The team waited in the dim, humming silence of the tower, their eyes locked on Mirabella. She leaned back, the flickering light of the gateway casting sharp shadows across her face.
"Think of Galaxy Fall as a video game," Mirabella began, her voice carrying the weight of forbidden knowledge. "When a game is in its early launch phase, the servers simply aren't equipped to carry billions of players at once." She pointed a slender finger at herself, then at Carl, and finally at Precious and Kent.
"The four of us are from Earth. We are one the 'lucky' ones—the beta testers selected by the system to navigate the initial rollout."
Everyone blinked in a mixture of surprise and growing confusion. The concept of their entire reality being a phased launch was a chilling thought.
