Arin signed the last line without reading the corporate phrasing anyone could quote in their sleep: irrevocable, non-replicable, property of Helix Systems. The pen trembled in his fingers not because the ink threatened to blur, but because signing meant a bridge the world had no business building would accept him. He pushed the document back across the stainless table, and the project liaison—a woman in an immaculate gray suit with an expression made of polite engineering—offered him a tablet that displayed the neural link schematic. "You know what you are asking," she said. "We can only grant access on a case-by-case basis. Recovery is not guaranteed." He already knew what the clause meant. He had read it at night until the margins of letters blurred into fevered patterns; Mira’s UID was stamped into every recurring thought.
He had not been a player before everything changed. He was a systems engineer who could jump a cluster without tripping a notification, the kind of person who read commit logs the way other people read bedtime stories. The technology that had promised to archive consciousnesses for clinical and research use—his sister had volunteered as a test subject—had glitched, and Mira's upload had been listed as 'locked'. Helix had told the family it was a containment issue; they had called it a corruption. Those were corporate euphemisms. To him, the words felt like the edges of a locked file-system, a directory you could enter if you knew the sudo.
The link cradle smelled faintly of antiseptic and polymer foam. Technicians checked cables, brushed sensors, tapped the external glass of the immersion dome until it hummed like a contained storm. Arin lay back and let the world retreat. He closed his eyes and let the technicians clip nodes behind his ears. The cradle's interface flashed against his retinas as the synchronization handshake began: heartbeat-level latency checks, biometric encryption, and a single line that pulsed in the center of his vision: AUTHORIZATION: ASCENDANCY ACCESS GRANTED.
The transition was not cinematic—no tunnel of light, no cosmic recalibration. It was a series of cold, efficient verifications, each one a soft chime that receded into the next. Then, quiet. A heartbeat later, the air cleared and a slate of interface text unfurled into the periphery of his vision, the HUD's pale blue grid superimposed on a world whose textures seemed to be patched together like an old operating system trying to render a new skin.