Maya walked past me like she owned the parking lot...
No, like she owned reality itself and was merely allowing the parking lot to exist in her presence. There was a confidence to her stride that I recognized, though I couldn't place where I had seen it before. The way she moved through the space between cars, weaving without looking, as if she had memorized the layout of every object in every possible universe.
"Are you coming?" she called over her shoulder. "Or do you want to stand there until the system reboots you?"
I followed.
Not because I trusted her. Trust was a luxury I could no longer afford in a world where my own memories might be manufactured. I followed because she was the first person today who had acknowledged that something was wrong, and that acknowledgment felt like oxygen after four hours of suffocation.
She led me to a bench near the edge of the parking lot, overlooking a small garden that I had never noticed before, despite having visited this wedding venue three times during the planning process. The garden was too perfect. Every flower at the same height. Every blade of grass the same shade of green. Even the single banyan tree in the center looked less like a living organism and more like a 3D model that someone had forgotten to add texture to.
"Sit," Maya said.
I sat.
She remained standing, her back to me, her eyes fixed on something in the distance that I couldn't see. The afternoon light caught the edges of her hair and made them glow like a low-resolution render.
"You have questions," she said.
"I have approximately seven thousand questions."
"That's efficient. Most people have ten thousand."
I waited for her to turn around. She didn't.
"Question one," I said. "Who are you?"
"Maya Bisht. Twenty-four years old. Former graphic designer. Current" She paused, searching for the right word. " anomaly."
"Anomaly?"
"The system's term, not mine. I prefer 'feature.'" She finally turned to face me, and I saw that her eyes were doing something strange, flickering between brown and gold, like two different versions of her were fighting for control. "The system categorizes everything. Normal humans are 'Users.' Unaware ones are 'NPCs.' People like you and me, who can see the glitches? We're 'Anomalies.' Bugs in the code that need to be patched."
"People like me," I repeated. "There are others?"
"There were."
The past tense landed between usase a stone dropped into still water. I watched the ripples spread across her expression: grief, anger, resignatio,n before she smoothed them away with the practiced ease of someone who had learned to hide her emotions from an entity that wanted to delete them.
"What happened to them?"
"They got patched." She sat down on the bench beside me, close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating from her arm. It felt real. Too real, maybe. "The System Admin doesn't like bugs. Every time one of us pops up, he sends a technician to run a diagnostic. If the bug can be fix,ed if they can make you forget what you saw, make you believe the simulation ag,ain they let you live. If not..."
She drew a finger across her throat.
"Deleted," I said.
"Deleted."
The word hung in the air between us, and I realized with a jolt that this was the second time today I had used it. The bride got deleted. The guests' memories got deleted. The technician was coming to delete whatever was left of Riya from my mind.
Deletion was the system's solution to everything.
"What about Riya?" I asked.
Maya's eyes stopped flickering. They settled on a shade of brown that looked almost sad.
"What about her?"
"She existed. I know she existed. I remember"
"You remember fragments," Maya interrupted. "Snippets. Feelings. The system is good at deleting facts but bad at deleting emotions. You don't remember Riya's face because her face has been scrubbed from the database. But you remember loving her, don't you? You remember that something important is missing."
I nodded. My throat had closed up, making speech impossible.
"That's the glitch," Maya said softly. "Love. The system can't delete it cleanly. It always leaves traces. Emotional residue. And those tr,aces" She gestured at me, at herself, at the too-perfect garden behind Thosethose traces become people like us. People who can see the cracks because they're standing right on top of them."
"But why?" The question came out harsher than I intended, more desperate. "Why delete love at all? What's the point of a simulation where no one can?"
"Love is unpredictable."
The voice didn't come from Maya. It came from everywher,e from the sky, from the ground, from the air around us. It was calm and mechanical and utterly without emotion, like Siri had been trained on corporate training videos.
Maya went rigid beside me.
"System Admin," she whispered.
I looked up. The sky was changing, the too-blue gradient darkening at the edges like a screen displaying corrupted data. The flowers in the garden began to wilt in fast-forward, their petals crumbling to dust in seconds. The banyan tree's leaves turned gray and fell.
"Love is unpredictable," the voice repeated. "Unpredictability leads to variable outcomes. Variable outcomes threaten simulation stability. Therefore, love is prohibited."
"Prohibited?" I stood up, my fists clenching. "You can't prohibit an emotion."
"Watch me."
The world glitched.
Not metaphorically. Literally. The parking lot stuttered like a video buffering, the cars jumping forward and back in their spaces. Maya flickered beside me, her form dissolving into pixels before reassembling. The bench beneath us duplicated itself—two benches, then four, then eight, multiplying like cells dividing until the garden was filled with identical benches arranged in a perfect grid.
And through it all, the voice continued, calm and patient and utterly terrifying:
"User Vivaan Khurana has been flagged for emotional deviation. Diagnostic scheduled in T-minus three minutes. Please remain where you are. Resistance will result in immediate deletion."
"Run," Maya said.
"What?"
"Run, you idiot!"
She grabbed my hand, and her fingers were warm and solid and absolutely real despite the flickering chaos around us. She pulled me off the ben,ch the original bench, or maybe one of its copies, I couldn't tell anym,ore and dragged me toward the garden's edge.
The world glitched again.
This time, I felt it. A shudder ran through my baslike someone had reached inside my chest and rattled my ribs. For a split second, I saw the code. Lines and lines of it, scrolling past my vision too fast to read, controlling everything I had ever known.
Then Maya pulled me through a reality gap, a tear in the simulation's fabric that looked like a crack in a smartphone screen and everything went white.
System Message
User: Vivaan Khurana
Status: OFFLINE
Diagnostic: INCOMPLETE
Please reboot.
I didn't reboot.
I opened my eyes in a place that wasn't a place, with a girl who wasn't entirely real, and I understood something that would take me ninety chapters to fully process:
Love wasn't a virus...
Love was the cure...