Fifteen minutes earlier

The human woman had always been shunned. As a child, she would focus on things that adults couldn't see or hear, always to the derision of others. As an adult she was on the fringes of society: in and out of jobs and doctors' waiting rooms and in recent months her local psychiatric hospital. It was beyond doubt that she wasn’t quite built for this world.

Yet today, for the first time in her life, her liminality was her greatest strength.

She stood in front of a tree in a nondescript park, staring at the melting bark with wide eyes. "Am I doing this?" She whispered.

There was no response, yet she knew instinctively that she was. She placed a hand on the tree; her hand and arm phased straight through it. The not-bark melted faster in response.

Simulation. The word crashed into her brain in a bolt of lightning-realisation.

"I'm not real," She said. "None of this is." The consequences of her realisation tumbled across her senses like falling dominos.

"None of this is real," She muttered at first; then rising to a wild shriek, "So none of this matters. At all. At all! AT ALL!"

The tree not-bark continued to melt, impassive to the wildness taking root in the young woman in front of it.

"What else can I do?" She asked out loud. "And who's running this place?"

~~~

In the present time

The Operators sprinted across the darkened park towards a doorway hidden in plain sight. Behind them was chaos; trees were twisting in on themselves, water from the nearby pond had exploded upwards then iced over, and birds were frozen in mid-flight.

Two spotted the danger first; she threw up a hand as the ground in front of the Operators cracked open. At once, there was metal sheeting covering the gap, and the Operators carried on.

"Move the doorway closer!" Two shouted.

"I can't!" One shouted back. "It's a fixed point in space! Did you even pay attention in training?"

"Enough so we didn't just die!" Two replied. She pointed to the sky from which boulders were now falling towards them; long before they could lay waste to their targets they disintegrated. The air responsible for this burned hot enough to set nearby trees alight.

"Shit," One muttered, "We’ll need a mass memory wipe for this one…"

“Paperwork?” Two asked.

“So much paperwork,” One replied.

Behind them, the cackling of a mad woman echoed across the park, the gravelly sound emanating from a thousand screens at once. "What if I do this?!" She called out. And then gravity itself changed.

"What the fuck-" Two spluttered as her, and everything around her, began free-falling up - or down? - into the sky. "One! I need help!"

"Got it!" One propelled himself across the inverted landscape with ease; he grabbed Two's hands, gripping them with white-knuckled fingers. Around them there was the shrieking and groaning of a world unmooring itself from reality.

"On my lead, Two," One said. "Copy what I do. You provide the power. I’ll provide the fine details!”

Two nodded, and the Operators closed their eyes. At once, the chaos around them was arrested. They were frozen around a kilometre into the sky, surrounded by soil and trees and animals and water; it was a surrealist painting conjured from mad imagination.

Then, time itself reversed as a soft glow emanated from One and a blinding glare from Two. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, the chaos righted itself. Even as the Operators landed back on the ground, they kept their eyes closed and their hands connected as trees replanted themselves around the two, the ground healed, and the water and birds returned to the clouds and ponds.

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Then the sun reignited itself, flaring into life as if it had never vanished.

Two opened her eyes, dazed, to see everything around her restored.

"Two," One said, awed, "How did you manage that?”

“Manage what?”

“All I did was control the edit speed. You did the rest.”

Two blinked. “For real?”

“For real. Um,” One replied, “That makes up for all the times you skipped training."

"Wow…" Two began. "Wait. The doorway! How long do we have?"

"Minutes," One replied. "We're back to before the first edit was made." He gestured towards a human woman who'd just entered the park from a faraway gate. "We've got time. Let's edit her out of existence before she gets the chance to do it again.”

"Is that ethical?" Two asked. "Shouldn't we work out what's happened?"

"Fuck no," One replied. "We have the first major simulation incident since you killed all those dinosaurs. The least we can do is remove the root cause."

Two nodded, uncertain, as the Operators walked through an invisible doorway then vanished.

~~~

"Three!" One called out, back in the office-turned-control-room. It was small and nondescript, with tables and chairs and holo-displays scattered throughout. "Get in here! It's an emergency!"

"He means it," Two added. "You'll not believe what's happened!"

There was the sound of rapid footsteps before the tall form of Three wandered through the doorway. There was confusion and irritation on their face; it was masked by careful neutrality the second One made eye contact with them.

"What?" Three asked.

"Two waved over a holo-display. "Here," she said. Check the logs."

"And this is what we saw…" One began.

Three observed One and Two as the pair told their story with manic gestures and increasingly stressed tones. Three's expression was impassive until the very end; only then did they betray the smallest of smiles.

"But what was it like?" Three asked. "To be amongst the chaos?"

"What-" One started. "The simulation could destroy itself, destroy everything we've worked towards for millenia, and you're asking us what it was like?"

"Mmhmm," Three replied, nodding.

Two piped up, "It was madness. Like nothing I've ever seen. Everything just… fell apart. All the rules broke themselves. It was lucky that two Operators were there."

Three said nothing. One, sensing a darkening in the tone of the conversation, frowned. Two was unperturbed.

The silence stretched into eternity before Three simply said, "Fascinating."

One, out of instinct, ducked off to one side as Three reached into a pocket. Three's knife, flicked across the room, missed One by millimetres; Two was not so lucky, however, and fell backwards with a gasp of pain as a second knife tore through an artery in their arm.

"What the fuck- Three, what?!" One cried as they dove across the room towards Two.

Three's smile grew wider and more unhinged. "Unfortunate," they said, "that Two succumbed to your unprovoked attack. I'm off to check on my creation. Chaos is just so fascinating." Three pulled a device out of another pocket, muttered some words in a strange language, and with a flash of light they were gone.

Several of the holo-displays now displayed a woman standing in front of a melting tree. The scene then zoomed out, showing Three striding towards the woman with purpose.

"One?" Two gasped as blood poured out of them and onto the floor. "Am I dying?"

"It's okay. It's okay it's okay it's okay oh fuck no it's not-" One was babbling.

"One!" Two forced out. "You're smart. The smartest of all of us. Take a breath and think-"

"I don't have time!" One shouted. "You have minutes-"

"TAKE A GODDAMN BREATH, ONE!" Two screeched, eyes half-rolling back into her head from the effort of her words. She was growing paler by the second.

One, shocked out of their panic, took a deep breath, and then another. Then, the craziest idea they'd ever had sprouted out of their mind.

"Two, I'm putting you back into the simulation." One said with eerie calm.

"Wait, no- I'm dying- breaches protocol," Two forced out. "You- stickler for rules."

"Fuck the protocol!" One replied. "I'm not losing you!" He lunged across the room and grabbed a bright red case tucked underneath a table; he ripped it open to reveal several devices, each identical to the one Three had activated. He grabbed two of them then ran back towards Two, pressing one of the devices into her blood-soaked hands.

"I'll be there shortly!" One shouted. "After what I’ve seen it’s obvious: you're the most powerful Operator we’ve ever had. Get in there and stop this! And in case you hesitate, you have my blanket, eternal permission to break every goddamn fucking rule ever made!"

One said a few words in that strange language Three had used, and then Two was gone also, leaving only her pool of blood and the knife responsible.

One picked up the knife, their limbs shaking with sheer fury. "You're dead for this, Three," they muttered. "You're fucking dead."

One locked the door to the office then called over five holo-screens. Murder raged in his eyes.