Slowly, deliberately, Elias navigated to the tablet’s settings. He found the factory reset. The screen asked: Delete all game data?
He looked out the window at the real stars, cold and indifferent and full of risk.
His blood chilled. “It’s not a game.”
He’d discovered it by accident ten years ago, a cascading glitch in the archaic dispatch software. Most pilots saw a pre-flight checklist: fuel, weight, balance, weather. Elias saw a command line. He’d tapped a sequence—up, up, fuel override, down, down, weather lock—and the world had shimmered.