The mansion screamed. It was a sound of grinding metal and corrupted audio files. The purple smoke was sucked back into the monitor with a violent hiss. The loading bars on the stairs retracted, the spiders vanished, and Thing popped back into high-definition, his fingernails once again perfectly manicured. The screen went black. A single line of text remained: UNEXPECTED ERROR: ENTITY 'ADDAMS' CANNOT BE COMPRESSED.

He was right. The heavy iron blade was stuck halfway through the mahogany, vibrating with a high-pitched digital whine, neither fully in this reality nor out of it. Grandmama simply adjusted her shawl. "It makes the chopping more efficient, dear. No resistance from the wood."

"How marvelous!" Gomez cried, lunging at a floating, glitched-out suit of armor with his rapier. "A digital haunting! Morticia, darling, look! The walls are becoming translucent!"

"Step aside, Uncle," Wednesday said. She didn't use a mouse. She didn't use a keyboard. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small, glass vial of highly corrosive, non-digital acid—a vintage blend from the family apothecary.

"It wants to delete us, Father," Wednesday said, reaching into the air and grabbing a floating error message. She snapped it in half like a dry twig. "It thinks we are obsolete code."

Thing scurried across the floor, but he was no longer a seamless hand. He was a blocky, flesh-colored cluster of cubes that moved in five frames per second. He tapped out a frantic message in Morse code against a baseboard, but the sound came out as distorted white noise.

Wednesday didn't wait for a second movement. She knew that to defeat a .rar file, you had to find the source of the extraction. She sprinted toward the attic, dodging falling textures and bottomless pits of blue-screen-of-death.