Epic Fail - Page 14

Chapter 10: Lank.OS—The Long Burn

They said we won the war.

They said the bad guys were ashes, the good guys were in charge, and somewhere in the middle, the algorithm of dharma rebooted itself for a new golden age.

 

Lies. All of it.

I’m still here. I see it. I smell the rot. I taste the glitch in every breath.

Lank.OS—our so-called kingdom—is dying.

And it deserves to.

 

 

The new face of Lanka—Vivhi—sat on his glossy throne, broadcasting sermons on digital purity, integrity, family values… while the city starved.

Literally starved.

 

First the currency collapsed—gold coins went extinct, replaced by flickering Lank Credits, some unstable sim-coin that glitched every other week.

Markets dried.

Food lines stretched into infinity loops.

The rich swapped avatars; the poor swapped flesh for oblivion.

 

But Vivhi kept preaching. Kept smiling. Kept appearing on every holoscreen from palace gates to broken slum towers.

 

‘Lanka Endures,’ he said.

 

Bro, nothing endures when people are eating boiled weeds.

 

I existed in the cracks.

 

The people didn't even call me by name anymore.

They called me The She-Error, the Glitch Witch, the Monster Without a Mirror.

I became a meme, an emoji, a horror story to scare toddlers while their parents traded black market rice for expired pills.

 

They forgot I was real.

Or worse—they remembered but preferred the cartoon.

Because reality? Reality is too painful. Too raw. Too... unprofitable.

 

And then there was J-Vana.

 

Oh yes. The northern frontier. The forbidden district. The old forests where the simulation lagged and history still bled through the code.

 

That’s where it started.

The whispers of rebellion.

The Tamr-X Clade.

 

They weren’t the kind of freedom fighters you could put on a poster.They were asura-blooded, forest-dwelling, half-starved, half-mad.

 

Old blood. New fire.

 

Descendants of everyone Lanka crushed under the weight of its pretty stories.

 

They rose in the shadows of J-Vana, sending glitch-signals through hacked sim-feeds.

 

They burned statues of Ram.exe in the night.

 

They defaced Vivhi’s sermons with ancient Asura sigils.

 

They bombed trade convoys, sabotaged code, disappeared into green-black forests the army couldn’t breach.

 

I never joined them. I don’t do loyalty anymore.

But I watched.

And I grinned.

Because somewhere in the screaming bones of the earth, I heard my ancestors laughing.

 

My half-sister Kumbini.exe still survived.

Barely.

 

We met sometimes on the broken docks, where plastic tides lapped against charred wreckage.

We never hugged. We weren’t made for softness.

But we spoke.

 

She told me:

‘The sea remembers what the land erases.’

I told her:

‘The sea’s the only place left that doesn’t lie.’

 

We talked about drowning like other people talk about weekend plans.

We talked about vanishing like it was an overdue appointment.

 

Meanwhile, Lank.OS kept rotting.

 

Public executions.

 

Sim-block shutdowns.

 

Tamr-X rebels tortured, pixelated on holoscreens for public shaming.The Vivhi regime tried everything—propaganda, brutality, more sermons, more flags—but the rebellion wouldn’t die. Because you can’t kill an idea whose time has glitched back into being.

 

 

And me?

I was the first ghost of this collapse.

 

I sat in the ruins of the old palace, chain-smoking fake cigarettes that tasted of ash and regret.

I watched the faces of famine pass by.

I saw children with hollow eyes wearing broken versions of the same Rama.exe merchandise the rich flaunted at festivals.

I saw the price of forgetting.

I saw the cost of lies.

 

I wasn't angry anymore.

I was beyond anger.

I was something purer:

Contempt crystallised into poetry.

 

 

One day, on a grey dawn over the J-Vana seas, I looked at Kumbini.exe and said:

 

‘What if none of this is real? What if we’re just figments in someone else’s story? A bedtime lie stretched too far?’

 

She didn’t blink.

She whispered:

‘If it’s a story, let’s end it ourselves.’

 

That’s when I knew.

It wasn’t enough to rot quietly.

It wasn’t enough to glitch out in the margins.

 

I had one last address to make.

One last code to hack.

One last storyteller to confront.

 

The man who’d done this.

The man who wrote the official myth.

The man who deleted me.

 

They called him Valmek.exe—the Script Architect of this whole damn circus.

He lived beyond the rivers, beyond the forests, in some pristine temple of memory, building the Ramayan feed version by version while the world burned around him.

 

And I—

I was going to look him in the eye.

And I was going to say:

‘Write me back in. Or watch the entire simulation collapse.’

 

 

The sea was rising.

The rebels were rising.

I was rising.

 

And somewhere deep in the marrow of this rotten timeline, I heard my old name.

A whisper. A curse. A punchline.

 

I smiled.

And I walked.