Part III: The Fall of San-Blockcisco

If you ever need a clear example of why portals between worlds in the Simulation can be insanely dangerous, just remember San-Blockcisco. It took only one tiny tear in reality for an entire metropolis and its suburbs to fall — all in a single night.

All right, maybe I’m exaggerating a bit. And forgetting to mention one more critically important ingredient for a truly successful catastrophe — you also need at least one curious little girl. And a shovel.

One day, while playing archaeologists in her schoolyard, a girl named Daisy unearthed something incredible with her friends — an unusually stable portal to another dimension. Naturally, the kids had no idea what they were dealing with. Naturally, even without realizing it was one of Portalius’s “gifts”, jumping into a glowing crack in reality was the least reasonable thing to do. Naturally, that didn’t stop them.

The portal took Daisy to a dark fantasy world — or more precisely, straight into the lair of a sleeping Dragon. For some reason, the girl decided that waking the creature was a great idea. And she couldn’t think of a better way to do it than smacking the Dragon on the head with her shovel. I suppose there’s no need to say that he woke up immediately. And in a very bad mood.

Daisy managed to escape the roaring monster — that’s the good news. The bad news was that the enraged Dragon sent hordes of his minions into the girl’s world. Unprepared for invasion, San-Blockcisco quickly descended into chaos: swarms of zombies flooded the streets, and as for the infernal creatures that overran the school — I can hardly describe them in words. A chain reaction, like collapsing dominoes, turned the city into ruins. Until it reached another heavy sleeper.

Pixelman, a retired special forces operative, was awakened in the middle of the night by strange noises outside. He wasn’t destined to get any more sleep that night. After all, when you find yourself surrounded by monsters and your city is literally falling apart, there’s only one thing to do — grip your pistol tighter and fight your way through.

Pixelman fought his way across all of San-Blockcisco and its outskirts until he reached the ill-fated portal at the school. Realizing that the invasion could be stopped only by neutralizing its source, he jumped into the portal — and began his journey through the strange worlds of the multiverse.

And what a journey it was! Pixelman managed to find and rescue Daisy, cross countless insane realities, defeat the Dragon in battle, and force it to withdraw its armies of monsters from San-Blockcisco. And although the hero had achieved his goal and saved his home world, it was still too soon for him to return.

During his adventures, Pixelman saw with his own eyes how vast and diverse the multiverse truly was. But its fragile balance was threatened by the Bug — the embodiment of corrupted code that grew stronger with each passing day. Pixelman understood that unless the Bug was defeated soon, every world in the multiverse would face a tragic fate. So he set out to find the only one who could arrange him a meeting with the monster — and he found me.

Honestly, I still don’t know if I did the right thing by agreeing to send Pixelman to face the Bug. Yes, the hero prevailed — in a grueling battle, Pixelman defeated the creature. Yes, the number of errors and logical conflicts across the multiverse dropped sharply. But the Bug’s malicious code didn’t vanish without a trace — it merged with Pixelman’s own code, and the hero himself became trapped in the deep layers of the Simulation.

And it’s hard to say which would be worse: if Pixelman remains there forever… or if one day he returns to us — with the Bug’s code inside him.