Volume 1 – The VR World
Chapter 8 – The Fifth Pillar
I hadn't left the lab in thirty-nine hours.
Sleep came in broken frames, shallow and dreamless. My palms had a faint chemical burn from resting too long against the biometric pads. I didn't notice until I moved to wipe the fog from the visor and left a smear of blood on the casing.
Ezra would've said something cryptic about consequences. Soren would've reminded me we had people for this. Darius would've told me to log out and hit something until my blood felt real again. Naomi… probably wouldn't have said anything. Just sat beside me and waited until the silence stopped hurting.
None of them were here.
Which is how I preferred it.
The server logs had gone quiet. Lauren hadn't moved in hours. Her last recorded action: kneeling beneath a broken statue outside the Sanctum ruins and whispering something we still couldn't isolate through sound capture. Ezra tried. He said there were words hidden in the white noise, but only on frequencies our hardware wasn't built to detect.
She wasn't waiting anymore.
She was expecting.
I opened the old file.
The one I kept buried three layers deeper than the others. Not encrypted. Just forgotten.
Project: Lamina
It wasn't part of the company's core build. It was mine. Older than the server, older than the game. A folder of broken code and dead-end theories scribbled during college lectures I didn't finish.
Inside: video footage. College lab. Unstable test rig built from borrowed hardware and two borrowed minds.
The experiment was stupid. A fantasy.
The goal had been to simulate subjective neural perception through chemical induction—half-molecular, half-quantum. A cocktail of sensory input designed to trick the brain into recognizing pattern before stimuli. Thought before matter.
In one test… it worked.
The subject's vitals spiked. EEG showed synchronization with something… undefined.
Then the file corrupted.
I'd blamed the hardware. Swore off it. Moved on. Built Aetherreach.
But part of me never stopped wondering what we touched that day.
I stood at the center of the sync ring.
The cold bit deeper through my soles than usual. The air smelled like copper.
The old formula was still on the whiteboard—half-erased, written in symbols even I didn't fully understand anymore.
Subjective phase recognition: induction event requires external primer not present in this system.
That line had haunted me for years.
Not present in this system.
Not "this machine." Not "this hardware."
This system.
I looked up at the main feed. Five nodes pulsing in stasis: mine, Darius, Soren, Ezra, Naomi.
The dive rig was functional. Clean. Updated. Monitored down to the nanosecond.
But it didn't matter how sharp the blade was if you were missing the hand that could swing it.
The AI wasn't missing the code.
It was missing the essence.
Something we couldn't create.
Something we couldn't simulate.
The ping came through just past three in the morning.
Naomi. One line of text.
"What if the missing link isn't technology?"
I stared at it for a full minute.
Then another ping.
Ezra.
"Subject Lauren reappeared. Not logged in any zone."
Third ping.
Soren.
"Trade reports showing ghost variables. Item IDs that don't exist. Value fluctuations from nothing."
Fourth.
Darius.
"If you're about to do something stupid, wait for me."
I closed my eyes.
Whatever was missing... it wasn't in here.
It never was.