John Doe felt like he’d been stuffed into a washing machine set to "Spin," then violently flung into a pile of Lego bricks.

  When the weightlessness vanished, he didn't hit hard ground. Instead, he fell into a soft, bouncy... "Cloud"?

  No, this wasn’t a cloud.

  John scrambled up and grabbed a handful of the stuff under his feet. It was a mountain of semi-transparent [Like] icons and shattered [Hearts]. They flickered with a cheap neon pink glow, like a pile of expired candy.

  "Is this... a social media wasteland?" John stared in shock.

  He looked up and scanned his surroundings.

  This was the iPad’s deep data space, but it looked more like a cyber-ruin built from obsolete internet garbage.

  The sky was a flickering mess of Glitch Art; purple noise and green scanlines flowed like auroras. Occasionally, massive, pixelated banner ads floated by like ghosts, emitting buzzing static:

  [HOT SINGLES IN YOUR AREA!]

  [CONGRATULATIONS! YOU WON A FREE IPHONE!]

  In the distance, the teetering Data Tower still stood tall. But the path leading to it was a suspended bridge made of countless broken Hyperlinks, hanging over a bottomless abyss of dark data, from which he could faintly hear the cacophony of a million keyboards clacking.

  "Welcome to the 'Recycle Bin,' mortal."

  A heavily synthesized voice dripping with mockery echoed from the top of the tower.

  The bunny-eared girl—Grace—was sitting on the edge of the tower spire, holding a mechanical keyboard that looked like a sniper rifle.

  Bang!

  She pulled the trigger.

  No bullet fired; instead, a massive, materialized red icon shot out—[DISLIKE].

  The thumbs-down red hand whistled through the air, smashing toward John's forehead like a brick.

  John instinctively ducked. The "DISLIKE" grazed his scalp and slammed into the pile of "Likes" behind him, detonating instantly into countless jagged words: "CRINGE," "FAKE," "RATIO."

  "If you don't want your brain stuffed with spam until it turns to mush, get the hell out!" Grace shouted from the top of the tower. Her voice carried the bluster of someone terrified but pretending to be tough. "This is my server! Private property! GET GUD, NOOB!"

  John dusted off his clothes (actually data fragments). He wasn't angry; in fact, he found it kind of funny.

  "Your territory? Looks more like an illegal private server built without a permit to me."

  He stepped onto the suspension bridge.

  "Stop!" Grace panicked. "Come any closer and I'll release the hounds!"

  She snapped her fingers.

  A chorus of bizarre barking erupted from the ruins around them.

  "Doge!"

  Several large yellow dogs with muscular human bodies and the famous Shiba Inu face sprang from the shadows. They didn't bite; instead, they circled John, staring at him with eyes that inflicted pure psychic damage, while spewing multicolored Comic Sans text:

  "Wow."

  "Such scare."

  "Very danger."

  The words hit John like physical stones, trying to block his path.

  John tried to push one of the dogs away, realizing it felt like pushing a ball of cotton.

  "This is your firewall?" John shouted as he waved away the annoying fonts. "Using memes as guard dogs? Just how insecure are you?"

  He noticed a pattern: as long as he didn't make eye contact with the dogs or acknowledge the mocking text, these "memetic monsters" passed right through him, dealing no damage.

  "Ignoring the trolls... is the best defense."

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  John muttered to himself, took a deep breath, and—ignoring the sky full of flying "Trollfaces" and "Pepe frogs"—stepped firmly onto the teetering Hyperlink bridge.

  "Dammit! You internet-illiterate primitive!"

  Seeing her "meme attack" fail, Grace began to panic. She frantically hammered on her keyboard, her fingers moving so fast they blurred.

  Rumble—

  The suspension bridge began to shake violently. From the abyss below, countless black hands surged up.

  The hands were plastered with all sorts of labels: [CANCELLED], [DOXXING], [HATE SPEECH]...

  They clawed at John’s ankles, trying to drag him into the dark abyss known as "Social Death."

  "Go down! Drown in the spit!" Grace shrieked.

  John felt a grip tighten around his ankle. A black hand labeled [YOUR OPINION IS TRASH] latched onto him.

  The sensation was cold, slimy, and full of malice, instantly transmitting straight to his soul through the data stream. It wasn't just code; it was the real resentment of countless keyboard warriors, the kind of "Cyberbullying" suffocating enough to kill a living person.

  An average person would have had a mental breakdown by now.

  But John was a Necromancer.

  He was a kid who grew up in the lower districts. He’d seen toxic sludge and heard curses far more vicious than this digital hate.

  "Is that it?"

  John sneered. A blue spiritual light flashed in his eyes—the admin privileges Singularity had given him, and his own grit as an "Agent."

  "Compared to my landlord who threatened to demolish the whole block, your little malice is child's play."

  He stomped his foot.

  "Block!"

  A burst of pure willpower exploded outward. The black hands formed of fake malice melted away like snow under a blazing sun the moment they touched his genuine, unyielding soul force.

  John strode across the bridge and stood before the tower's entrance.

  He pushed open the heavy door plastered with "404 Not Found" seals, climbed the spiral staircase, and finally reached the roof.

  It was a small platform, barely a few square meters.

  Grace stood there, backed into a corner.

  Now, she was no longer the arrogant bunny-eared girl.

  When John actually stood before her, all those flashy effects, that defensive armor made of memes, peeled away.

  Standing there was a semi-transparent girl who looked only fifteen or sixteen.

  She wore an ill-fitting T-shirt printed with cheap anime characters. The edges of her body were constantly pixelating and disintegrating. She clutched the massive keyboard tightly, hugging it like a final lifeline.

  The mockery was gone from her face, replaced by a heartbreaking terror.

  "Don't... don't report me..."

  Grace shrank into the corner, trembling. Her voice cracked with tears. "I don't want to disappear... I tried so hard to upload myself... I don't want to die..."

  The interrogation John had prepared died in his throat.

  He looked around.

  The tower roof wasn't a luxurious control room. It was piled high with "digital trash": selfies with zero likes, half-written fanfic, music demos no one listened to...

  Grace was like a homeless squatter, building a teetering "home" out of unwanted data garbage.

  John's gaze landed above her head.

  There floated a red, counting-down system pop-up:

  [User ID: Grace (Glitch)]

  [Subscription Status: Overdue 365 Days]

  [Storage: Recycling Imminent]

  [Time until Forced Formatting: 00:05:30]

  Suddenly, it all made sense.

  She wasn't a virus. She was a "Digital Refugee."

  In life, she might have been a girl yearning for digital immortality, uploading her consciousness to this so-called "Eternal Cloud Service." But she ran out of money.

  In the cyber world, a broke ghost didn't even have the right to exist as data.

  The system flagged her as a "garbage file occupying storage" and was executing a cleanup protocol. And the reason she invaded John’s tablet and caused all that chaos was just to—

  Steal a tiny bit of Merit Points. To renew her subscription.

  To survive.

  John sighed, letting his spiritual pressure fade. He slowly crouched down until he was eye-level with Grace.

  "You weren't attacking me," John said softly. "You were calling for help."

  Grace froze. She looked up, and blue data tears streamed from her eyes, which were flashing red error codes.

  "They said... as long as you upload your consciousness, you can live forever in the Cloud Heaven..."

  She sobbed, pointing at the pitch-black void above. "But there is no heaven here. Only payment notices. The cleanup programs come for me every day. I have to run, I have to hide... I'm so tired..."

  "I just wanted to find a place where I wouldn't be deleted... even a corner just a few kilobytes large..."

  "Your tablet had high-level defenses... I wanted to hide inside... but I couldn't afford the rent..."

  Her voice grew smaller and smaller, her body disintegrating faster. Her right arm had already turned into scattering code.

  John looked at her.

  He knew that look all too well.

  It was the look he saw in the mirror. It was the look his mom gave when the medicine bottle was empty.

  It was the look of someone backed into a corner by the world, forced to bare their fangs to survive, yet still shivering in fear.

  Cyber hacker? Electronic poltergeist?

  Just another poor soul in this man-eating capitalist world who couldn't pay the "Survival Tax."

  "You don't have to hide anymore."

  John reached out to pat her head, but his hand passed through her body, touching only a cold stream of data.

  "Why?" Grace closed her eyes in despair. "Are you going to execute the deletion? Do it... I'm out of money anyway."

  "No."

  John stood up and looked above the tower.

  In the dark void, a massive mechanical hand made of red antivirus code was slowly descending. It was the system's forced cleanup program—the Grim Reaper named "Poverty."

  John pulled a virtual card from his chest—his account in this system.

  It displayed his entire net worth: 5000 Merit Points.

  This was the money he had saved for so long, intended for his mother's next course of inhibitors.

  He looked back at Grace.

  The girl was hugging her knees like a stray cat waiting for the butcher's knife, teetering on the edge of non-existence.

  John remembered what Daoist Singularity had said: "Merit is the response to 'Need'."

  If he couldn't even save the soul right in front of him, what was the point of cultivating merit?

  "Grace." John suddenly called her name.

  The girl looked up blankly.

  John pointed at the descending giant hand, a helpless but determined smile curling his lips.

  "Put away your memes. From now on, you don't have to pretend to be tough."

  "Because starting today..."

  John's finger slammed onto the [RENEW SUBSCRIPTION] button popping up in front of him.

  "I'm covering your rent."

  [Message from Singularity]

  VIP Suite for you over on the Patreon Server. We are opening New Rooms (Chapters) for FREE daily. Even better? Select Chapters feature HD Illustrations for the full immersive experience.

  ?? [Enter the VIP Suite]

  [System Notification]: Enjoying the simulation so far? Please drop a Rating or leave a Comment. It helps the algorithm summon more updates (and keeps John alive).