[Year: 2030 | Sector B-7, New Athens]
Michael Ardent was eighteen years old and already tired of surviving.
The window above his bed was cracked, leaking cold air into the tiny one-room flat he called home. Beyond it, the skeletal skyline of Sector B-7 flickered in sickly neon blues and reds, pulsing like a dying heartbeat. You couldn't really hear silence anymore—not in this part of the city. Just the hum of drones, traffic grinding on broken pavement, the occasional shout or siren in the night.
He lay on his back, arms folded behind his head, staring up at the crumbling ceiling. Paint chips clung to the edges like they were too tired to fall.
Rent was late. Again.
The old tablet by his side buzzed with a reminder.
He ignored it.
Michael hadn't gone to school in over a year. Technically, he was enrolled in a "Remote Education & Skillstream" program, but the truth was: if you didn't have credits, you didn't get much of anything. His mother had disappeared two years ago—left for a job abroad and never came back. No word. No body. Just vanished like so many others from the poorer sectors.
His father had died when he was ten.
After that, it had just been survival.
Jobs came and went. Mostly under-the-table tasks—manual scrubbing for machine shops, virtual call center work that paid in crypto tokens he couldn't even convert legally. There was no family left. No friends that stuck around when the walls started to close in.Only him.And the city.
He sat up with a grunt, dragging himself to the corner where a cracked sink sat above a pile of unwashed dishes. The water only ran for two hours a day. The electricity was rationed.
2030 was not a dystopia with fire and war—it was quieter.
More tired.
People didn't scream anymore. They just stopped asking.
He opened the fridge. Two instant meal packs. One half-drunk bottle of water. That was it.
Michael closed it and leaned his head against the cool plastic.
"I can't keep doing this."
He didn't say it out loud. He didn't have the energy.
Most nights, he spent his last hours browsing old message boards—half-dead communities of gamers and urban myth hunters. Places where people talked about "phantom updates," games that appeared on your system with no source, apps that tested your mind more than your reflexes.
One name kept showing up.
Veilborn.
Not a game you downloaded. Not something you could buy. It appeared.
To some.
Michael didn't know why the name stuck with him. Maybe it was the desperation behind the posts—players whispering about how "Veilborn knew them," how it showed up when they had nothing left. But all those threads eventually got wiped. Deleted like they'd never existed.
Urban legend. Probably.
He lay back down and closed his eyes, the cold crawling up his arms like vines.
The knock came at 2:17 a.m.
A single knock. Firm. Precise.
Michael sat up, pulse hammering. No one came here. Not at this hour. Not to him. He stepped cautiously toward the door and looked through the cracked peephole.
No one.
He opened the door slowly.
There was only a box.
Black. Smooth. No label. No delivery mark.
On top of it sat a silver envelope, sealed with a crescent moon pressed over a closed eye.
He picked it up with hesitant fingers and broke the seal.
Inside: a single card.
*"You see beyond the veil.
You've already been playing—
You just didn't know.
Say the words: 'I accept the descent.'"
Michael blinked, heart thudding.
Inside the box was a headset. Sleek, black, faintly glowing. Advanced beyond anything he'd seen. It looked like something out of a dream. Or a warning.
He looked around at his room—the cracked walls, the broken light fixture, the cold bed, the empty future.
And then back at the headset.
His breath caught in his throat as a whisper brushed the edge of his mind.
"Say it."