The year was 2050, and the world was quietly but surely collapsing.
No one ever declared it. There were no final broadcasts, no sirens over crumbling cities. But Sorrin felt it in the silence between things: in the absence of laughter on once-busy streets, in the grayed-out faces that walked with shoulders too tired to carry hope. The numbers said enough. Each year, fewer people returned from the border towns. Each month, a new Gate opened, and each time, the creatures that spilled out were stranger, crueler, more resistant to whatever magic they still dared to call "combat-worthy."
Magic.
A word that should've meant wonder. Instead, it had become a bureaucratic buzzword, the domain of government-salaried "Conduits" with stitched uniforms and a catalogue of officially sanctioned spells that mostly involved glowing circles and minor explosions. Spells that were, if Sorrin was honest, ineffective at best and suicidal at worst.
He'd watched the leaked footage. A battalion of Conduits trying to close a Gate in Northern Zule. Glyphs glowing in practiced synchrony. Sparks flying like stage pyrotechnics. And then came the abomination: a hunched thing with skin like heat haze and too many joints. It moved through the lines like wind through paper.
No survivors.
"They're still trying to light campfires with flint," his friend Rell had said the day after. Rell, who'd passed the Conduit examination by some combination of stubbornness and dumb luck. He wasn't particularly gifted in magic, but he'd memorized the spells, chanted the syllables, and drawn the circles as instructed. That had been enough.
Sorrin had laughed then, bitterly. "Except no one taught them how to build a fire. Just handed them rocks and wished them luck."
He was sixteen.
Not that it mattered. Age felt oddly irrelevant these days. Time itself had turned into something abstract, marked not by school years or birthdays, but by which neighborhoods had been evacuated, and which Gates were being ignored.
Yet Sorrin still went to the Academy. Not the military one, nor the arcane colleges in the Core Sectors. He attended the remains of a technical institute in the outer zone of Ruan City. Concrete buildings, rusted air conditioning units, and classrooms with projectors that buzzed and flickered. He studied code, not conjurations. Most of his teachers had long given up trying to inspire anyone. The world was bleeding out, and programming languages felt like the grammar of a dying tongue.
After all, with the sizable advancements in artificial intelligence and other forms of generative code, the world simply had no use for mere human programmers.
But Sorrin loved it. Not because he thought it would save anyone. Not even because he was good at it, though he was. He loved it because it made sense. Every line had a purpose. Every bug had a cause. There was a strange comfort in a world where rules were followed, where logic could build miracles one keystroke at a time.
And maybe, just maybe, that comfort was starting to fray.
It began, like most shifts in Sorrin's life, with Rell.
The two met under the half-lit sign of the old synth-bar near the East tramline. It was a weekend, which meant fewer patrols and more time to pretend normalcy still existed. Rell looked worse than usual. Eyes hollow, one side of his uniform stained with a dull maroon substance that Sorrin tried not to think about.
"They sent us to Sector 12," Rell said somberly.
There was no greeting between the two, just that.
"The Gate was smaller than usual, but the creature..."
He trailed off. After a couple of seconds, he lit a cigarette with shaking fingers. Magic was banned within city limits, but no one enforced that rule anymore.
"It bled sound," Rell finally whispered.
"Do you even get what I mean? When it moved, it stole the noise from the air. I couldn't even hear myself scream."
Sorrin said nothing.
"And the spells," Rell continued, bitterness creeping into his voice. "We used a Type-4 seal circle. High-tier, they said. Experimental. You know what it did? It glowed. And then it broke. Like the thing just looked at it too hard."
That was the moment something shifted in Sorrin.
Not panic. Not dread. Those were old friends by now. What settled into his chest was quieter. A thought. No, more than a thought. A seed of doubt that he hadn't dared mention before.
He finally said, "Do you have the glyph notation for that circle?"
Rell blinked. "What?"
"The diagram. The actual structure. Can you get it?"
"Probably," Rell said slowly.
"They're logged in the internal database. Why? You want to fail your exams and get arrested for hacking classified spellforms?"
Sorrin didn't smile. "I'm just a little curious about something..."
Later that night, with the glyph structure displayed across four monitors in his room, Sorrin stared at the curves, sigils, and loops of the "Type-4" seal. It looked like madness—a tangled mess of tradition, random experimentation, and overdesign.
But then he began to recognize patterns.
Patterns that he was strangely familiar with.
Code.
Not good code, of course. Not structured or optimized. Hell, he could hardly understand the thing.
But under the nonsense, something fundamental pulsed. A language that was not quite understood.
At least, not yet.
Magic wasn't unknowable. It had simply never been debugged.
Sorrin leaned forward, the glow of the screens reflecting off his glasses. His hands hovered over the keyboard.
They were trembling.
Outside, the world continued its slow collapse.
But inside of his dimly lit apartment, a new thread of logic began to unspool.
A line of code in a dying language.
Waiting to be compiled into something that could, for once, fight back