I watched the wall behind us flicker.

At first I thought it was lag. A texture loading wrong.

Then the wall disappeared.

Not dramatically. Not with thunder. Just… gone.

I sat up in my chair at home, my hand frozen on the mouse, staring at the screen like it had betrayed me. In Second Life, when something disappears it doesn’t fall into ruin—it vanishes as if it was never there.

The next wall dissolved.

And then the roof.

Pictures hung in midair with nothing to hang on.

Our private home—our sky house, our invented refuge—was being erased in front of us piece by piece.

“What just happen?” I typed, helpless, watching the room collapse into open air.

We were still lying in bed in our avatars, still in that tender pose we’d been in only minutes before. The intimacy now looked absurd against the void around us.

Then the bed disappeared.

And suddenly we weren’t in a room anymore. There was no floor. No walls. No ceiling. Just sky.

For a second we hung there—two avatars frozen in the posture of tenderness, suspended in a world that had forgotten it had ever promised to hold us.

The script snapped. The physics changed. And we were thrown apart.

One moment we were still in that embrace; the next we were two separate bodies tumbling through open air, flailing like puppets with their strings cut. There was no floor to hit, no wall to grab—only the long drop toward the land far below.

I watched Tatchi falling beside me, close enough to reach, but not close enough to touch. Her arms jerked and spun as her avatar tried to recover. Mine did the same. It was frightening in a way Second Life rarely was—suddenly the world had weight again.

And the irony hit us both at the same time.

We had just shattered the illusion with our words—Italy, age, the real world—and now the world itself was shattering the illusion for us.

Tatchi typed, like a person delivering a law of nature:

“Words have power!”

I stared at the words.

Then I typed the only question that made any sense.

Did we bring this on ourselves?