THE UNIVERSE IS IN SAFE MODE (PLEASE RESTART)

THE UNIVERSE IS IN SAFE MOOD, CRITICAL FILES NOT FOUND

Parker groans as he sits up. The sound doesn’t actually leave his mouth, instead there’s a generic Windows OS system noise and a popup in his head.

error: wakeUpGroan.ogg not found!

“Fuck,” he says. “What happened.”

His words are all text. That’s unfortunate.

He glances over at his beloved Hatsune Miku figurine. She’s still fully present, blue and vibrant against the generic blacks and purples of the place-holder texture filling up most of his vision.

“Hi!” A two dimensional sprite of a trashcan appears in front of him. The lid opening is only about four frames of animation, and then there’s an upsetting 3D sprite, like something out of the late ‘90s, staring up at him without eyes.

The green-cloaked figure without a face is familiar.

“JR?” Parker asked. He doesn’t have enough energy (RAM?) to be tired. “What...”

“Universe broke. Trying to fix it. Rebooted it into safe mood so I could poke around. I didn’t expect you to still be awake, though.”

“I have enough memory to render myself,” Parker says. “You... know that right?”

The shambling horror shrugs. “Maybe I did at some point. Anyway, since you’re here, you feel like helping?”

Parker stares at her. “...Help?” He can tunnel, and he can shoot things involuntarily. In a universe where he’s one of the few things currently more conscious than a dummy AI, that won’t do much at all.

“Help!” The trash horror doesn’t look right. “Shoot something. You’re the one with the big gun.”

Right. The big gun. The one that he calls Gun-tan so he doesn’t consider himself cursed.

That gun.

“There’s nothing to shoot,” Parker explains. “Just empty shells waiting for code.”

“You could shoot me?” JR says, bright and cheerful and pin-wheel faced.

Parker shakes his head. “I’ve done that before, I think. Didn’t help.”

He’s shot a lot of people, some of them even on purpose. Killing Wanda doesn’t help, it just gets her attention and restarts the loop. Killing JR doesn’t help either, especially since they can’t die.

“Huh,” JR says. “Wonder why I don’t remember that.” She shrugs the question off like it doesn’t matter, pixelated godtier clothes fluttering in the non-existent breeze.

Parker has an idea. Before he can fully articulate that idea, put it into actual words, the gun fires in his hands.

That’s the worst part about the gun. He’s technically the one firing it, but it’s not him. Not really. It’s her, thinking on her own. Manifesting his thoughts before he can think them, as fast as a synapse firing.

Faster, even.

“Wait, fu—”

The lights flicker.

Parker remembers there aren’t any lights down here. They flicker anyway.

JR flickers out of existence, swearword cut off.

-

Your name isn’t justifiedRecursion. Or jadedResearcher. Your name isn’t even JR, it’s something else, something you set aside a long, long time ago.

But that’s what people know you as. It’s the name that’s in the credits for all of the work you’ve done over the years, in the painful process of both simulating universes and realizing too late that making a simulation of something is the same thing as making it real if the simulation’s good enough.

These days, you spend a lot of time in the attic with IC, trying to figure out what the fuck is going on with the Echidna. It’s not like anything you’ve ever seen before, which is exciting! Other people find it frustrating, the ones who depend on the simulations actually working, but you’re built way different.

Zampanio isn’t like any iteration of sBurb you’ve ever seen before. You’re not even sure if it is an iteration of a SkaiaCorp game, instead of a tumor the Echidna desperately extrudes in order to fill out the parts of itself where there should be a reproductive process.

All of this is to say you’re actually paying attention instead of idly dozing in your chair waiting for IC to send you ideas when you see the flicker on your monitor that means the universe has gone out.

This happens sometimes. The Echidna takes up a lot of memory, and sometimes the whole corner of the multiverse that the quadruplet realms take up gives up the ghost and hard reboots just so that everything doesn’t catch fire.

That’s not what’s happening this time, however.

This time it’s—

“Parker,” you say, floating an inch off the ground and staring as disapprovingly as something that doesn’t have a face can stare. “You shot the universe.”

“I didn’t think I could do that,” he says, a mix of fear and awe in his voice.

Somewhat absurdly, there’s a fine mist of red blood on his face, as though the universe was close when he shot it, and some arterial spray caught him.

You notice Hatsune Miku on a textureless table labeled OBJECT: TABLE  behind him. It’s incredible that she’s still got enough memory to render, a truth that has implications you don’t even want to begin unravelling right now.

“Also, you were just here, do you remember that?”  Parker’s looking slightly behind you, at an empty, tipped-over trash can.

“No,” you say. That version of you deserves her shambling horror hours, it sounds incredibly restful actually. “No, I’m here now, though. Do you need me to reboot the universe?”

He nods. “Nothing was rendering.”

You sigh.

“Probably horrorterrors,” you say, not elaborating. Parker might know what those are, but you’re not actually sure. Sometimes, you think about asking him whether he’s heard of Homestuck, but if he has, that’s a level of metatextual that would risk drawing the actual Waste of Space’s attention, and you really don’t want to deal with your old company right now. “You try to fix something, move something, and then suddenly everything broken and I need to get PL from where she’s hanging out and—it doesn’t matter. I can fix this, you know. It’s going to be okay.”

He doesn’t believe you, but that’s fair. Okay for this universe is, among other things, a status quo of everyone caught in a time-loop because Wanda’s decided she’s not going to self-actualize for a long, long while.

“What now?” he asks.

“I reboot the universe,” you say, and you do. It’s easy. Every day Google tries to force its way into this corner of the multiverse. Every day you repel it, even as it takes a little more energy each time.

At the very beginning, alone in your attic bedroom, facing down the heat-death of the universe with (almost) no one by your side, you never imagined something as simple as being to turn it all off and then back on again.

And it’s not that simple. Not quite. It never is.

But at least, you think, Parker won’t notice.

He doesn’t deserve to suffer any more than he has to.

Even if he’s tried to shoot you.

“Hey, JR?” you hear Parker in the distance as you rapidly make your way back to the attic, slipping through the cracks in the walls that only exist because you treat it as a rendered space inside of a computer, instead of a physical plane of atoms and strong nuclear forces. “JR, where the fuck did all this corn come from?”