A Strange Stillness

The catapult officer gave the signal—two fierce sweeps of the arm—and the Dauntless was hurled from the carrier’s deck like a stone from a sling. Wind clawed at the fuselage. The gray Pacific churned below, enormous and indifferent, as Silen banked to join the others climbing toward the dimming sun.

Radio chatter crackled around him—callsigns, bearings, altitudes—each fragment weaving the familiar tapestry of combat. The island was a dark smudge on the horizon, green jungle wrapped in coral and smoke. Faint flashes glimmered from its cliffs: anti-air batteries waking up, impatient.

Silen adjusted throttle, felt the vibration settle into a steady pulse.

It was almost beautiful.

The second sortie was coordinated, mechanical, almost balletic in its brutality. Fighters dove first, strafing bunkers and emplacements with streams of tracer fire. Silen followed in steep descent, bomb bay open, crosshairs trembling.

The world narrowed to a plane, a target, a heartbeat.

Release.

The bomb fell clean, tumbling through the late-day light. Silen pulled up hard, engine shrieking, tracers clawing at his tail. Explosions rippled through the jungle below—bright blossoms of flame and earth.

The sky was chaos now—fighters twisting through arcs of smoke, voices snarling through the radios, commands drowned by static. Silen climbed again for altitude, turned, dove, fired. Training and instinct fused into one fluid dance.

And through it all, that faint tug at the back of his mind—like a frayed thread brushing the edge of awareness—kept whispering that something was wrong, out of place, out of time. It didn’t slow him, not now. It only lingered, an unfinished thought waiting for a quiet moment.

Hours later, after the last attack run and the evacuation of wounded from the island beachhead, the order finally came:

“Return to base. Repeat, return to base.”

Fuel low, adrenaline burned off, the squadron lined up for approach to the carrier. The sea had swallowed the sun; dusk was smearing into night. Silen touched down again with a jolt and the comforting shriek of steel cables.

Below deck, as the engines cooled and men slumped into bunks with cigarettes and half-jokes about the morning, the simulation began to… settle.

A strange stillness fell over everything.

That was new.

Normally, war—at least this war—did not linger in stillness. War moved, demanded, fed on motion. Stillness was not part of the loop.

Silen noticed.

He sat alone in the briefing room, helmet on the table, goggles set beside it, listening to the muted hum of the ship. Lights flickered once. Then twice. Then steadied.

Somewhere below decks, a klaxon began to wail—briefly—before dying mid-note, as if someone had pulled the plug.

Silen stood.

And in that fragile quiet, the other world—the tunnels, the candles, the humming servers—didn’t return, not fully.

But a single question rose up, crisp and undeniable:

“Who wrote this?”

The thought was lightning. It cleaved his mind in two.

The lights failed entirely. The ship dissolved into darkness. Screams began—not human, not entirely sound—and the simulation itself shuddered like a reel of film melting in a projector.

Reality fractured.

Battle had been completed.

And now the architects had to decide whether to correct… or to erase.