Chapter 2: Neon Code

The alarm screamed at exactly 6:00 AM, its shrill digital cry piercing through the thin walls of Lucent's makeshift apartment. He didn't need to open his eyes to know the time - the pale blue glow of the Aethernet node outside his window had already shifted to its morning pulse, bathing his cramped space in cold, artificial light. His fingers fumbled across the uneven floor, knocking over an empty nutrient can before finding the source of the noise.

A month before he'd face Vesper in the Pit. Right now, there was only this, another dawn in Neo-Tokyo's lower tiers, another day of outrunning the debt collectors and Reclamation Units.

The AetherPhone's cracked screen flickered to life beneath his thumb, displaying the morning's first indignity in rounded corporate script:

MYRIAD DAILY USAGE QUOTA: 0/5 GLYPHS

CREDIT BALANCE: ₢12.38

WARNING: AETHER-OS UPDATE REQUIRED. NON-COMPLIANCE PENALTIES APPLY.

Lucent exhaled through his nose, watching his breath fog the already grimy screen. The numbers hadn't changed since yesterday, or the day before that.

Twelve credits wouldn't even buy him a decent protein bar from the vending machines downstairs, let alone renew his expired AquaFilter subscription. He rolled onto his back, feeling the uneven pressure of the thermal padding beneath him, scavenged from a discarded Nimbrix shipping crate last winter - and stared at the water stains on the ceiling.

Outside, Neo-Tokyo was already stirring. The rhythmic beat of mag-lev trains vibrated through the building's bones, punctuated by the occasional burst of static from the public address system three blocks over.

Someone's child was crying in the adjacent unit, the sound muffled through paper-thin walls. Closer, just beneath his window, the noodle vendor was firing up his grill, the sizzle of synthetic pork substitute mixing with the ever-present acrid air of the Aethernet node.

Lucent dragged himself upright, his joints protesting. The apartment - if you could call a converted storage closet was barely large enough to stand in.

His mattress took up most of the floor space, surrounded by the results of his day-job: half-disassembled Conduits, tangled coils of fiber-optic cable, and the skeletal remains of last week's attempt at building a Faraday cage from scavenged microwave parts.

He reached for the dented kettle in the corner, its surface pockmarked with heat scars from countless bootleg purification glyphs. The sink coughed and sputtered before yielding a thin stream of rust-colored water.

Lucent held the kettle beneath it, watching the liquid swirl with unnamed particulates. His thumb hovered over the AquaFilter icon on his AetherPhone before remembering the license had expired three days ago.

"Right," he muttered, setting the phone aside. Instead, he traced a jagged shape in the air with his index finger, the motion practiced but hesitant.

The bootleg glyph - something he'd scraped from a decaying data cache in the blackmarket - shimmered faintly in the dim light before dissolving into the water.

The liquid bubbled ominously, turning a sickly green before clearing to something approximating transparency.

Lucent sniffed it. Close enough. 

The streets were worse in daylight.

Lucent shouldered his way through the morning crowd, keeping his head down as he navigated the gauntlet of corporate propaganda. Above him, holographic billboards screamed competing messages:

"AETHERION'S NEWEST CONDUIT - 30% MORE EFFICIENT GLYPH COMPILATION!"

"MYRIAD SPRING SALE - UNLOCK YOUR 5TH DAILY GLYPH FOR JUST ₢99.99!"

"NIMBRIX SECURITY SOLUTIONS: BECAUSE YOUR SAFETY IS OUR ALGORITHM."

The advertisements pulsed in time with the Aethernet nodes lining the street, their obsidian surfaces beading with morning dew that defied gravity, sliding upward instead of down.

A Reclamation Unit stood sentry at the intersection, their glyphed batons humming faintly as they scanned the crowd. Lucent felt the familiar prickle at the base of his skull as their sensors passed over him, the sensation like static electricity crawling across his skin.

A kid in a patched school uniform stumbled in front of him, his government-issued AetherPad chirping a low-battery warning. The sound made Lucent's teeth ache. He'd heard that same tone three years ago, standing in a nearly identical crowd, watching as his sister's pad died halfway through her licensing exam. No resets. No second chances. Not for people like them.

The shop wasn't much, but it was his.

Two square meters of counter space in what had once been a luxury mall, now home to the desperate and the debt-ridden. The synth-meat vendor to his left hadn't stopped coughing since winter, his lungs ravaged by whatever preservatives they put in the protein paste.

To his right, a Myriad-certified glyph tutor glared at Lucent through the glass partition, her disdain palpable even through the augmented reality filters she wore like a second skin.

Today's job was a Nimbrix security drone, its carapace cracked from what looked like a three-story fall. The shopkeeper who brought it in couldn't meet Lucent's eyes when he named his price - half what corporate servicing would charge, but still more than either of them could comfortably afford.

The drone's core was locked behind layers of Aetherion's proprietary glyphware, the encryption shifting every few seconds like a living thing. Lucent's fingers danced across his toolkit, selecting a modified data probe he'd built from scavenged parts. The bootleg diagnostic glyph he used to interface with the drone's systems flickered uncertainly, its edges fraying at the corners.

He held his breath as the anti-tamper protocols flared, the drone's casing growing warm beneath his fingers. One wrong move and it would report him, triggering a Reclamation audit he couldn't afford. The glyph stabilized at the last possible second, its code adapting in a way that shouldn't have been possible.

Lucent didn't question it. He never did.

The protein stick tasted like ash and regret.

The vending machine chirped cheerfully as it dispensed his lunch, its screen flashing:

AETHERION LOYALTY POINTS DETECTED! 3 MORE PURCHASES FOR A FREE DRINK!

Lucent flicked it off with more force than necessary, his fingers leaving smudges on the already filthy touchscreen. Across the food court, a corporate mage in an Aetherion-branded suit laughed too loudly with his colleagues, their Conduits gleaming under the artificial lights. One of them gestured absently, summoning a climate-control glyph that left the air around them perfectly temperate while the rest of the room sweltered.

For a moment, just a moment, Lucent imagined what it would be like to walk up and smash his bootleg AetherPhone against that perfectly groomed face. To watch the shock in those eyes as the privileged bastard realized people like him existed.

Then the mage's weather-control glyph stuttered.

It was barely noticeable - a flicker at the edge of perception. The air around the corporate mages shimmered for half a heartbeat, and in that instant, Lucent saw the flaw in the code. Not just a bug, but a fundamental weakness in the glyph's architecture, a vulnerability that ran all the way down to the AetherOS kernel.

His fingers twitched with the knowledge of how to exploit it.

The AetherPhone in his pocket buzzed before he could act, the vibration sharp enough to bruise. The message glowed ominously when he pulled it out:

RECLAMATION UNIT DEPLOYED IN YOUR DISTRICT.

Lucent swallowed the impulse, the taste of copper sharp on his tongue. Not today. Maybe not ever.

***

Back in his closet, with the sounds of Neo-Tokyo's nightlife filtering through the thin walls, Lucent fired up his bootleg AetherPhone. The cracked screen cast jagged shadows across the room, illuminating the peeling posters and makeshift repairs that defined his existence.

The undernet was alive with chatter tonight. A new thread pulsed at the top of the message board, its header blinking urgently:

GhostKey dropping fresh cracks tonight. Myriad firewalls failing. Be ready.

Lucent's thumb hovered over the download link, his stomach churning with something that wasn't quite hunger. Last month's "cracked" glyph package had left a kid in Jakarta with third-degree burns.

The month before that, an entire block in Mumbai had lost power for three days when a pirated infrastructure glyph went rogue.

Outside, the Aethernet node hummed louder, its vibration resonating through the thin walls. For a moment, just a moment, it almost sounded like laughter.

Lucent exhaled slowly, his breath fogging the cracked screen. His rent was due tomorrow. The noodle vendor had raised his prices again. And the corporations?

They never hesitated.

His finger descended toward the download button just as his AetherPhone flickered, the screen distorting in a way that had nothing to do with its physical damage.

Lucent stared at the screen, his pulse loud in his ears. The node outside continued its ceaseless hum. The city moved on around him, oblivious.

Somewhere in the distance, a Reclamation Unit's siren wailed.

The cracked glyph file sat heavy in his AetherPhone's memory, a digital grenade with the pin already pulled. He wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his hand, leaving a smudge of grime across his forehead.

The Faraday cage's distorted reflection in the phone's cracked screen made his face look fractured, like the image had been reassembled wrong.

Lucent's fingers hesitated over the screen. Every instinct screamed this was different - GhostKey drops always came wrapped in their signature glitch-art packaging, screaming skull avatars and pulsating neon warnings about corporate trackers.

This was... quiet. Just a nondescript data packet, barely larger than a basic utility glyph, squatting in his storage like a sleeping viper.

He reached for the salvaged Nimbrix battery pack wired to his workbench, its exposed Aether coils humming with unstable energy. With a practiced twist, he connected it to his primary Conduit - not the battered AetherPhone he carried daily, but the Frankenstein monstrosity he'd pieced together from three different black-market devices.

Its screen flickered to life, displaying the jagged characters of his custom OS, a bastardized mix of Aetherion's walled-garden interface and the crude, efficient code of the underground.

The Faraday cage's panels clattered to the floor, their delicate shielding glyphs now dark and inert. Lucent stared at the wreckage, his breath coming in short, sharp bursts. His fingers trembled as he reached for the AetherPhone, its screen still glowing with the cracked weather-control glyph.

The decompiler's interface had frozen mid-process, displaying a jagged fragment of the spell's architecture. Lucent tapped the screen, but the device refused to respond. He exhaled through his teeth and pried open the back panel, his fingertips brushing the warm circuitry beneath.

A reset glyph—crudely scratched into the phone's casing with a conductive pen—flared briefly before the device shuddered back to life.

The cracked glyph was still there, waiting.

Lucent hesitated. Standard procedure was to datamine the cracks methodically: isolate the executable components, strip out any corporate tracers, and test the glyph in a sandboxed environment. But this wasn't a standard crack. The way it had reassembled itself, if only for a moment, suggested something far more dangerous than a simple pirated spell.

He wiped sweat from his brow and began the slow, painstaking work of dissecting the glyph's structure.

The first layer peeled away easily—a superficial wrapper designed to mimic GhostKey's usual packaging. Beneath it, the spell's true architecture unfolded in intricate, interlocking patterns of Aether-script. Lucent traced the glyph's logic paths with a fingertip, his brow furrowing as he followed the flow of energy through the spell's framework.

There.

A subroutine buried deep in the glyph's core, its purpose obscured by layers of obfuscation. Lucent isolated the fragment and fed it into his debugger. The screen flickered, then resolved into a block of code that made his stomach tighten.

It wasn't just a weather-control glyph.

Embedded within the spell's structure was a data-harvesting routine—a silent, insidious thing designed to siphon information from any Conduit that executed it. Usage patterns, location data, even fragments of the caster's neural feedback. All of it would be bundled into compressed packets and routed back to...

Lucent's breath caught.

The return address was masked, but the routing path was unmistakable.

Myriad.

He sat back, his mind racing. This wasn't sabotage. It was a trap. A honeypot glyph, deliberately leaked into the underground to identify and track unlicensed Conduits. And if GhostKey was distributing it, that meant either they'd been compromised—or they were complicit.

The AetherPhone's screen dimmed suddenly, its power reserves draining faster than they should have. Lucent frowned and checked the diagnostics. A background process was consuming resources, something his sandbox hadn't quarantined. He killed the decompiler and watched as the phone's energy levels stabilized.

Then he saw it.

A single line of code, written in a dialect of Aether-script he didn't recognize, nestled deep in the glyph's architecture. It wasn't part of the original spell. It wasn't part of the data-harvesting routine. It was something else entirely—a fragment of logic that shouldn't have been there, like finding a line of poetry etched into the circuitry of a gun.

Lucent copied the fragment and fed it into his analyzer. The device churned for a long moment before returning an error:

[UNRECOGNIZED SYNTAX]

[INSUFFICIENT PROCESSING POWER]

He stared at the message, his fingers hovering over the screen. The fragment was small—barely a dozen symbols—but something about it set his teeth on edge. It felt less like code and more like... a question.

Outside, the city hummed and pulsed, its rhythms dictated by the Aethernet nodes and the corporations that controlled them. Somewhere in the distance, a Reclamation Unit's siren wailed, its tone sharp and insistent. 

Lucent wiped the cracked glyph from his AetherPhone and powered the device down. The screen went dark, but the strange fragment of code lingered in his mind, its symbols burning behind his eyelids like afterimages.

He needed to know more.

And there was only one place to get answers.

Lucent unfolded his aching body from the floor, knees popping like a string of firecrackers. His fingers brushed the cool metal of his jacket - the same one he'd worn for three winters running, its inner lining stitched with stolen dampening glyphs that barely worked anymore.

Outside, the city's artificial dusk was settling in, painting his ramshackle apartment in hues of corporate lights.

The Neon Bazaar would be stirring to life beneath the streets by now, its denizens emerging like rats from the cracks of the city.

Two birds with one stone - that's what he told himself as he checked the charge on his battered AetherPhone. Credits to keep the repo-mages from his door. Answers about Myriad's poisoned glyphs.

Simple.

He paused at the door, his hand on the knob, and glanced back at the Faraday cage's shattered remains.