"That's impossible, Two," Operator One whispered in hushed tones. "There's only three Operators with edit access."

"I thought the same 'till an hour ago," Operator Two replied. "One, take a look at this."

The Operators stood in a nondescript park that was littered with trees and paths and greenery. Two pointed towards the nearest tree. "The tree bark," she said. "Take a look."

One stared at the tree for a few moments before replying, "Looks too smooth to be bark. Wait, is it moving?" The not-bark was indeed moving; like syrup, it was melting down the sides of the tree in a gradual advance towards the ground.

"It gets weirder," Two continued. She glanced round to check for humans then snapped her fingers. At once, a holo-display appeared in front of them. Text appeared on top of the screen: SIMULATION AE-07. "Search for known glitches in the logs," she continued.

One looked confused for a moment then focused on the display. The holo-display responded to his unspoken query with a list. "Few thousand," One muttered. "But they’re harmless. They’re all visual glitches. We patched out anything dangerous hundreds of years ago."

"Search again," Two replied, "But not for glitches. Search for all uncategorised changes in the past hour. That’s what this one’s logged as."

"Right…" One said. He closed his eyes; the display in front of him went haywire. Opening them, he gasped as he saw the number of results displayed.

"What the fuck?" One cried. "8.6 Quintillion?!"

Two looked haggard as she responded, "Yeah. I know."

"Have you told Three yet?"

“No.”

“Why not?”

"You know what they're like. They'll get mad and blame me. You've got more experience so I asked you first. And I-" Two sighed. "Honestly? I trust you more. I’ll admit it: I don’t know what’s going on."

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One looked as if he was about to pass out. "You don't know. You don't know why 8.6 quintillion edits were made, some of which’re probably worse than this stupid tree? Or why none of them were recorded as glitches?"

"No."

One let out an aggravated hiss. "Let's look at the tree again," he said with trepidation.

The Operators walked up to the tree and One peered at it with a discerning eye. "This looks like something I'd make when I was new to the job," he said. "It's poor work. I'd fail a trainee Operator in an instant for it."

Two suppressed a smile. "Like the time I sent that meteor towards Earth by accident?"

One rolled his eyes. "Ugh. Don't remind me. That incident paperwork took weeks to fill out." He hovered a hand over the melting not-bark. "This tree… why’d you show me this one?"

"That search you just did? Tree’s the first result when you sort by earliest to latest date," Two replied. "And like you said, it's a bad edit. Would freak out any human who saw it. So I figured whoever did this was sloppy. They’d leave clues behind. Right?"

"Good thinking," One said. He brought the holo-display over to him with the flick of a hand. "Date and time of edit," He muttered to himself as the display shifted and changed with every word, "priority level, counter-signer - hmm, empty, and editor nam- what the fuck?”

Two glanced over. "What?"

"It's one author.” One had gone pale. “All of the edits… one author. Same ID. Every single one."

Two blinked. "Impossible."

One was now frantically checking logs and making secondary searches. "There's no way. Oh- oh. This is bad. Real bad." He looked up at Two with fear evident in his eyes. "We need to leave."

"What? Why?"

"The editor isn’t an Operator."

"Then who?" Two asked.

"It's a human."

Suddenly, the holo-display in front of Two duplicated itself. Then again to make four; then again and again and again, until there was a wall of displays stretching into the sky and as far as the eye could see.

"Too late," a tinny voice echoed from the original display.

A human woman had appeared on the display, grinning at the Operators with eyes like black holes; her lips curled back further to reveal an impossible number of teeth. One by one, each screen became static then was replaced by the same grinning woman.

"Well, that was easy. I knew whoever created all this'd investigate. Found you!" she hissed.

"Run!" One shouted. He grabbed at Two's hand and dragged her back from the spectacle of screens.

Then, everything was plunged into darkness as the sun in the sky was extinguished.