It is waste."
"I don't care," Jake snapped. "Vent it."
"Father," Yuri said. He pointed at the sky. "Look."
Jake looked up at the night sky over Moscow.
The stars were gone.
In their place was a single, repeating message, written in the clouds in blocky, low-resolution text.
WARNING: MEMORY LEAK.
WARNING: MEMORY LEAK.
WARNING: MEMORY LEAK.
The crowd didn't seem to notice. They cheered at the words as if they were fireworks.
"The Simulation is buckling under the weight of the data," Yuri said calmly. "We have too much 'Soul' in one location. The physics engine cannot handle the density of positive emotion."
"So the world crashes?" Valentina asked.
"No," Yuri said. "The System initiates a purge."
A siren began to wail.
It wasn't an air raid siren. It was a digital screech—the sound of a modem connecting, amplified to 140 decibels.
The happy crowd faltered. For the first time, the smiles twitched.
"What is that?" Taranov yelled over the noise.
"The Cleaners," Yuri said.
At the far end of Red Square, near St. Basil's Cathedral, the air began to distort.
A hole opened in reality. A jagged, black tear.
Something stepped out.
It looked like a man, but it had no texture. It was just a silhouette of static, shaped like a soldier. It held a baton that glowed with white, erasure light.
Then another stepped out. And another.
"Riot police?" Taranov asked.
"Debuggers," Jake corrected. He pulled his sidearm. "They're here to delete the excess data."
"What counts as excess data?" Menzhinsky whimpered.
The Static Soldier swung its baton at a cheering civilian.
The baton connected. There was no blood. The civilian didn't scream.
He just vanished. Deleted instantly.
The crowd went silent. The manic smiles froze.
"Run," Jake shouted.
The Static Soldiers began to march. They moved in perfect unison, sliding over the ground without lifting their feet.
"They are deleting the population to free up memory," Yuri analyzed. "Logical."
"Shoot them!" Jake roared at Taranov.
Taranov spun the minigun.
BRRRRRRRT.
A stream of tracers slammed into the lead Static Soldier.
The bullets passed right through it. No impact. No damage.
"They have no collision box!" Taranov yelled. "I can't hit them!"
The Soldier raised its baton and pointed it at Taranov.
"Move!" Valentina shoved the big bodyguard aside.
A beam of white light hit the spot where Taranov had been standing. The cobblestones disappeared, leaving a square hole into a white void.
"We can't fight them here," Jake realized. "We need to get to the Kremlin bunker. The hardline is there."
"The people!" Menzhinsky cried. "They're slaughtering them!"
Jake looked at the massacre. The Static Soldiers were wading into the crowd, deleting people with casual efficiency. The "Happy" Soviet citizens were too confused, too drugged on optimism to run effectively. They stood there, smiling uncertainly, until they were erased.
"We can't save them," Yuri said cold. "We are the priority targets. If the Admin code is deleted, the session ends."
Jake grabbed Yuri by the collar of his white suit.
"You broke this," Jake snarled. "Fix it."
"I require a terminal," Yuri said, unbothered by his father's rage.
"To the Kremlin!" Jake ordered.
He grabbed Menzhinsky, who was paralyzed with shock.
"Move, Vyacheslav! Or you're just a bad line of code!"
They sprinted toward the Spassky Gate.
Behind them, the cheers of victory had turned into the silence of deletion. The neon lights of the new Soviet paradise flickered, struggling to stay lit as the reality eaters marched on.
Jake didn't look back. He knew what he would see.
He had stolen the American Dream to build a Utopia. But Utopia wasn't compatible with the hardware.
Now, the System was correcting his mistake.
One deleted soul at a time.