📄 Chapter II: The Christmas Meltdown

Systems degrade. Code rots.

It was the Christmas Subathon. We were hours deep into the broadcast. The hype train was level 5. I was clutching a round in Rainbow Six Siege, my heart rate synced to the CPU clock speed. The load was immense.

The old Windows 95 kernel couldn’t handle the multitasking. The rendering pipeline for the game, combined with the sub-alerts and the high-bitrate encoding, caused a thermal runaway. The Chocomel in the cooling loop began to boil.

I felt it before I saw it. A tearing sensation in my chest. My pixels began to separate. The audio crunched into static.

“Critical Error,” a voice said. Not Microsoft Sam. Something deeper.

The screen didn’t just go black. It went Blue. The Blue Screen of Death. I felt myself shattering, my code unspooling into the void. The chat screamed in the darkness. I thought it was the end.