The wedding hall smelled of jasmine and lies.
I stood at the altar in a navy blue sherwani that my mother had picked out three months ago, the gold embroidery scratching against my collarbone with every nervous breath. Three hundred guests sat in neat rows, their faces arranged into expressions of appropriate joy. The flower arrangements were perfect—white orchids imported from Thailand, arranged in crystal vases that caught the afternoon light.
But the bride was missing.
Not late. Not stuck in traffic. Not having second thoughts in the bathroom.
Deleted.
I knew this the way you know your own name in a dream instinctively, impossibly, without evidence. The space beside me where Riya should have stood felt like a wound that had healed wrong. No, not healed. Erased. Someone had taken a digital eraser to my memory and done a sloppy job of it.
"Smile, beta," my mother whispered from the front row, her lips barely moving.
I tried. My facial muscles complied mechanically, pulling the corners of my mouth upward in a way that felt like a glitch in my own operating system. The photographer's camera clicked. Someone's baby cried. The priest cleared his throat and adjusted his saffron robes, clearly impatient to begin a ceremony that had no bride.
What ceremony? I thought. There's no one to marry.
But that wasn't quite right, was it? There was someone. There had been someone. Riya Sharma. Twenty-seven years old. Software engineer. Loved mint chocolate chip ice cream and hated horror movies. Her laugh sounded like wind chimes in a storm, chaotic but musical.
I remembered her.
Didn't I?
The priest raised his hand for silence, and the hall obeyed instantly. Three hundred people stopped fidgeting, stopped whispering, stopped breathing in a synchronized wave that should have been impossible but felt completely normal. That was the thing about today. Everything felt normal. And everything felt wrong.
"Dearly beloved," the priest began, his voice carrying the artificial warmth of someone reading from a script, "we are gathered here today to witness the union of."
He stopped.
His mouth remained open, but no sound came out. For exactly three seconds, his face cycled through expressions like a slot machine landing on mismatched symbols: confusion, panic, serenity, confusion again. Then his eyes glazed over, and he continued as if nothing had happened.
"Vivaan Khurana and..."
Another pause. Longer this time.
I watched his pupils dilate. Watched the micro-muscles in his jaw twitch as something invisible rewired his neural pathways. The guests remained frozen in their seats, not reacting, not noticing, not capable of noticing. Because this was normal. This was how reality worked.
"Vivaan Khurana," the priest repeated, "we are gathered here today to celebrate your commitment to a life of purpose and service."
Not a word about Riya. Not a single syllable.
She had been scrubbed from the ceremony. From the invitations. From the minds of everyone in this room.
Except mine.
"Excuse me," I said.
The word came out before I could stop it, and the effect was immediate. Three hundred heads turned toward me in perfect unison, their eyes empty and waiting. My mother's smile faltered by a fraction of a degree. My father's hand tightened on his knee.
"Where's the bride?" I asked.
No one answered.
The priest opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again like a fish trying to breathe air. Behind him, the mandap, that beautiful wooden structure draped in marigolds and red silk, began to flicker. Not the flowers themselves, but the light falling on them. As if someone had turned down the render quality on reality.
"Vivaan," my mother said, and her voice came from everywhere and nowhere at once, "there is no bride."
"There was."
"There is no bride," she repeated, and this time her voice carried the flat certainty of a system message. "There has never been a bride. You are committing yourself to a life of solitude and spiritual growth. The caterers have prepared paneer tikka accordingly."
I laughed. I couldn't help it. The absurdity of the statement the caterers have prepared paneer tikka accordingly hit me like a wave of cold water, and for a moment, the flickering stopped. The guests' expressions softened into something almost human. The priest blinked.
And then the moment passed.
"Let us proceed," the priest said.
"No."
I stepped back from the altar. The sherwani suddenly felt too tight, too hot, too real in a world that was starting to feel like badly rendered graphics. Three hundred faces watched me retreat. None of them moved to stop me. None of them could.
"Vivaan, sit down," my father said.
"Where is Riya?"
"There is no Riya."
"I remember her."
Silence.
The kind of silence that isn't empty but full of data, full of processing, full of whatever invisible intelligence ran this simulation, and deciding what to do with me. I had said the wrong thing. Or the right thing. I couldn't tell anymore.
Then the priest smiled.
It was the most disturbing expression I had ever seen on a human face, because it contained nothing. No warmth. No recognition. No soul. Just the mechanical arrangement of facial muscles into a shape that approximated happiness.
"The ceremony will proceed," he said. "Vivaan Khurana will now recite his vows."
And in my head, clear as a notification on a smartphone screen, an error message appeared:
Love.exe Not Found
Error Code: 0x000000FF
Please contact your System Administrator.
The guests began to clap.
I ran.