Player-1. Not Developer. Not Admin. Not the version of me that could pull up a console and type the world back into something manageable. Just a user. Just another body the system had decided to process by its own rules.
I stood there with the practice sword hanging from my hand, staring at the space where that error message had been, and breathed through the specific misery of almost.
But then the programmer part of my brain, the part that had kept functioning through the car crash and the coma hypothesis and the stale bread, caught something. The system had recognized the Prometheus Protocol. Just for a moment, just long enough to start processing it, before something had shut it down. Which meant the core code was still there. Intact. Accessible in theory, even if something was sittin
