**Chapter 1: Rebirth**
Kai Mercer woke with the taste of scorched earth on his tongue. Not the mineral tang of real soil, but the industrial burn of melted polymers and rebar—a flavor branded into his memory from dreams that left his sheets damp and his throat raw. He lay still, listening to the apartment's symphony of decay: the *drip-drip* of a leaky faucet syncopated with the wheeze of a dying refrigerator. Five years. The countdown pulsed behind his eyelids like a second heartbeat. Five years until skyscrapers folded like house cards, until the air turned to broth, until the only thing thicker than the smoke were the bodies choking it.
The crack in his bedroom wall had grown overnight. Yesterday, it had been a hairline fracture; now it split the plaster like a lightning strike, tiny flecks of drywall snowing onto his pillow. Kai pressed his palm to the breach, half-expecting warmth, a pulse—some confirmation that the world was rotting in time with his nightmares. But it was just cold, dead gypsum. *Trauma does funny things to perception*, the free clinic therapist had said during his single half-hearted session. *You're fixating on mundane details as coping mechanism*. She hadn't understood. The crack wasn't a detail. It was a timestamp.
---
The storage locker smelled of rust and forgotten birthdays. Unit B-12's corrugated door screeched open to reveal his great-uncle's final joke: a 1972 Honda CB500 slouched on flat tires, its cherry-red fuel tank streaked with pigeon shit. "Ran when parked," read the note duct-taped to the handlebars, dated eleven years prior. Kai's laugh echoed through the warehouse as he rolled the bike into sunlight. His uncle had always been a bastard.
At the auction yard, brokers circled like vultures.
"Eight-two's my final offer," said a man in snakeskin boots, squinting at the Honda's rust-pocked exhaust. "These old heaps are nostalgia pieces, kid. No one's commuting on a death trap."
Kai clenched the locker key until its teeth drew blood. He'd seen this bike in his visions—or one like it. A future raider straddling a modified CB500, its engine roaring through streets carpeted with ash, sidecar bolted on to haul scavenged VR rigs. The rider's face had been obscured by a gas mask, but Kai recognized the dent in the fuel tank. His dent.
"Ten grand," he said.
The broker spat sunflower seeds onto the asphalt. "You high?"
"Nine-five."
"Eight-five, and I'm doing you a favor."
The Honda sold for $8,200. Kai signed the paperwork with hands that didn't shake, the broker's pen scraping like a bone saw.
---
Twilight found him hunched over his desk, the RealView VR1's instruction manual splayed open like a grimoire. Outside, neon signs for ramen shops and pawn stores bled through his blinds, painting the studio in strips of fuchsia and bile-green. He'd sold everything that wouldn't bolt down: his gaming rig, his signed *Blade Runner* poster, the leather jacket that had survived three winters and one ill-advised motorcycle crash. Now the emptiness of the room felt deliberate, as if the walls were leaning closer to watch.
The headset itself was a masterpiece of black titanium and frosted glass, its contours smooth enough to slip through time. Critics had called the VR1 "the most advanced neural interface ever sold to civilians," praising its sub-millisecond latency and haptic gloves that mapped every fingerprint ridge to virtual surfaces. But RealView's platform had only one title: **Etherea**.
The game's beta had been the punchline. Streamers mocked its clunky AI, its placeholder textures, its combat that felt like "swinging a pool noodle at a screensaver." Investors howled about RealView's hubris—a VR titan staking its future on a single, half-baked fantasy MMO. *Fools*, Kai thought. They didn't know tonight's launch patch would rewrite everything. That Etherea wouldn't just dominate RealView's platform—it would *become* the platform. The *only* game. The last one humanity would ever need.
The loan shark arrived at 11:03 PM, smelling of clove cigarettes and kerosene.
"Twenty grand's a big ask for a nobody," he said, boots propped on Kai's stripped kitchen counter. His voice was a gravel road peppered with landmines. "Especially for a dead game."
Kai gestured to the studio's sole window, where a billboard for Etherea's official launch glowed blood-red. "Dead games don't get second acts."
The shark snorted. "You think a fancy trailer fixes beta footage of NPCs T-posing through walls?"
"I think they fired the entire dev team last week."
"Even better! You're betting on a corpse."
Kai's thumb brushed the VR1's neural crown—cold, flawless, humming with potential. The beta had been a mask. This sleek beast in his hands? It was the key to the mask's removal.
---
Midnight.
The headset's visor clamped over Kai's face with the precision of a surgeon's tool. No fogging, no pressure points—just the electric kiss of a trillion micro-sensors syncing with his synapses. The calibration sequence unfolded like a dark bloom: black petals of code peeling back to reveal Etherea's new login screen. Gone was the beta's glitchy carnival music. Now there was only a single piano note, sustained, trembling with promise.
He'd watched LilithVoid's first stream after the patch. Seen her avatar—a spellblade with eyes like smelted copper—freeze mid-combo as Etherea's AI *learned*. How her fire spells began tracing real combustion patterns, how NPCs started dodging attacks they shouldn't have seen coming. The beta's "pool noodle combat" had become a dance of consequence, every parry and feint weighted with kinetic truth.
His hands slid into the haptic gloves. They fit like second skins. Beta testers had complained about input lag, but now? Now his fingers flexed in perfect sync with the virtual digits hovering before him. The walls breathed. Plaster dust sifted through moonlight. Kai's reflection in the darkened monitor fractured—for a heartbeat, he saw the corpse beneath: jaw unhinged, eye sockets filled with login-screen static.
*Trauma responses*, he recited. *PTSD. Night terrors.*
The crone-stamped coin sat heavy in his pocket. Just a silver dollar. Just a dead man's joke.
He hit **START**.
The world faded to black.