Debugging system activated. Logic error solved.

  8.17 am. 3 hours, 13 minutes, 4 seconds remaining. KYZDKYU:WRATH ver. 173.00475.3.012 is having breakfast at his apartment in Montemarcone.

  Berto and Vanni were on the road to Lanciano again. Berto was crying and screaming, Vanni stood with his hand stretched out towards him as if he wanted to make him stop.

  “No, no, no! Fuck!” Berto sobbed in despair, “Vanni why? Why did you do it?! We don't have any more time!"

  “Berto, listen, we still have time. We can still do it. We have to try again,” Vanni tried to persuade his partner.

  “It is not true! We had staked everything on this last opportunity! Already last night we risked triggering a new logic error by talking to Quintino, now it's completely impossible to do it!”

  “I told you it wasn't a good idea to spend the night doing nothing! But now we must use the time left to save him!”

  “And what would you have done during the night? We had hypothesized that perhaps Rosselli's men were already tailing him! Quintino had no way to escape! Fuck Vanni, you gave me your word! If they had managed to kill him, you wouldn’t intervene!”

  “We can convince him to hitchhike again, and find someone who goes faster!”

  “You stupid old bastard, do you understand he's done for? We only had two choices: try to make him die somewhere else or wait for him to die in that shitty reed patch as it should be. And maybe now it’s too late for the first one. In short: we're screwed.”

  “I'm not giving up!”

  “Well done Vanni, don't give up. I’ve had enough. I'm going somewhere to wait for the world to end."

  “Yeah, go lie somewhere and wait for death, you little bastard!” With these words, Vanni left and fled down the slope toward Montemarcone.

  Berto sighed. He felt a weight in the center of his chest. It was anguish. But he hadn't lied about being tired of trying. Maybe, from a certain point of view, it wasn't such a great tragedy to be erased from existence.

  He had no idea what his past lives had been like or what his future ones would be like, but Gilberto Calabrese's life had been bland and forgettable. And looking ahead, things could only get worse.

  There was a place where he wanted to go to wait for everything to end. A bar in Lanciano. He had often been there with Gianna. Gianna said that it had belonged to her grandfather but that he had then sold it. Berto had never believed her. She was too low class and that bar was too fancy.

  In any case, they made some amazing Chantilly cream donuts at the Savoy Bar, and Berto wanted to eat one before disappearing forever.

  He walked towards the center of Lanciano, but after half an hour, when he was almost there, the debug system brought him back.

  Debugging system activated. Logic error solved.

  “Sucked wind, huh?” Berto asked Vanni.

  Vanni grunted and ran away again towards Montemarcone. Berto shrugged and set off towards the bar again, but once more he was sent back just before arriving.

  Debugging system activated. Logic error solved.

  This time Berto didn't even bother making a joke to Vanni. He simply went on his way.

  Debugging system activated. Logic error solved.

  “You're a pain in the ass, Vanni! Get it over with! At least let me die in peace!”

  “Fuck you!”

  Debugging system activated. Logic error solved.

  “Enough, I give up!” Vanni exclaimed in defeat.

  “Fucking finally! There's an hour to go, if you don't stop I won't even be able to get to that damned place!” Berto replied unnerved.

  “What? What place?” Vanni asked, genuinely intrigued by Berto's exasperation.

  “The Savoy Bar in Lanciano. They make amazing Chantilly cream donuts.”

  "Oh. Does it bother you if I come with you?”

  “Do as you like, as long as you don't get in my way.”

  At five minutes to eleven Berto and Vanni reached the porticoes of Lanciano. Under them was the Savoy Bar, with its gold and black sign.

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  “How do we pay for the donut?” Vanni asked naively.

  “What the fuck do you care how we pay? In half an hour the world will end!” Berto replied laughing.

  Vanni went to sit at a table in front of the bar. “Will you get me one too?”

  Berto nodded and entered. He looked at the refrigerated counter, and then at the bartender. He blinked a couple of times. The bartender was Gianna. She was a little different from how Berto remembered her, but there was no doubt about it.

  “Excuse me, could you give me a couple of Chantilly cream donuts?” Berto began.

  “Oh, we have a connoisseur I see. They're my favorites,” Gianna replied with a smile.

  Berto waited for the barmaid to put the two donuts on a saucer. He wanted to ask her if it was really her, but he felt ashamed. She looked for his gaze as if to say she could take the plate.

  “Listen, is your name Gianna by any chance?”

  “Do we know each other?”

  “Yes – well, no. I come from another dimension and I knew you there. We even were in a relationship for a while. For like three months.”

  Well, why not screw it at this point?

  Gianna laughed. “Tell me, has this pick-up strategy ever worked?”

  “I promise you it's not bullshit. Like, this was your grandfather's bar. You told me while sitting at that table over there,” Berto stretched out to point to a green leather sofa in the corner, “That day too you had taken a Chantilly cream donut. You let me taste it for the first time and told me it was the bar’s crown jewel.”

  “Are you a stalker?” Gianna asked him, squinting as if she wanted to look at him better. When she was joking she always did this. "What is your name?"

  “Berto.”

  “Berto? Alberto or Roberto?”

  “Gilberto.”

  “It's a peculiar name. But my dad came from a place with many people called like that.”

  “Yes, your father is from Casoli, and the Patron Saint of Casoli is Saint Gilbert. So, there’s a lot of people from there with that name."

  Gianna laughed again, “There were. Casoli was razed to the ground quite a few years ago.”

  “Yeah, well, not where I come from. Different dimension, remember?”

  For an instant, Gianna looked at Berto and seemed to see something in him. It looked like she had seen a dead person. Then reality started to glitch. As the existent began to change shape for the last time, Gianna said, “The Gianna in your dimension must be stupid. You're cute, you know?”

  Debugging system activated. Logic error solved.

  11.07 am. 0 hours, 23 minutes, 15 seconds remaining. The hitmen took KYZDKYU:WRATH ver. 173.00475.3.012 and are taking him to the place of execution.

  Berto darted away as fast as an arrow. Suddenly he had a very good reason to avoid the apocalypse.

  "Where are you going?" Vanni shouted at him.

  “I'm going to save the world,” Berto replied without looking back.

  “Didn't you give up?”

  “I've changed my mind,” Berto's words reached Vanni like an echo. And Vanni, who had seen him chatting with the waitress before the debug, thought "Oh yeah, the proverb’s right. One hair of a woman can draw more than a hundred pair of oxen.”

  Berto ran at breakneck speed, in his crazy fight against time. He didn't know his exact speed, but he could swear that as he passed the Brecciaio bridge the speed detector activated and ordered him "Slow down!". But he couldn't slow down. There were only five minutes left.

  At the end of the bridge, Berto jumped below, chasing the cursor a few hundred meters away. It was pointing somewhere along the riverbank.

  Running among the elm and plum trees, Berto crossed a large wild boar. He had an idea. Maybe not a brilliant idea, but it was the only one his brain could come up with. Berto resumed his material form, caught the boar's attention, and then let it chase after him. He ran towards the cursor, and an instant before emerging from the vegetation he became invisible again. The boar charged out of the bramble thicket and then towards the reeds.

  Quintino was there, and with him, there was a young guy who pointed a gun at the back of his head, Pablo, and three other criminals. The game seemed to be almost over. When the boar appeared, everyone turned towards the beast.

  Berto listened to Quintino's mind. “What? A wild boar? How long has it been since I saw one? I used to like hunting wild boars once.”

  Rosselli's men squealed in fear, and the young guy pulled the gun from Quintino's head to aim it at the boar.

  “What a bunch of clowns.”

  “Stay fucking calm!” Pablo screamed and fired a shot into the air, but the boar ignored him.

  “I was a hunter and fisherman twenty years ago. I shot my prey in the head in cold blood, and with one shot they fell to the ground dead.”

  “Go away you shitty beast!” Pablo fired another shot at the boar, wounding its leg, and the beast fled into the vegetation. “Good, now let's get back to us”

  “Can I really accept being killed by these imbeciles?”

  The young guy moved the barrel towards Quintino's face again, but in a split-second decision, Quintino darted forward and grabbed the gun, brought it out of his line, and snatched it from the guy's hands. Then he grabbed him by the throat, holding him as a human shield.

  “Don't fucking shoot! That's my nephew!” Pablo screamed in terror. And Pablo was the first to get a bullet in the head.

  “Shoot, holy shit!” shouted one of the three criminals. Taking cover with Pablo's nephew, Quintino responded blow for blow, and when the three were on the ground he let go of the lad's body, riddled with lead.

  The human shield had not been enough to protect Quintino completely. He had quite deep wounds that were bleeding profusely, but he was still alive. Quintino dabbed his wounds and shuffled along the white road along the river, leaving red puddles behind.

  “And what do I do now?” Quintino staggered forward muttering to himself “I'm going to Archi, I'll take a bus, and then – ”

  Berto would have liked to follow him, he would have wanted to find out whether Quintino would have been able to save himself or not. But the world began to fade and turn into an infinite white sheet.