Fifth Book

Sample first chapter

“Pull up Borealis,” she requests to the empty room. Light spills out, spinning up ghosts – their first sketchy builds rotating in space, vid caps of the team running on caffeine and spite, desperate messages from players watching their worlds unravel. Each memory with what it felt like then – the rush of creation, the anxiety, the wild hope that they could actually pull this off.

Stats scroll past the window: player count stabilizing, rage-quit rates down, less “dead game” spam in the forums. But it’s the comments that get her – kids finding their people across time zones, shut-ins building whole art scenes, pure chaos energy of players pushing the engine places it was never meant to go.

Her feed pings: Jiro and Rae are already up at the office, bouncing off walls about the new social features. It’s not some fake AI emotion simulator – just better ways for real people to actually connect. 

Today’s to-do list feels solid: pitch the player council idea, crack open more source code, maybe finally launch those workshops for baby devs who want to build worlds of their own.

Mekha calls up her journal. Zindra pixelates into the room wearing that old coat of hers, the one with scuffed haptic panels down the sleeves. Light from the volumetric display catches the worn spots where she’s traced too many maps on distant worlds.

“When was the last time you slept?” She perches on Mekha’s desk, right through a cluster of deadline alerts. “Still trying to make it perfect?”

Mekha watches rain bead on the smart glass. “Tell me about Dad’s violins again.”

“The ones he’d find at estate liquidations and restore? All that ancient wood, cracked from too many seasons on dying worlds, strings gone musical-dead.”

“Yeah.” Mekha’s fingers hover over the neural interface. “The new printed ones made mathematically perfect sound, but those broken ones…” She trails off, remembering. “Dad always said they played extraordinary songs. Like the wood remembered every hand that ever held it. Wedding dances from Earth. Kids learning scales in colony ships. Someone’s last lullaby before the evacuation.”

That’s what scares the corps about larimar tech, Mekha thinks – memories aren’t something you can own. Every broken violin carries ghosts of the hands that played it, just like every gem holds echoes of where it’s been. The new printed instruments are perfect, dead things. But the old ones, the survivors – they remember, carrying patterns older than human thought in their scars. You can’t package that kind of truth. Can’t control it. 

These aren’t just lost recordings. They’re alive, mixing with our own thoughts, shaping how we dream tomorrow. Every one is a bridge, past flowing into present, present flowing into future. The corps want to control it, contain it, but you might as well try to bottle starlight. It lives in the broken places, where perfect things crack and real bleeds through.

“Kind of like your mother’s garden.” Zindra’s voice goes soft as settled dust.

“Yes! Behind the decom’d fusion plant. Soil was dead – radiation, nanite corruption, structural waste. The agri-corps said nothing would grow there. But she’d plant between the decay-blocks, in recycled atmo-scrubbers, through the bones of old machines. Red roses and Earth-mint breaking through. She said plants had to work harder in broken ground, reach deeper, learn secrets from the rust and background rad.”

“So why does this sim have to run perfectly?” Zindra questions.

Through the window, ancient mag-lev tracks rattle in their housings. The city shivers below, its millions of lights reflecting in pools of rain. “Because everything else is falling apart.”

“Like that factory ground before your mother got there? Like those violins before your father found them?” Zindra’s coat ruffles with remembered moonlight. “Cities fall. Get rebuilt. Each time carrying dataweave echoes of what they were.”

“You’re saying things have to break?”

“I’m saying breaking isn’t ending. Rivers change course. Mountains become sand. Stars die to seed new worlds.”

This triggers a memory: She’s looking into still water in a marble basin in her backyard. She’s six, maybe seven, complaining to no one: “It’s so boring when everything stays the same.”

Then wind catches the garden trees. Cherry blossoms spiral down and drift like tiny boats. Her finger breaks the surface, draws one perfect circle. Water dances. Petals spin in her tiny galaxy. She remembers being pure joy, watching chaos turn to patterns from that single touch.

There’s something magical in seeing how you can alter things – water bending to your touch, watching your code flip switches in the real world, catching that moment when your moves make stuff shift and dance. Even better when that change has some sort of positive impact on someone else’s life. 

The memory shifts, bleeds into darkness between stars. Real galaxies now, spinning the same ancient dance. Solar winds. Planetary orbits. Planets rising blue and fragile, then—

The Overseer’s face fills every screen in the sector. Sweat catches stadium lights. “I serve only YOU, my Rosons!” Behind him, the crowd roars like a living thing. Their banners eclipse the stars.

His voice cracks with passion: “Today we break free! Our new quintessence array brings power undreamed of!” The cheering drowns him out. When it lessens, his words turn gentle, almost loving: “We must shatter these shackles. Expand our circle of compassion until it holds all living things, all the beauty of creation. None of us can do it perfectly. But in trying—” He touches his heart. “In trying, we find liberation. Find security.”

Years later, she sits alone at her window. The array cluster feels cold in her hands. Her whisper fogs the glass: “Give me power. Give me love. Give me something that feels like home.”

Outside, cherry blossoms fall through starlight. Still spinning.

Mekha stares at her code, waiting to become something true. She thinks about cities rebuilding from their own atoms, carrying old stories in new configurations.

“It’s time to build something honest,” she says to the empty room, Zindra’s presence dissolving like morning fog. “Something that knows how to break and is worthy of growing again.”

Outside, rain falls on streets that remember all their names.

Her hand hovers over her workstation. The surface waves, ready to spark into life. An idea takes shape – not another game, but something bigger. “New project,” she says under her breath. Her desk flickers on. Through the window, morning hits the towers, and for once the whole mess feels fixable.