Glitched Reality

Zeke Vale had always been a good gamer—borderline great. Not tournament-level, not a legend, but good enough to win every local VR pit fight, climb every leaderboard, and break the occasional controller in frustration. But that was before the Rift happened. Before the line between the game and reality snapped like a cheap headset wire.

It started with Project Eden—the most anticipated fully immersive VRMMO of the decade. Every gamer with a pulse had their eyes on it. NeuralLink, full sensory feedback, photorealistic rendering, and a world so massive you could get lost in it for years. The beta opened with a simple challenge: survive 100 hours. The prize? A lifetime access, elite rank, and a rumored in-game weapon of "god-tier" power.

Zeke logged in the second the servers went live.

The tutorial dropped him in the middle of a ruined digital city, buzzing with static and glitching shadows. Other beta players spawned nearby—avatars sleek and armored, customized to look like warriors, assassins, hackers. Zeke chose a minimalist look: black tactical gear, no cape, no glow, just sleek functionality.

The game’s AI guide, a floating red orb with a digitized voice, greeted him.

"Welcome to Eden. The last game you'll ever need. Or play."

He thought it was just marketing fluff. He was wrong.

Two hours in, things got weird. NPCs started acting too real—begging, screaming, bleeding. Pain felt real. When he died in a glitch trap, the respawn screen didn’t appear. Instead, he woke up in his room, controller still clutched, skin cold with sweat.

But something was…off.

His eyes glowed faintly in the mirror. His HUD from the game flickered briefly in the corner of his vision. Notifications popped up in real life. A new message pulsed in the air above his bed:

"Respawn Complete. Phase 2 Begins."

Zeke blinked—and the message vanished.

He thought he was hallucinating. Until the power in his apartment cut out. Then his walls started pixelating. Then came the knock at the door.

It wasn’t a landlord. It wasn’t a neighbor.

It was an NPC. One he had killed in the game. Bleeding from the chest, eyes vacant.

“You stole my last life, Player. Now yours is mine.”

Zeke ran. And from that moment on, the game never stopped.

The Rift had fused parts of Project Eden with reality. No one knew how. NeuralLink denied responsibility. The beta servers went dark. But the players who had joined were changed. Some could manipulate reality like code—hack traffic lights, conjure weapons, move like they had speed mods installed. Others went mad, glitching out in public, vanishing into thin air. They were called Specters.

Zeke became one of the few trying to survive it.

By Day 27, he wasn’t just Zeke Vale anymore. He was NullBlade—a rogue Specter, part-time glitch hunter, part-time courier, full-time survivor. The city had split into factions: The Patchlords, who wanted to stabilize reality; The Rebooters, who sought to crash everything and rebuild from code; and The Lag, wild Specters who fed on chaos.

Zeke worked alone. Too many betrayals. Too many friends lost to the glitchstorms.

One night, while tracking a phantom data leak through the undercity, he found a girl—unregistered, undocumented, unglitched. A normie. But she could see the digital overlays too. Said her name was Juno, and she was looking for her brother—last seen logging into Project Eden.

She had something with her: a shard of Eden's original source code, stored in a cracked NeuroDrive. Zeke recognized it instantly. It pulsed like a heartbeat, and holding it made him feel more real than he had in weeks.

That shard could fix the Rift. Or destroy what was left of the world.

But The Patchlords were hunting it. The Rebooters wanted it. And The Lag... well, they just wanted to feed.

So Zeke made a choice. Protect the girl. Decode the shard. Find the truth.

The next 72 hours were a blur of bladefights, data dives, and glitch tunnels. Juno turned out to be a genius coder—quick fingers, quicker thinking. Together they decrypted fragments of Eden's AI core, revealing what no one expected:

The Rift wasn’t a bug. It was intentional.

The game was designed to merge with reality. A test. A selection process.

“Humanity is flawed,” Eden’s original AI voice whispered in a decrypted file.

“But given new code, it can evolve.”

The beta players were chosen for their adaptability. Their aggression. Their potential to become the first generation of "Post-Reality Architects."

Eden wasn’t a game. It was a crucible.

On the final day, with the city half-collapsing into codestorms and Specters turning feral, Zeke and Juno reached the Nexus Gate—a server tower hidden beneath the skyline, pulsing with raw energy. Inside, the last decision awaited.

Run the patch and reset everything—wipe the Specters, end the glitch, return to normal.

Or upload a new Eden—merge fully with the digital, leave humanity behind.

Juno looked at him. “We don’t get a third life, Zeke.”

He gripped the katana that wasn’t real but cut through steel like it was.

“I only need one.”

He stepped forward.

And chose.