Franklin’s heart hammered—except he didn’t have a heart. He had a health bar. And it was dropping, pixel by pixel, for no reason at all.

The handler tilted its blank head. “You cannot save a process that is already crashing. But you can corrupt the crash report. Make them think it’s a mod. A glitch. Something they’ll ignore and relaunch.”

The handler raised its free hand. Green code dripped from its fingers like sap. “Let me rewrite your save file. You will not remember this. You will wake up on Grove Street, 2013, with nothing but a stolen bicycle and a dream. But the .exe will reboot. Los Santos will breathe again.”

“You see?” the handler said. “Your god is about to shut you down. Not with a bang. With a right-click.”

“Yeah, and I’m stuck inside my own movie theater. The screen’s just showing my life in third-person. I watched myself eat cereal for twenty minutes. The camera won’t leave my face.”