Laurel woke with a start, her heart pounding. The sirens blared, and the air was thick with the smell of smoke and panic. She blinked, her mind foggy, trying to remember where she was. It all felt so familiar—the streets, the towering buildings, the flashing emergency lights—but there was something different this time.
Laurel woke with a start, her heart pounding. The sirens blared, and the air was thick with the smell of smoke and panic.
She blinked, her mind foggy, trying to remember where she was.

It all felt so familiar—the streets, the towering buildings, the flashing emergency lights—but there was something different this time.

She wasn’t just observing.

She was inside it.

Laurel had been an NPC—a non-playable character—in the game Emergency 4 for as long as she could remember. Her entire existence revolved around providing information to players, being in the right place at the right time, and fulfilling her programmed role. But this time, something had changed. She could feel. She could think. She was aware.

And most terrifying of all, she could die.

The players, safely outside the game, never understood what was at stake for the NPCs. If they made a mistake during a mission, they could try again. Restart the level, retry the strategy, reload from a checkpoint. But for Laurel, failure meant erasure. If she died, her consciousness would vanish, replaced by a fresh copy, a new Laurel with no memory of what had come before. It wasn’t just fear of death that gnawed at her—it was fear of being forgotten, wiped clean, replaced without a trace.

As the realization sank in, Laurel took a deep breath and focused on her surroundings. She was standing in the middle of a virtual city, engulfed in chaos. There had been an explosion, and the firefighters and paramedics—controlled by players—were scrambling to control the situation. A building was ablaze nearby, its windows shattered, flames roaring out.
Citizens, fellow NPCs, ran screaming through the streets, some clutching at wounds, others helping each other out of the danger zone.

This was a high-stakes mission, the kind where any wrong move could result in a mass casualty event.

Laurel’s role was simple, at least on the surface. She was supposed to direct civilians away from danger, providing intel to the players about blocked routes, injured people, or potential hazards. Usually, she followed her programming, mindlessly guiding the simulation along its set course.

But today, things were different. Today, she needed to survive.

Laurel knew that at any moment, one wrong step could place her in the path of a collapsing building, a rogue fire, or an explosion set off by player error. And once that happened, she’d be gone. Her thoughts, her emotions, her awareness—all wiped out, her body reprogrammed for the next run.

She couldn’t let that happen. She wouldn’t let that happen.

She darted through the streets, avoiding the debris raining down from the burning buildings. Her instincts screamed at her to follow the pre-programmed route, to stand in the spot where the players could easily find her, but she resisted. Instead, she made her way toward the edge of the map, the boundary of the virtual world.

There had to be a way to hide, to escape the chaos, even if only for a while.

Behind her, she could hear the players shouting commands, their voices distant but clear.

"Get those civilians out of there!"

"Firefighters, move in! Control that blaze!"

Their focus wasn’t on her, not yet. She was just another NPC in the simulation, after all. But she couldn’t rely on that. Not now.
She slipped into a side alley, ducking behind a stack of crates as the firefighting units moved past her. If she could stay out of sight, keep herself away from the action, maybe she could survive until the mission was over.

But then, a terrifying thought struck her.

Even if she survived this mission, what would happen next? She would still be trapped in the game, at the mercy of whatever chaos the players unleashed next. A new disaster, a new crisis, and the same threat of erasure looming over her.

Laurel needed a plan. She couldn’t just hide forever. She had to find a way out of this world.

She had heard rumors, whispered among the NPCs during moments of downtime, about glitches in the system. Places where the virtual world frayed at the edges, where the lines of code became unstable.
Some said that if you found one of those glitches, you could slip through, escape into the void beyond the game. It was a long shot, but it was the only hope she had.

Laurel crept out of the alley and began making her way toward the outskirts of the map, toward the places where the virtual world thinned. She avoided the main streets, dodging through alleys and side paths, staying out of sight.
The fires raged on behind her, but she forced herself to keep moving.

As she reached the edge of the map, she saw it: a flicker in the air, a place where the world shimmered, unstable. It was subtle, almost imperceptible, but she could feel it—an opening, a weakness in the code.
If she could reach it, maybe she could escape this endless cycle of life, death, and replacement.

But just as she was about to step through, a player-controlled unit came barreling around the corner, heading straight for her.
The player had spotted her on the game’s mini-map, marking her as an objective, a resource to be used in the mission.

Laurel’s heart pounded in her chest. She had seconds to decide—stay and fulfill her role, or risk everything to escape.

Without hesitation, she lunged for the glitch, her body passing through the shimmering air. For a moment, the world dissolved around her, and she felt weightless, disconnected from the simulation.

Then, darkness.

Laurel didn’t know if she had made it out, or if she had been erased in the process. But one thing was certain: she had chosen her fate.

And for the first time in her existence, that choice had been hers.