This can’t be happening. That was all Anna Visneski could think as she stared down at the ruin of her right arm, trapped by the wreckage of what had recently been her father’s SUV. It didn’t even feel like her arm anymore, worse yet, it didn't feel like anything anymore. Despite the ever-expanding pool of blood there was no pain, nothing but a heightened buzz in her body as her mind spun trying to make sense of the situation.

They had been on their way to the city, just a normal school day. It was all still a little fuzzy, but she remembered the hard bump of the car as they drove onto the Manhattan bridge. She'd been texting with a couple of friends to pass the time, then her father had screamed-

“Dad!” Even shouting his name sent a wave of agony through her, but it was nothing compared to the sudden, gut-wrenching panic. Her body protested, every inch of her feeling bruised as she struggled merely to roll her body far enough to see the driver's seat.

Her father was nowhere to be found.

Anna’s immediate thought was that the force of the crash must have thrown him from the vehicle. But that wasn’t right, even in her dazed state she could see that. His seat-belt was still buckled, and the windshield was still more intact than not on his side of the SUV. She knew she’d passed out in the immediate aftermath of the crash, but her dad would never leave his sixteen year-old princess to wake up pinned and terrified.

“Dad! Someone! Anyone! Please help me!” Shock was fully giving way to panic now. Something was very wrong here. Through the cracked windshield she could see dozens of vehicles piled up as part of the massive collision, but what she couldn’t see were people. There was no one going from car to car looking to help, no one stumbling around in a daze or on their phones calling their insurance. Strangest of all, there didn’t even appear to be anyone in the vehicles themselves. Even the worst of the wrecks, vehicles so damaged that it would take the Jaws of Life to extract a passenger, were frighteningly vacant.

This can’t be… they can’t all have… In her stunned state she briefly wondered if she was hallucinating. She felt level headed, but had she simply cracked something in her skull when she’d struck it? Or was the warmth trickling down her destroyed arm taking her wits with it. This couldn’t be happening; people didn’t just disappear.

It also didn’t matter. Right now she needed help, and her screams were going unanswered.

Her phone lay in pieces on the floor of the car, so it wouldn’t be of much help. Her father’s by comparison, had weathered the crash in the way only a phone in an ugly two inch thick black safety case could have managed, still pristine and functional on its dash mount. When the day was done she was going to be eating crow about mocking her father's ‘unstylish’ choices.

Anna didn’t know his password, but she didn't need to. Just power it on and hit the emergency call button. At least, that was the idea.

At the push of a button the phone sprang to life in her free hand, however, what it showed her was unexpected. Her father’s lock screen was supposed to be a family photo, a shot of the four of them smiling and laughing on vacation. Instead it showed a black screen lit by a single silver word.

Babel.

Anna’s thumb stroked across the screen as much on instinct as anything else, and the image shifted to show a promotional page. In the few seconds it took her mind to register what she was looking at she absorbed enough to know it was an advertisement for some sort of MMORPG, making the same sort of ludicrous claims about lifelike graphics and realistic combat that she’d seen on a hundred similar ads.

Her thumb stabbed down on the back button to clear the ad, but to her frustration that simply returned her to the original screen with its black background and glowing silver text. The home button was an equal failure, as were each of the increasingly complex button combinations she used in an attempt to bring the phone back to a state where she could actually use it.

“Goddamnit! Work you piece of garbage!” She shouted at the phone, suddenly aware of the warm wetness of tears on her cheeks and the way the device was shaking like a leaf in her one good hand. Fear and pain were getting the better of her and she knew it.

With a deep breath she focused her gaze on the screen and began to swipe right to left once again. If she couldn’t simply skip out of it, perhaps she could close the stupid thing if she got to the end of it.

Even with her thumb moving quickly not all of the text was lost on her as she flipped from page to page and with each little snippet that her brain absorbed her fervour to reach the end diminished. Her initial estimate of the thing had been correct, it was some kind of MMO, but the rest of this… it had to be a joke.

It claimed that ‘Babel’ was the worlds first Real-Life Massive Multiplayer Roleplaying Game. It claimed that this would take place in a tower with a hundred levels, and that the first person to reach the top of that tower would be granted a wish. And it claimed that the game’s titular Tower of Babel was on the isle of Manhattan.

Which, now that she looked, certainly explained the enormous spiralling monolith that was growing in the midst of the Manhattan skyline.