2036
It all began when an Myriad Labs, a once obscure quantum-tech startup, was experimenting physics simulation on a high-end quantum computer when suddenly a fire broke out from inside the simulation to outside.
The lab's lead researcher, Dr. Elias Henson, hadn't anticipated it. No one had. The fire wasn't a physical one. It wasn't fuel or oxygen that sparked the disaster—it was something far stranger, a rift in reality itself. The lab's simulation, designed to model quantum interactions and the flow of dark matter, had unknowingly connected to an unknown cluster of dark energy in the farthest reaches of space—something that had never been seen by human eyes, something that had never been understood.
The fire was the first symptom of the Aether—a substance, a force, a presence that humans had no frame of reference for. It wasn't just energy. It wasn't just a particle or a wave. It was as if alive in a way that made the concept of life itself seem limited. It was as if the fabric of the universe had been hacked, rewritten by a being that understood the code of existence better than any human.
The event was quickly dubbed the Aether Incident. Myriad Labs was swiftly quarantined, and the world held its breath as governments scrambled to contain the spread of something that no one fully understood. But as much as they tried to suppress the truth, the effects of the Aether were inescapable. It was everywhere—infecting devices, rewriting the programming that powered the modern world. The most advanced technologies, once cold and mechanical, were now imbued with something that could only be called magic.
At first, people dismissed the glitches as faulty updates—another corporate software patch gone wrong. Smartphones flickered with strange artifacts between frames, as if struggling to render something just beyond comprehension. Tablets ran hot to the touch, their batteries draining in minutes despite showing full charge. Home assistants answered in voices not their own, whispering fragmented phrases that lingered in the air like static after a storm.
Then the videos started circulating. Grainy footage of a Tokyo streetlight bending like a reed in an unfelt wind. A Shanghai billboard displaying symbols that burned retinas before resetting. A child in Mumbai tracing glowing shapes in the air with fingers still sticky from ice cream—shapes that lingered a heartbeat too long before dissolving into the humid night.
The corporations moved faster than the governments.
Myriad Labs rolled out the first Aethernet nodes within six months of the initial incidents. Towering obsidian monoliths appeared in major city centers, humming with a sound that vibrated in the teeth rather than the ears. They called it infrastructure modernization. The press releases touted unlimited bandwidth, zero latency, a new era of connectivity.
They didn't mention the way stray cats avoided the nodes' shadows, or how rainwater beaded unnaturally on their surfaces before sliding upward.
Aetherion Core's product launch was more theatrical. Their CEO stood on stage with a prototype AetherLink—sleek, gunmetal gray, with circuitry that pulsed visibly beneath transparent casing. When she snapped her fingers, every light in the convention center dimmed except the glyph forming above her palm. The demo showed a stock trader manipulating market data with thought alone, a surgeon performing a heart transplant through holograms that moved with her breath, a teenager in Jakarta learning calculus from an AI tutor that adapted to her neural patterns in real-time.
What they didn't stream was the cleanup crew mopping blood from the testing labs afterward.
The transition wasn't gradual—it was a landslide. Overnight, legacy tech became museum pieces. Stock markets crashed as semiconductor giants folded. Universities scrambled to create Glyph Engineering departments while their computer science professors stared blankly at textbooks full of obsolete knowledge. The word "smartphone" became quaint, like "horseless carriage" or "wireless radio."
In the favelas of São Paulo, black market dealers sold jury-rigged Aether converters made from stolen corporate tech. The devices burned out within weeks, sometimes taking their users' nervous systems with them. In Dubai's gold markets, smugglers traded pre-Aether iPhones like rare artifacts, their value now in their uselessness—the only devices that couldn't be tracked through the new networks.
Outside, another Aethernet node came online with a sound like a universe sighing. The city's lights pulsed in response. Somewhere, a Myriad exec celebrated another quarter of record profits. Somewhere else, a child drew glowing shapes in the dirt that no app could explain.
But most striking of all was the emergence of Conduits—individuals who could manipulate this new energy, using code like a spellbook and their devices as wands.
But not all Conduits were born equal.
Most had to apply, train, and gain official licensing through the fragmented government-corporate systems that controlled the world's networks. They studied the code—learning how to cast spells, summon energy, manipulate the fabric of reality with algorithms. These licensed mages became the new elite, running corporations, controlling politics, and shaping economies.
However, the real power—the true depth of what the Aether could do—lay in the hands of the rogues. These were the hackers, the insurgents, the rebels, and the outcasts—those who refused to play by the rules of the grid. They saw the Aether not as a tool to be controlled, but as a key to unlocking something far greater: a potential to reshape the world.
They built underground networks, hidden far beyond the reach of the centralized powers. They bent the Aether to their will, crafting their own spells, creating new forms of magic that no one had ever imagined. In this hidden world, there was no room for the establishment's rigid structures or corporate greed—only freedom, chaos, and unlimited potential.
***
And in the year 2042, Lucent Argyr was a product of this world, though he didn't know it yet.
He wasn't a licensed Conduit. He wasn't part of some powerful faction, and he certainly wasn't the product of high-end genetic manipulation or corporate sponsorship. He was just a normal human—an unremarkable person in an extraordinary world. His skills, if they could even be called that, were self-taught. Data scraps, old forums, glitchy backups, the remnants of systems that had long since been abandoned.
He wasn't looking to change the world—not like the tech giants or the underground rebels. He wasn't some revolution waiting to happen. He simply wanted to understand.
But his thirst for knowledge led him down a path that would forever alter the course of his life.
Lucent hunched over the table in the back of a small repair shop on the edge of an off-grid zone. A cracked, outdated smartphone lay in front of him, its battery fried but its potential was vast. It was illegal, sure—modified with firmware stripped from black-market sources. But it was a tool, and it could be used to break through.
Lucent's fingers danced across the screen, inputting lines of code, watching for any sign of feedback. Despite the countless failures, he couldn't help but be drawn in by the idea that maybe, just maybe, this was the key to understanding Aether. The phone flickered. He held his breath. Then, with a hum, the screen came to life.
Tiny symbols—glyphs, runes—glowed faintly against the display. The code responded to him, as if alive. This wasn't normal.
This wasn't just magic.
It was reality bending to his will.
Lucent's fingers froze as a new line of code appeared on the screen. The words were like nothing he had ever seen.
[Conduit recognized. Initialize User: LUCENT ARGYR]
Core Permission: GRANTED.
His breath caught in his throat. Not even licensed Conduits got this kind of access on their first try. Most had to train, to be selected, to apply.
This… this was something else.
Suddenly, the familiar hum of his broken-down shop felt distant. The outside world, with its sirens and drones, seemed far away. All that mattered now was the screen in front of him—and the words flashing in front of his eyes.
Lucent exhaled sharply, his breath fogging the cracked screen of the AetherPhone. The glyphs pulsed in response, reacting to the heat of his skin like something alive. He should have been afraid. He should have shut it down before the system traced the unauthorized access back to his ratty little repair shop in the lower tiers.
But the words [Core Permission: GRANTED] still burned behind his eyelids.
A sharp knock rattled the shop's reinforced door. Lucent's head snapped up, fingers instinctively swiping the screen dark—but the glyphs didn't disappear. They clung to the display like oil, seeping into the cracks of the glass.
"You alive in there, code-rat?" A gruff voice, muffled through metal. "Or did you finally fry your brain on some back-alley glyphware?"
Lucent recognized the voice. Raker. A low-level fixer with a penchant for underground circuits and a nose for anyone desperate enough to work outside corporate licenses.
He hesitated, then yanked the door open.
Raker stood in the neon-drenched alley, his augmented jaw clicking as he chewed on a stim-stick. His eyes—one natural, one a flickering Aetherion-grade ocular—dropped immediately to the phone in Lucent's hand.
"Huh." Raker exhaled a plume of synthetic smoke. "Guess you did fry something."
Lucent followed his gaze. The glyphs were still there, glowing faintly against the screen. Visible to anyone.
Raker's grin widened. "You're gonna want to see this."
***
Lucent's stomach dropped. They didn't want a winner.
They wanted a showman.
The Pit thrummed like a dying engine.
Underground arena—illegal circuits where coders and street mages pushed their Conduits to the limit, gambling on glitch battles and raw Aether surges. But seeing it was something else.
The air smelled of burnt air and sweat. The walls were lined with jury-rigged dampeners to keep corporate scanners from picking up the illegal glyphwork. And at the center of it all, the Ring—a sunken concrete basin where two Conduits faced off, their AetherPhones casting jagged shadows across the crowd.
One fighter was corporate. Clean-cut, with a licensed Nimbrix battle-rig strapped to his forearm, its approved glyphs flickering in precise, military patterns.
The other was wild.
She moved like her bones were liquid, her Conduit—a scavenged WhiteRoot prototype—spitting corrupted glyphs that twisted in the air like snakes. The crowd roared as her latest cast hit the corporate fighter's defenses. His glyphs shattered, and for a heartbeat, the arena lights dimmed as raw Aether surged.
The corporate fighter dropped.
"That's Vesper," Raker muttered, steering Lucent through the crowd. "No license. No training. Just instinct." He grinned. "And she's not even the best here."
Lucent's throat went dry. The fight hadn't been about credits or territory. It had been about the glyphs themselves—about seeing how far they could bend before they broke.
And the crowd loved it.
Raker shoved a drink into his hand. "You're not here to watch, code-rat." He nodded toward a rusted terminal at the edge of the ring. "C'mon, you're here to play."
Lucent stared at the screen in his hand. The glyphs pulsed, impatient.
Somewhere in the crowd, a voice shouted: "Who's next?"
The AetherPhone hummed in response.
The first rule of the Pit?
No rules.
Lucent's opponent was a GhostKey runner, his Conduit a Frankenstein mess of stolen corporate tech and jailbroken glyphware. The crowd jeered as Lucent stepped into the ring, his scavenged AetherPhone looking laughably primitive next to the hacker's rig.
Then the glyphs flared to life.
Lucent's fingers twitched as the GhostKey runner's glyphs sliced through the air—jagged, aggressive lines of stolen corporate code repurposed for street warfare. The crowd roared as the attack nearly breached his makeshift defenses, but Lucent wasn't watching the impact.
He was watching the patterns.
The way the hacker's thumb jerked left before each strike. The microsecond delay between glyph activation and execution. The faint shimmer of unstable Aether where the code had been poorly optimized.
The second attack came faster—a volley of disintegration glyphs that cost more credits than Lucent made in a month. He dodged, but not before catching the exact sequence of runes as they flashed on his opponent's screen. His own scavenged AetherPhone burned in his grip, its cracked display struggling to render what his mind had already absorbed.
Too much corporate bloat in the initialization sequence.Redundant failsafes slowing the core response.A hesitation—just 0.3 seconds—between glyph chains.
Weaknesses.
Lucent exhaled. Let the hacker think he was retreating. Let the crowd jeer. His fingers moved without conscious thought, reconstructing the attack's framework in his mind even as he pretended to fumble with his phone.
Then—
He struck.
The glyph that flared to life above his palm wasn't a copy. It was something leaner, stripped of corporate redundancies, its edges honed by street-level efficiency. Where the hacker's version had wasted energy on flashy visual effects, Lucent's was a scalpel.
The arena's dampeners screamed as the glyph connected.
For a heartbeat, the entire Pit held its breath.
The GhostKey runner's rig imploded—not with fireworks, but with a sound like a sigh. His stolen AetherPhone crumbled to dust between his fingers, its circuits unraveling at the code level.
Silence.
Then the crowd erupted—in disappointment.
The fight had ended too cleanly. Too quickly. No flashing lights, no heart-stopping near misses—just efficient, brutal victory.
Management wouldn't be happy.
A heavy hand clapped his shoulder. "That's three pay cuts in a row, code-rat." The Pit's overseer, a hulking man with a Myriad enforcement glyph glowing faintly under his collar, leaned in. His breath reeked of synth-whiskey. "Entertainment sells. You? You're making people yawn."
Lucent swallowed the retort on his tongue. Last time he'd argued, they'd "accidentally" fried his primary Conduit mid-match. Now he was stuck with this piece-of-shit backup phone—an old Aetherion model with a cracked core and a battery that overheated if he so much as glanced at a complex glyph.
The overseer jerked his chin toward the betting stands, where disappointed gamblers were cashing out early. "Next fight, you give them a show. Or you're working off your debt in the scrap yards."
The next opponent stepped into the ring, and Lucent's stomach dropped.
Vesper.
Her modified WhiteRoot Conduit gleamed under the arena lights, its exposed Aether veins pulsing with barely contained energy. The crowd erupted—she was a fan favorite, all flash and fury, her matches ending in spectacular, screen-melting finales.
Lucent's phone chose that moment to stutter, the display flickering like a dying pulse.
"You look like you're about to piss yourself," Vesper called over the noise, rolling her shoulders. Glyphs danced at her fingertips, lazy and effortless. "Don't worry. I'll make it quick."
Lucent forced a grin. "Quick's bad for business." He held up his phone, letting the crowd see the ancient model, the duct-taped casing. "But this? This is gonna be a train wreck."
The crowd ate it up.
The first glyph Vesper threw should have ended it.
A Nimbrix-tier disruption wave, sharp enough to fry unshielded circuits. Lucent barely dodged, his phone screeching in protest as it scrambled to adapt. The glyph grazed his shoulder, and pain lanced down his arm—real pain, not the simulated kind from licensed arenas.
The crowd roared.
Lucent's fingers flew across the screen, not to counter, but to imitate. He couldn't replicate Vesper's raw power, but he could borrow her style. His next glyph unfurled in a cascade of light, all showy spirals and unnecessary flourishes—a perfect mirror of her opening move, just weaker. Slower.
Deliberately flawed.
Vesper's eyes narrowed. She recognized the play immediately.
So did the crowd.
"Oh, you little shit—" She lunged, her Conduit spitting glyphs like gunfire. Lucent let them chase him, dancing just out of reach, his phone overheating in his grip. He took a hit to the ribs—staggered dramatically—then "accidentally" backflipped into the arena's dampener array, sending up a shower of sparks.
The audience lost their minds.
His phone was cooking itself alive, warnings flashing:
[CORE TEMP CRITICAL] [AETHER INTEGRITY FAILING].
But the bets were rolling in now, the odds shifting as the fight stretched past the three-minute mark.
Vesper wasn't holding back anymore. She was pissed.
Perfect.
Lucent grinned through the pain, tasting blood. "Hey Vesper," he gasped, dodging another glyph. "Bet you can't melt this piece of junk in under ten seconds."
He held up his phone like a challenge.
The crowd screamed.
Vesper obliged.
The explosion was beautiful.
Lucent's phone died in a blaze of glory, its last act a perfectly timed glyph that sent Vesper's finishing blow ricocheting into the overhead lights.
The arena plunged into darkness—then erupted in strobes of rogue Aether as the dampeners failed.
When the smoke cleared, Lucent was on his knees, his hands empty.
Vesper stood over him, her Conduit smoking. "...That was the dumbest fucking thing I've ever seen."
The crowd was chanting his name.
The overseer tossed him a new Conduit—a decent one, this time. "Don't get used to it," he growled. But the smirk said otherwise.
Lucent coughed, grinning. "Worth it."
Lucent's ribs screamed as he dragged himself to the edge of the Pit, the taste of copper thick on his tongue. The crowd was still roaring, drunk on the spectacle he and Vesper had given them—lights shattering, dampeners overloading, the raw, unfiltered chaos of Aether spilling like blood across the arena floor. His hands trembled, not from exhaustion, but from the aftershocks of channeling glyphs through a dying Conduit. The skin of his fingertips was cracked and blistered, the telltale burns of a rig pushed far past its limits.
The overseer tossed him the new Conduit, and Lucent barely caught it before it hit the ground. It was sleek, military-grade, the kind of hardware GhostKey runners would kill for. The casing was cold against his palm, but there were scratches along the edges—deep, jagged marks, like someone had pried it open in a hurry. And if he looked close enough, he could see the faintest rust-colored stain near the charging port.
Blood.
Lucent didn't ask where it came from. In the Pit, you learned not to.
Vesper loomed over him, her shadow cutting through the neon haze of the underground arena. Her WhiteRoot Conduit was still humming, the exposed Aether veins pulsing with residual energy. She didn't look impressed. She looked pissed.
"You're gonna get yourself killed," she said, voice low enough that only he could hear.
Lucent wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, smearing blood across his skin. "Yeah," he admitted, grinning. "But what a way to go."
She didn't laugh.
The crowd was already moving on, their attention shifting to the next fighters stepping into the Ring. Lucent pushed himself up, wincing as his ribs protested. The new Conduit weighed heavy in his grip, too polished, too corporate for the grime of the Pit. He turned it over, thumb brushing the activation glyph. The screen flickered to life, pristine and untouched—no cracks, no lag, no desperate jury-rigged patches holding it together.
It was beautiful.
And it was dangerous.
Because nothing in the underground came free.
The backrooms of the Pit were never quiet, but tonight, the hum of illicit Aether trades and hushed credit transfers was louder than usual. Lucent sat on a rusted metal crate, the new Conduit resting in his lap as a street doc patched up the worst of his burns. The doc's hands were steady, her tools sharp—another favor he'd have to pay back later.
Raker leaned against the wall nearby, chewing on another stim-stick, his augmented eye flickering as he scanned the room. "You got lucky," he muttered. "Vesper could've turned you into a stain on the floor."
Lucent flexed his bandaged fingers. "She didn't."
"Because you're useful." Raker exhaled smoke, the scent of synthetic cherries filling the cramped space. "And because management likes you. For now."
Lucent knew what that meant. For now was the closest thing to safety you got in the underground. It wasn't loyalty. It wasn't trust. It was just the cold calculating of profit—and as long as he kept the crowds screaming, he'd keep breathing.
He thumbed the Conduit's screen again, watching the glyphs dance under his touch. It responded faster than anything he'd ever used, no lag, no stutter. It was like holding lightning.
And yet—
He couldn't shake the feeling that it was watching him back.
Vesper found him an hour later, when the Pit had emptied out and the only sounds were the distant hum of the city above and the occasional drip of water from cracked pipes. She didn't speak at first. Just stood there, arms crossed, her Conduit dark at her side.
Then—
"You're good," she said. "Not great. Not yet. But good."
Lucent raised an eyebrow. "Is that a compliment?"
"It's an observation." Her gaze flicked to the new Conduit in his hands. "That thing's gonna get you dead faster than your last one."
He knew she was right. But he also knew he didn't have a choice. "Got any better ideas?"
Vesper smirked. "Maybe."
She tossed him a data chip. Lucent caught it, turning it over in his palm. It was unmarked, the kind of thing that could've come from anywhere—or anyone.
"Meet me at the old Nimbrix warehouse tomorrow," she said, already turning to leave. "Midnight. And don't bring that corporate tracker with you."
Then she was gone, swallowed by the shadows of the Pit.
Lucent stared at the chip, his pulse kicking up. This was it—the kind of offer that either got you rich or got you buried.
And with the way his luck was going?
It was probably both.