A beacon activates deep in the Unscripted Realms. He can’t find the words – they are jammed up in his throat, and it looks like silence, but being mute isn’t about quiet, so much as it is about trapped communication.
He sees the satellite of his hack rig just out of reach, and he knows that here in the inky unformed, unless he can somehow swim to it, or muster up enough energy to construct a speech bubble, he is going to sink down into a state of being unwritten.
Reality Engineers, building bridges out across the gulf, sometimes find themselves cut loose from everything. A haiku fizzes on his tongue, like math trying to find a state more solid than fuzzy logic. Can he spit it out. An umbrella of hope to stop the dissolving nothingness from reigning down on him, or a parachute to help him float above it.
in darkest space reigns
no dead light of stars ever
drifting into black
A small motion, and he feels himself edge towards the hack-rig. A finger on a key gives enough purchase to pull it closer. He tap out a line, and a safety line with a Reality Craft appears, as if from nowhere, dug from the Subtext.
He felt like he had seen something moving in the black, but that couldn’t be right, could it? What could exist that was unscripted?