Summer, 2026

  At the ripe old age of seventeen, Johan ‘Halbrecht69’ Halbrecht was worth two-point-three million dollars. By nineteen that had almost doubled, and by the time he celebrated his twenty-second birthday, his combined income had inflated to a little over ten-point-eight million USD.

  It was a Thursday when the envelope stamped with the black Monolith tower slid through his front door. It flapped onto a pile of unopened letters and beige-brown Amazon parcels that he'd forgotten purchasing.

  He didn't see it for the first few days—Johan was deep in a three day feature stream with an upcoming indie studio. Swampspank. A goofy, third person MOBA-style shooter that was actually pretty good. Not the most polished of games, but scuffed in a 2008 kind of way that made him nostalgic enough to pretend it was the next big thing. Plus, he was getting paid just shy of fifty-k for the promo.

  After the stream had ended—neon glow “ty for watching” animation on loop—Johan stared blankly at his phone. His wallpaper was an anime style green-text. Stark white room, high angle, guy with his hands on his head with his face to the desk. The text read:

  >be me

  >twenty-three, no hope

  >please don't be me

  It made him feel profound every time he glanced at it, but really, he just liked the way the white space looked on his app screen.

  He had a text from his manager, Jackie. A promo gig for a new line of ergonomic pillows. He was thinking about answering it when he walked idly past the front door of his apartment, kicking past the envelope with his Nike sliders. The Monolith logo spun on the door mat like some psychedelic Jodorowsky movie. He ripped it open with his fingers—nails bitten down to the quick.

  In thin black letters it read:

  Johan,

  Ore sings to you in its eternal slumber.

  The Iron Ark is the final proving ground for the greatest competitors on this planet and the next.

  Will you answer its call?

  And beneath it, a single, blocky, black and white QR code.

  Johan scanned it, of course, white wallpaper briefly blinking as he opened the camera app.

  It took a scratchy voiced representative from Monolith less than three minutes to call him. Another sixteen or so for Jackie to blow up his phone with missed calls and voicemails.

  He signed the contract via an encrypted e-signature. He never read it in full. That was Jackie's job, and he paid her enough to make sure the T’s were crossed and the I’s dotted.

  By Tuesday he'd been flown out to a repurposed oil-rig off the coast of Kerala, and the following morning he experienced his first few hours in a Monolith 0Dimensional rig.

  Johan had never been intubated before. That should probably have been his first red flag, but the nurse had soft hands and her teeth were so crisp and white. She smelled like cool mint, like the expensive type of toothpaste that a wealthier friend has at a sleepover. When you realise that there are other detergent brands, not just the value box that your mum uses so much that you can no longer tell the difference.

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  He felt every fibre. Every blade of grass across his palms, every spec of sand between the roll of his fingertips. Sweat across his brow—the slick between his arse-crack and the weird leather jerkin that he'd spawned into the world wearing.

  Johan spent his first few steps in Ore roaming through a low-walled terrace dotted with thin, tubular fountains. He splashed his face in their clear blue waters; huffed the scent of bright yellow flowers like some yogi turned influencer; munched on small, orange fruits that tasted like apples and had a whiff of custard.

  Nothing tried to kill him in those first few hours.

  His own private Eden—though nothing slithered, nothing stalked, nothing hissed hexes or marked curses or whispered false beginnings.

  It was transcendental, exactly as Tim Graf had described at Gamescom several years prior, and at that point the toothpaste was way—way—out of the tube.

  Why would you play any game ever again? This wasn't that. This wasn't hunched over some stream-sponsored desk for sixteen hours a day, Zyn boxes scattered like spent relics, left arm slightly cocked like some Bellini polyptych.

  Johan had played VR. Oculus. Meta Quest. Vision Pro. Vive. They all sucked. He'd never gotten the gimmick, though developers had paid him handsomely to gush over them live on air.

  In fact, that's exactly how he started his stream after the demo had rolled down and they'd pulled the tube free from the space in his trachea.

  “Sorry guys—” he started.

  The tube had scratched his larynx on the way out, so his voice was scratchy and his throat tasted like pennies.

  “My voice is still fucked. Damn, I sound like Filthy Frank.”

  “Guys—I lied to you, okay? VR sucks. That Vive bullshit we did last year, even with the haptic stuff and the treadmill. That sucks, okay? What I just experienced… what Monolith have done. I don't fucking know, guys. I feel like a crack addict. Like genuinely. My skin doesn't feel good enough any more. I feel like I just injected the most delicious crack that has ever been cooked up directly into my eyeballs.”

  “Fuck.”

  Monolith had given him his own ocean-view apartment to decompress—kitted him out with some Bluetooth lav mics and an Alienware laptop to do a small broadcast to his followers.

  He didn't know it, of course, but Tim Graf and the team had paid a bot farm in Lanzhou to brigade the stream. Johan had titled it i'm never coming back…, and it was broadcast to a total viewership of over one point nine million.

  “Genuinely—guys. This has destroyed gaming for me. It has fucked it. I can't sit at my desk and play some stupid shitty CS and be authentic with you.”

  He sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

  “I can't unsee what I've just seen, guys. Monolith have still got the NDA so I can't tell you everything but please believe me. This changes everything. Like legit. No game, no bullshit little indie title, no super AAA studio, can even come close. I just, like, I don't even know. It's like I just saw a glimpse of god and she smelled so good, guys.”

  That line became the most clipped segment in Twitch history. It made its way around several global political spheres precisely as designed. There was just as much outrage as there was sheer elation—the fury only drove the clicks even higher.

  “There is kind of a catch though, chat. I gotta be real with you. I'm kind-of boned because I've already signed the contract but hey, we move.”

  “SO—its me and like fifty other streamers I think. I got no idea who else is here in this facility because they're keeping us separated. But, like, once 1.0 goes live—we basically have to stay in the game world until we get smoked. And, like… I guess that could be a really long time for some of the goats in here. You know, me included.”

  Johan stared out of the window, the ocean waves around carved like mountains.

  “But—like—I don't know. Basically, if we kill another player in Iron Ark then we instantly claim their net worth. Like, everything. The whole thing. We've… I’ve signed a contract that says that so…”

  He looked directly at the camera and grimaced wide with his eyes and teeth.

  “YOLO? Right?”

  That image would be gifed, screenshotted, and turned into at least seven different evolutions of the origin meme. Johan would become the poster child for a generation utterly consumed by digital hegemony.

  The end point of the Harambe arc.

  The water-line of the high tide mark—where it did not, in fact, recede where the scholars and the artists had predicted.

  It surged over the flood barrier like a mentos in a Pepsi bottle.

  “I mean—damn. There might be some whales in here, right?!”

  Johan grinned because it was the most natural thing he'd learned to do on stream.

  “I dunno though, guys. I'm gonna do it. Well, I'm kinda fucked so I have to do it now. We ball—”

  He paused and bit a fingernail.

  “—I can't lie. I kinda feel like if we died in that game then that would be it? Like… damn, everything was so god-damned-real.”

  “I don't wanna die, guys. Like, I like my life. I got it going pretty good with you guys.”

  “But, damn. This game. It really feels like my career just went to a whole other level.”