Evan Kade cradled the Anchorstone the way some people worried a photograph. The little device hummed in his palm, warmed by contact and by the weight of intent. Outside, the city coughed neon and rain; inside, his kitchen light hummed, but those sounds unmade themselves as the entry sequence folded him out of the apartment and into Anchorpoint.
The first overlay arrived like a map that already knew him. HUD: Level 7. Persona Integrity 92%. Memory Shards 1. Contract Slots 2. Anchorstone Charge 86%. Class: Anchor-Walker — binding and stabilization. The font was clinical and indifferent, the numbers punctuation to a life he had stopped calling ordinary. For a moment he let the familiarity steady him: the soft animation of the cursor, the little chime that meant he had permission to exist in this slice of someone else's architecture.
Anchorpoint did not pretend to be a place. It was a stratified system of spaces, layers of nodes, each offering tasks and payment. The game taught you to trade pieces of yourself as if they were the same things people traded for coffee. It wrapped the bargain in pleasant motion: easy quests, neat rewards, the sensation of growth when the Persona gauge blinked up a few points. Most of the players learned the rhythm and then learned to blink past the costs.
Then a broken voice cut through the tutorial hum. A presence unindexed by the public registries flickered into the plaza — three words, thin with static. 'Evan. Help.' The cadence was wrong, but something in it made him stand still. A fragment appeared: an unsorted node with speech patterns that matched Lyra Kade’s cadence in a way that a machine should not have managed. The system rendered one small object alongside the fragment: a pale green memory shard drifting like a slow-breathing mote.
His display flagged the shard with metadata: origin uncertain, micro-value 0.3, potential tie to Lyra Kade — low-certainty match. He moved as if on skeleton-key instinct and touched the shard in the projected space. A brief log unfurled: timestamps, compression fingerprints, and a tag that would become important later — Binding Risk: minimal.
The shard unfolded in his awareness: a sliver of a morning, sunlight on a chipped mug and a laugh cut sharp by a dishwasher’s clatter. It was small enough to be dismissed and savage enough to rearrange his heart. The HUD accepted the pickup with the casual beep it used for mundane exchanges; the Persona gauge did not flinch. But his throat tightened as if some private lock had felt a key touch.