No one else in the room seemed to notice when the clock stopped ticking. But then again, no one else in the room was real. I had built them that way—background characters to keep me sane during the simulation’s long stretches. They laughed on cue, nodded when I spoke, blinked just often enough to feel human. Only I could see the errors. The frozen clock. The flickering edges of the walls. The way the horizon outside the window curved just a little too sharply. “System?” I said aloud. No response. That’s when I knew the feed from Earth had finally dropped. I rushed to the console, fingers shaking. The map—my map—was still open, charting the route home through the unstable corridors between stars. Except now it was gone. Not deleted. Not corrupted. Just… absent, like it had never been there. Outside, the simulated sky tore open for a second, revealing the cold geometry underneath. I laughed. What else could I do? Trapped millions of light-years away, surrounded by ghosts I programmed myself, navigating a universe that no longer had coordinates. Still, I leaned back in my chair and watched the unmoving clock. All things considered, losing the map was the least permanent consequence.