Eli tried to walk CJ toward a nearby vehicle, but the "Narge" mod changed the physics. Every time CJ moved, the world behind him glitched into a void. He wasn't playing a game anymore; he was being chased by a deletion script. A new mission marker appeared on the map, labeled only as "The Witness."

Eli found the file on an abandoned forum from 2007. It was titled simply . No description, no screenshots—just a 400MB download link that somehow still worked.

As Eli drove toward the marker, the pedestrians didn't dive out of the way. They stood perfectly still, facing north, their character models twitching. He reached a small shack in the desert where a single NPC stood—a model of CJ’s brother, , whose death is only mentioned in the main game's backstory.

In the world of GTA modding, "Narge" didn't mean anything. Most people assumed it was a typo for "Orange" or a creator’s handle. But when Eli extracted the files into his game directory, the loading screen didn't show the usual stylized art of Carl Johnson. Instead, it was a grainy, low-exposure photo of the summit at midnight.