The screen flickered like a dying storm, pixel-art blizzards swallowing Lin’s terminal whole. “Either EagleWolf77 is cheating, or we’re looking at a literal machine ghost,” she muttered, fingers dancing as the cursed server rerouted her commands into ancient German ciphertext.
Watson watched the lines of corrupted data unfold—a Nazi scientist’s consciousness, buried in blocky 8-bit purgatory, screaming into the void since 1945.
“He’s not cheating,” Watson said. “He’s haunting.”
Dead Server
The satellite uplink led them to a bunker under Nevada’s dust, its entrance half-buried behind chain-link and warnings in four languages—all variations of DO NOT TOUCH THIS.
Kria kicked open the server rack, coughing as decades of stale circuitry smoke billowed out. “Great. So we’re hacking a Nazi’s Minecraft hard drive?”
“Not hacking,” Watson corrected, brushing dust off a cathode-ray monitor. “Exorcising.”
The screen buzzed to life—EagleWolf77’s last save file, still rendering.
A perfect block-for-block Silbervogel prototype, suspended mid-construction.
A single chat message pulsed in the corner:
< EAGLEWOLF77 >
“I WAITED. WHO ELSE REMEMBERS THE SKY?”
Fragments in the Nether
They split the work:
- Lin dug through code, chasing the ghost’s IP through dead protocols.
- Kria covered the exits, in case the server spat out something worse than a digital phantom.
- Watson jacked in directly, letting the corrupted world flood his neural feed.
The simulation stuttered—brief flashes of another time.
- Prisoners forced to mine pixelated uranium.
- A Redstone rocket, built wrong on purpose.
- The glitching final message:
< SYSTEM >
“TRANSFER FAILED. NO ESCAPE. ONLY THIS.”
And then—
A player skin flickered into view.
Not Nazi grey.
Auschwitz stripes.
Watson recoiled. “He wasn’t the architect. He was the sabotage.“
The Last Logout
They hit the server with everything:
- Lin’s forkbomb— deleting the world chunk by chunk.
- **Kria’s EMP—**collapsing the hardware into molten slag.
- Watson’s final command— /ban EAGLEWOLF77
For a second, the screen froze on a single line:
< EAGLEWOLF77 >
“DANKE.”
Then black.
Silence.
What Remains
Back at the van, Lin checked her logs. “So… we just helped a dead Jewish engineer delete his Nazi prison?”
Kria shrugged. “Gaming’s weird now.”
Watson said nothing, rolling the recovered data between his fingers—a single corrupted .PNG.
When he opened it, the image loaded in fragments:
A minecraft torch.
A Star of David built from fence posts.
And a sign, pixel-crooked but clear:
“I MADE SURE IT WOULD NEVER FLY.”
Disclaimer: No servers were permanently harmed in this exorcism. Except the Nazis. Screw those guys.
Next Case: **Who—or what—is sending **tax audits from a rogue IRS AI buried in the Alaskan tundra?
