Shard of Lumen

Kest Vireo woke to the smell of burnt synth-coffee and the thin blue pulse of the city overlay running across his ceiling. Neon veins traced the plaster, adverts folded like paper birds, and a tiny HUD badge floated above the plants he kept because plants remembered the old world better than people did. He sat up, fingers reaching automatically for the scar on the inside of his wrist where the old docking port left a pale crescent. Habit checked the morning feed: two missed messages, a bug report flagged by someone named 'LiaH', and a system notification from a server he'd been contracted to skin three nights ago.

He pushed his feet into socked shoes and watched the apartment door bloom with AR; his neighbor's laundry feed scrolled patches of motion and scent suggestions. The city outside was already a layered map—tram overlays, a route for morning joggers, a market cluster scented with lemon and oil. Kest's work lived in those layers: textures, flow, the tiny things you could touch on-screen and not in real life. He ran a hand over the battered interface tablet on the kitchen counter. The glass still had a dent from last winter when a failed patch had dumped rain-activations onto his console. He smiled at the dent like it was an old wound that taught him to be careful.

'Morning, mess,' he told the dent. His voice sounded thin in the apartment, the walls full of stored songs and old code. A message lit on the tablet—Maya Harlow: 'Sync tonight. Can't believe I'm in.' He thumbed it open and saw a selfie, Maya with a grin too wide for 3AM, hair plastered to one cheek with a strap, a small silver node tucked behind her ear. Kest's chest tightened, that particular soft ache of someone too familiar with how fragile people were when they lent themselves to tech they'd not built. He remembered her laugh that sounded like a wind chime dropped from a high balcony; he remembered the way she worried about other people's coffee orders. He typed back: 'Tell me you'll do a backup.'

Her reply arrived immediately: 'Full. My brain is boring, you'll be fine.' The reply sticker—an animated fox with a missing tail—blinked in the corner of his vision. He closed the message and turned to the window, where the glass reflected the overlay and the city beyond. The Shard network made everything feel thin and bright. People walked through augmented courtyards, buying smells and weather like subscriptions. Kest pulled his jacket on; his pockets were full of small tools and a handful of emergency algorithms he liked to fiddle with. He had a freelancer's stomach—hunger and a steady, anxious curiosity.

He decided to walk. The tram app promised a two-minute delay and sent him a sympathetic emoji. In the stairwell his neighbor, Maris, called out, 'You look like you slept in your art.' 'I art wherever gravity lets me,' Kest said, and they shared a laugh that folded briefly over the morning. The street ground below was a layer of human warmth and steam. People bent over interfaces on their wrists, traded digital postcards of last night's neon storms, and a child chased a drone while its owner scolded about 'unauthorized pathing.' Kest kept his head down and felt, for a sliver of the walk, the comforting numbness of all the routine widgets humming like bees. The city had rhythms, and they covered the edges of the things he feared were fragile inside him.

At the clinic ten blocks over, a line of translucent chairs glowed faintly with health-feed adverts. Kest's badge flashed and allowed him through. There was a nurse with tired eyes and a soft patch on her shoulder where the clinic's systems had been hot-patched three times that month. The room smelled of antiseptic and citrus: the scents of people who tried to keep everything from going rotten. 'You must be Kest Vireo,' she said, and his name sounded heavy in the way it did when a person was not just a contact on a feed. 'Maya's awake but she—' She stopped, searching for a word that wouldn't be a headline. 'She's connected to something we can't cleanly disconnect yet.'

A screen over Maya's bed showed the shimmer of the Lumen interface washing like tide over her closed eyelids. The node at the base of her skull pulsed faintly, and a miniature UI ribbon hovered near Kest's temple: 'PLAYER LINKED: MayaHarlow | STATUS: SYNCED' It didn't feel like a simple medical readout. It felt like a ledger entry. He reached for her hand; it was warm and real as he had remembered. He felt the tick of the city's ambience, the small hum like a held breath. Behind his right ear, a small notification bloomed—urgent, grey, ransomware of attention: 'SYSTEM ALERT: Lumen Shard Beta — Emergency Patch Deployed. Server Stability Compromised.'