4 — Obliterate Everything
I pressed N.
The gray cube where my mother had been was no different from the gray cube where the refrigerator had been. That was the horror. That was the point. By the 500th obliteration, I had stopped sleeping. The game didn't save; it remembered . Every time I closed the laptop, the shard-windows were there when I reopened it. I'd erased cities, ecosystems, historical events (the moon landing, the signing of the Magna Carta, a specific Tuesday in 1987 when someone, somewhere, finally understood why they were sad). Each erasure added to the chain. obliterate everything 4
The body said: "You're not too busy. You're scared. That's different. Come home anyway." I pressed N
Then I saw it. A crack in the gray.
At 102 obliterations, the game showed me my childhood bedroom. The exact layout. The Star Wars poster with the torn corner. The crack in the windowsill where I'd hidden a note I wrote to myself at eleven: "Don't forget to be brave." The note was still there, inside the crack. I could read it. That was the point
A voice, flat and synthesized: "Select your first target."
It read: "Drea—You are on iteration 47. In iteration 12, you erased the hospital but kept the playground. In iteration 23, you hesitated for 4.7 seconds before erasing the dog. You told yourself it was because the dog looked like Buster. But Buster died in 2019, and you didn't cry then either. Why are you crying now?"