Lucent Argyr woke to the sound of his neighbor's AetherLink screaming again.
The knockoff device was bolted to old Mrs. Chen's wrist, its transparent casing pulsing angry red. Through the paper-thin wall, he heard her whimper as it drains her credits again. Standard procedure for late payments. The corporations called it debt collection.
Lucent rolled off his mattress and kicked the wall. "Turn it off or fry it, Chen! Some of us work nights."
A wet cough answered him. The pulsing light dimmed to a sickly yellow.
Another morning in paradise.
He dressed in the half-light filtering through his window—just bright enough to avoid tripping over the scavenged Conduit parts littering the floor. The city's newest Aethernet node had come online last week three blocks east, and ever since, the local tech had been glitching.
His clock radio spat static in no discernible pattern. The fridge's stabilizer glyphs burned out every 36 hours. And sometimes, when the node's hum hit a certain frequency, cats and dogs relentlessly bark and hiss towards the source.
Ten years since the Aether Incident, and the world still hadn't decided whether this was progress or not. But if you ask the humanity as a whole, they will most likely say it's a progress. Though deep inside they will deny it.
The repair shop stank of aether—like the smell of burnt air. Lucent flicked on the bare bulb overhead, its filament struggling against the unnatural dark clinging to the corners. He'd pried it from a pre-Aether lamppost last month—real tungsten, none of that glyph-dependent corporate crap. The light wavered as he passed beneath it, like even this simple technology was forgetting how to function.
On the workbench, his latest project waited: a scavenged AetherPhone with a cracked core, its guts strewn across a stained circuit mat. The corporations had declared these models obsolete when they rolled out the first Conduit licensing programs. Too dangerous in untrained hands, they'd said. Too unpredictable.
Lucent smirked. That was the point.
He settled onto his stool, fingers brushing the phone's exposed Aether veins. They pulsed faintly at his touch, like a heartbeat. This close, he could see the damage—blackened pathways where some back-alley hacker had tried to force a glyph it couldn't handle. The burn pattern looked almost like a symbol.
Almost.
His own Conduit—if you could call it that—hung from a fraying lanyard around his neck: a jury-rigged translator chip spliced with glyphware stripped from a Myriad Labs trash bin. It couldn't cast worth a damn, but it could see. And right now, it was showing him something strange in the phone's damage.
The burns weren't random. They formed a sequence. A pattern. A—
[Recognition Protocol Engaged]
The words flashed across his translator's tiny screen, searing white-hot behind his eyes. Lucent recoiled, knocking over a jar of screws. They hit the concrete floor in a discordant clatter, but the sound seemed distant. The phone's screen had woken on its own, glyphs spiraling across the glass like ink in water.
Not just any glyphs.
His name.
[User Identified: LUCENT ARGYR]
[Core Permission: GRANTED]
The bulb overhead shattered. In the sudden dark, the phone's glow painted the walls in liquid light, casting sharp-edged shadows that moved when nothing else did.
Lucent's hands shook. This wasn't just a hack.
This was an invitation.
The phone's glow pulsed, its light eating at the shadows of the shop. He forced himself to breathe, to think. This wasn't just some glitch—it was a handshake. And if the Aether had recognized him without corporate licensing, then either the system was broken, or he was.
A ringing voice crackled from the shop's busted holo-projector, yanking his attention sideways. The news feed flickered to life above a pile of discarded battery cores, showing a sleek stage backlit by Aetherion Core's signature silver-blue glyphs.
"—thrilled to unveil the AetherPhone-X," said a woman with a smile like a scalpel. CEO Elise Riven, her bone-straight hair framing a face engineered for investor confidence. She held up a device so thin it seemed to vanish when she turned it edge-on. "Our first Conduit with embedded lethality protocols for civil defense applications."
Lucent snorted, fingers still tracing the cracks in his own scavenged phone. Civil defense. That's what they called it now.
The feed cut to a demonstration: A riot control drone disintegrated midair when the AetherPhone-X's user flicked their wrist. No glyphs visible, no incantation—just a thought, and the machine came apart like wet paper. The crowd applauded.
"Pre-orders open at 0800 for Gold-Tier license holders," Riven said, as the demo shifted to a surgeon using the same tech to slice a tumor from a holographic brain. "Because safety shouldn't be a privilege."
Lucent muted the feed. His knuckles ached from gripping his screwdriver too tight. The hypocrisy burned worse than the time he'd tried to hotwire a Nimbrix glyph-caster bare-handed. Safety. As if Aetherion's last "civil defense" model hadn't been the reason three blocks of Jakarta's slums had to be quarantined.
He turned back to his own device. The glyphs had stabilized now, forming a latticework of symbols he half-recognized from old underground forums. Pre-Incident coding, maybe. Or something older.
The shop's window rattled as an Aethernet node cycled up outside, its obsidian surface drinking the daylight. Lucent's translator chip buzzed against his chest, translating the node's hum into a warning.
Lucent's hands shook. He'd seen unauthorized glyphwork before—hell, he'd jury-rigged most of it himself—but this wasn't just a back-alley hack. This was a window.
And through it, something had looked back.
Outside, a billboard flickered to life, bathing the street in neon-blue. The new AetherPhone-X rotated slowly above the words: EVOLUTION REQUIRES COMPLIANCE.
Lucent wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
He reached for his soldering iron. Time to see how deep the rabbit hole went.
Lucent set the AetherPhone aside for a moment, the glyphs on its screen still flickering faintly. He needed a smaller screwdriver head to pry open the casing further, something delicate enough not to damage the fragile Aether veins inside.
He slid open the rusted bottom drawer of his workbench, the metal scraping against itself with a sound like an old man clearing his throat. Inside was the usual mess—spare microchips, tangled wires, half-empty tubes of thermal paste, and a dozen screwdriver heads buried somewhere beneath it all. He dug through the clutter, fingers brushing against forgotten projects and abandoned fixes.
Then his hand hit something smooth and cold.
He pulled it out.
A pre-Aether Incident phone.
The thing was ancient by today's standards—thick, plastic, with a cracked but still-intact touchscreen. No glyphs, no Aether veins, no corporate licensing ports. Just a dead piece of tech from a world that didn't exist anymore.
Lucent turned it over in his hands. The backplate was scratched, the charging port clogged with dust. He remembered these. Remembered when phones were just phones, when they didn't whisper back at you, didn't burn your fingers if you used them wrong. When they didn't recognize you.
He pressed the power button out of habit. Nothing. The battery had probably corroded years ago.
For a second, he let himself imagine it turning on. Just a dumb, simple interface. No glyphs, no permissions, no corporate oversight. Just texts. Calls. Maybe a shitty mobile game.
Outside, the Aethernet node hummed, its presence pressing against the walls of the shop like a living thing. The phone stayed silent and inert. A relic of the past.
Lucent exhaled, set it aside, and went back to digging for the right screwdrive
Lucent found the right screwdriver head buried under a tangle of copper wire. As he worked it free, the nearest Aethernet node cycled through its hourly calibration outside. The vibration rattled his mugs on their hooks - not enough to spill his coffee, just enough to remind him it was there. Like a neighbor stomping upstairs.
He glanced out the shop's grimy window. The node stood across the street, same as it had for the past eight months. Obsidian surface drinking the afternoon light. Municipal workers had bolted a graffiti-proof polymer coating to its base last week, but someone had already scratched a crude glyph into it. Probably kids. The coating was supposed to resist markings, but these days nothing worked quite like the specs promised.
The city had installed them fast after the Incident. First just downtown, near the corporate hubs. Then spreading block by block like some aggressive franchise. Lucent remembered when they'd planted the one outside his shop - two Myriad techs in their sleek black uniforms, moving with the rehearsed calm of people who knew the device might decide to rewrite local physics on a whim. The neighborhood stray cat, a one-eared tabby, had arched its back and fled. It never came back.
Now the nodes were as common as fire hydrants. You learned to ignore the way they made your fillings ache when you walked too close, or how pigeons never roosted on them. The corporations called it progress. The city called it infrastructure. Lucent called it Tuesday.
He wiped dust from the pre-Aether phone's screen with his sleeve. The nodes' spread reminded him of that old game – Go, was it?
The one where you placed stones to claim territory. Except here the stones hummed in a frequency that made dogs howl three blocks over, and the players were trillion-dollar entities playing for stakes no one fully understood.
The phone in his hands stayed stubbornly locked. Across the street, the node's surface shimmered as rain began to fall. Droplets hit the obsidian and hesitated, then slid upward toward the crown of the monolith in defiance of gravity. Just another quirk the user manuals didn't mention.
The AetherPhone's glyphs pulsed lazily, waiting. Somewhere uptown, an Aetherion executive was probably demoing some new node-based services for investors. Here in the trenches, you just learned to work around them. Like power lines. Or landmines.
Its exposed veins pulsed faintly under Lucent's screwdriver. He adjusted his magnifier, tracing the corrupted glyph pathways. This was third-hand corporate castoff tech - the kind licensed Conduits would sneer at before summoning their pristine, sponsor-approved rigs.
Through the shop's window, a Nimbrix-branded mag-lev train hissed by, its sides emblazoned with the smirking face of some Gold-Tier Conduit influencer.
"MASTER THE GLYPHS - ENROLL IN OFFICIAL CERTIFICATION TODAY!" The ad flickered as it passed the Aethernet node.
Lucent's lips twisted. He'd seen their training facilities - gleaming corporate temples where privileged kids practiced sanitized glyphcraft under the watchful eyes of Aetherion-approved instructors. They learned from approved spellbooks, cast through regulated devices, their every incantation logged and monetized.
A burst of static from the shop's illegal receiver caught his attention:
"...another arrest in the Glyph Riots. Aetherion Security confirms the detained rogue Conduit was operating unlicensed reality-altering code in residential..."
He turned it off. The authorities always made it sound like rogues were terrorists, not pioneers. Lucent had seen what licensed "safe" glyphcraft did - the way it boxed the Aether into corporate-approved shapes, like caging a lightning. Meanwhile, in the Pit last, he'd watched a street mage named Chrome weave glyphs that made the air taste like copper and possibility, her jury-rigged Conduit spitting raw potential.
The phone in his hands sparked suddenly, its damaged glyphs rearranging into something that looked suspiciously like the unauthorized patterns Chrome had used. Lucent froze. This wasn't in any corporate manual. This was...
His fingertips tingled where they touched the screen. The glyphs swirled under his touch, not just responding to his inputs. The sensation reminded him of the stray cats that used to haunt the alley behind his shop - that moment when a wary animal leans into your hand before remembering it shouldn't trust you.
Lucent pulled back, wiping his fingers on his jeans. The glyphs pulsed softly.
Maybe this was what the rogues meant when they said the Aether was alive. Not alive like a person, but alive like fire - hungry to spread, to consume, to dance. Or maybe he'd just inhaled too much solder fumes today.
He flexed his hand. The tingling faded, but the memory of it lingered like the afterimage of a bright light. Whether it was real or just his brain trying to make sense of something too big to understand, one thing was certain: this wasn't the docile, corporate-approved Aether from the training vids. This was something wilder.
Something dangerous.
Something interesting.
Outside, another Nimbrix ad floated by, this one featuring a licensed Conduit performing perfect, soulless glyph chains for some banking security contract. The contrast was almost funny. They'd built golden cages around something that by its very nature refused to be caged.
Lucent exhaled, watching the rogue glyphs swirl. Maybe that's why the corporations feared the unlicensed so much - not because they were dangerous, but because they remembered that Aether was supposed to be magic.
Lucent held his breath as the final glyph stabilized. The cracked AetherPhone lay reassembled on his workbench, its surface still faintly warm from the soldering iron. He'd realigned the fractured Aether veins as best he could, bridging gaps with scavenged conductive gel that shimmered like mercury where it caught the light.
One last connection to test.
His finger hovered over the activation glyph. This was the moment - either he'd patched it correctly, or the damaged core would fry itself and possibly take his eyebrows with it. The shop's single hanging bulb flickered overhead. Even the air smelled charged, thick with aether and the coppery tang of overheated circuits.
Then - three sharp push at the reinforced door. Not the casual rhythm of customers. Not the uneven rhythm of parts dealers.
Raker.
Lucent's hand jerked back instinctively. The phone's screen remained dark, but something in its core emitted a subsonic whine that made his molars ache. He threw a grease-stained rag over it just as the door creaked open.
"Still breathing, code-rat?" Raker's augmented jaw clicked around a stim-stick, his mismatched eyes scanning the cluttered workspace. "Or did you finally find something down here that bites back?"
Lucent leaned casually against the workbench, feeling the phone's residual heat through the rag. "What do you want, Raker? I'm between paydays."
Raker exhaled synthetic cherry smoke, not bothering to hide his appraisal of the covered workbench. "Heard you've been asking about Vesper's crew." A pause. "Heard they've been asking about you."
The phone chose that moment to emit a quiet chime - the sound of a system rebooting. Raker's ocular implant flickered in response, its focus dropping to the rag-covered lump on the bench.
Lucent didn't blink. "New doorbell. You like it?"
For three heartbeats, the only sound was the Aethernet node's distant hum. Then Raker's teeth flashed in something that wasn't quite a smile. "You have a really good timing. Pit's opening early tonight. Seems management wants a word with their lowest attraction." He turned to leave, tossing over his shoulder "Bring your doorbell."
The door clicked shut. Under the rag, the AetherPhone's screen flared to life, glyphs swirling like ink in water.
Lucent exhaled. He'd wanted to see if it would work. Now he had his answer - and considerably less time than he'd hoped to decide whether that was a good thing.
***
The Pit
Underground arenas—illegal circuits where coders and street mages pushed their Conduits to the limit, gambling on glitch battles and raw Aether surges. But seeing it was something else.
The air smelled of burnt air and sweat. The walls were lined with jury-rigged dampeners to keep corporate scanners from picking up the illegal glyphwork. And at the center of it all, the Ring—a sunken concrete basin where two Conduits faced off, their AetherPhones—Conduits casting jagged shadows across the crowd.
One fighter was corporate. Clean-cut, with a licensed Nimbrix battle-rig strapped to his forearm, its approved glyphs flickering in precise, military patterns.
The other was wild.
She moved like her bones were liquid, her Conduit—a scavenged WhiteRoot prototype—spitting corrupted glyphs that twisted in the air like snakes. The crowd roared as her latest cast hit the corporate fighter's defenses. His glyphs shattered, and for a heartbeat, the arena lights dimmed as raw Aether surged.
The corporate fighter dropped.
"That's Vesper," Raker muttered, steering Lucent through the crowd. "No license. No training. Just instinct." He grinned. "And she's not even the best here."
Lucent's throat went dry. The fight hadn't been about credits or territory. It had been about the glyphs themselves—about seeing how far they could bend before they broke.
And the crowd loved it.
Raker shoved the drink from his hand. "You're not here to watch, code-rat." He nodded toward a rusted terminal at the edge of the ring. "C'mon, you're here to play."
Lucent stared at the screen in his hand. The glyphs pulsed, impatient.
Somewhere in the crowd, a voice shouted: "Who's next?"
His conduit hummed in response.
The first rule of the Pit?
No rules.
Lucent's opponent was a GhostKey runner, his Conduit a Frankenstein mess of stolen corporate tech and jailbroken glyphware. The crowd jeered as Lucent stepped into the ring, his scavenged AetherPhone looking laughably primitive next to the hacker's rig.
Then the glyphs flared to life.
Lucent's fingers twitched as the GhostKey runner's glyphs sliced through the air—jagged, aggressive lines of stolen corporate code repurposed for street warfare. The crowd roared as the attack nearly breached his makeshift defenses, but Lucent wasn't watching the impact.
He was watching the patterns.
The way the hacker's thumb jerked left before each strike. The microsecond delay between glyph activation and execution. The faint shimmer of unstable Aether where the code had been poorly optimized.
The second attack came faster—a volley of disintegration glyphs that cost more credits than Lucent made in a month. He dodged, but not before catching the exact sequence of runes as they flashed on his opponent's screen. His own scavenged conduit burned in his grip, its cracked display struggling to render what his mind had already absorbed.
Too much corporate bloat in the initialization sequence.Redundant failsafes slowing the core response.A hesitation—just 0.3 seconds—between glyph chains.
Weaknesses.
Lucent exhaled. Let the hacker think he was retreating. Let the crowd jeer. His fingers moved without conscious thought, reconstructing the attack's framework in his mind even as he pretended to fumble with his phone.
Then—
He struck.
The glyph that flared to life above his palm wasn't a copy. It was something leaner, stripped of corporate redundancies, its edges honed by street-level efficiency. Where the hacker's version had wasted energy on flashy visual effects, Lucent's was a scalpel.
The arena's dampeners screamed as the glyph connected.
For a heartbeat, the entire Pit held its breath.
The GhostKey runner's rig imploded—not with fireworks, but with a sound like a sigh. His stolen AetherPhone crumbled to dust between his fingers, its circuits unraveling at the code level.
Silence.
Then the crowd erupted—in disappointment.
The fight had ended too cleanly. Too quickly. No flashing lights, no heart-stopping near misses—just efficient, brutal victory.
Management wouldn't be happy.
A heavy hand clapped his shoulder. "That's three pay cuts in a row, code-rat." The Pit's overseer, a hulking man with a Myriad enforcement glyph glowing faintly under his collar, leaned in. His breath reeked of synth-whiskey. "Entertainment sells. You? You're making people yawn."
Lucent swallowed the retort on his tongue. Last time he'd argued, they'd "accidentally" fried his primary Conduit mid-match. Now he was stuck with this piece-of-shit backup phone.
The overseer jerked his chin toward the betting stands, where disappointed gamblers were cashing out early. "Next fight, you give them a show. Or you're working off your debt in the scrap yards."
The next opponent stepped into the ring, and Lucent's stomach dropped.
Vesper.
Her modified WhiteRoot Conduit gleamed under the arena lights, its exposed Aether veins pulsing with barely contained energy. The crowd erupted—she was a fan favorite, all flash and fury, her matches ending in spectacular, screen-melting finales.
Lucent's phone chose that moment to stutter, the display flickering like a dying pulse.
"You look like you're about to piss yourself," Vesper called over the noise, rolling her shoulders. Glyphs danced at her fingertips, lazy and effortless. "Don't worry. I'll make it quick."
Lucent forced a grin. "Quick's bad for business." He held up his phone, letting the crowd see the ancient model, the duct-taped casing. "But this? This is gonna be a train wreck."
The crowd ate it up.
The first glyph Vesper threw should have ended it.
A Nimbrix-tier disruption wave, sharp enough to fry unshielded circuits. Lucent barely dodged, his phone screeching in protest as it scrambled to adapt. The glyph grazed his shoulder, and pain lanced down his arm—real pain, not the simulated kind from licensed arenas.
The crowd roared.
Lucent's fingers flew across the screen, not to counter, but to imitate. He couldn't replicate Vesper's raw power, but he could borrow her style. His next glyph unfurled in a cascade of light, all showy spirals and unnecessary flourishes—a perfect mirror of her opening move, just weaker. Slower.
Deliberately flawed.
Vesper's eyes narrowed. She recognized the play immediately.
So did the crowd.
"Oh, you little shit—" She lunged, her Conduit spitting glyphs like gunfire. Lucent let them chase him, dancing just out of reach, his phone overheating in his grip. He took a hit to the ribs—staggered dramatically—then "accidentally" backflipped into the arena's dampener array, sending up a shower of sparks.
The audience lost their minds.
His phone was cooking itself alive, warnings flashing:
[CORE TEMP CRITICAL]
[AETHER INTEGRITY FAILING].
But the bets were rolling in now, the odds shifting as the fight stretched past the three-minute mark.
Vesper wasn't holding back anymore. She was pissed.
Perfect.
Lucent grinned through the pain, tasting blood. "Hey Vesper," he gasped, dodging another glyph. "Bet you can't melt this piece of junk in under ten seconds."
He held up his phone like a challenge.
The crowd screamed.
Vesper obliged.
The explosion was beautiful.
Lucent's phone died in a blaze of glory, its last act a perfectly timed glyph that sent Vesper's finishing blow ricocheting into the overhead lights.
The arena plunged into darkness—then erupted in strobes of rogue Aether as the dampeners failed.
When the smoke cleared, Lucent was on his knees, his hands empty.
Vesper stood over him, her Conduit smoking. "...That was the dumbest fucking thing I've ever seen."
The crowd was chanting his name. Even if he lost the game, he won the crowd.
The overseer tossed him a new Conduit—a decent one, this time. "Don't get used to it," he growled. But the smirk said otherwise.
Lucent coughed, grinning. "Worth it."
Lucent's ribs screamed as he dragged himself to the edge of the Pit, the taste of copper thick on his tongue. The crowd was still roaring, drunk on the spectacle he and Vesper had given them—lights shattering, dampeners overloading, the raw, unfiltered chaos of Aether spilling like blood across the arena floor.
His hands trembled, not from exhaustion, but from the aftershocks of channeling glyphs through a dying Conduit. The skin of his fingertips was cracked and blistered; the telltale burns of a rig pushed far past its limits.
The new conduit he received was sleek, military-grade, the kind of hardware GhostKey runners would kill for. The casing was cold against his palm, but there were scratches along the edges—deep, jagged marks, like someone had pried it open in a hurry. And if he looked close enough, he could see the faintest rust-colored stain near the charging port.
Blood.
Lucent didn't ask where it came from. In the Pit, you learned not to.
Vesper loomed over him, her shadow cutting through the neon haze of the underground arena. Her WhiteRoot Conduit was still humming, the exposed Aether veins pulsing with residual energy. She didn't look impressed. She looked pissed.
"You're gonna get yourself killed," she said, voice low enough that only he could hear.
Lucent wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, smearing blood across his skin. "Yeah," he admitted, grinning. "But what a way to go."
She didn't laugh.
The crowd was already moving on, their attention shifting to the next fighters stepping into the Ring. Lucent pushed himself up, wincing as his ribs protested. The new Conduit weighed heavy in his grip, too polished, too corporate for the grime of the Pit. He turned it over, thumb brushing the activation glyph. The screen flickered to life, pristine and untouched—no cracks, no lag, no desperate jury-rigged patches holding it together.
It was beautiful.
And it was dangerous.
Because nothing in the underground came free.
The backrooms of the Pit were never quiet, but tonight, the hum of illicit Aether trades and hushed credit transfers was louder than usual. Lucent sat on a rusted metal crate, the new Conduit resting in his lap as a street doc patched up the worst of his burns. The doc's hands were steady, her tools sharp—another favor he'd have to pay back later.
Raker leaned against the wall nearby, chewing on another stim-stick, his augmented eye flickering as he scanned the room. "You got lucky," he muttered. "Vesper could've turned you into a stain on the floor."
Lucent flexed his bandaged fingers. "She didn't."
"Because you still have your use for them." Raker exhaled smoke, the scent of synthetic cherries filling the cramped space. "And because the management is starting to like you. For now."
Lucent knew what that meant. For now was the closest thing to safety you got in the underground. It wasn't loyalty. It wasn't trust. It was just the cold calculating of profit—and as long as he kept the crowds screaming, he'd keep breathing.
He thumbed the Conduit's screen again, watching the glyphs dance under his touch. It responded faster than anything he'd ever used, no lag, no stutter. It was like holding lightning.
And yet—
He couldn't shake the feeling that it was watching him back.
Vesper found him an hour later, when the Pit had emptied out and the only sounds were the distant hum of the city above and the occasional drip of water from cracked pipes. She didn't speak at first. Just stood there, arms crossed, her Conduit dark at her side.
Then—
"You're good," she said. "Not great. Not yet. But good."
Lucent raised an eyebrow. "Is that a compliment?"
"It's an observation." Her gaze flicked to the new Conduit in his hands. "That thing's gonna get you dead faster than your last one."
He knew she was right. But he also knew he didn't have a choice. "Got any better ideas?"
Vesper smirked. "Maybe."
She tossed him a data chip. Lucent caught it, turning it over in his palm. It was unmarked, the kind of thing that could've come from anywhere—or anyone.
"Meet me at the docks warehouse tomorrow," she said, already turning to leave. "Midnight. And don't bring that fixer with you."
Then she was gone, swallowed by the shadows of the Pit.
Lucent stared at the chip, his pulse kicking up. This was it—the kind of offer that either got you rich or got you buried.
And with the way his luck was going?
It was probably both.