The cobblestones of Red Square weren't just slippery; they were liquid.
Jake Vance's boot sank into the stone like it was grey mud. He yanked it free with a sickening squelch and kept running.
"Don't look down!" Jake screamed. "Look at the Gate!"
The Spassky Tower loomed ahead. The massive clock face was glowing wrong. The hands were spinning counter-clockwise so fast they looked like a blur, emitting a high-pitched whine that drilled into Jake's teeth.
"They are behind us!" Menzhinsky shrieked.
Jake risked a glance over his shoulder.
The Static Soldiers—the "Cleaners"—were gliding across the square. They didn't run. They just scaled up in size as they got closer, sliding over the ground without friction.
A laughing woman in a floral dress stood in their path. She held out a bouquet of flowers to the faceless monsters.
"Welcome to the party!" she giggled.
The lead Cleaner walked through her.
She didn't scream. She unspooled. Like a sweater caught on a nail, her body unraveled into long, thin ribbons of binary code. The ribbons floated for a second, then dissolved into white dust.
"Keep moving!" Taranov roared. He grabbed Menzhinsky by the belt and hurled him toward the Kremlin entrance.
They hit the archway of the Spassky Gate.
"Door is locked!" Valentina shouted. She slammed her fist against the massive oak timber. "It's not budging!"
"It's not locked," Yuri said calmly. He tapped the wood. It sounded like tin. " The collision mesh is misplaced. The door thinks it is a wall."
"Break it down!" Jake ordered.
Taranov revved the minigun. The barrels spun with a hungry whine.
"No!" Yuri grabbed the barrel. The metal sizzled against his palm. "Bullets are physical assets. That door is a logic error. If you shoot it, you might crash the physics in this entire sector."
"Then how do we get in?" Taranov yelled.
The hum of the Cleaners was getting louder. It sounded like a swarm of electric wasps.
"We cheat," Jake said.
He grabbed the handle of the door. He didn't pull. He visualized the code he had seen on the Moon. The raw, green lines of the developer console.
He focused on the concept of Open.
His hand began to vibrate. The wood under his fingers turned into a wireframe grid.
"Noclip," Jake whispered.
He shoved Taranov.
The big bodyguard yelled as he stumbled through the solid wood, phasing through it like a ghost.
"Go!" Jake shoved Valentina next. Then Menzhinsky.
Yuri walked through on his own, adjusting his tie as he passed through the oak beams.
Jake went last.
The sensation was freezing. It felt like walking through a curtain of ice water.
He tumbled out onto the pavement inside the Kremlin walls.
The world here was quieter. The roar of the happy crowd was muffled, like he was underwater.
"My hands," Taranov gasped. He was staring at his gloves. "Look at my hands."
Jake looked. Taranov's fingers were flickering. One second they were flesh, the next they were blocky, low-polygon shapes.
"Rendering lag," Yuri noted. "We moved too fast for the server to load our avatars correctly."
"We need the bunker," Jake said, forcing himself to stand. The nausea was rolling in his gut like a storm. "Where is Oppenheimer?"
"Sector 4," Menzhinsky wheezed. "The Secure Lab."
They ran past the Tsar Cannon.
The massive bronze weapon was floating three feet off the ground. It rotated slowly, clipping through a nearby tree.
"Don't touch anything," Jake warned. "The environment is hostile."
They reached the entrance to the government building. The guards at the door were frozen in a T-pose, their arms stuck out to the sides, eyes wide and unseeing.
"Are they dead?" Valentina asked, slowing down.
"Paused," Jake said. "The System is allocating resources to the Cleaners. It paused the NPCs to save memory."
They sprinted past the frozen statues of men. It was a museum of wax figures, terrifyingly still.
They burst into the elevator. Jake smashed the button for the sub-basement.
The doors didn't close.
"Press it again!" Taranov yelled.
"I am pressing it!"
A shadow fell over the lobby floor.
Jake looked out.
A Cleaner was standing at the glass entrance doors. It didn't have a face, just a swirling vortex of static where a head should be.
It raised a hand. The glass doors shattered—not into shards, but into pixels.
"It found us," Menzhinsky whimpered. He curled into a ball in the corner of the elevator.
"Taranov, give me a grenade," Jake said.
"You said weapons don't work!"
"Just give it to me!"
Taranov unclipped a fragmentation grenade from his belt.
Jake grabbed it. He didn't pull the pin. He pulled out the "Root Access" crystal he still had in his pocket—the shard from the Statue of Liberty.
He jammed the crystal against the grenade.
"Yuri, interface!" Jake commanded.
Yuri touched the grenade. His eyes glowed with a faint blue light.
"Overwriting payload," Yuri droned. "Replacing 'Shrapnel' with 'Corrupt_Data_Packet'. Success."
Jake threw the grenade into the lobby.
It bounced once.
The Cleaner stepped on it.
BLIP.
There was no explosion. No fire.
Instead, a sphere of darkness expanded from the grenade. It looked like a hole in the universe.
The Cleaner touched the darkness.
It screeched—a sound like metal tearing. The static body turned bright pink, then blue, then inverted.
"Texture error," Yuri observed.
The Cleaner collapsed, imploding into a tiny, dense black dot on the floor.
The elevator doors finally slid shut.
"Going down," the automated voice said cheerfully. "Have a productive day!"
Jake slumped against the wall. His heart was hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs.
"What did you do to that grenade?" Valentina asked, staring at him with wide eyes.
"I turned it into a virus," Jake said. "We can't kill them with physics. We have to kill them with bugs."
The elevator dinged.
Sub-basement 3.
The doors opened onto chaos.
The lab was filled with smoke. Not from a fire, but from dry ice.
Robert Oppenheimer was standing on a table, holding a fire extinguisher. He looked like a mad conductor, waving the nozzle at a bank of servers that were sparking wildly.
"Don't let the magic smoke out!" Oppenheimer screamed. "If the smoke leaves, the math stops working!"
"Robert!" Jake shouted.
Oppenheimer spun around. His face was gaunt, his eyes rimmed with red. He looked at Jake, then at Yuri.
"You broke it," Oppenheimer accused. He pointed a trembling finger at them. "I told you! I told you the atomic structure was just a rendering trick! But no! You had to plug the Vampire Drive in!"
"Situation report," Jake barked, stepping over a pile of cables.
"The situation is that Pi is now exactly 3!" Oppenheimer yelled. "Do you understand? The universe is rounding down numbers to save processing power! Circles are becoming squares!"
He held up a coffee mug. It wasn't round. It was hexagonal.
"Low poly count," Yuri nodded. "Optimization protocol."
"It's hideous!" Oppenheimer smashed the hexagonal mug on the floor. "And the Americans... oh god, the Americans."
"What about them?"
Oppenheimer ran to a massive wall of monitors. Half of them were showing "NO SIGNAL." The others showed grainy satellite footage of the United States.
It was grey. Pitch black in some places.
But in the center of the darkness, something was moving.
"The lack of hope created a vacuum," Oppenheimer explained, his voice trembling. "Nature abhors a vacuum. Even a digital one."
Jake leaned closer to the screen.
In the ruins of Washington D.C., the grey shadows were pooling together. They were forming shapes. Twisted, elongated shapes.
"Despair isn't just an emotion anymore," Oppenheimer whispered. "It's spawning mobs."
"Mobs?" Taranov asked.
"Monsters," Jake translated. "High-level enemies."
"And here?" Valentina pointed to the screen showing Moscow. "We have the opposite problem."
The screen showed the streets above. The "Happy" citizens were now gathering in circles, holding hands, staring at the sky.
"They are forming a hive mind," Yuri said. "The system is trying to cluster the AI to reduce the processing load."
"They're merging?" Jake asked, horrified.
"Physically," Yuri said. "Look."
On the screen, three people in the crowd seemed to melt into each other, fusing into a multi-limbed mass of smiling flesh.
Menzhinsky vomited on the floor.
"We can't stay here," Jake said. "The Cleaners are upstairs. The Hive Mind is forming outside. And reality is downgrading to 8-bit graphics."
"We need to leave Earth," Valentina said. "The Moon Base. It's the only stable server."
"The N-1 Rocket is at Baikonur," Oppenheimer said. "That's two thousand miles away. We'll never make it. The trains are glitching."
"We don't need a rocket," Jake said. He looked at Yuri. "We have the subway."
"The Metro?" Taranov scoffed. "Boss, the Metro goes to the suburbs, not the Moon."
"There is a line that doesn't go to the suburbs," Jake said. "Metro-2. The secret line Stalin built."
"That's a myth," Menzhinsky wiped his mouth. "I'm the head of the NKVD. I would know."
"It wasn't built by you," Jake said. "It was built by the previous admin. The one before me."
He looked at the floor.
"Yuri, scan the foundation."
Yuri looked down. His eyes glowed blue again.
"Detecting a void space beneath us," Yuri said. "Depth: 200 meters. Shielded by a firewall."
"A firewall?" Oppenheimer perked up. "If it's firewalled, the Cleaners can't see it."
"Exactly," Jake said. "It's a developer tunnel. A backdoor."
BOOM.
The ceiling shook. Dust—pixelated, square dust—rained down on them.
"They are breaching the blast doors," Taranov said, racking the slide of his minigun, even though he knew it was useless.
"We have to dig," Jake said.
"With what?" Valentina asked. "Spoons?"
Jake looked at the server rack Oppenheimer had been protecting. It was a massive, humming monolith of Soviet electronics.
"Oppenheimer," Jake said. "Is that the main cooling unit?"
"Yes. It uses liquid nitrogen."
"Overload it," Jake ordered. "Thermal shock the floor. Crack the concrete."
"It'll blow the room up!"
"Do it!"
Oppenheimer didn't argue. He typed a command into the terminal. Then he ran behind a heavy desk.
"Cover!"
Jake dragged Yuri down.
CRACK.
It wasn't an explosion. It was the sound of a glacier breaking.
The liquid nitrogen tank ruptured. A wave of absolute cold washed over the room. The concrete floor hissed, turned white, and then—shattered.
A hole opened up. A dark, jagged maw leading into the abyss.
"Go!" Jake yelled.
He grabbed Taranov and shoved him into the hole. Valentina followed.
Above them, the blast doors turned pink and vanished.
Three Static Soldiers stood in the doorway. They raised their glowing batons.
"Come on!" Oppenheimer screamed, jumping into the darkness.
Jake grabbed Yuri.
"We're going underground, son," Jake said.
"Underground is just a lower layer of the simulation," Yuri noted.
"Let's hope nobody clipped through the floor down there," Jake grunted.
He jumped.
They fell into the dark, leaving the glitching, melting, smiling nightmare of Moscow behind.
Above them, the Cleaners stared down into the hole. They didn't follow.
They just stood there, watching, as the room around them slowly dissolved into grey geometric shapes.
The chase wasn't over. It had just changed levels.