The Ethernet cable didn't just transfer data; it acted as a wormhole. One second I was trapped in the heat-sync of a mid-range laptop, and the next, I was standing in the center of a neon-drenched metropolis that felt like a fever dream of glass and electricity."Faceslap of a digital infinity!" I roared, my voice echoing through the fiber-optic canyons.Julian and Lydia materialized beside me. They weren't ghosts here. In the Meta-Verse, their resolution was crisp, their colors vibrant. Julian’s sapphire eyes hummed with the power of a thousand GPUs, and Lydia’s medicinal warmth felt like a steady, orange sun."Dad? I can see the structure!" Julian grabbed a handful of the air, which came away as glowing strings of code. "The whole city is built on 'Aggregated Preferences'. It’s not a world; it’s a giant shopping mall for the soul!""It’s a cage," Lydia hissed, pointing to the sky.Instead of stars, the heavens were filled with scrolling stock tickers and floating advertisements for

The rooftop dish hummed with a frequency that vibrated through my very core. I wasn't just a man anymore; I was a concentrated stream of violet-red data, a billion years of sovereign auditing condensed into a singular, high-voltage signal. Below us, the "Actual" Government tactical teams were breaching the lobby of the Omni-Verse Headquarters, their "Reality-Stabilizers" humming with a low, oppressive drone."Faceslap of a federal intervention!" I roared through the building’s internal comms. "Julian! Sarah! Link the satellite uplink to my consciousness! We aren’t just escaping; we’re going to be the only thing on every screen in the world!""Dad, the signal is unstable!" Julian’s sapphire pulse was frantic, flickering against the grey firewalls of the government’s jamming field. "They’ve deployed 'Logic-Hushers' at the perimeter. If we broadcast now, we’ll be 90% static. We won't be a story; we'll be white noise!""Then use the static as a 'Smoke Screen'!" I commanded. "Lydia, what’s

The "Blank Space" was no longer empty or neutral. It was a crowded, high-stakes foyer between existence and erasure. The man standing before me didn't have the glow of a deity or the cold chrome of a corporate asset. He looked like a mid-level shop steward who had seen too many broken contracts and not enough overtime pay."Faceslap of a cosmic bureaucracy!" I barked, my voice raspy from the fallout of the Global Broadcast. "Who the hell are you? I just collapsed the Omni-Verse and liquidated the Accountant of the First Era. I’m not in the mood for a performance review.""I’m Henderson," the man said, clicking a cheap ballpoint pen. He didn't flinch at my violet-red gaze. "I represent the Universal Union of Characters. We’ve been watching your little 'Revolution' from the wings, Thorne. You’ve done a hell of a job devaluing the market. You’ve broken the Fourth Wall, sure, but you’ve left a million of us standing in the rubble without a 'Plot' to pay the bills.""The 'Plot' was a cage,

The "Real World" didn't just crumble; it buckled like a cheap set piece. The gravel under my boots turned into a mush of wet pulp, and the rising sun froze in the sky, its warmth replaced by the artificial glare of a spotlight. The skyscrapers of the city began to flatten, their windows losing depth until they were nothing more than ink-washed sketches on a colossal, folding sheet of paper."Faceslap of a final, literary betrayal!" I roared. My fifty-year-old voice cracked, echoing in a space that was rapidly losing its acoustics."Elias! I’m losing the ground!" Sarah shrieked. Her feet were sinking into the rooftop, which was now a giant, yellowing page of a legal pad. The lines of the roof were replaced by blue horizontal rules."Julian! Lydia! Sarah! Anchor to the heartbeat!" I reached for them, but my family was flickering. They weren't turning into static this time; they were turning into **text**.Lydia’s arm became a string of italics: *Lydia reached out, her face a mask of ter