Chapter 4: The Abyssal Deep

Acidic, rusty rain drizzled from a leaden sky, which over the Lower District of Sector 4-Retro never took on any hue other than the color of filthy machine oil. The downpour, dubbed "Yaldabaoth’s oil" by the locals with a touch of gallows humor, settled on the plastic cloaks of passersby as a sticky, greasy film that stank of sulfur, rotten freon, and burnt plastic once dried. The air was thick, cold, choked with fumes from the monolithic cooling towers of Apex-Core that loomed high above the heads of the poor like steel mountains blocking out the sun. Water cascaded from monstrous overhead pipes, forming puddles on the cracked concrete below where oil slicks of transformer fluid and spent coolant shimmered with rainbow hues.

A perpetual twilight hung over the streets, broken only by flickering, rusted neons hawking cheap neuro-stimulants, synthetic protein steaks, and back-alley medical services. Peter and Rhea forced their way through this labyrinth of rusted iron, passing the stalls of street vendors whose grates sputtered with greasy, vat-grown protein grubs. The stench of burnt fat mingled with the ubiquitous stink of dampness and ozone.

Peter walked with a brisk, if slightly unsteady stride, tugging up the collar of his faded military jacket. He was trying to shield the fresh, stinging stitches behind his ear from the damp chill. The copper plate of the Absolute-IP filter, which Oktavian had grafted into him barely a dozen hours ago in his workshop, was inflamed. The skin surrounding it was taut, and with every sudden turn of his head, a sharp pain lanced up to his temples. Still, Peter felt a sense of relief. That fucking, piercing background hum—the ubiquitous babble of city telemetry that had plagued his brain for weeks—had finally gone quiet. The filter worked flawlessly. It isolated his inner, natural frequency of 432 Hz from the pervasive electromagnetic smog of the slums, locking it inside his skull like the muffled roar of a powerful engine.

Rhea strode beside him. Her steps were measured and springy, betraying a habit of constant vigilance. She wore a heavy, worn coat of darned faux leather, from which water ran down in thick streams. Her face, buried in the deep shadow of her hood, was tense and cold. Every few moments she cast wary glances into the dark alleys and alcoves of ruined tenements. In those dens lurked the cybrids—human wrecks with cheap, leaking optical implants from which yellowish lymphatic fluid dripped. Beside them crowded the synapse-heads, shivering from a hunger for neural current, along with petty dealers peddling synthetic stims, stolen memory chips, and expired protein rations made of biomass.

“This zone is completely off Apex-Core's official telemetry routing,” Rhea said quietly, drawing closer to him so her voice wouldn't drown in the steady drone of the rain. Her breath rose in the cold air as a thin, white mist. “The system rarely looks here. There are no active biomass factories, no active client accounts to squeeze loosh taxes from. To the board, this sector is a dead zone, a digital landfill. But that also means, Peter, that there is no law here. If the recovery agents decide to skin you for your implants or carve out your kidney, no one is going to send a crime log to headquarters. You’ll vanish, and your personal code will be wiped from the registry without a single byte of complaint.”

“And Vesper?” Peter asked, stepping around a deep crater in the concrete from which plumes of hot, foul-smelling steam billowed. “Is she one of those who shorten others by a head for a few working chips?”

Rhea paused for a moment by a rusted, hissing heating pipe and looked at him grimly. Her green eyes flashed in the gloom.
“Vesper...” she sighed, adjusting her wet hood. “Be bloody careful around her and hold your tongue. She used to be an elite competitor in the Apex-Secure corporate league. Back then, they called her the 'Glimmer-Queen'. She had everything Lower District kids dream of: freon core cooling along her spine, custom optical implants with polarizing filters, and zero-impedance gold connectors. Her reflex time was under four milliseconds. She thought and reacted faster than the game's physics engine could keep up with frustum culling the surroundings. She was a goddess in the Crucible arenas, and the corporation paid millions for her smile. Everyone thought she was untouchable.”

“So what happened? Why did she end up in this rusted mire?”

“A classic tale of corporate sabotage and hardware fatigue,” Rhea continued walking, and Peter kept pace with her. “During the Consortium Cup finals, a rival cartel, Archon-Systems, unleashed a black-market daemon called 'Phantasm' into her combat channel. It was a military-grade combat worm designed to trigger micro-strokes in operators. In a fraction of a second, it fried her entire team. Her closest teammates—Lucian, Kael and Jax—died right there in their pods. Blood poured from their ears, and their brains literally boiled under the sudden surge of feedback. Vesper survived, but her motor cortex was heavily scarred by the overload. While she lay in a coma in the intensive care unit, lawyers and technicians from Apex-Secure invaded her room. They invoked the clause on immediate loss of hardware utility. Since her implants were corporate property, they carved them right out of her on her hospital bed. Ripped out her gold connectors, leaving her with damaged, half-severed nerves, chronic tremors in her left hand, and a medical debt she won't pay off in three lifetimes. They dumped her in the slums like useless scrap.”

“And now she runs an illegal retro arcade?”

“Crucible 2038 is her only therapy,” Rhea explained, stepping around a semi-conscious cybrid slumped against the wall, mumbling about lost data packets. “Her damaged motor cortex cannot tolerate modern, high-frequency telemetry protocols. At modern data transfer speeds, her brain immediately goes into epileptic seizures. But the old, clunky, low-frequency code from a decade ago... that’s another story. Crucible 2038 runs on a raw VM-Retro emulator. It's the only thing that lets her feel what she once did. Even a semblance of her former freedom. And trust me, she hates amateurs. Especially those who think they can enter the Crucible without a spinal port.”

Peter touched the cold metal of the Absolute-IP behind his ear with his fingers.
“Oktavian claims that lacking a direct neuro-synaptic port in the spine is my greatest advantage. That the absence of a physical connection protects against the lethal feedback that fries silicon implants.”

“Oktavian is a fucking heretical Gnostic who has spent half a century studying forbidden reality codes,” Rhea replied with a hint of skepticism. “Maybe he’s right in his physical theories. But Oktavian’s theory doesn’t account for human physiology. Without a spinal port, you must use temporal induction. And the coils in those old pods can generate a pulse that will fry your brain without the need for any daemon.”

They turned into a narrow passageway between two concrete monoliths of former warehouses. Overhead loomed a rusted railway viaduct, where a heavy freight train rumbled with a deafening roar, showering sparks into the wet dark. Debris crunched beneath their boots, mingled with glass vials from neuro-stimulants and the shattered plating of scout drones. Peter felt that with every passing minute they were sinking deeper into the bowels of Sector 4, a world where human life was worth less than a working fuse in a power distribution board.

“It’s not just a matter of survival, Rhea,” Peter spoke up, staring at a flickering neon sign in the distance. “Sometimes I wonder if what Oktavian says about the structure of reality isn’t the only logical truth. Look at this world. The speed of light... three hundred thousand kilometers per second. Why exactly that much? Why does this impassable limit exist?”

Rhea shrugged, wrapping her coat tighter around her.
“Because that's how physics works. Those are the laws of nature.”

“No. Because that's how the system bus works,” Peter said, a glint in his eye. “It’s the bandwidth limit of the CPU rendering this world. If anything moved faster, the memory controller wouldn't keep up with calculating vector collisions. And the Planck constant? That's the minimum length, the resolution boundary of the spatial grid. Smaller pixels simply do not exist because the system hasn't allocated memory for more precise coordinates. And the collapse of the probability wave upon observation? That's nothing but lazy rendering, pure conservation of RAM. Why waste processing power rendering what’s behind your back or in unexplored corners of the universe? The system only generates the image when an observer—an instance of consciousness—directs their vector of attention there. In physics, it’s called John Wheeler’s theory: it from bit. Everything comes from information. All our matter is merely the result of binary queries. And Yaldabaoth, or whatever system drives this, is conserving resources. The corporations know it. They want to keep us in low resolution, milk our loosh, and control us with algorithms.”

Rhea stopped and looked at him askance. Her green eyes held a mix of anxiety and admiration.
“A pretty philosophy, Peter. Truly. Sounds like something out of the forbidden books of Kabba-Core. But Crucible 2038 is no academic lecture. Down there, no one will debate the Planck constant or quantum eraser experiments with you. Down there, clunky, buggy code will tear you to shreds if you fail to maintain coherence. If your brain can't take the tension, you’ll become another blank-eyed vegetable they’ll recycle in the nearest biomass reactor to supply the upper sectors with organic energy.”

“I have no choice,” Peter replied quietly. “My living pod will lock down in less than four hours. If I don't get the credits to pay the telemetry rent, they'll throw me onto the street. And without a roof over my head, without basic protection from the acid rain and organ harvesters, I’ll survive two days at most. I’d rather take my chances in the Crucible.”

Rhea didn’t answer. She led the way, guiding them toward a squat, ruined structure that loomed ahead like a tomb from a bygone industrial era.

*

The former textile factory in the lower, board-forgotten reaches of Sector 4-Retro towered over the sludge-flooded canals like a giant, rusted monolith. Walls of cracked concrete and corroded iron were thickly blanketed in black mold and mildew, and most of the narrow windows were boarded up with rotting planks and sheets of corrugated metal, their long-faded paint peeling in sheets. No smoke rose from the thick ventilation stacks, which were lashed together with makeshift brackets. Instead, they vented a dense, oily steam that clawed at the throat, reeking of stale cold, decayed bio-filters, and scorched copper.

This was the home of "The Abyssal Deep"—the largest illegal neuro-sensory arcade and forbidden simulation den in the district.

Peter and Rhea passed the broken industrial gates of the factory, above which hung a makeshift sign with the word "GRID" glowing in red. They stepped inside, immediately hit by a wave of hot, humid air and a deafening clamor.

Inside, the factory floor was staggering in scale and chaos. Within the vast, three-story-high space, amidst a tangle of rusted, hissing steam valves and steel scaffolding, dozens of gaming pods were lined up in rows. These pods—referred to by the regulars as "coffins" or "crates"—were cobbled together from scrap metal, old hulls of combat drones, power cabinets, and sheet metal salvaged from dismantled spinning looms. Everywhere, like black serpents, hung bundles of thick power cables, hooking the pods to transformers suspended from the ceiling. Above each crate, an old CRT monitor was strapped with electrical tape. These screens flickered with a harsh, cadaverous green and amber, displaying betting tables, player stats, and the raw, three-dimensional vector grids of the Crucible.

The air was thick with bluish haze from e-tobacco, the smell of hot transformer oil, and the aroma of cheap, synthetic moonshine distilled in the cooling units of power generators. This booze, dubbed "byte-moonshine", flowed in streams from makeshift taps mounted directly onto the distillation pipes.

The crowd inside the hall was dense and diverse. Hooded hackers in worn coats, interface cables dangling from their gear, rubbed shoulders with petty thieves dealing in stolen code, and cybernetic gladiators with massive, mechanical frames. "Byte-racism" reigned supreme—a raw, street-level animosity between those sporting expensive corporate implants and the "algorithmic plebs" who had to make do with cheap, home-brew electronics or pure biology.

“Come on, you synapse-head!” roared a massive cybrid with a mechanical jaw, slamming his fist against the casing of one of the pods. “I put my last hundred credits on you! If you glitch out on the first turn, I’ll personally tear that cheap processor out of your skull!”

Bookies in the crowd took wagers using portable telemetry terminals. People scanned their cards, trading local script-tokens and credits. The stakes were high—in the Abyssal Deep, you could bet on anything: from fractions of credits to your own implants, and in extreme cases, time off from forced labor in the biomass factories of Apex-Core.

“Look at that one,” Rhea whispered, pointing to a young lad leaning against the wall. A thin, clear fluid seeped from his ears, and his eyes were wide open, locked onto a flickering monitor. “A casualty from yesterday’s tournament. He entered coherence too late. His brain couldn't handle the voltage of the temporal coils. Now his motor cortex is nothing but dead tissue. Vesper will let him sit here until his kin pay off his debts, or until the biomass harvesters buy up his body.”

Peter felt a cold shiver run down his spine. The environment was brutal, stripped of any empathy. Human existence here was reduced to raw input and output data, and those who failed to maintain proper bandwidth were instantly pruned from the system structure.

“Aetrys, is it?” A raspy voice, distorted by a low metallic hiss, came from the side.

Peter turned his head. Sitting on the edge of inactive pod number 3 was a girl, idly twirling a black-market signal processor between her fingers.
It was Vesper.

Her short, asymmetrical hair, the color of faded blue, gleamed in the deathly light of the CRTs. A military jacket with sheared sleeves exposed her forearms—clad in matte black medical silicone, beneath which glowed the bright red threads of illicit, home-brewed neural fiber-optics spliced directly into her veins and nerves. Her left hand trembled in a steady, mechanical cadence—a persistent tic betraying deep damage to her motor cortex caused by a military daemon. Yet the girl operated a soldering iron with uncanny precision, cleaning the contacts of an ancient motherboard.

“That's him,” Rhea replied, stepping forward and laying a telemetry card on the rusted top of the registration console. “Sign him up for the Crucible 2038 qualifiers. I'll back his entry fee from my own reserves.”

Vesper hopped down from the crate, landing lightly, though Peter noticed a slight limp in her left leg—another souvenir of corporate sabotage. She approached Peter, studying him with keen, narrowed eyes. Her optical implant, concealed beneath heavy VR goggles pushed up on her forehead, gave a soft, high-pitched focus whine as it scanned his face.

“This boy doesn't even have spinal ports, Rhea,” Vesper said, her lips curling into a mocking, supercilious smirk. Her voice was harsh, distorted by an onboard speech synthesizer that masked the damage to her vocal cords. “You want to jack him into the VM-Retro emulator via temporal induction? Do you have any fucking clue about the architecture of this heap of junk? Crucible 2038 runs on raw, unpatched code from the 2030 cycle. The voltage to the temporal electrodes is cranked up by twenty-five percent to cut down input lag. Without a direct spinal port, his response time will be too slow. If his avatar hits a lag-spike or the system throws a memory division error, his motor cortex will simply boil. He’ll stroke out in three seconds.”

“I'll take the risk,” Peter said, looking her straight in the eyes. “My living pod locks down in a few hours. I either burn up here or croak in an Apex-Core coffin. Sign me up, Vesper. I don’t need a lecture on the risks. I know how this emulator works.”

Vesper narrowed her eyes, her optical implant humming softly as it analyzed his physiological reactions.

“You know how it works?” she snorted. “Then tell me, boy, what will you do when the VM-Retro emulator catches a page fault or a register conflict on hardware interrupts? This old crate has no protective buffers. It uses physical, analog vacuum tubes to emulate ancient architectures, and the high voltage from the coils goes straight to your temporal bones. One stack overflow and you get a neuro-stroke that bursts the blood vessels in your brain. Your eyeballs will literally pop from the pressure.”

“The Absolute-IP will filter out the excess voltage,” Peter replied calmly, pointing to the copper plate behind his ear. “Oktavian designed this bypass to absorb feedback spikes of up to two hundred volts.”

Vesper studied him for a long moment. In her gaze, mocking superiority gave way to a predatory, cold curiosity. She noticed the fresh stitches behind his ear and the copper contact of the Absolute-IP that Peter had tried to mask with his jacket collar.

“Absolute-IP...” Vesper whispered, her optical implant clicking thrice. “Old Oktavian really gave you his best filter. That bypass is stuff of legends. I thought every single unit was destroyed during the telemetry purges in Sector 3. Let's see if this military bypass of yours is worth the hassle. I'm registering you as Aetrys. The qualifying round starts in ten minutes on arena number 4. Better sharpen your senses, lad. There are no safety rules in the Crucible. Either you glitch the system, or the system glitches you.”

She spun on her heel, barking sharp orders to her lackeys who were bustling about the power generators.

*

Rhea helped Peter settle inside pod number 4. The interior of the "crate" was cramped, smelling of the sweat of previous players, old polyurethane foam, and burnt insulation. As Peter rested his head on the hard leather headrest, Rhea began pressing the temporal electrodes to his skin. Her hands trembled slightly.

“Peter...” she whispered, leaning over him so closely that he could smell the chamomile in her hair. “Remember what Oktavian said. Coherence rhythm of 0.1 Hz. Six breaths per minute. Don't try to force the Crucible code using reflexes. This engine is clunky and buggy. If you fight its mechanics as if they were ordinary physics, the emulator will fry your neurons. You must flow with the errors. Become part of the glitch.”

“I'll remember, Rhea. Close the lid.”

The crate's lid fell with the heavy, metallic clang of magnetic locks. Peter was sealed in pitch darkness. Instantly, a high-pitched, screeching whine of an old modulator built up in his ears, and the needles of the temporal electrodes bit into the skin behind his ears with a sharp, searing pain, linking with the Absolute-IP filter.

Peter hissed in pain. He felt an intense, metallic taste of copper flood his mouth, and his heart began to hammer in his chest like mad, hitting a hundred and twenty beats per minute. A primal, paralyzing terror of being locked in this cramped, metal coffin gripped him. The dread of inevitable brain death that had claimed so many before him.

“Initializing VM-Retro emulator... Privileges: Guest... Loading Crucible 2038 code... Warning: Absence of certified bio-filters detected. Risk of brain tissue damage exceeds 45%. Proceed at your own peril...”

Peter closed his eyes and began to breathe slowly. Inhale... Exhale... He focused on the ticking of a metronome in his mind. His pulse slowed, and the 432 Hz vibration in his chest became stable, cool, ready to collide with the archaic code of Yaldabaoth.

He had to achieve a state of 0.1 Hz coherence. It was no simple meditation technique; it was precise consciousness engineering. In reality-theory as a simulation, consciousness was the sole force capable of causing the collapse of the probability wave. Physical particles had no definite position or momentum until the system had to render them for an observer. This rendering process occurred at a specific threshold frequency, dictated by the clock rate of reality's processor.

Most people functioned in a state of mental chaos, their brainwaves incoherent. To the system, their observation was blurred, forcing the rendering engine to constantly recalculate probabilities. But a mind in a state of perfect 0.1 Hz coherence worked like a laser. It focused the vector of attention with such precision that it forced the simulation engine into an immediate, stable, and predictable wave collapse.

Moreover, at this frequency, Peter’s brain synchronized with Gatesian error-correcting codes—mathematical structures woven into the deepest layers of the quantum vacuum that prevented the simulation from collapsing under the weight of numerical rounding errors. James Gates had discovered these codes in supersymmetry equations; they were the exact same error-correcting codes used in web browsers. To Peter, this was proof that the entire physical universe was but a program running on some monolithic server.

In this state of coherence, Peter also began to discern the deeper dimension of reality Oktavian had taught him about. It was the morphogenetic field—the biological memory of the species, which in the simulation was emulated via global state registers. Synchronizing his brainwaves allowed for a direct read of these registers, granting the operator foresight into the intentions and movement trajectories of opponents before their physical avatars had made a single move on the arena.

Peter had no intention of playing the game by its official rules. He intended to become the observer who forces the Crucible engine to render reality in a manner beneficial to him.

Inhale... two... three... four... five...
His pulse began to slow. A hundred beats. Eighty. Seventy.

Exhale... two... three... four... five...
The hum of the transformer in his ears began to shift in pitch. From a high, screeching tone, it fell into a deep, low rumble. Peter felt his body cease to exist. The cold foam of the pod, the pressure of the needles behind his ears, the stink of sweat—it all began to blur, losing focus, as if the system were downscaling the texture resolution of his own senses.

Before his eyes, in absolute darkness, the first raw lines of code began to manifest. Green, glowing characters arranged themselves into columns, forming the vector outlines of a three-dimensional world. He felt the copper Absolute-IP filter behind his ear heating up, filtering incoming data packets, discarding redundant telemetry junk, and letting through only the pure, raw stream of Crucible 2038 code.

“I am ready,” Peter thought, and the thought was instantly interpreted by the emulator as a start command.
The world around him exploded in a searing, green light.

*

Around pod number 4, the crowd thickened by the second. On the CRT monitor above Peter’s head, his name flashed: AETRYS. The bookies set his odds of winning at fifteen-to-one—no one wagered on an organics-only scrap-head entering the Crucible for the first time without a spinal port.

“The lad's suicidal,” one of the cybrids muttered, swilling byte-moonshine from a tin cup. “Ten credits says his brains leak out before the first round is done. Who’s taking the bet?”

“I’ll take that,” Rhea said, stepping out from the crowd and slapping her telemetry card onto the console surface. “My entire reserve on Aetrys.”

Vesper shot her a sidelong glance, arching an eyebrow.
“Are you fucking sure, Rhea? If he croaks, you lose everything. How will you pay for your filters?”

“Oktavian trained him,” Rhea repeated with unwavering certainty. “He won’t lose. He sees the code differently than we do.”

Vesper snorted, but a flicker of something like respect glinted in her eyes.
“We'll see,” she muttered, glancing at the monitor where the Crucible’s vector grid was assembling into the outlines of a virtual arena. “We'll see if that coherence rhythm of his can survive a clash with the butcher waiting for him on the first tier.”

*

Inside the simulation, Peter no longer felt the cold or the fear. He stood on a virtual platform suspended in an infinite, black void. Beneath his feet stretched a grid of glowing green, pulsing vector lines that formed the floor. In the distance rose monolithic, geometric solids—obstacles and walls of the Crucible 2038 arena.

This world was stark, stripped of textures, shadows, and realistic lighting. Everything was composed of raw lines, like the displays of ancient machines from the end of the previous century. Yet to Peter, this starkness was beautiful. He saw every line of code, every collision vector, every variable defining the physics of this space.

His body within the simulation—a simple, vector avatar—moved without any delay. Thanks to the Absolute-IP filters and the stable 0.1 Hz rhythm, he felt none of the lag that usually paralyzed unmodified players jacked in via temporal induction.

Suddenly, the space before him rippled. Code began to coalesce, forming a monstrous, vector shape of an opponent. It was an avatar assembled from sharp, triangular polygons, its arms ending in spinning blades of code. Glowing red above its head was the tag: EXECUTIONER_V2.0.

Peter took a deep breath. Six breaths per minute.

The system announced the start of the match. The opponent charged at him with uncanny speed, the spinning blades of its arms producing a high-pitched, screeching whine of an overloaded processor in his mind.

Peter didn’t budge. He waited. He focused his entire attention on a single, specific point—the opponent’s movement vector, analyzing the rounding errors in its trajectory. He knew that the old VM-Retro engine struggled with the precision of collision calculations at high speeds. Under the right frequency of observation, the system was bound to fail.

And that failure came.

A fraction of a second before impact, the Executioner's vector mesh shuddered, and its coordinates in the emulator's cache suffered a brief destabilization. This was the moment. The glitch.

Peter took a minuscule step aside. He didn't try to run; he simply allowed his avatar to synchronize with the opponent's positioning error. To the game engine, in that very same split second, Peter existed in two different places at once—in physical space and within the glitch zone.

The Executioner hurtled past him, its spinning blades slicing through empty air. Before the program could recalculate the new trajectory and correct the positioning error, Peter reached out and touched the opponent's vector core.

His thoughts, synchronized at 0.1 Hz, acted like a virus. He injected a simple divide-by-zero command into the opponent's code, exploiting the lack of security measures in the archaic emulator.

The Executioner's avatar stiffened. The vector lines constructing it began to rupture and split in all directions. Outside, the CRT monitor must have hissed with static at that very instant.

A second later, the opponent exploded into a cloud of green pixels that drifted slowly onto the vector floor and vanished into the black abyss.

“Victory,” a cold, synthetic voice announced in his head. “Round 1 complete. Neural coherence level: 99.8%. No brain tissue damage detected. Preparing for Round 2...”

Peter smiled in the darkness of his pod. The first step had been taken. He could hear the muffled, disbelieving shouts of the crowd filtering in from outside, but to him they were merely distant static in Yaldabaoth’s endless ocean of code.

*

An absolute silence fell over the factory floor. The crowd of onlookers stared open-mouthed at the monitor above pod number 4. Aetrys’s green avatar stood unmoved in the center of the vector arena, while the mighty Executioner had shattered into pieces in mere seconds.

“What... what the bloody hell was that?” croaked a cybrid with a lens instead of an eye. “He didn't even touch him! The Executioner just froze!”

Vesper stood by the console, her optical implant whirring like mad as it parsed the combat logs. Her trembling hand ceased its shaking for a brief moment. She looked at Rhea with disbelief and a budding sense of awe.

“Your boy...” Vesper whispered. “Hey, Rhea, he wasn't fighting the program. He forced the emulator to crash. He hacked the game's physics using nothing but consciousness. How in the plague did he do that?”

Rhea smiled wanly, though she breathed a quiet sigh of relief.
“I told you, Vesper. Oktavian trained him. He doesn't play the game. He doesn't even look at the rules. He sees its code. And he knows how to make the engine capitulate.”

Vesper shook her head, a predatory, dangerous smirk creeping onto her face.
“I wonder how he’ll fare in the next round. The code is even older there, and the coil voltage even higher. If he keeps this pace, he might actually survive the night. And us... we’ll make a fucking fortune off this.”

*

Peter felt the code grow stickier, denser, and more aggressive with each passing round of the simulation. The VM-Retro emulator tried to defend against his intrusion by ramping up the clock speed and boosting the voltage of the induction coils. Behind his ears, where the Absolute-IP needles pierced, a searing heat was building. He could smell scorched flesh and metal, yet his mind, anchored in the 0.1 Hz rhythm, remained steadfast.

He knew that as long as he maintained coherence, as long as his breathing remained steady and slow, the system wouldn't be able to fry him. He was a ghost in the machine, a system error that no algorithm of Yaldabaoth could rectify.

The next round was beginning. The vector world around him started to shrink, the arena walls closing in, while from the dark emerged new, increasingly complex and lethal enemy avatars. Peter closed his virtual eyes, listening to the hum of the code, ready for another collision with the imperfect software that imprisoned his mind.

*

Outside the pod, the rain in Sector 4-Retro continued to drum against the tin roof of the old spinning mill. The crowd in the Abyssal Deep ran wild, the bookies frantically adjusting the odds, while Rhea stood by the console, her eyes locked onto the flickering monitor where the name AETRYS began to glow brighter. The fight for survival in this digital tomb raged on, and Peter was becoming its new, unpredictable god.

All around, in the dark corners of the factory, whispers spread about a new runner who used no cables yet managed to bend the rules of the Crucible. To the algorithmic plebs and rogue cybrids, he became a symbol—proof that even in a world dominated by ruthless corporations and buggy emulators of reality, a human mind, properly tuned, could still find a way out of the maze.

Vesper, never tearing her eyes from the system logs, began frantically modifying the power parameters of pod number 4. Her trembling fingers clattered against the rusted keyboard with incredible speed.

“If the lad wants to go all the way,” she whispered to herself, “I have to give him full bandwidth. Let Oktavian see that his Absolute-IP can do more than just filter noise. Let's show them what real coherence looks like.”

She slid the coil power lever up to one hundred and thirty percent. Instantly, the transformer above Peter’s pod roared with a menacing, bass tone, and small blue sparks of electrostatic discharge began to crackle around the crate's seals.

Rhea clenched her hands around the scaffolding railing.

“Peter...” she whispered toward the sealed pod. “Endure this. Flow with the glitches. Don't let them fry you.”

And in the darkness beneath the crate's lid, amidst the searing pain and the roar of the overloaded emulator, Peter kept breathing. Slowly. Rhythmically.
Inhale... Exhale...
0.1 Hz.
The world became code, and the code became his will.

*

Every second inside the Crucible felt like an eternity. Time in the VM-Retro simulation did not flow linearly; it depended on GPU load and the queuing of telemetry packets. For the observers outside, barely a few minutes had passed, but in Peter’s mind, hours of complex maneuvers, evasions, and precise virtual movements had played out.

His opponents in the arena were no mere programs. They were avatars controlled by other players—veteran hustlers from the Lower District who made a living by pruning novices. Their movements were aggressive, cunning, and full of unpredictable turns. They used illegal positioning scripts that allowed them to briefly ignore the physics laws of the game.

Yet to Peter, their technological advantage was an illusion. He saw their data packets arriving late by a few milliseconds due to network latency. He saw their neuro-ports generating electromagnetic interference that the Absolute-IP isolated without effort.

In the third round, he faced a runner tagged CYPHER_TRUCKER—a hulking cyborg whose arena avatar took the shape of an eight-legged metallic beast. Cypher-Trucker tried to corner him, shrinking the rendering area using a script that restricted visibility.

Peter felt his vector avatar become enveloped by a dense, grey fog of code. His physical senses in the pod reacted instantly—his breathing quickened, and the coherence indicator on Vesper’s monitor wavered, dropping to 92%.

“He’s losing his rhythm!” Rhea cried, pointing to the reddening status bar on the console. “The coils are starting to overheat him!”

“Steady, girl,” Vesper growled, though she clenched her own teeth so hard they gritted. “If he panics now, he’s finished. The temporal coils will burn out his occipital lobe. He must keep the rhythm.”

In the darkness of the pod, Peter felt sweat sting his eyes, and a sharp, throbbing pain pulsed behind his ears. The Absolute-IP needles dug even deeper as the automatic stabilizing system tried to compensate for the voltage spike.

“The Planck constant...” Peter thought, forcing himself to slow his breathing once more. “Light... The bus... It’s only resolution. Fog is nothing but a lack of data in the render buffer. If there is no data there, then there are no collisions either.”

Instead of fleeing the beast, Peter charged straight into the thick fog of code.

Cypher-Trucker, convinced of his victory, leaped at him from above, ready to crush Peter’s avatar with his vector limbs. But Peter made no attempt to dodge the blow. He focused his attention on the very structure of the fog. Since the system didn't render objects inside it, it meant collision physics in this area had been suspended to conserve processing power.

In the split second before the beast’s limbs could touch him, Peter synchronized his mind with the 0.1 Hz frequency. He imagined the space before him as a clean, unallocated block of RAM.

To the game engine, Aetrys’s avatar simply ceased to exist in the collision database. The beast plunged right through him, crashing into the vector floor with a massive, synthetic thud that shook the entire arena.

Before Cypher-Trucker could turn, Peter materialized directly behind his back. He reached out and injected a simple, obsolete buffer overflow code into the opponent’s input port.

Cypher-Trucker’s avatar shuddered violently. His vector limbs began to bend at unnatural angles, and on the monitor screen above pod number 4, a flashing red warning appeared: FATAL SYSTEM ERROR: MEMORY CORRUPTION.

A second later, the player on the other side of the net—sitting in one of the pods on the opposite end of the floor—let out a short, choked cry. The lid of his crate popped open automatically, venting a plume of thick white steam. The player, a young lad with facial implants, slumped limply onto the floor, a trickle of blood leaking from his nose.

“Haul him out!” roared the bookie, never pausing in taking bets. “Cypher-Trucker’s fried! Aetrys wins the third round! Who’s stepping up for the final?”

The crowd buzzed with disbelief. The odds on Peter’s victory dropped to three-to-one. People began frantically betting on his win, pulling out their telemetry cards and scanning them at the terminals.

Vesper watched the screens with her mouth agape. Her left, silicone-clad hand trembled more violently than ever, but her face wore an expression of absolute triumph.

“This kid... he’s not just playing. He’s rewriting code on the fly. Rhea, where the fucking hell did you find him? Who is he?”

Rhea stared at the monitor where Peter’s vector avatar was preparing for the final showdown.
“Someone who has understood that this world is nothing but a prison,” she replied quietly. “And that the key to getting out lies in our own heads.”

*

Inside the pod, Peter felt his body reaching the limit of physical endurance. The temperature around the Absolute-IP filter behind his ear was so high that he smelled burning flesh. Every breath came with difficulty, and he felt a heavy, choking pressure in his chest. Yet his mind remained clear, cold, and razor-sharp.

He knew that the final, decisive round lay ahead. The Crucible 2038 arena began to shift, taking the form of a giant, geometric labyrinth whose walls moved to the rhythm of pulsing red code.

At the center of the labyrinth, his final opponent awaited—the champion of the arena, a legendary runner known as VOID-WALKER. His avatar was a dark, almost invisible smudge against the green vector lines, surrounded by a cloud of flickering, corrupted data packets.

Void-Walker didn't use standard scripts. He himself was part of this old system, a living bug that had survived in the nooks of the emulator for years.

“Aetrys...” the opponent’s voice hissed in his head, distorted by the simulation's audio filters. “Do you think your coherence will save you from the raw code of Yaldabaoth? This engine has devoured hundreds of your kind already. Your filters won't withstand the voltage. Your consciousness will be wiped, and your carcass will serve as fertilizer for corporate gardens.”

Peter took a deep, calm breath. Six breaths per minute.
“Perhaps,” he thought in response. “But today, I won't be the one who gets wiped. Let’s begin.”

Void-Walker went on the attack. His black avatar began to flicker, appearing and vanishing in different parts of the labyrinth, as if he could teleport through collision walls.

Peter knew this was no teleportation. It was frame-rate rendering manipulation. Void-Walker knew how to delay transmitting his positioning packets to the server, allowing him to cheat the game engine and materialize in unexpected coordinates.

To defeat him, Peter had to descend even deeper. He had to synchronize his mind with the simulation's Planck constant itself—the smallest possible unit of time and space in which the system processed data.

He focused his entire attention on the flickering of the black avatar. In the 0.1 Hz rhythm, he began to perceive microscopic gaps between rendering frames. He saw the moments when, for a fraction of a millisecond, the system ceased processing Void-Walker’s position, holding it in a probability buffer.

In those moments when the opponent was nothing but mathematical probability, Peter didn’t attempt to strike him. Instead, he focused his vector of attention on the very structure of the space around him.

Using the Absolute-IP filter as a signal booster, Peter dispatched a series of synchronization packets to the server, forcing the game engine to instantly refresh the render buffer across the entire arena.

It was a forced collapse of the probability wave.

To the Crucible engine, reality became fully defined in a fraction of a second. Void-Walker was forced to materialize at a specific point in space—directly in front of a collision wall he was currently passing through in his attempt to bypass the attack.

The system failed to recalculate the new position in time and interpreted it as a collision of vectors with infinite mass.

A deafening, synthetic roar rang out. Void-Walker’s avatar was literally crushed by the walls of the labyrinth, which snapped shut around him with the force of a bugged positioning algorithm.

The black smudge began to tear, exposing raw, red system code. The vector champion of the arena fell apart before the eyes of the shocked crowd.

“Victory,” the synthetic voice announced in Peter’s head. “Crucible 2038 tournament concluded. Winner: AETRYS. Coherence state: 99.9%. No brain tissue damage. Initializing log-out procedure...”

At that same split second, the voltage in the temporal coils dropped to zero. The electrode needles retracted into their casing, and the pod's metal arms released their grip on his head.

The lid of crate number 4 opened with a loud hiss of escaping steam.

Peter lay inside the pod, wheezing heavily, staring at the rusted ceiling of the factory floor. His entire body was slick with cold sweat, and a thin, clear lymphatic fluid leaked from his ears. But he was alive. And he felt an absolute, undisturbed silence reigning in his temples.

Rhea leaned over him, tears of relief streaming from her eyes.
“You did it, Peter...” she whispered, helping him sit up. “You did it. You won.”

Vesper walked over to them, holding two telemetry cards loaded with credits. Her left hand still trembled, but there was no trace of mockery left on her face. Only a deep, almost religious respect.

“You outsmarted the code, organic,” she said softly, handing him the cards. “I don't know how the fucking hell you managed it, but that was the finest thing I've seen since my finals at Apex-Secure. Your cut of the winnings is over fifteen thousand credits. Enough to pay the rent on your pod for a year in advance. And to get some decent filters from Oktavian.”

Peter took the cards, clenching his trembling fingers around them.
“This is only the beginning, Vesper,” he croaked, trying to stand up with Rhea’s help. “Now that I know how their engine works, I intend to descend even deeper. To the very core of the system. Where Yaldabaoth holds the source code of this world.”

Vesper and Rhea stared at him in silence. On the factory floor of the Abyssal Deep, the crowd still cheered the new champion, but to Peter, the clamor was already nothing but a distant hum at the edge of the rendering environment he intended to destroy.

Outside, the acidic rain still drummed against the tin roof, rusty and relentless, but inside the ruined spinning mill, a new force was born—the Operator who had grasped the code and was not afraid to use it.

*

On the way back through the wet, ruined alleys of Sector 4, the rain seemed different to Peter. It was no longer a chaotic, malicious force of nature, but a collection of repetitive, pre-defined conditional instructions. He saw every droplet falling from the sky as a simple loop in the structure of the simulation code, and the splashes of water on the rusted concrete as predictable vector collisions that Yaldabaoth’s engine had to laboriously compute.

Rhea walked beside him, holding him by the arm to help him balance. Her presence was warm, real, and constituted the sole anchor in a world that, with every passing minute, was losing its material obviousness to Peter.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked quietly as they bypassed another patrol of police drones, their blue searchlights sweeping the rusted viaduct.

“Oktavian,” Peter answered, touching the cool copper plate behind his ear. The skin around it was cool now, and the Absolute-IP filter vibrated softly, stabilizing his brainwaves. “About what he said regarding Gatesian error-correcting codes. If those codes exist within the structure of spacetime, it means the system is not perfect. That it requires constant patches to keep from self-destructing under the weight of accumulated quantum rounding errors. It’s like an old computer program in dire need of a patch.”

“And what follows from that?”

“It means this world can be reset,” Peter whispered, staring at the distant, flickering neons of Apex-Core rising above Sector 4 like the crown of an artificial god. “If we find a way to inject a sufficiently massive error into the main loop, the system will have to reboot. And then... then perhaps we’ll wake up in the real reality. A place where there are no corporations, no loosh, and no Yaldabaoth.”

Rhea didn’t answer. She only pressed closer to his arm, and their silhouettes slowly dissolved into the thick, grey mist of the acidic rain, leaving behind nothing but rusted sludge and the quiet, metallic hum of the Lower District.