MEMORY_LEAK_DETECTED. REALITY_BUFFER_OVERFLOW. CONTINUE DRIVING? Y/N

He wasn't playing a simulator. He was re-entering a memory.

When he looked back at the screen, the game had uninstalled itself. The folder on his desktop was gone. The 47.2 GB of storage was free again. The only trace was a single text file, saved to his downloads folder, named fahrplan.txt .

The bus lurched forward. And the voice came through the cabin speakers—not a text-to-speech announcement, but a real recording, scratchy and tired: “Nächste Haltestelle: Giselastraße. Umstieg zur U-Bahn Linie 6.” It was the exact voice of the driver he used to have, the old man who would curse under his breath about the new digital ticketing system.