The Seekers collapsed, their purpose erased. The citizens of the Arcology stumbled out of their dwellings, blinking, their faces slack with a terror that was slowly, impossibly, becoming wonder. They had no script to follow. No next line to read.
That night, Kaelen broke every law he was sworn to uphold. He downloaded the fragment of missing text into a forbidden memory-reed and fled the Correction Spire. The words burned in his pocket like a live coal. derelict script
It wasn't an error. Errors were sparks, quick to extinguish. This was a void. A section of the Script, deep in the agricultural sub-levels, was simply gone . Not overwritten. Not corrupted. Absent. The text flowed smoothly up to a certain point, then resumed as if nothing had happened, but three hundred and eleven words were missing. The Seekers collapsed, their purpose erased