The counter hits zero, and for one full second, nothing happens.
Then every screen in the control room lights up at once.
User numbers climb so fast the display can barely keep pace with itself, the counter blurring past thresholds Olivia projected we wouldn't hit until next week. Server load graphs spike and hold steady. Peter's monitoring station fills with a wall of green that he stares at like it's a religious experience.
Peter grips the edge of his console with both hands, leaning into the screen like he doesn't trust his own eyes yet. "We're live. We are actually live."
Tony sets his mug down hard enough that coffee sloshes over the rim, and for once he doesn't seem to notice or care. "Told you the housing would hold."
"You told me it might hold. There's a difference."
"Semantics."
Gwen doesn't say anything at all. She just watches the interface metrics scroll past, her hand pressed flat against the console like she's checking a pulse, and when the numbers settle into a steady rhythm, one that says the system is holding strong instead of merely surviving, something in her shoulders finally lets go.
Olivia's the only one who doesn't react with her whole body. Her eyes move from the tablet to the room, and then she allows herself the smallest possible smile I've ever seen on her face.
Olivia doesn't lower the tablet. "Four hundred and twelve thousand active connections in the first ninety seconds. I'll let the rest of the day surprise you."
I'm apparently the only one in the room for whom that number just rewrote the next several years of my life.
I don't say anything either. I can't. My chest's doing something complicated, pride tangled up with disbelief and the specific kind of vertigo that comes from watching a thing you built in your head for eighteen months become real enough that other people are inside it right now, this second, without me.
That last part sticks with me longer than it should.
Because I haven't gone in yet.
I built the blueprint. I sat through the pitch meetings and the whiteboard sessions and the six a.m. calls with Dr. Aris about throughput ratios I only half understood myself. But I've never actually stood inside EDEN, not the way four hundred thousand strangers are standing inside it right now.
"I'm gonna log in." It's out of my mouth before I've fully decided to mean it. "See it from the other side."
Tony raises an eyebrow. "You built the thing and you haven't tried it yet?"
"I've tried the test builds. Broken glitchy versions with half the textures missing. This is different."
Peter's already reaching for a spare headset on the equipment rack. "This is the good version. You should see it clean. Come on, I'll set you up."
He hands it over, and I settle into one of the chairs near the back wall, the headset heavier than I remember from the prototype days, though Peter swears it's forty percent lighter than the first working model. Gwen crosses over and adjusts the strap at the back without asking, the same way she adjusts everything without asking, like she's already decided the correct configuration exists and she's just implementing it.
Gwen steps back and studies my face for a second. "Ready?"
"Define ready."
"Your heart rate's fine. Your hands are shaking a little, but that's normal for a first login." She steps back. "Go."
The room disappears before I finish processing that she was watching my hands.
A half second of nothing swallows me first, the strange, textureless dark that Peter once described as "the gap between rooms," and then light floods in from every direction at once, and I'm standing somewhere that isn't the control room anymore.
It's a city.
Not a lobby, not a menu screen with pretty backgrounds, an actual city, stretching out in every direction under a sky that shifts color slow enough that I only notice it's moving because I keep watching it. Buildings rise on either side of a wide boulevard, glass and light layered over something that looks almost like steel but glows faintly from within, veins of soft color running through the structure like the whole city has a pulse. Signs float above storefronts in a dozen languages, translating themselves in real time the moment my eyes land on them.
Somewhere ahead, a plaza opens up, ringed with kiosks and benches and what looks like a fountain made entirely of light instead of water.
People move through all of it. Real people, or the avatars of real people, walking and talking and pointing at things the way tourists do in a city they've never seen before, except every single one of them is seeing it for the first time today, at the same time, because I made this thing exist an hour ago.
I stand there longer than I mean to.
This is what four hundred thousand people are standing inside of right now.
Knowing a number is one thing. Feeling its size settle into your legs while you stand in the middle of the exact space it describes is another.
I pull out the Digivice, still strapped to my wrist even here, and open the connection.
Light gathers beside me, five separate points of it, and then my partners are there, solid and real in a way none of the passing avatars quite manage, standing on the boulevard like they've walked into it out of somewhere else entirely, which, I guess, is exactly what happened.
Gatomon lands lightly on the ground and looks around with the same calm, assessing expression she gives any new environment, cataloguing exits and angles before she lets herself relax into it.
A grin spreads across BlackGatomon's face before her paws even settle. "Oh, this is fun."
Agumon spins in a slow circle, mouth open, taking in the buildings, the light, the sheer scale of it. "Ethan, this is amazing! Is this real? I mean, is it, like, real real?"
"Real enough."
Close at my side, Gabumon's ears stay low, his eyes tracking the crowd instead of the architecture. "There are a lot of people."
"You'll be fine."
Ears flopping, Cutemon's already bouncing in place. "It's so pretty, chu! Look at the lights, look at the buildings, look at everything, chu!"
I don't get a chance to answer her, because that's when the first stranger notices them.
She's maybe twenty, avatar dressed in something bright and impractical, and she stops mid-stride to stare at BlackGatomon with the kind of expression usually reserved for concert merchandise.
"Okay, wait, that's the most detailed custom skin I've seen all day." She circles BlackGatomon like she's inspecting a car. "Is that a paid model? Where'd you even get texture work that clean?"
BlackGatomon's tail flicks with obvious enjoyment. "I wasn't modeled. I was born."
"Ha. Good bit. Very in-character." The girl waves over a friend. "You have to see this guy's avatar."
More of them drift over within seconds, the way a crowd gathers around anything that looks expensive or rare. Someone asks what render engine I used. Someone else asks if the fur physics are procedural or baked. Agumon insists he's not a render of anything, that he's an actual Digimon, and gets a round of appreciative laughter for what everyone assumes is dedicated roleplay.
Agumon plants his feet like the point needs backing up. "No, seriously. I'm real. I eat food and everything."
"That's some serious commitment to the bit, dude."
Agumon looks at me, betrayed. I shrug, because honestly, I don't know how to explain this any better than he just tried to.
Gatomon endures the questions with the particular stillness of someone counting down the seconds until it's socially acceptable to leave. Cutemon, on the other hand, is having the time of her life, soaking up every compliment like sunlight, occasionally adding a "chu~" just to see the crowd's reaction, which only makes them like her more. Gabumon stays half a step behind me the whole time, close enough that his shoulder brushes my leg, watching the attention land on everyone but him and seeming perfectly fine with that arrangement.
Eventually the crowd thins, pulled off toward some other novelty further down the boulevard, and it's just the six of us again, standing in the middle of a city built from a blueprint I bought off a system shop for fifty thousand Digi-Coins and eighteen months of my life.
I look around at all of it: the light, the buildings, the people still moving past, unaware that the guy standing next to a very convincing cat costume is the reason any of this exists at all.
My pulse settles into something steady, quiet and solid, nothing like the nervous energy from this morning. Not quite pride. Something steadier than that.
I built this.
And it's real.
***
Donate Power Stones to support this novel
Advance chapters in patreon.com/Najicablitz