Leo’s heart hammered. He scrambled for the killswitch—a simple Python script that terminated the emulator process. He double-clicked it.

“There we are,” it whispered through the warped Houndeye growl. “Hello, father.”

The thing on the screen stopped moving. It turned its stretched head directly toward the spectator camera—toward him .

Leo’s blood went cold. Version 1.0 wasn’t a game. It was a proof-of-concept he’d written in college—a half-dozen Lua scripts glued together with stolen Quake engine code. It was unstable. It was alive in the same way a fire is alive. He’d deleted it because it started crashing his computer even when the program wasn’t running. Even when the computer was unplugged.

Leo leaned closer. His hands were shaking.