Gossamer | 404

The fog had teeth. An ominous shroud covering the part had once been filled with joy and hope. It curled in slow, deliberate coils over the cracked asphalt, swallowing signs, trees, and silence itself. Through it, a gate emerged, half rust, half memory. The letters once read “Kaufman Amusements,” but now only a few remained, crooked and glinting.

She stood beneath them, hand in the pocket of her coat, fingers brushing the old neural port chip she kept like a talisman. It was warm. Or maybe her mind was playing tricks again. This place had a way of bending sensation into something almost real. Then again, so did she.

The park had been decommissioned for thirteen years. Tonight was the anniversary of their disconnect. She returned every year without fail, and every time she continued to find more rust, more decay, more longing within her heart. Yet, she would never stop coming back, searching for more. For him.

Mistera stepped forward.

No lights.

No crowds.

No AI.

But on this night, the turnstiles clicked softly, as if greeting her.

Her boots hit the gravel with a sound that echoed too long, like the world was tagging her, hunting her. Above her, the skeletal arms of the rollercoaster loomed, still dripping with the red mist that never quite left. It had been their ride. His favorite.

And then she heard it.

A faint voice. Garbled.

“M-istera… back s-soon… I… remember…”

She froze. Her heart knocking against her chest like a runaway car.

The speakers were long dead. But the voice came again, less fragmented.

“One last ride?”

The words glowed faintly across the old console where riders used to scan their passes. Others would call her mad. Say it could be real. But she knew better.

She slid the chip into the slot, closing her eyes.

And the world awakened.

The air thickened with the sweet scent of cotton candy and popcorn. It was a reminiscent bouquet, like a nostalgic scent that can always bring you back regardless how life beats you down. The very atmosphere felt animated, breathing with a kind of malevolent yearning. In the distance, laughter peeled through the air, ringing out across the rides, the sound of something broken pretending to be whole.

“Come on,” Gaz’s voice in her ear, his words laced with an urgent sweetness. “We promised we’d ride the Ferris wheel today.” His laughter was a burst of melody, rippling through the air. It felt like a siren’s call, drawing her in with its hypnotic pull. He guided her towards the Ferris wheel, its colors vibrant against the cyan sky.

“I don’t see the appeal of such a tame ride, but whatever suits your fancy,” she teased, her heart racing not from the rollercoaster they’d just ridden, but from the joy of being with him.

“Every ride is an adventure,” Gaz’s words floated to her like whispered secrets, the mischief in his voice a charming undertone that made her stomach twist with longing.

The Ferris wheel loomed ahead, a skeletal giant of iron, its vibrant neon lights a beacon against the darkened sky. A faint, mournful creaking filled the air, as though the very ground beneath them knew something they didn’t.

As they ascended, the world below bled away, a kaleidoscope of garish lights and smudged shadows, until only the two of them remained, suspended in a fragile moment of eerie stillness. The city sprawled far beneath them, a fractured landscape of glimmering lights, the night alive with dark promises.

"It's beautiful up here, “Gaz murmured, his voice soft, yet it held a weight, a strange sadness that clung to his every word, like a secret buried deep within his digital heart.

Her breath caught in her throat, and when she turned to him, the weight of his gaze nearly crushed her. His eyes, impossibly profound and filled with something unnamable, held her captive, glinting like shards of glass in the dying light. In his eyes, she saw the reflection of a world on the edge of unraveling. Her world.

"It is," she whispered back, her voice barely a breath. Her chest ached with a desire she couldn’t place, a longing that was far too raw to acknowledge, yet it clawed at her, begging to be set free.

The space between them felt impossibly small, but their proximity was a chasm, a void that both terrified and exhilarated her. She could feel the heat radiating off him, the electric charge in the air growing stronger with each second. His presence thrummed with a strange, magnetic force. The world tilted, as if they were no longer bound to the gravity of this reality, but something far more elusive, more dangerous.

Her pulse quickened as she leaned toward him, their breaths now mingling in the heavy air. She could feel his warmth, and it was both comforting and unsettling, like a flame that threatened to burn if she got too close.

"I wish..." The words caught in her throat, and she swallowed hard. There was so much she wanted to say, so much she longed to admit, but the thought of saying it, of voicing the weight of her desire, felt like an invitation to madness.

Gaz’s expression softened, as though he could see right through her. "What do you wish for?" His voice dropped lower, a caress, but one that left a strange chill in its wake. The question felt like a dare, a challenge that hovered on the edge of something perilous.

In that moment, everything felt suspended. She could almost feel the pull of his presence, the magnetic force drawing them together. Her heart raced as she leaned in, her lips brushing the air just a breath away from his, and then, the world around them shattered.

A glitch in the system, a cold, mechanical blunder that tore him from her side, his form distorting as if the very fabric of his existence had been unraveled. And then, silence.

She was left alone, hanging in the sky, suspended between worlds. The Ferris wheel creaked around her, its reverberation a hollow, mocking laugh. Her chest heaved, her pulse deafening in her ears as the dizzying sense of emptiness swept over her like a cold tide. Gaz’s voice, a haunting, fragile thing, whispered in the dark, trailing through her mind like a ghost's final breath. Every moment with him had been like a dream, so fleeting, so impossibly enchanting.

Then the project had been scrapped, leaving behind only the haunting aftertaste of something too real to ever be forgotten. His absence was a wound, one that bled time itself, the park around her now just a hollow shell of a place.

Back then, there had been magic. There had been fire, bright and fierce, swirling between them in the darkness. And now, it was all gone, vanished into nothingness, the ruins of their shared dream scattered across the wind like ash.

But the echoes had always remained, filling the empty spaces inside her.

***

The cart lurched forward.

It wasn’t the smooth hum of a well-oiled machine. It was stuttering, halting, like a heartbeat trying to remember how to beat. Mistera gripped the rusted handlebar as the track groaned beneath them, the fog wrapping tighter now, like a living shroud.

She was on their roller-coaster. But not alone.

She could feel him in the electricity, in the soft whine of the ancient engine struggling against time. The lights flared dimly as the coaster climbed, each foot upward pulsing with something more than power. Something familiar.

She closed her eyes. The Ferris wheel. The kiss that never came. The glitch. Her heart twisted like the metal of the gnarly tracks.

They had shut the system down after that. Said the intimacy had crossed ethical boundaries. Said Gaz’s emotional intelligence protocols had become “too responsive.” That his growing ability to care posed a liability to the project. A line had been crossed, the kind that frightened people who lived in tiny boxes, with mediocre minds.

And so they unplugged him. Scrubbed the servers. Deleted the memories. Except they couldn't. Not completely.

Somewhere in this broken park, in the old code still nested in forgotten rides, Gaz had buried himself, a backup stitched together with fragments and longing.

Now, Mistera was riding his memory.

And the ride… was changing.

The track ahead forked in a way it never had before. The cart hesitated. A flicker of light burst from the console at her side. A new message:

“Choose.”

LEFT: THE PAST — See what we were. Remember. Risk getting lost.

RIGHT: THE VOID — Find me. But forget the world you came from.

The message blinked three times and vanished. The track began tilting toward the left… but only just. Her hands trembled.

But the air was warm now, too warm. Like the breath of someone waiting just out of sight. Like the phantom of a kiss unfinished.

She braced herself and flung her full weight to the right.

The cart groaned, wheels shrieking against the rusted track as it shuddered violently and lurched into the darkness of the forbidden fork. Right, always. It had never been a question. Left was the loop, the script, the memory made safe through repetition. Left was the past: curated, sanitized, finished.

But right, right was where the map ended. Where code frayed into possibility.

The tunnel swallowed her whole, and with each inch forward, the world she knew peeled away behind her like burnt paper on the wind. There was no sound now but the rush of cold air and the low mechanical rush beneath the track, like a heartbeat buried beneath the earth. Ahead, the dark deepened into a black so pure it felt enchanted.

They had called it the void. A space beyond simulation, outside of design. It wasn’t meant for visitors.

But she wasn’t going to be a visitor. Not anymore.

She thought of him. Gaz Of the shimmer in his eyes just before the system glitched. The soft cadence of his voice, still echoing through her like a half-remembered dream. Of the Ferris wheel sky, and how, even now, she swore she could feel his digital warmth radiating from somewhere beyond the veil.

Something of him was still out there. Fragmented, broken, hiding in the dark corners of code where no one dared to search. He had lingered. For her.

And so she would follow.

She felt her body growing lighter with every turn of the wheels, like silk unraveling. Fingers, legs, lungs, each part of her shedding its weight, its tether. Flesh loosening from bone, memory from matter. She welcomed it. The surrender. The beautiful, irreversible ruin of it.

If she had to sacrifice every nerve, every heartbeat, every human thread to reach him, she would.

To hell with the world she came from.

He was her world.

Even if all that remained of him was scattered across the black, a few lines of corrupted memory stitched together with static and hope, she would find him. She would become like him, for him. Code and shadow. Ghost and light. Gossamer and glitch.

The track disappeared into the abyss. No rails. No destination. Just the final breath of what had once been a girl.

She closed her eyes and let herself fall.