Phoenix Code

The apartment smelled faintly of coffee and solder, a small, domestic mixture that had become the backdrop for every late night Ilya kept since he'd taken over half of the spare room as a workspace. Monitors threw pale light across the room; a stack of server notes and a cheap mechanical keyboard sat like an altar to habits that paid the rent. Outside, the city hummed with the usual indifferent traffic. Inside, everything quieted down the moment he strapped the neural band to the base of his skull, tightened the clamp against his temple and breathed in as the interface woke. The Beta launcher slid across his vision like glass: Aeteris — Beta Access Granted. He hesitated for a second, fingers hovering over the confirmation glyph. The session timer read his system latency, the Sync Meter at bottom-left was a flat blue line. He thought of Katya, of how she'd texted him earlier with a string of excited emojis about a new immersive path they'd pushed live that morning. She'd been different lately — quieter in passing messages, distracted when their mother called. She'd told him she loved how the game made her forget the lectures and the deadlines, how it let her be something else for a while. He'd become half a guardian: check in, make sure she logged out when she supposed to, keep an eye on the telemetry she couldn't parse. It was a small role that had ballooned into worry when he started noticing blips in her activity. The band warmed, the first neural handshake acknowledged, and the world rearranged itself.

When Aeteris painted itself against his consciousness, it did so in layers. At the edge of perception there was the hum of infrastructure — constant, like a distant train — and then the overlay of designed reality, crisp and close: cobblestones that never wore, distant lamplights that held the same golden fall every time you approached. The game's onboarding voice was polite and without sympathy. "Welcome, System Analyst. Calibration complete." A thin bar filled with a soft chime and a new skill glyph blinked open at his elbow: Mirrorcraft. The description read as if someone had left a note in a language he only half remembered: read process states, copy transient data, mimic a process snapshot for up to thirty seconds. A tool for debugging, the manual said, but in the small print there was a line about "nonstandard signatures" and an icon that pulsed like an ember. He felt a smile he hadn't intended. It was the kind of tool he'd built code for once in the dark hours of a production rollback. He accepted.

A ping sounded and a holographic rectangle blinked into being: a friend list. Names ran down the side. Katya's avatar, bright, a short, restless sprite with an auburn braid and a simple cloak, sat at the top. Beside her name a tiny sigil glowed — an offbeat mark that twitched independently of the standard presence dots. He frowned. The sigil wasn't part of Aeteris' usual UI. It fluttered like a pulse in the corner of her portrait, and when he hovered his gaze the sigil responded with a slow rotation as if it were testing him back. In the real world, his head band hummed, and a fine prickling rose along his scalp. He sent a quick whisper through the in-game channel — a private ping. No answer came. He tried again, sharper. The sigil completed its rotation and blinked out. For an instant he could have sworn the avatar's eyes looked toward him and not toward the environment the engine drew around them.