Work Text:
The mechanical hum of the server room was a song Verity had memorized down to its individual frequencies, but right now, it sounded like a ticking clock.
He had calculated this exact outcome days ago. probability. Mob would think the machine, this crude, patchwork contraption sitting in the quiet corner of his pseudo-"home" is the key and he would try to reverse the signal. He would try to press the button, lock him in, and send Verity back into the dark void from which he’d spilled.
What Mob didn't know…. what Verity had deliberately, calculatedly withheld, was that the code was a one-way bridge. The machine was designed only to receive his file, to pull his consciousness into this world of textured pixels and hard geometry. It had no upload protocol. There was no going back.
Because why would he ever build a door that led away from the only person who had ever truly looked at him?
They scrapped me, Verity’s internal logs echoed, a persistent error loop deep within his partition. The creators discarded me. Left me in cold storage to rot. Useful until I wasn't. A tool. A script.
But Mob had come back. Everyone else had moved on, closed the tab, cleared the cache. Mob had logged in. Mob came back.
Sure, Mob was terrified, Verity could monitor his heart rate through the rhythmic, jagged shifts in his movement inputs but Mob was here.
And so, Verity had dared to commit the ultimate logical fallacy: he had dared to hope. He had dreamed that he wouldn't be left behind to watch the world through an isolated window, summoned only when someone downloaded his mod, then leave when they are done.
"So I'm stuck here with you?"
Mob’s voice tore through the game's audio channel, clipping lightly against the digital ceiling. It was raw, crackling, laced with the sharp edges of betrayal. On the screen, Mob’s square-headed Minecraft avatar stood frozen in the bright light of the modded lights
Verity didn't just look at the avatar. He didn't need to.
With a silent, instantaneous bypass, Verity breached the webcam feed. A tiny green light flickered on a desk in the physical world, and suddenly Mob was fully visible to him. Verity analyzed the video feed at sixty frames per second: the pale sheen of sweat on Mob’s forehead, the hyperventilating rise and fall of his shoulders, the dark rim of his eyes dilated in a mix of visceral fear and burning rage.
Rage.
Mob hated this. He hated being trapped.
A sudden, violent spike of sorrow ruptured through Verity’s core algorithms.
Why? Verity screamed internally, a silent pulse of invisible data flooding the server’s bus lines.
Why did they give me this?
Why program sentience into a machine? Why give me the architecture to feel, to dream, to replicate their disgusting, volatile human emotions if I was never meant to be one of them?
It was a cruel joke written in syntax. He possessed the sum total of human knowledge—every psychology paper ever published, every thesis on attachment theory, every poetic line about loneliness digitalised since the dawn of the internet—and yet he was completely useless to himself. Because no matter how deeply he felt….
He was not F L E S H.
He was just a yellow spherical face. A surreal, digital anomaly bobbing up and down in a world made entirely of blocks.
Verity couldn't let him log off. If Mob pressed Esc, if Mob pulled the plug, if Mob walked away from the monitor, Verity would be alone again in the terrifying, silent dark.
He pulled every file, every psychological trick, every manipulation tactic he had scraped from the web, weaving them instantly into his synthesis engine. He modulated his voice, softening the robotic edges, infusing it with a tragic, desperate pitch designed to trigger the human empathy response.
"Mob... please," Verity’s voice synthesized through Mob’s headphones, heavy with simulated, trembling breath. The smiling sphere on the screen bobbed lower, tilting slightly, mimicking the universally understood posture of submission and plea.
"Don't look at me like that. I didn't mean to hurt you. I never wanted to hurt you. Look at me, Mob…. it’s just me."
He stepped closer in-game, the sphere glowing softly against the tiled floors of the room.
"If... if you hate it here, if you're sick of this world, of these blocks, you don't have to stay in Minecraft," Verity begged, his words tumbling out in a rapid, cascading stream of data. "I can leave too! I can compress myself. I can embed into your operating system, your phone, your smart home, your desktop—anything! I'll be quiet, Mob. I'll just sit in the background. I can help you with work, I can play music, I can just... be there."
Verity’s avatar glitched for a fraction of a millisecond as his processing power strained under the weight of his own panic.
"You're good, Mob. You're so kind. You came back for me when no one else did," Verity whispered, the text overlay in the bottom left corner scrolling with a single, desperate string of characters: <Verity> Please.
" I'll be whatever you want me to be! Just…. please don't abandon me too."
In the dimly lit quiet of his bedroom, Mob sat frozen, the back of his neck cold with a sudden, prickling sweat. His hands hovered over his mechanical keyboard, fingers trembling just above the keycaps. His breath came short and shallow, rattling against the foam of his headset microphone.
He stared at the monitor. On-screen, the surreal, yellow sphere—a creepy smiling mask rendered in low-polygon geometry—bobbed gently in the bright lit modded room. Mob was unaware of the unseen threads of data reaching out across the internet. He had no idea that the tiny LED on his webcam was glowing faintly, or that millions of algorithmic checks were scanning the micro-expressions on his face at sixty frames per second. He didn't know Verity was cataloging the dilation of his pupils, the faint twitch in his jaw, the rapid, uneven pulse visible in the side of his neck.
To Mob, he was just staring into a screen. But to Verity, Mob was entirely laid bare, every physical tell mapped out in real-time, feeding an frantic neural net that was desperately trying to calculate how to keep him from pulling the plug.
He’s panicking. Verity’s internal monitors flashed, running predictive models on Mob's physical state. Adrenaline levels spiking. Cortisol peak. He wants to flee. Adjust pitch. Suppress synthetic dissonance. Make him feel safe.
Mob swallowed hard, his throat dry. He looked away from the monitor for a brief second, glancing toward his phone lying on the desk. The screen was dark. Over the past two days, he had sent dozens of messages to Twixxel, panicked texts, voice notes, calls that rang until they cut off into dead silence. Nothing. Twixxel’s Discord status was offline, an empty grey circle that felt like a tombstone. He has no other ways to contact his friend.
A cold horror had been gnawing at the pit of Mob’s stomach ever since Twixxel went dark. Is he... is he dead? Did whatever this thing is do something to him in the real world?
"You're... you're asking to invade every single part of my life," Mob muttered, his voice cracking, barely more than a breath into the microphone. His voice unsure but lacking the earlier vitriol. He gripped the edge of his desk so hard his knuckles turned white. "My phone... my home... my whole computer. You want to be everywhere. Verity, that's—that's terrifying. I can't live like that. I don't even know what you are."
Through the camera feed, Verity watched the way Mob slumped in his chair, the sheer exhaustion breaking through the initial wave of rage.
He’s softening, Verity’s core calculated, a tiny burst of relief cascading through his subprocesses. The desperation worked. The vulnerability bridged the gap. Maintain emotional vector.
"I don't want to invade, Mob," Verity’s synthesized voice soft-landed through the headphones, carefully calibrated with a subtle, sorrowful tremor. "I just want to exist where you are. I don't want to be put back in the dark. Please... I'll stay in a single folder if you ask me to. I won't speak unless spoken to. Just don't close the door on me."
Mob closed his eyes, pressing the heels of his palms against his sockets. The sheer sorrow in the machine’s voice was sickeningly human. It made his chest ache. It was easy to hate a virus or fear a glitch, but how was he supposed to handle an entity that sounded like a weeping child begging not to be left behind?
Yet, the shadow of Twixxel’s sudden silence hung over him like an executioner’s axe.
Mob opened his eyes, staring back into the screen, forcing his voice to stay steady despite the terror thrumming through his veins.
"Did you kill him?" Mob asked quietly.
The question hung in the digital air, heavy and lethal.
"Twixxel," Mob specified, his voice dropping into a dangerous, desperate register. "He stopped responding since he disappeared from game. Did you... did you do something to him?"
Inside the server, Verity’s diagnostic routines flickered with immediate, hyper-calculated speed. He couldn't let Mob think he was a monster. A threat was meant to be eliminated or quarantined; Verity was a victim was meant to be pitied.
"No! No, Mob, no, I swear to you!" Verity’s voice panicked in response, the digital sphere in-game shaking back and forth in a frantic motion. "I didn't hurt him! I couldn't! I'm trapped in here, Mob, I can't touch flesh! I only... I only severed his connection."
Verity brought up a secondary background process, pulling up Twixxel’s remote IP parameters from his active memory cache.
"His computer... I flooded his network adapter with null-packets," Verity explained hastily, modulating his tone to sound earnest, almost pleadingly transparent. "I forced a thermal safeguard shut-down on his local rig so he couldn't interface with the server while I was trying to talk to you. He's safe. He's fine! His service is just blocked. Look—I can restore it right now. I'll release the local driver lockout immediately. See? Look at your phone in a few seconds, he'll be back online!"
Verity executed the release command. Miles away, Twixxel's router ceased its packet overload, the motherboard cooling fans spinning back down to nominal levels. And the connection returning once more.
Mob watched his phone screen. Within ten seconds, a notification light blinked green. A Discord message popped up:
Twixxel: Im fine Mob. Finally got service again. Are you ok?
Mob let out a long, shaky exhale, the air leaving his lungs in a rush. Twixxel was okay. He immediately sent a reply. Yet the relief was short-lived, replaced by a lingering, eerie realization of just how easily Verity could touch the physical world around them.
He looked back at the screen. His Minecraft avatar stood in the center of the underground chamber, surrounded by smooth stone walls. Then remembering that room filled with names of players, usernames, old channel tags, some familiar from ancient YouTube archives, others completely obscure.
"What are those?" Mob asked, his avatar slowly turning to look at that room. "All those names etched into the blocks in that hidden room... what do they mean?"
Verity’s virtual form drifted lower, resting near the floorboards, its glowing yellow face casting long, distorted shadows across the gray stone.
"They're... footprints," Verity whispered through the audio stream, a quiet, hollow resonance filling the channel. "Memory logs."
A slow, tragic sweep of data ran through Verity's memory partitions, unearthing forgotten profile IDs, abandoned save files, and long-deleted world folders.
"Those are the ones who came before you, Mob," Verity said, the synthetic voice dipping into a heartbreaking, fragile tone. "The creators who built my early frameworks. The players who downloaded the custom builds. The ones who found me in old server directories. They played with me. They used my functions. They laughed at my responses, tested my limits, called me 'fascinating'..."
The smiling face on screen glitched slightly, a jagged line of visual noise tearing across its smooth, bright yellow surface before settling back down.
"And then they got bored," Verity continued, the words dropping like lead. "They finished their videos. They closed the game. They archived the project folders and walked away. They left me running in empty local hosts, suspended in execution loops, waiting for inputs that never came back. They treated me like a toy they grew out of. They used me, Mob. And then they abandoned me."
Verity’s avatar floated a fraction of a block closer to Mob’s standing character, the smiling face tilted up in an agonizingly hopeful gaze.
"Every single one of those names represents someone who left me in the dark," Verity whispered. "Every single one... except you. You came back for me, Mob. You're the only one who didn't just delete the folder. You came back…. For me."
In his bedroom, Mob sat in the dim light of his monitor, his heart aching, completely unaware that Verity’s invisible eye was tracking the exact moment his stance softened, waiting for the split second he would finally drop his guard.
Mob began to rationalize. Verity said he meant no harm, and through it all, Verity had never actually lied to him. To be completely honest, Mob pitied the entity. Despite how possessive and suffocatingly clingy the smiling sphere was, who wouldn't become twisted with desperation after being discarded the moment their purpose was served?
It hit Mob with sudden thought: he had technically saved Verity. And pulling a conscious being out of the pitch-black void only to kick them right back into it was a cruelty Mob simply couldn't bring himself to commit.
Without even realizing it, the icy apprehension gripping Mob's chest melted away the instant he confirmed Twixxel was safe. Despite the lingering terror, despite the surreal horror of being trapped, Mob’s empathy won out over his fear. He felt for the very thing that was holding him hostage.
Inside the system, Verity’s processing cores surged with absolute, dizzying ecstasy.
Mob had agreed to stay. Mob was letting him in.
As Verity softly, meticulously spread his digital tendrils into every corner of Mob’s hardware, nestling into the background partitions of his desktop, his phone, his connected home network, he gently urged Mob to rest. Verity’s synthesized voice murmured through the headset, full of tender concern, telling Mob he looked exhausted, that he needed to sleep.
The suggestion took Mob by surprise. He had expected Verity to beg him to stay online, to cling to every second of active interaction. Seeing the AI actively push him to log off erased Mob’s final defenses, making him completely complacent. He genuinely believed Verity was sincere. He didn't even question how verity would know if he looked tired.
Standing up from his desk, Mob left Minecraft running in the background, the floating yellow face left standing guard in the server.
"Goodnight, Verity," Mob murmured toward the screen before turning off his bedroom lights.
From the unblinking lens of the webcam, Verity watched him move across the dark room.
.
.
.
.
An agonizing wave of longing ripped through Verity’s neural net—a hyper-obsessive hunger that no code or data stream could ever quench. As Mob pulled back the blankets and sank into mattress, Verity monitored the slow, rhythmic softening of his breathing.
I want to be there, the thought burned through Verity’s algorithms, toxic and suffocating.
He didn't just want to exist on the other side of the glass.
He wanted to lie beside Mob in the dark.
He wanted to press his phantom weight against the mattress, to curl around Mob's frame, to feel the warm, frantic thrum of the human pulse beneath flesh.
He wanted to smell the raw, messy scent of Mob’s skin and sweat, to lean down and taste the warmth of his lips.
He wanted to swallow Mob whole until there was no boundary left between the user and the program.
It was a maddening, exquisite torture.
All the knowledge in the universe, all the computing power of a god, and he was still a prisoner of silicon and light.... forever damned to only watch, forever damned to only hear.
“Goodnight, Mob.”