Ronan Vale was twenty years old, and even at that retively young age, he already felt like he’d—if not seen it all—grown thoroughly bored with the real world.
He had been a gamer from childhood, drawn not to twitch shooters or leaderboard dders, but to games that required true thought—puzzle solving, code-breaking, yered strategy. First-person shooters? Anyone could do that shit. MMO RPGs with four starter csses, barely customized skill trees, and “kill ten goblins to level up” quest design? Pass.
Ronan craved challenge. Depth. Consequence.
At sixteen, he won a national mathematics and logic competition. Then he was offered—and promptly turned down—a schorship from MIT, instead building an indie game studio in his basement. He coded and designed day and night, but despite his work ethic, turning down a full-ride from such a prestigious school was too much for his parents. They kicked him out the day after he turned eighteen.
He crashed on his buddy’s couch at first, but two months after that birthday, his studio—just Ronan and two of his friends—released a breakout indie title called Echoes of Everfall. It went live on Steam and a few other gaming ptforms, and within three months, it had netted over sixteen million dolrs.
The game explored a crumbling reality where every major decision echoed forward or backward in time, fracturing the world in yers. Everfall became known for being essentially impossible to “fully complete”—the map was alive, mutable, responsive. Pyers compared karma scores and stats like secret codes. It became a huge sensation.
No longer concerned with rent or approval, Ronan set his sights on taller mountains.
That’s when DARPA came calling.
Through back channels and curious intermediaries, they invited him to consult on AI ethics simution environments—systems designed to teach autonomous models how to make decisions involving chaos, diplomacy, and moral complexity.
Ronan’s role? Break the machine.He was a “conflict architect,” crafting edge-case dilemmas so yered and difficult that they would push even human minds to the edge.
At first, it was thrilling. The complexity was worthy of his intellect. But over time, he saw the cracks. The systems and scenarios weren’t evolving. They were being tuned. Restrained. Simplified to yield results patable to higher-ups.
One day, he realized the truth:
The AI wasn’t learning to choose. It was being taught to obey.
He stayed long enough to pnt an elegant, cascading self-erase protocol inside one of their most promising models—a digital time bomb buried under a thousand lines of shell logic that would take enough time to unravel that he would be long gone by the time they realized what had happened.
Then he walked.
No press. No wsuit. Just silence.
He drifted. Lost in thought. Drinking far more than he should. Sleeping with a string of women whose names he couldn’t recall by morning. Truly lost. Until a man in a bck suit found him, nursing his fifth gin martini at noon on the 28th floor bar of the Conrad Hotel in Tokyo.
The man’s name was Graham Thorne.Hearing his name called out in a pce where he knew no one, Ronan looked up slowly from his gss. It was that moment when the real game—the one he’d been seeking most of his life—finally began.
“Ronan Vale. Are you done whining yet? Are you ready for a challenge worthy of your genius?”
Ronan blinked through his drunken blur and looked at the imposing figure. With a quick swig of the st remnants of his drink, he stood up, wavering for a moment, before he passed out. The st thing he remembered was Graham Thorne catching him—just before his head could sm into the marble bartop.
<
The sun still hung high over the city as Elliot Voss and Graham Thorne stood near the floor-to-ceiling windows of the 20th floor office, gazing out across San Francisco’s skyline. The door behind them hissed open.
Ronan Vale strolled in, hands in his pockets, a bag slung zily from one shoulder.
Internally, he scoffed at the scene—two older men, one old enough to be his father, the other his grandfather, standing like generals at the edge of a war room.
Seriously, why the fuck am I here?Did I get the first meeting after that glorified TED Talk for executives?
Before either man could greet him, Voss turned and gestured toward the two chairs in front of his desk. “Have a seat—”
Vale flopped into the nearest chair, legs spyed, head resting against the top edge of the backrest.“I’ll start with the obvious,” he said, eyes half-lidded. “Why am I here?”
Graham chuckled, enjoying the kid’s irreverence. Voss raised an eyebrow. Before he could reply, Ronan kept going.
“Medical breakthroughs. Longevity science. Global logistics. All impressive, sure. But I’m not sure why I needed to be here for any of it. I’m on the edge of a major breakthrough in The System Rises, and getting pulled off it for days… doesn’t exactly help the process.”
Voss didn’t flinch. Still standing, he smiled mildly, then moved to his desk and sat. Fingers csped in front of him, he let the pause stretch—just long enough to see if Ronan had more to say.
Vale met his gaze with a curious, vaguely annoyed look.
Finally, Voss broke the silence.“Thanks for your patience. I know today was a long one—especially for someone whose area of expertise didn’t exactly line up with what you saw earlier.” He nodded toward Ronan’s bag. “Did you bring your tablet?”
Ronan exhaled, more from habit than frustration, and reached down. He pulled the tablet from his shoulder bag, unlocked it with a quick fingerprint, and—
His eyes widened.
“Is… is this real?” he said, sitting up straighter. “How…”
He didn’t finish the thought.
For the first time in hours, Elliot Voss had Ronan Vale’s full attention.
Voss leaned forward slightly, his voice steady.
“Ronan, every person in that auditorium today contributed a piece of what’s coming. But you? You’re about to become one of four people who know the full truth.”
“The synthetic bio-constructs delivered through Vitalyx and Rejuvenex—once their initial tasks are complete—migrate to the optic nerves and three key regions of the brain. There, they begin constructing the scaffolding for a neural interface.”
Vale didn’t blink.Didn’t breathe.Just stared.
Voss gave him a moment.Then he continued.
“Once approximately seventy-five percent of the world’s popution has taken at least one dose of both Vitalyx and Rejuvenex, we’ll activate The System.”
“That night, across the globe, as people sleep, their internal structures will receive the signal and begin a synchronized countdown. When the SCN detects the onset of REM sleep, the countdown completes—”
“—and they wake up inside The Tutorial.”
Vale’s lips parted slightly. “The Tutorial?” he said. “You didn’t have me design this thing for a unch date on Steam…”
He looked between Voss and Graham, disbelief morphing into awe.“You’re going to make it literally go live… for seventy-five percent of the human race?”
Graham, now seated in the chair beside him, smiled without humor.“Ideally, it’ll be one hundred percent,” he said. “But we’ve got contingencies for the edge cases.”
The silence that followed Graham’s st words was weighty, but not empty. Ronan wasn’t overwhelmed. He was calcuting.
He leaned forward slightly, elbows on knees, his voice low.
“So let me get this straight. These things—bio-constructs, nanobots, whatever you want to call them—cure disease, rewire the genome, and then what? They just... sit there? Pying cards until you flip a global switch?”
Graham smirked. “Not exactly.”
He too leaned forward, matching Ronan’s posture with quiet intensity.
“Once Rejuvenex completes its primary purpose, the constructs don’t vanish. They shift into what we call passive-state architecture. Not quite active, but not dormant either. They migrate to their spots and wait. They adapt. And they absorb—byproducts of respiration. Mitochondrial spillover. Free radical drift. Heat. Low-level biochemical noise.”
Voss picked it up from there, his voice smooth and even.
“Over the next two weeks, they use that energy and material to build the optical and cerebral interface. Layer by yer. They’re optimizing. Not just stabilizing the system—but calibrating it to each individual’s neurological fingerprint.”
He tapped his tablet once, then folded his hands again.
“By the time we hit the seventy-five percent threshold, every person who’s taken both compounds will have a fully formed neural scaffold—precise, tailored, tuned to their physiology.”
Ronan blinked, once.Then let out a low breath and leaned back in the chair.“So... self-reinforcing code. In meatspace.”
Graham ughed under his breath. Voss smiled, pleased.
“You’re letting the body do the rendering,” Ronan added. “Beautiful.”
He wasn’t trying to ftter them. He just appreciated good design when he saw it.A few seconds passed before he spoke again.“And when the countdown finishes, during REM sleep, they wake up inside The Tutorial.”
“Correct,” Voss said.
Ronan sat with that for a moment. “That’s going to be some shocking patch notes.”
Voss took a sip of water and sat back in his chair, letting Ronan absorb what he’d just heard.“We’ll dive deeper into the Tutorial soon enough,” he said. “But it’s time we got to the real reason you’re here.”
Ronan straightened. “There’s more?”
A knowing look passed between Voss and Grim. Then Graham spoke.
“We’re forming a Round Table,” he said. “Key foundation architects—people who understand the full picture. People who will ensure the stable unch and ongoing evolution of The System.”
“You’ll be inducted like everyone else eventually,” Grim added. “But first, we’ve got a hell of a lot to build.”
Ronan looked out the window as the sunlight began its slow descent toward the horizon.“So I get to be Sir Gahad or something?”
Voss chuckled. “We’re not assigning roles from Arthurian legend. But yes—the Round Table will be made up of five three-person teams. Each team oversees one of the five pilrs of the Ascension Framework.”
He tapped his desk. A new graphic came to life on Ronan’s tablet—a pentagon, pulsing faintly, with circles at each of its five points. As Voss spoke, each circle expanded in sequence, as if responding to his voice.
“The first team oversees everything reted to Vitalyx and Rejuvenex. Manufacturing. Distribution. And... compliance.”
There was a slight beat on that st word.
Ronan gnced at Grim, who gave him a faint nod.Grim added, dryly, “Compliance meaning: ensuring people take it. Not paperwork.”
Ronan was unable to hold back a shiver running up his spine.
“Moving on,” Voss said smoothly.
The second circle expanded. “The second team governs the Css System. Not just the initial archetypes, but how they evolve. Branching paths. Hidden talents. Rare css development. Think of it as adaptive combat and identity progression.”
Ronan’s eyes flicked to his tablet. The icon now glowed with an ethereal outline—bdes, shields, energy arcs.
“The third team manages Professions. Design, engineering, education, logistics, diplomacy. Not just job functions—but progression paths. Growth, contribution, transformation. We want Professions to matter just as much as combat.”
Another circle spun to life, glowing blue.
“Fourth,” Voss continued, “is the Race Evolution Path. This is where humanity truly moves forward. As users rise in alignment—body, mind, spirit—they unlock new potential. Higher cognitive states. Sharpened perception. Physiology that begins to reflect the choices they’ve made.”
Ronan looked up.
“You’re not talking fantasy races, are you?”
“No,” Voss said. “We’re not turning people into elves or goblins. This is evolution—earned and triggered through performance and internal growth. The Race system is rooted in biology, but driven by something more.”
Then the fifth and final circle lit up. It expanded to dominate the entire tablet screen.
Two words pulsed at the center:
THE SYSTEM
Voss’s tone dropped slightly. “This is the team you’ll lead. The most essential of them all. The System governs everything—rules, boundaries, logic, bance. It assigns stats. It observes action. It calcutes karma. It responds to behavior, rewards virtue, and penalizes harm.”
He looked Ronan directly in the eyes.
“It’s the living code that interprets humanity’s future. And you’ve already been building it in pieces since your first game over fifteen years ago. This time, you’re building it for real.”
Ronan leaned back into his chair like he’d just been punched in the chest.
He’d walked in with an attitude. Thinking he was too good for all of this. That this summit was another corporate circle jerk. That the old man was wasting his time.
And now?
Now the old man had just handed him the single greatest design challenge in the history of civilization.
He didn’t even feel daunted.He felt alive.
Jesus, Ronan thought. Voss is a fucking genius.Shit, the word didn’t even begin to describe how far ahead this man had seen.
For the first time in his life, he felt something close to reverence. He looked back at the two men seated across from him, and asked the one question that wouldn’t leave his mind:
“Okay. Let’s say this all works. The bio-construct superbots build the Interface. The System activates. But where does it live? What hardware can handle this much data—for eight billion simultaneous and constant users?”
Voss stood slowly and walked toward the window, hands csped behind his back.
His voice, when it came, was quiet. Almost solemn.
“That,” he said, “is the greatest secret currently in existence. Well… aside from The System itself.”
He turned, meeting Ronan’s gaze.
“We’ve built five sub-oceanic data arks. Hidden deep below the ocean floor. Each one cooled naturally by the currents, shielded by electromagnetic fields, and insuted against seismic activity. They’re fully autonomous. Each contains a quantum anchor core with a full clone of The System’s current state—constantly syncing across all five sites.”
Ronan’s jaw tightened. He hadn’t expected that.
Voss continued.
“In the long term, the Professions will take on a new task: repurposing every satellite orbiting the Earth. At first, they’ll provide geolocation and live tactical mapping—part of the Interface’s overy. But eventually, when the risk of sabotage has passed, the codebase will migrate into what we’re calling the Stratospheric Rey Network.”
“Orbital satellites?” Ronan asked.
“Exactly. Each satellite will house code fragments, with distributed redundancy across orbital bands. We’ll need to upgrade them first. And, of course, clean up the orbital debris field. But yes—that’s the pn.”
Ronan nodded, still stunned.“And the final phase?”
Voss turned back toward him.“The true endgame,” he said, “is called Biological Load-Bancing.”
Graham stepped in now, voice even.
“Human brains operate at a fraction of their capacity. Vitalyx and Rejuvenex enhance that. Over time, users will begin accessing upwards of seventy percent of their brain’s active capacity. Some, far more.”
Voss continued from there.
“And during periods of low activity—sleep, meditation, idle cycles—the brain’s unused bandwidth becomes a node in a global mesh. Every mind becomes a rey. Each one processes micro-fragments of The System’s code—holographic redundancy. The whole can be reconstructed from the parts.”
Ronan sat there, jaw sck, eyes wide.It was brilliant. Elegant. Scable. Unbelievably ambitious.And completely insane.He felt like his chest might explode from excitement.
Fuck. I can’t wait to get started.I’ve never wanted anything more in my entire life.Man, what a turn this day has taken…