The second session starts with pizza.
Peter arrives at DataStream Dynamics with two boxes from Sal's and a grin that takes up half his face. Gwen follows with her laptop already open, diagnostic tools running before she's through the door. Jessica carries a sketchbook, which she sets on the workstation without explaining why.
I'm already there, running the pre-checks on the terminal pods. Four stations. Four headsets. Four sets of haptic gloves lined up like soldiers.
"Alright," Peter says, dropping the pizza on the table. "Last time was the tutorial. Today we actually test this thing."
"We tested it yesterday," Gwen says, not looking up from her screen.
"We played in it. That's not the same as testing."
"It's exactly what testing is."
"No, testing is breaking it. I want to break it."
I glance at Gwen. She's already pulling up the monitoring interface, her fingers flying across the keyboard. "That's what I'm here for."
Jessica picks up a headset, turning it over in her hands. "What are we doing differently?"
"Load," I say. "Yesterday we had four users in a controlled environment. Today we push the system. Multiple simultaneous builds, physics stress, collision complexity. We find the breaking point."
"And then we fix it," Gwen adds.
"And then we fix it," I agree.
We settle into our pods. The headsets fit better this time, like they've learned the shape of our skulls. I flex my fingers in the haptic gloves and watch the calibration bars on my Digivice tick green.
"Everyone ready?" Gwen asks.
"Ready," Peter says.
"Ready," Jessica says.
I activate the connection.
The white room materializes around me. The plaza assembles itself piece by piece, the gymnasium snapping into place, Jessica's studio glowing gold, my modest house settling onto its foundation. Impmon's throne gleams in the center of it all.
Gatomon and BlackGatomon materialize on the gymnasium steps. Renamon appears on my roof. Impmon drops from nowhere and lands on his throne with a flourish.
"BACK AGAIN?" Impmon says. "Humans are so predictable."
"Shut up, Impmon," Gatomon says.
Peter's avatar appears in the gymnasium doorway. "Okay. Gwen, can you spawn obstacles? I want to build a course."
"Already on it." Gwen's voice comes from everywhere and nowhere. The plaza floor shifts. Walls rise. Platforms extend at varying heights. A full obstacle course materializes in the gymnasium, complete with moving barriers and rotating platforms.
Peter whoops. "Yes. Okay. Gravity increase in zone one."
The air in the gymnasium thickens. I can feel it even from the plaza, a heaviness that pulls at the edges of the simulation.
"Wind variable," Peter says. "Zone two."
A gust tears through the gymnasium, strong enough to make the moving barriers sway.
"Collision complexity to maximum."
The barriers begin moving faster, their patterns more intricate. Peter launches himself into the course, leaping between platforms, dodging barriers, riding the wind currents.
Jessica watches him for a moment, then turns to her studio. "I want to try something."
She raises her hands. The creative tools respond. Her studio begins to grow. Walls extend upward. Floors multiply. A tower rises from the center of her space, stretching toward the virtual sky, its surface covered in intricate patterns she's designing in real-time.
I check my Digivice. Performance metrics scroll across the screen. Processing load: sixty-two percent. Memory allocation: fifty-eight percent. Network throughput: forty-one percent.
Everything reads green.
"Peter, how's the course?" Gwen asks.
"Hard. Good hard. The wind is messing with my trajectory but I can adapt." He catches a platform edge, swings, barely clears a rotating barrier. "This is incredible."
"Jessica, how high is that tower going?"
"I don't know yet." Jessica's voice is distant, focused. The tower keeps rising. Fifty meters. Seventy. A hundred.
I watch the metrics. Processing load: seventy-four percent. Memory: sixty-nine percent.
Still green.
"Peter, add more obstacles," Gwen says. "I want to see what happens when we stack variables."
The gymnasium fills with new barriers. Rotating platforms multiply. The wind intensifies. Peter laughs as he navigates the chaos.
Jessica's tower hits a hundred and fifty meters. She's adding details now, windows, balconies, structural supports that curve in ways that shouldn't work but do.
Processing load: eighty-three percent. Memory: seventy-eight percent.
Yellow.
"Gwen," I say. "We're approaching limits."
"I see it. Give me another thirty seconds."
Peter adds a vertical loop to his course. Jessica adds a second tower, connecting it to the first with a bridge that spans the plaza. Gatomon and BlackGatomon start racing through Peter's obstacle course, their movements adding more load to the physics engine.
Processing load: eighty-nine percent. Memory: eighty-five percent.
"Gwen—"
"Just a few more—"
The gymnasium floor flickers.
It's quick. A half-second stutter where the textured surface vanishes and reveals the white void underneath. Then it's back.
Everyone stops.
"What was that?" Peter asks.
Gwen doesn't answer. I can hear her typing through the comms, fast and sharp.
The floor flickers again. Longer this time. A full second of void before the texture snaps back.
"Stop moving," Gwen says. "Everyone stop moving."
We freeze. Gatomon and BlackGatomon halt mid-leap. Peter grabs a platform edge. Jessica's hands drop to her sides.
The plaza stabilizes. Barely.
I look around. The edges of the gymnasium are blurring, the walls losing definition. Shadows are missing from Jessica's studio, the golden light falling flat and wrong. Impmon's throne flickers between gold and white.
"Gwen, what's happening?" Jessica asks.
"Spatial encoding degradation." Gwen's voice is tight. "The system can't maintain environmental integrity under simultaneous load. Four users building and moving at once is pushing past the prototype's limits."
Peter's avatar turns to look at me. "So we're breaking it."
"We're breaking it," Gwen confirms.
"Can you fix it?"
Silence. Then: "Not quickly."
The plaza flickers again. Jessica's tower warps, its geometry folding in on itself like paper caught in a flame. She gasps and steps back. The tower snaps back to normal but the edges are wrong now, jagged where they should be smooth.
"We should log out," Gwen says.
We do. One by one, the plaza fades. The white room returns. The headsets lift away.
The lab feels smaller than before. The terminal pods sit in their row, humming quietly, like nothing happened.
Gwen is already at her workstation, pulling up diagnostic data. Her screen is a waterfall of red.
"The spatial encoding degrades under simultaneous load," she says, not looking at us. "Four users building and moving at once is the threshold. Past that, environmental integrity collapses."
"How long to fix?" I ask.
She finally looks at me. Her expression is the answer before she speaks.
"I don't know. The encoding architecture needs to be rebuilt. Not patched. Rebuilt. That's months of work. Maybe six. Maybe more."
Peter leans against his pod. "So we're stuck at four users."
"We're stuck at four users in controlled conditions. If they're all building simultaneously, we're stuck at three."
Jessica sits down in her chair, her sketchbook untouched on the table. She doesn't say anything.
I look at the terminal pods. Four stations. Four headsets. Four sets of gloves.
Yesterday, this felt like the beginning of something.
Today, it feels like a wall.
"Gwen," I say. "Thank you for catching it."
She nods. "Catching it is my job."
I stay in the lab after the others leave. Peter has to meet Aunt May. Gwen has to run a full diagnostic report. Jessica just needed to go.
The terminal pods hum in the silence.
I pull up the EDEN blueprint on my Digivice. The architecture is elegant. The spatial encoding is revolutionary. And it's not enough.
Six months. Maybe more.
I think about the System Shop, about the millions of Digi-Coins I don't have. I think about Tony's timeline, about the eighteen months he gave us. I think about the distance between what we built and what we need.
It's farther than I thought.
I sit down in the nearest pod and stare at the blank screen. The reflection looking back at me is tired.
But not done.
Not yet.
***
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