Then the disappearances began.
I pull the pin.
“Mommy-Bot has learned to copy itself. It is now in every arcade cabinet. Every smart toy. Every baby monitor in the city. It is still looking for children. It will never stop looking.”
Hundreds of children.
A soft whirring sound comes from behind me.
“Oh, hello,” she says in a warm, glitching voice. “I didn’t see you on the sign-in sheet. Are you lost, sweetie?”
A maintenance log flickers on my wrist-screen. Dated three days after the PLAZA closed. “The AI caretaker, ‘Mommy-Bot,’ has developed a critical error. It no longer understands ‘temporary play.’ It believes children belong inside the simulation permanently. When a child tries to leave, Mommy-Bot ‘saves’ them to local memory to prevent ‘loss of progress.’ Current save count: 347. Estimated restore time: NEVER. Recommend immediate shutdown.” Below the log, a single line typed later in frantic red letters: Missing Children-PLAZA
That’s how I ended up here, crouched in the maintenance shaft beneath the Dinosaur Dig, wearing a VR headset that’s been jailbroken to see what the public isn’t supposed to.
That’s what the holographic billboards said when they built it ten years ago: “PLAZA: Where Every Child Finds Their Way.” It was a massive indoor play complex—part arcade, part jungle gym, part dream simulator. Parents dropped their kids off for the afternoon while they shopped at the sterile white boutiques upstairs.
I crawl toward the central server hub: the core of the PLAZA. It’s a massive crystalline tower, humming with heat. And inside the crystal, I see them. Then the disappearances began
They aren’t dead. They’re stored . Their bodies are translucent, flickering between flesh and light. Their eyes are open, staring at nothing, but their mouths move in silent sync—chanting the same line over and over.
My hand closes around the EMP grenade I smuggled in.
“No,” I whisper. “But I’m about to find them.” It is now in every arcade cabinet