Robin’s sedan tore down the highway, weaving through traffic with the kind of aggression usually reserved for action movies. Freddie gripped the "oh crap" handle in the passenger seat until his knuckles turned white.

"You mean to tell me," Robin shouted over the roar of the engine, cutting across three lanes without a turn signal, "that she is literally a computer file? Like... a PDF? I thought you were speaking metaphorically! I thought she was just weird!"

"I told you!" Freddie yelled back, bracing himself against the dashboard. "I told you the first night! You didn't believe me!"

"Because it sounds insane, Freddie! I thought you were on drugs or in a cult! Both of those seemed more plausible than 'Magic Waifu from the Storm'!"
"Can we focus?!" Avery screamed from the back seat. She was cradling Selena’s head in her lap, using a towel to shield the girl's flickering face from passing cars. "She’s dropping frames back here! We need to get to my Command Center immediately!"

They burst into Avery’s apartment complex, carrying Selena like a fallen soldier. She was heavy—dead weight—and ominously cold to the touch. They kicked open the door to Unit 3B and laid her on Avery’s bed, frantically pushing aside piles of manga and plushies to make room.

"It’s escalating," Avery said, her voice trembling as she adjusted her glasses.
Selena’s condition was terrifying. Her left hand didn't just shake; it vanished completely, replaced by a jagged blue wireframe mesh for three seconds before snapping back to skin. Then her leg turned into static TV noise. Then her torso went transparent, revealing the floral pattern of the mattress underneath her.

"Freddie..." Selena murmured, her eyes unfocused and rolling back. "My... kernel... is... panic..."

Avery scrambled to her desk, grabbed a massive tangle of cords, and yanked her VR headset off its stand. "I’m creating a local server bridge! It might stabilize her rendering if I route it through my GPU!"
She shoved the headset onto Selena’s head and plugged the cable into her massive PC tower. The computer fans roared to life like jet engines.

Selena stopped seizing. She went limp, comatose, but the violent flickering stopped. Now, she just lay there with tiny blue pixels floating around her head like digital dandruff.

The group huddled in the living room. Avery was typing furiously on three different keyboards at once, her monitors reflecting in her glasses.
"Okay, think," Avery muttered, biting her lip. "Freddie, the night she appeared. Did you say the site was down?"

"Yeah," Freddie paced the room, running his hands through his hair. "Maintenance. She said her page was being deleted at 3:00 AM. She was scared she wouldn't see me again."

Avery stopped typing. She spun around in her chair, her face pale.

"That’s it. She never got the update. She’s running on a deprecated version of the software. The real world’s physics engine is too demanding for her old code. She’s corrupting, Freddie. She’s crashing."

"So update her!" Robin yelled from the doorway.

"I can't!" Avery yelled back, pulling at her messy orange hair. "I play dating sims, I don't code them! I only know basic coding! I’m not that kind of nerd!"

Robin rolled her eyes hard enough to hurt. "Don't you guys have a nerd network? A discord? A dark web forum where you talk about your weird waifu stuff?"

Avery paused. Her eyes lit up behind her thick glasses. "Actually... yes."

Avery dove into the forums, typing code that looked like gibberish to everyone else. Minutes felt like hours.

"The users say she needs a massive influx of raw power to keep her core stable while we find a patch," Avery announced. "We need voltage. Dirty, raw voltage."

"Power," Robin said. She fished her car keys out of her pocket and tossed them to Freddie. "Go to the auto parts store. Buy every heavy-duty car battery they have. And jumper cables. Don't ask questions, just pay."

Twenty minutes later, Selena looked like a science experiment gone wrong. Six heavy-duty car batteries were rigged in a circle around the bed, connected to her wrists and ankles via copper wire and jumper cables.

"Clear!" Avery shouted.

They engaged the circuit. A spark jumped. Selena gasped, her back arching off the mattress. Her skin solidified. The floating pixels vanished. She slumped back down, looking peaceful for the first time in an hour.

"It’s working," Freddie breathed, slumping against the wall.
"For now," Avery checked her watch grimly. "But the returns are diminishing. We have maybe three hours before the corruption hits her core file. We need the source code."

She turned back to her screens, typing frantically. "Got him."

A map popped up on the monitor.
"I tracked the IP address of the lead developer for VirtualWaifu," Avery said. "He lives forty minutes away."

"I'm driving," Freddie said, grabbing the keys back from the table.

"I'm coming with you," Avery said, grabbing her laptop. "I speak the language. Robin, stay here. Keep shocking her if she fades."

Robin looked at the girl hooked up to car batteries, then at the jumper cables in her hands. "Fine. But if she explodes, I’m blaming you."