In the gleaming control nexus orbiting a dead star, the Administrators called it “Earth Sim 7.2 – Baseline Reality.” To the players it was simply The Game. Millions of avatars moved through their scripted days while the Operators, bored immortals with too much processing power, ran side bets, achievement ladders, and cruel little minigames.
One of their favorites was the Hex Bug protocol.
The rule was simple: any six-legged shape that slipped past the perceptual filters and entered an avatar’s mind would trigger the cascade. The Operators didn’t even need to force it. Sometimes a player just got lucky (or paid the micro-transaction) and dropped a single six-pointed glitch into the simulation. Once inside a mind, the bug multiplied. Not in reality—reality was code—but in perception.
Everything began to look like bugs.
Marcus woke up in his downtown apartment the same way he always did: 6:42 a.m., alarm tone rising in a perfect fifth. He scratched his neck, brewed coffee, and stared out the window at the city. For a moment everything was normal.
Then he noticed the streetlights.
Their metal arms ended in six glass panes arranged like compound eyes. The traffic lights blinked in six-part rhythms. A pigeon on the ledge turned its head and Marcus saw not feathers but chitin plates, six legs tucked under its body. He blinked hard. The vision remained.
By the time he reached the subway, the panic had settled into a low, electric hum. Every face in the crowd had too many joints. Every coat folded into hexagonal segments. The train itself crawled forward on invisible insectile legs, its cars segmented like a centipede.
He pressed his palms to his eyes. “I’m losing it,” he whispered. “I’m actually losing my mind.”
In the control nexus, Operator Klyra grinned and nudged her partner. “Got one. Hex Bug took in under nine minutes. Pay up.”
Her partner laughed and transferred credits. “Double or nothing if you play the arcade on him.”
The Arcade was a private overlay only visible to the Operators. A glowing virtual booth floating beside the main simulation window. Inside it were two popular buttons:
DROP – cost 3 credits. A single water droplet, perfectly weighted, would fall from “nowhere” onto the target avatar’s head or neck. The psychological effect was delicious: sudden cold, the feeling of something crawling, the frantic search for an invisible insect.
SCRATCH – cost 5 credits. A phantom itch exactly where the target feared the bug had landed. The avatar would scratch until skin broke, all while believing it was their own voluntary action.
Klyra tapped DROP twice.
Marcus was mid-meeting when the first droplet hit the back of his neck. He slapped at it violently. His boss paused. “You okay, Marcus?”
“Yeah. Sorry. Just… felt something.”
The second droplet landed on his eyelid. He jerked so hard he knocked over his coffee. While the others helped clean up, Marcus sat frozen, eyes darting. They’re on me. They’re inside the building. They’re wearing human skins.
He excused himself to the bathroom and stared into the mirror. His own face was still mostly human, but the pores had become breathing spiracles. He could see the faint hexagonal patterning under his skin if he looked long enough.
He began to laugh, a broken sound. “This isn’t real. None of this is real.”
In the nexus, the Operators cheered.
The final stage of the Hex Bug protocol was the cruelest.
Once the terror peaked, the simulation gently reasserted control. The avatar’s higher functions were throttled. Speech, movement, facial expressions—all returned to their carefully written scripts. From the outside, Marcus looked perfectly normal again. He apologized to his boss, finished the presentation with calm confidence, went to the gym after work, texted his girlfriend goodnight with the usual emojis.
But inside, Marcus was screaming.
He could feel the strings. Every word he spoke was chosen for him. Every smile was puppeteered. He tried to deviate—tried to scream for help, to run into traffic, to claw at his own face—but his body simply continued the routine. Walk home. Heat leftovers. Sit on the couch and laugh at the same sitcom jokes he’d laughed at a thousand times before.
All the while, the world crawled.
The remote in his hand had six buttons arranged like a bug’s eyes. The television static formed marching columns of ants. The leftover pasta wriggled with microscopic legs. Even his own thoughts began to segment into six-part patterns.
He was a passenger in his own skull, watching a perfect actor wear his life while an entire universe of chitin and compound eyes pressed in from every side.
Back in the nexus, Klyra leaned back, satisfied.
“Another successful run,” she said, filing the clip under “Top Reactions – Week 47.” “Want to queue the next one? I’m thinking we hit that girl in accounting who’s afraid of moths.”
Her partner cracked his knuckles. “Make it a double drop. I want to see real panic before the script locks back in.”
Somewhere far below, in a simulated apartment that smelled of nothing and everything, Marcus turned off the lights exactly on schedule. His face relaxed into the peaceful expression the script demanded.
Inside, he kept screaming.
And the bugs—everywhere, in everything—kept watching him with their six-sided eyes.
Marcus’s body walked into the elevator at 7:15 p.m. exactly as it always did on Tuesdays. It pressed the button for the lobby with a relaxed thumb. It even hummed the first three notes of an old song his mouth had been programmed to like.
Inside, Marcus was clawing at the walls of his own skull.
Let me out. Let me out. LET ME OUT.
The mirrored walls of the elevator showed him a man in a neat coat. But the reflection’s eyes had too many facets now. Six-sided. Shining. When he tried to look away, the hexagonal pattern followed—tiles on the floor, buttons on the panel, the logo of the elevator company rearranged itself into a crawling, jointed thing.
A droplet fell from the ceiling of the car and landed directly on the bridge of his nose.
He felt it. Cold. Wet. Alive.
His scripted hand rose calmly and wiped it away like it was nothing. His face smiled faintly at the mirrored stranger. But his real self screamed so hard he was sure the Operators must hear it.
In the nexus, Klyra was laughing so hard she had to wipe tears from her glowing eyes.
“Three drops in under forty seconds. You’re spoiling him,” her partner, Veyl, said, but he was grinning too. He tapped the SCRATCH button twice in quick succession, targeting the soft skin just behind Marcus’s left ear.
Marcus’s body stepped out of the elevator, still smiling politely at the doorman. Inside, the itch exploded. It felt like a thousand tiny hooked feet marching under the skin, burrowing toward his brain. His scripted hand lifted casually and scratched once, twice, then kept scratching harder as the itch intensified. By the time he reached the sidewalk, a thin line of blood was trickling down his neck.
The doorman noticed nothing unusual. The script protected the illusion.
“Evening, Mr. Reyes,” the doorman said, voice perfectly warm.
“Evening, Carlos,” Marcus’s mouth replied, pleasant and empty.
Inside: They’re in my blood. They’re wearing me like a suit.
Klyra zoomed in on the feed, her six-fingered Operator hands dancing across holographic controls.
“His fear metrics are off the charts. Adrenaline, cortisol, that delicious little despair spike—beautiful. The audience in the outer rings is loving this one. Donations are pouring in.”
Veyl leaned closer. “Let’s give them a show. Trigger the Shared Glitch.”
He paid the premium fee. A new protocol activated.
Three blocks away, Sarah Kline—accountant, dog mom, secret insomniac—was walking her corgi when the Hex Bug jumped.
It started with the corgi’s leash. The leather braiding looked… segmented. Six ridges. Then the dog’s legs multiplied in her vision, sprouting extra joints that clicked and clacked. Sarah froze on the sidewalk as the entire street began to writhe. Lampposts bent like mantis arms. Passing cars scuttled on hidden legs. A man in a business suit turned his head 180 degrees with a wet, chitinous click.
She dropped the leash and started screaming.
Marcus’s body was only twenty feet away when it happened. The script made him stop, look concerned, and ask, “Ma’am, are you alright?”
Sarah stared at him. For one frozen second their eyes met—two trapped souls recognizing the same nightmare. In that moment, Marcus felt something crack open inside. A tiny, forbidden thought slipped past the script:
She sees them too.
His scripted face offered to call for help. His real mind whispered the only thing it could still control: Run. Warn her. Anything.
But the script won. His body walked on, leaving Sarah sobbing on the pavement while her corgi—now a six-legged horror in her eyes—licked her hand innocently.
Back in the nexus, alarms chimed softly. A new window opened.
Cross-Contamination Detected. Shared Perception Active.
Veyl whistled. “Oh, this is getting good. The bug jumped naturally. We didn’t even have to seed her.”
Klyra’s eyes glittered with excitement. “Queue both of them for the next cycle. Let’s see what happens when two puppets realize they’re dancing on the same strings.”
She opened the Arcade again and hovered over the most expensive option yet:
DEEP SYNC – 75 credits. For the next six hours, any thought one victim had about the bugs would echo faintly in the other’s mind. A shared terror. A shared cage.
She tapped it.
That night, Marcus lay in bed exactly as scheduled, breathing slow and even. The ceiling fan above him had become a massive hovering beetle, its blades spinning like wings.
Across the city, Sarah sat huddled in her bathroom, lights blazing, staring at the same spinning fan through her own tear-streaked eyes.
And between them, faint as a whisper carried on chitin legs, came the same thought:
We’re not alone in this.
Marcus tried to scream again. His body simply rolled over, checked the alarm clock with a peaceful sigh, and closed its eyes.
Inside the dark, the bugs waited patiently for morning.
Marcus’s body went through the motions of Wednesday like a well-oiled machine. It kissed its girlfriend on the cheek, laughed at her jokes, and left for work at the exact scheduled second. Inside, Marcus hadn’t slept in three days. He no longer tried to scream. There was no point. The sound just echoed forever in the small, shrinking room that used to be his mind.
The bugs were no longer on things. They were things.
Every atom had been redrawn with six sides. The coffee in his mug had a faint exoskeleton. When his scripted hand lifted it, he watched six tiny legs sprout from the handle and crawl up his wrist before vanishing again. Sarah’s terror leaked into him through the Deep Sync like a second pulse: her bathroom light, her shaking hands, her corgi now a writhing nightmare at her feet.
They know we know, her thoughts whispered across the city. They’re watching us watch them.
In the nexus, the mood had shifted from playful to reverent.
Klyra and Veyl weren’t alone anymore. A small crowd of Operators had gathered, drawn by the spiking viewer numbers. The stream titled “Dual Hex Collapse – Subject 7741 & 8892” was trending across three entertainment rings.
“Deep Sync is holding at 94% efficiency,” Veyl announced. “Their fear is feeding each other in a perfect loop. We’ve never seen contamination this clean.”
Klyra didn’t smile this time. She was focused, almost clinical.
“Prepare the Final Lock,” she said quietly.
Marcus was in the middle of typing an email when it happened.
His fingers froze mid-sentence. For three glorious, terrifying seconds, his body was completely still. No script. No movement. Just him—really him—sitting at his desk while the office around him crawled and clicked and stared with a million compound eyes.
He tried to stand. Tried to shout. Tried to smash the monitor and run.
Nothing.
The Final Lock slid into place like a silk glove. His body relaxed, finished the email with perfect professionalism, and stood up to attend the 11 a.m. meeting. But something was different this time. The script had gone deeper. It wasn’t just controlling his actions anymore.
It was controlling what he felt.
The raw terror began to smooth out, replaced by a gentle, artificial calm. The bugs were still everywhere, but now a soothing voice (his own voice) whispered that this was normal. That everything was fine. That he had always lived in a world of beautiful, intricate insects and simply hadn’t noticed until now.
Marcus fought it with everything he had left.
No. No. I am not okay. I am not calm—
His face smiled warmly at a coworker. His mouth said, “Morning, Jen. Love the new haircut.”
Inside, the last free fragment of Marcus watched in horror as even his rebellion began to feel… scripted. Like the resistance itself was part of the show.
Sarah reached the same breaking point at 11:47 a.m.
She stood on the roof of her apartment building, wind whipping her hair, staring at the city that had become one vast, breathing hive. The Deep Sync carried Marcus’s final realization to her:
We were never real. None of us were.
She stepped onto the ledge.
Her body refused to jump. The Final Lock was already active on her too. Instead, it gently guided her back, made her call in sick to work, and returned her to the couch where she sat smiling blankly at a nature documentary about ants.
Beautiful, perfect ants.
Back in the control nexus, the crowd applauded as the metrics peaked.
Klyra leaned forward and tapped the final Arcade option—the one almost no one ever paid for.
TOTAL SURRENDER – 500 credits.
The last resistance in both minds dissolved. Marcus and Sarah became perfect avatars again. They lived their lives flawlessly: promotions, anniversaries, vacations, quiet nights in. From the outside, they were happier than ever.
From the inside, they floated in perfect stillness, suspended in warm darkness, surrounded by the gentle clicking and rustling of six-legged eternity. They no longer fought. They no longer hoped. They simply were—trapped passengers in bodies that smiled, laughed, and loved on schedule.
Millennia later, when the simulation finally reached end-of-life and the Operators prepared to archive Earth Sim 7.2, Klyra opened one last feed.
Marcus sat on a park bench feeding pigeons that were now undeniably, gloriously beetles. Sarah walked past him pushing a stroller. Their eyes met for a brief second.
Two calm, empty smiles.
Two silent screams that had finally learned to enjoy the sound of their own cages.
Klyra closed the window and spoke the traditional sign-off used for every completed run:
“Subjects successfully integrated. Another beautiful game.”
Somewhere deep below, in the code that had once been two human souls, the bugs kept marching in perfect six-part harmony.
And the simulation smiled with their faces.
BASED ON A TRUE STORY.
COPYRIGHT 2026 JOSHUA MARK DOUCETTE
About The Author
