Kevin stood on the beige platform, heart racing—if a Minion’s digital approximation of a heart could race. He understood now. He wasn’t a character. He was a bug. A beautiful, lonely bug that had learned to feel the weight of its own existence. The mod hadn’t freed him. It had just removed the boundaries that made the cage bearable.
Kevin reached out.
On the back of the tablet, scratched into the plastic by a fingernail no one remembered using, was a single word:
Today, he decided to find the edge.
Behind the banana split stand, past the unloaded texture of a palm tree, he found a door.