The morning after graduation, I wake up to silence.
No Digivice buzzing. No Gatomon and BlackGatomon bickering through the speaker. No urgent mission alert dragging me out of bed at dawn. Just sunlight cutting through the blinds and the distant sound of traffic outside my apartment window.
I lie there for a minute, staring at the ceiling. The leather journal Olivia gave me sits on the nightstand next to my diploma. Both of them feel like artifacts from someone else's life.
My phone buzzes on the mattress beside me. I grab it.
TONY: Lab. 10 AM. Bring the gang. We've got work to do.
I check the time. Nine-fourteen.
I'm on Behemoth twenty minutes later, cutting through Queens traffic with the engine rumbling between my legs. The morning air is warm and thick, the kind that promises a hot summer. I pull into the Stark Industries parking garage at nine-fifty-three and kill the engine.
Peter's already there, leaning against the wall by the elevator with two coffees. He hands me one as I walk up.
"You look like you slept," he says.
"I did. Weird, right?"
"Tell me about it. I kept waiting for my spider-sense to go off."
We take the elevator up. The lab is on the top floor, behind three security checkpoints and a door that requires Tony's thumbprint. Peter and I both have clearance now. The doors slide open to reveal the main workspace — a sprawling, open-concept lab filled with workbenches, holographic displays, and more computing power than most countries.
Tony's already at the whiteboard, marker in hand. Gwen sits at a nearby workstation, her laptop open, surrounded by sketches and wireframe mockups. She looks up when we walk in and waves.
"You're late," Tony says without turning around.
"It's nine-fifty-eight," I say.
"Exactly. Late."
He caps the marker and steps back from the whiteboard. Written across it in Tony's sharp, angular handwriting is a single word:
EDEN
Beneath it, a web of connected components branches outward — power systems, data architecture, user interface, spatial encoding, network infrastructure. Lines connect each component to the others, forming a dense web of interdependencies.
"This," Tony says, tapping the word with the marker, "is the most ambitious thing any of us will ever build. And we're going to build it in the next eighteen months."
Peter sets his coffee down and moves closer to the board. "The arc reactor integration is the bottleneck. We've got the power output, but the sustained delivery—"
"Is YGD's problem," Tony interrupts. "Dr. Aris's team handles data flow. We handle the hardware. Gwen handles the interface."
Gwen holds up a tablet showing a 3D rendering of what looks like a sleek headset. "I've got three prototype designs. The lightest one is still too heavy for extended use, but I'm working on it."
The door opens again. Jessica walks in, looking around the lab with wide eyes. She's wearing jeans and a t-shirt, her hair pulled back in a simple ponytail. She stops just inside the doorway, taking in the holographic displays, the workbenches covered in components, the sheer scale of everything.
"This is..." She trails off.
"Overwhelming?" I offer.
"I was going to say insane."
Tony turns to face her. "You must be Jessica. Ethan's told me about you."
"He has?"
"Not the interesting stuff," I say quickly.
Tony smirks. "Sit. You're about to get the pitch."
Jessica pulls up a chair next to Gwen. I take a spot on the edge of a workbench. Tony picks up the marker and draws a circle around the word EDEN.
"All right. Let me bring everyone up to speed. EDEN is a virtual reality network. Not a game. Not a social media platform. A persistent, shared digital space that people enter, inhabit, and interact within." He draws a line from EDEN to a box labeled POWER. "The hardware requires massive sustained power delivery. That's where the arc reactor comes in. Peter and I have been miniaturizing the design. We're close."
Peter nods. "The Mark V reactor prototype can sustain output at three hundred percent above what the first-gen arc reactor managed. We're refining the housing now."
Tony draws another line to DATA FLOW. "YGD handles the data architecture. Dr. Aris's team confirmed the simulations work. The throughput requirements are beyond anything that exists commercially, but the blueprint accounts for it."
He points to the box labeled INTERFACE. "Gwen's designing the user-facing layer. How it looks, how it feels, how a human being moves through a non-physical space without getting lost."
Gwen rotates her tablet to show Jessica the rendering. "The goal is intuitive navigation. You shouldn't need a manual to exist inside EDEN."
Jessica stares at the screen. Then at the whiteboard. Then at me.
"Ethan... what is EDEN?"
The question hangs in the air. It's the same thing she asked at the amusement park, but this time it's different. This time she's asking about the thing we're building, not the thing we're fighting.
I slide off the workbench and walk over to the whiteboard. I pick up a marker and draw a simple stick figure.
"This is a person. Right now, they experience the digital world through a screen. They look at it. They tap it. They scroll." I draw a rectangle around the stick figure. "They're always outside looking in."
I draw another stick figure, this time inside a larger circle.
"EDEN removes the screen. The person enters the digital space. They're inside it. They can move through it, touch things, talk to other people who are also inside it. It's not a website you visit. It's a place you go."
Jessica frowns. "Like... a video game?"
"No," Gwen says, leaning forward. "A video game has rules. Objectives. Win conditions. EDEN doesn't. It's a space. What people do inside it is up to them. They could meet friends, build things, explore, work, create art. There's no game to win."
"It's a new layer of reality," Peter adds. "That's how Tony describes it. Not a replacement for the real world. An addition to it."
Jessica looks at the whiteboard again. Her expression shifts from confusion to something slower, more careful. Understanding, maybe. Or the beginning of it.
"So you're building a world," she says quietly.
"Yeah," I say. "We are."
Tony checks his watch. "Eighteen months. That's the timeline. Hardware prototype in six. Interface alpha in nine. First closed beta in fifteen. Full launch in eighteen."
"That's aggressive," Gwen says.
"That's the only kind of timeline I work with."
I look at the whiteboard. At the web of components and connections. At the word EDEN sitting at the center of all of it.
I pick up the marker and walk to the bottom corner of the board. Below everything else, I write:
DATASTREAM DYNAMICS – FOUNDED – JUNE 2009
The date feels right. This is the moment it stops being an idea and starts being real.
Behind me, Gatomon's voice crackles through the Digivice in my pocket.
"Is this the part where we celebrate?"
BlackGatomon chimes in. "I was thinking more along the lines of food."
"You're always thinking about food."
"And you're always thinking about napping. We all have our priorities."
I stifle a laugh. Peter glances at me and grins. He can tell the Digimon are talking.
Jessica catches my eye. She's still looking at the whiteboard, at the word EDEN, at the date I just wrote. When she looks back at me, there's something in her expression I haven't seen before.
Not confusion. Not overwhelm.
Purpose.
"So when do we start?" she asks.
Tony caps his marker. "We already have."
***
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