Elvander Gray sat in the dim glow of a flickering neon sign, the hum of the city pressing in from all sides. The bar, if it could even be called that, was a smog-drenched pit carved into the underbelly of MMORTIS, where broken men and rogue AIs drowned their sorrows in synthetic liquor and corrupted code. A low murmur of conversation filled the space, punctuated by the occasional static-laden cough of an overclocked cyborg.

He nursed a drink he couldn’t taste, fingers drumming against the table as the data-feed in his vision pulsed with news cycles he no longer cared about. Then his HUD flickered. A message burned across his retinas, overriding the garbage streams.

Sly News wants a word.

His fingers froze mid-tap.

Terry Rowntree.

The name alone sent a slow, crawling itch up his spine. Rowntree wasn’t just another media mogul scavenging scraps of truth to sell back to the desperate—he was the media. If there was a dark underbelly to HyperLondium, Rowntree was its voice, its archivist, its curator of uncomfortable truths.

Elvander exhaled through his nose. It was never good when someone like Rowntree called you in. Especially if he’s the CEO of the company you work for.

A presence shifted beside him.

“You gonna sit there all night, or do I have to drag you?”

Elvander turned his head slowly. A man—or something shaped like one—stood in the bar’s half-light. He was all sharp edges and synthetic muscle, a trench coat hanging open to reveal the unmistakable glow of a Kabal-issued Agape core pulsing in his chest. An Omega Enforcer.

Elvander took a lazy sip of his drink. “Tell Rowntree I don’t do interviews.”

The enforcer grinned, all teeth. “Who said it was optional?” He pulled out a lighter and flipped it as if it were seconds on a clock.

The bartender, a faceless automaton, turned the music up just a notch—enough to drown out whatever came next.

Elvander sighed, setting his glass down with a deliberate slowness. He didn’t need this. He didn’t want this. But Terry Rowntree had reached out, and that meant the game was moving whether or not he liked it.

He stood, rolling the tension out of his shoulders. “Fine. Lead the way.”

The enforcer turned on his heel, and together, they walked out into the neon rain.

Rain poured down in sheets, though whether it was real water or just another artifact of MMORTIS’ decaying code, he could not say. Ana Zognozia had given him a lot to think about during their sessions.

The neon glow of the city bled through the downpour, twisting in the puddles like an oil slick. He pulled his coat tighter around himself, though it did little against the damp.

The enforcer flicked his lighter, leading Elvander through HyperLondinium’s streets. Holographic billboards flickered, their messages corrupting mid-cycle. BUY NOW twisted into BE NOW—then into something ancient, unreadable.

They passed a screen playing a news segment. Sly News. Rowntree’s voice oozed through the speakers like a knife through silk:

“Do you ever wonder why the world doesn’t feel right? Why the past shifts when you’re not looking? MMORTIS is not just a game. It’s a story written in real time, and you’re not the author.”

Elvander felt something crawl up his spine. Does he know?

The enforcer didn’t slow down. The skyline twisted above them, towers rising and falling like living things, as if the city itself couldn’t decide on its shape. He tried not to stare too long.

The building came into view—a jagged, asymmetrical monolith, a contradiction of architecture that shouldn’t exist. Sly News HQ.

Elvander had been here many times before, but it had changed. The walls weren’t steel and glass any more. They pulsed, shifting between the physical and the digital, as though they weren’t sure which reality to occupy. He could feel the weight of it pressing against his thoughts.

The doors slid open with a low hiss.

Inside, the newsroom was a storm of information.

Banks of monitors filled the cavernous space, some showing live newsfeeds, others running loops of distorted history. On one screen, King Charles III was still alive. In another, the British Empire had never fallen. A third showed the Leon Koom Particle Accelerator spinning up, just moments before it cracked open the Choron Zone.

AI journalists flitted through the chaos like ghosts, their holographic forms flickering as they compiled data, rewriting narratives in real-time.

A headline scrolled past on an overhead ticker:

WHO OWNS REALITY?

Elvander’s stomach twisted.

The enforcer gestured toward a private elevator at the far end of the newsroom. “End of the line.”

Elvander hesitated, his reflection staring back at him from the elevator’s mirrored doors. The face he saw was his, but not his. He was too sharp, too defined—like someone had rendered him in higher resolution than the rest of the world.

The doors slid open.

Inside, Terry Rowntree was waiting.

*

Elvander stepped into the elevator. The doors slid shut behind him with the finality of a vault locking. Inside, the light was dim, humming with sickly fluorescence that cast jagged shadows over Terry Rowntree’s face.

Rowntree lounged in a battered chair, feet propped on a desk littered with papers, half-burnt cigars, and data-drives marked with cryptic labels. Empty Coala bottles lay strewn across the office like the wreckage of a long-fought siege. He grabbed the nearest half-empty bottle, drained it in one pull, then lobbed it into a growing mountain of glass in the corner.

His yellowed eyes, sharp from too many sleepless nights, flicked to Elvander.

“We all have our addictions, don’t we, Professor Gray?” Rowntree drawled, stretching the title like a joke. “Or should I say, Elvander Gray—the occult expert, the great heretic.” He leaned forward slightly. “You remember little, don’t you? Or do you still think you’re a journalist?”

Elvander’s stomach twisted. Rowntree tapped a button on his console.

The surrounding screens flared to life.

The footage was grainy, corrupted at the edges, but real. Undeniably real.

Elvander was in it.

Not as the confused amnesiac standing in this room—but as someone else. Someone sharper. Someone dangerous. He moved across a dimly lit lecture hall with cold precision, his presence commanding. Behind him, a massive diagram flickered into existence—the Leon Kooms Particle Accelerator, its labyrinthine structure sprawling like some eldritch glyph carved into the earth.

In the video, his voice was razor-edged with conviction.

“It’s not a research project,” the recorded Elvander said. “It’s a bomb. A ritual. A device designed to crack open the crust of the Earth and shatter the veil between dimensions.”

The room was filled with people. Their faces blurred by corrupted data. Some nodded. Others looked terrified.

Elvander watched himself continue.

“They speak of clean energy, of scientific advancement—but the truth is written in every occult manuscript from Babylon onward. They’re trying to finish what John Dee, Crowley, and Jack Parsons started. The Pacific Proving Grounds. The first atomic rituals. They want to summon something.” His voice lowered. “And they’re using science as the incantation.”

Elvander staggered back a step, his pulse hammering.

This wasn’t MMORTIS. It wasn’t some scripted fragment of lore buried in the game’s archives.

This was real.

His stomach lurched. He tried to step back, but the footage held him prisoner.

Rowntree let the footage play. Another moment. Another revelation.

A news broadcast.

Elvander—no, Professor Elvander Gray—stood outside the Leon Kooms facility, floodlights painting him in stark relief. His voice carried through the static-choked airwaves.

“They call themselves scientists. They think they’ve found the God Particle. And they believe they can control this god. That they can contain it.”

A pause.

“But what they don’t understand—”

A blast of light swallowed the screen.

Then, nothing.

Rowntree exhaled smoke through his nose and clicked off the feed. The newsroom felt too quiet.

Elvander’s hands were shaking. “What… what happened to me?”

Rowntree leaned back, eyes dark with something between pity and amusement. “You got too close to the truth.” He tapped his temple. “Brought something back with you from the Choron Zone.” Then he gestured vaguely at the world around them. “And then this? MMORTIS.”

Elvander’s throat was dry. His memories—fractured, half-formed—swam beneath the surface, just out of reach.

Had he died in the Choron Zone?

Had the expedition twisted him into something new?

Had it made MMORTIS?

Rowntree leaned forward.

“MMORTIS.” His voice turned sardonic, like a salesman reciting a tagline. “Massively Multiplayer Online Real-Time Immersive Simulator.”

He stood, pacing, taking frequent gulps from a fresh bottle of Coala.

“The next step in virtual reality.” He spread his hands wide like an old-world televangelist. “But there was just one problem.”

He let it hang.

Elvander swallowed. “There’s no way to turn it off.”

The words landed like a coffin lid slamming shut.

Somewhere in the distance, an alarm wailed.

Something was coming.

*

The alarm blared, bathing the office in rhythmic flashes of crimson, but Terry Rowntree didn’t flinch. He just laughed—a dry, crackling sound, like old circuitry frying.

Elvander barely registered it. His thoughts were collapsing in on themselves like a dying star.

“And stop looking for an exit,” Rowntree said. “There isn’t one.”

The elevator door was gone. In its place, a seamless wall of marble.

Rowntree leaned forward, his bloodshot eyes glinting in the glow of the monitors. His pupils were needle-thin, swallowed by the sickly light. He was shaking, though whether from excitement or madness, Elvander couldn’t tell.

“Oh, this is beautiful,” Rowntree breathed. “This is fucking beautiful. You’re finally getting it, aren’t you?”

Elvander gritted his teeth. “Getting what?”

Rowntree jabbed a nicotine-stained finger at him. “You. The Choron Zone. MMORTIS. Thelema. The whole bloody circus.” He threw his hands up. “You think you’re just another lost soul? A journalist working for me? They made you the thing you hate the most.”

The monitors flickered. A dozen feeds—news reports, black-market data leaks, corrupted video files. Each one centered on a single name: Elvander Gray.

“You’re the reason we’re all trapped here.”

The words didn’t fit. They snagged in his brain like glass in flesh.

“That’s impossible.”

Rowntree’s grin stretched too wide. “Is it? Then let me spell it out nice and slow.”

The screens behind him filled with brain scans.

Elvander’s brain scans.

Neon-blue cross-sections of a mind no longer entirely human. Electrochemical pathways spiraled outward—recursive, infinite. The architecture of thought rewritten in something alien.

A lattice of nanotech threaded through living tissue, its glow identical to the mutated synapses in the scan.

“You remember the Leon Koom Particle Accelerator?” Rowntree’s voice was a fevered rasp. “You remember what you said? That it was a bomb? That it would crack the Earth’s crust?” He leaned closer, breath thick with nicotine and paranoia. “Well, you were half right.”

Elvander’s vision swam. Sparks of pain fired like a Gatling gun through his skull—memories detonating in jagged bursts.

“The explosion wasn’t just an explosion. It was an invocation.”

The footage changed. The accelerator roaring to life. A sphere of impossible darkness forming in the heart of Britain. The moment the Choron Zone opened and Thelema poured out.

Then, the aftermath.

Britain wasn’t destroyed. It was rewritten. The land reshaped into the Four Zoas, those mythical realms of Blakean vision. Reality hadn’t just broken—it had become something new.

And at the center of it all—

“You.”

Elvander staggered back. “No. That’s—that’s bullshit.”

Rowntree bared his teeth. “No, professor. That’s lore.”

The word hit like a hammer.

Lore. The foundation of MMORTIS. The history that defined the game. Except…

Something cracked in Elvander’s head.

Memories surged, jagged and wrong. Sitting in a university lecture hall, scribbling occult equations, speaking in hushed tones.

The night of the experiment.

The machine firing. The country split in four. A gateway torn open.

The Choron Zone. The expedition. The screams.

Leon Kooms. The eldritch scripts. The only survivor.

And now MMORTIS—so much more than a game.

“What do you mean, I’m at the center of it all?” His voice was raw, shredded by the surge of memories.

Rowntree exhaled through his nose. “You already know. It’s what you brought back with you.” He gestured to the screens. “The key to siphoning Agape.”

The feed shifted—lines of code scrolling too fast to follow. But this wasn’t programming. It was language. A living, writhing thing. A spell woven from numbers and blood.

“MMORTIS wasn’t just a game,” Rowntree said. “It was a containment field. A siphon.”

Elvander’s hands curled into fists.

“Do you know why it feels so real?” Rowntree’s voice was a whisper now, almost reverent. “Why every time you question it, reality pushes back?”

The answer lodged in Elvander’s throat, choking him.

Because it was alive.

Rowntree slammed a button, and the final revelation unfolded across the screens—

*

The footage is degraded, distorted as though corrupted by time itself. Glitching, bursts of static, and the occasional stutter of audio give the clip an otherworldly quality, as if it’s a fragment of a dream piecing itself back together. The lighting is dim, academic in tone but shadowed, with occult symbols faintly visible on a chalkboard or projected onto a screen behind the speaker.

The Scene unfolds in a lecture hall; the camera catching Professor Elvander Gray in mid-sentence. His late-thirties face is intense, charismatic, yet there’s an undercurrent of weariness in his voice—a man who has ventured too deeply into forbidden knowledge. Behind him, the room is a strange blend of ancient tools, books, and holographic diagrams that pulse with an unsettling energy. The audience is invisible, the space feeling as much as a tomb as a classroom.

The transcript of the key moments is:

“Thelema is not merely a mystical force. It’s a living current, an energy older than civilization itself. What Crowley touched upon—what he glimpsed—was just below the surface. Beneath it lies something vast, something primordial. The ancients called it ‘Agape,’ the cosmic love that binds creation together. But Agape is more than love—it’s power. And like any power, it can be harnessed… or consumed.”

As he speaks, the image flickers. A glitch warps his face, elongating it, distorting him into something almost inhuman before snapping back to normal.

“The Star of Chaos—the Key of Choronzon—is not a symbol. It’s a cipher. A lock. And somewhere, scattered across history, its fragments are waiting to be found. But here’s the danger: whoever holds the Key does not merely unlock Choronzon. They risk opening themselves to it. And Choronzon is not chaos as we understand it. It’s anti-structure. entropy incarnate. It is the great devourer of meaning.”

The footage skips, and the sound skips with it, creating a sudden, unsettling pause in the flow. The words continue:

“And yet… there is hope. Agape is not just fuel for destruction; it is the antidote. A perfect harmony of opposites. However, if the Kabal discovers a way of siphoning it, they would have control over Thelema, commodifying it, like fossil fuels—”

Another glitch, this time his voice distorts, overlapping with faint, cryptic whispers. Then the audio cuts off completely. Elvander’s face stares into the camera, his eyes intense, as though he’s aware of being watched. His gaze seems to pierce through the screen, locking onto the viewer. And then, the screen goes dark.

The clip ends abruptly, leaving a heavy silence in its wake. A corrupted symbol—the Star of Chaos—flickers on the screen, its jagged points wavering in and out of shape before the video cuts to black.

In Terry’s office, Elvander is shaken, still staring at the now-dark screen.

“That’s me,” he whispers, the weight of the revelation settling in. “That’s… me.”

Terry, leaning back in his chair, gives a small, almost reluctant smile. “Yeah, it is. And if you’re wondering why the hell I have it, let’s just say it wasn’t easy to get my hands on. The Kabal wiped everything they could about you, but this? This was buried so deep even they must’ve forgotten it existed. Lucky me, eh?”

Elvander doesn’t respond immediately. He’s still staring at the screen, his mind racing. “MMORTIS… is a siphon? For Agape? And I gave them the key to siphoning it.” His body, neurasthenic, as he wrestled back the convulsions.

Terry’s tone sharpens, growing more serious. “Oh, I know the irony, right?” He chuckled, “But it’s more than that, mate. It’s a bloody black hole. And you? You’re the only one who’s ever gotten close enough to figure out how to collapse it. Looks like they missed a spot, though. Somewhere in that skull of yours, there’s something they need. Something you need to remember.”

The air between them is thick with the weight of unspoken truths, the kind that could reshape everything Elvander thought he knew. His neurons were nearing the crescendo before he threw up the synthol he’d been drinking earlier.

*

Rowntree watched in amusement, his tirade unrelenting. “Thelema feeds on emotion,” Rowntree said, his voice low, manic. “But Agape—that’s the pure stuff. Love, passion, humanity in its rawest form. You think Kabal wanted a new world? No. They wanted a battery. Something to keep Thelema running forever. And guess what, professor?”

He pointed a trembling finger at himself and then Elvander.

“We are the power source.” The Holo screens flickered again. It was a blurred shot of Newton’s Cradle, where pods containing gamers extracted their emotions, their souls, the force that made them human. Agape.

“I still remember logging in. It was the biggest thing since AI. Millions trapped in the space of a few days, and many more since. Now doing the work for those outside of it, while they suck our souls dry in the process to refine into Agape cores.” Rowntree opened another Coala, drinking deep.

Elvander’s ears rang, the floor tilted under him. The room felt suddenly too small, as if the entire world was closing in.

“No.” Elvander clutched at his head, breath coming in ragged gasps. “No, no, that’s—that’s not possible.”

It couldn’t be true. His own reflection stared back at him from one of the monitors.

Sharp. Too sharp. Higher resolution than the world around him.

Like something rendered separately.

Like something more real than the game itself.

Something inside him cracked. A terrible, yawning void opened in his chest, sucking in every certainty he had ever known.

The memories, the visions, the pieces of himself he had spent so long trying to hold together—

They weren’t just breaking.

They were rearranging.

“You’re the reason this world exists, Elvander,” Rowntree whispered. “And you’re the reason it can’t end.”

The alarms screamed louder. Someone was coming.

Rowntree straightened, shaking the tension from his limbs. He grabbed Elvander by the lapels, voice suddenly deadly serious.

“You need to make a choice, professor.” His eyes burned with something between desperation and reverence. “Do you let them keep you in here forever?” His grip tightened. “Or do you burn it all down?”

*

The alarms howled, flashing red light tearing through the smoke-stained office. The walls vibrated like something was pressing in from the outside.

But Terry Rowntree wasn’t running.

He just stood there, grinning that nicotine-stained grin, his fingers twitching at his sides. His eyes flickered between Elvander and the screens—those damned screens—still scrolling with unreadable text, rewriting history in real time.

“You’re shaking,” Rowntree muttered. “That’s good. Means you’re waking up.”

Elvander barely heard him. His mind was fracturing, rearranging itself in a violent, jagged spiral. MMORTIS—his mind—the Agape siphon; none of it should have been possible. None of it should have.

He clutched his head. “If this is all true,” he rasped, “what happens next? “

Rowntree let out a wheezing chuckle. “Oh, professor.” His pupils were too small. “You’re not ready for the answer to that one.”

Elvander forced himself to breathe. “Tell me.”

The CEO turned back to the screens, eyes drinking in the endless cascade of data like a dying man seeing God.

“You ever wonder what happens when the heart stops pumping?” He gestured at the monitors, a mockery of a magician unveiling a grand trick. “When the machine runs out of fuel? When the last drop of Agape is squeezed from the bones of the millions trapped in here?”

Elvander didn’t answer.

Rowntree didn’t need him to.

“MMORTIS is gonna go mad.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like a starving animal. Just like a god denied its worship. The players—those poor, lost bastards—they won’t just die, professor.” His voice trembled with something between reverence and horror. “They’ll unmake. “

The screens flickered, showing glimpses of what was to come.

A city dissolving into endless static, players screaming as their avatars melted into digital sludge. A colossal, writhing thing made of code and flesh, rising from the depths of MMORTIS like a nightmare clawing its way out of a dream. Shattering into light, the player’s last words, THIS ISN’T A GAME, remained frozen in the chat as he stared into the heavens.

Elvander stumbled back. “No. “

“Yes,” Rowntree whispered, breath hitching in a manic laugh. “And it’s gonna be beautiful. “

The alarms screamed louder. The walls pulsed like a living thing.

Elvander grabbed Rowntree by the collar. “We have to stop it.”

But the journalist was laughing now, really laughing, like he’d just heard the punchline to some cosmic joke.

“Stop it?” He wheezed. “None of this is real.”

“You don’t remember, do you? What they did to you? What you became? The Nyxus Experiments.”

And before Elvander could react, Rowntree pulled a gun from his coat, pressed it against his temple—

—BANG.

Blood splattered across the monitors. The gun clattered to the floor.

Elvander froze. His breath hitched. The world felt too quiet.

Rowntree’s body twitched, his face still twisted in that mad, satisfied grin. His lips moved, one last whisper curling into the air like smoke.

“None of this is real.”

Then his eyes glitched, flickering like corrupted pixels.

And he was gone.

Not dead. Not a corpse. Just… gone.

Alarms reached a fever pitch. The wall that was once the entrance blew open. Green beams of laser sights piercing the smoke, as Omega Enforcers flooded in.

The game had moved, shifting, the office folding in on itself. If none of this is real, I can control it. And with that thought, he allowed the game to swallow him.

To be Continued

© Aiwaz, 2025. All rights reserved.