Cosmic Lights

The pods were everywhere in Crevon City, and Ricky could not afford a single one.

They lined the storefronts on the upper streets — long rows of white shells, each one tilted at a slight angle like a sleeping figure caught mid-fall, each one glowing softly at the seams with the pale blue light that meant occupied. You saw them through the glass as you walked past, the bodies inside still and slack, faces smooth, the faint movement of dreaming eyes behind closed lids. People on their lunch breaks. People on weekends. People who had saved for three months to buy four hours inside.

The service was called Elysium. The company that ran it was called the same. The founder and primary shareholder was a man named Conrad Vael, whose face appeared on the screens above the upper streets with the frequency of a god who enjoyed the reminder.

The pitch was simple. You lay in the pod. The interface read your neural signals and you transferred — not physically, but in every way that mattered to the experience of being — into a simulated world built to a fidelity that made the real world seem rough and approximate by comparison. Inside, you could be anyone. You could be a hero. You could walk into a room and have people turn toward you with recognition and warmth. You could be exactly who you had always wanted to be, in a world that responded to you accordingly.

People got addicted. This was documented and debated and ultimately irrelevant, because the service was legal and the demand was enormous and Conrad Vael was very rich.

Ricky was seventeen years old and lived in the lower district and delivered packages on a bicycle for a company that paid him barely enough to eat. He had never been in a pod. He had stood outside the glass and watched the bodies inside and done the mathematics on his wages many times and arrived at the same answer every time, which was not yet and possibly never.

He wanted it with the specific hunger of someone who has been told, by the architecture of the world, that certain things are not for them.

He planned the theft for six weeks.

He was not a criminal by nature — he was, in fact, methodical and careful and smarter than the job he was doing suggested. The planning came naturally. He studied Vael’s personal residence, which was a tower on the highest point of the upper district. He studied the security patterns. He studied which days the household was lightest on staff.

He was not stealing from someone who would miss it. He had established this in his own mind thoroughly before he did anything. Vael’s net worth was a number so large it had stopped being money and become abstraction. What Ricky needed was four thousand credits — enough for a pod contract, six months of unlimited access, the basic tier. Four thousand credits was an amount Conrad Vael would not notice losing any more than a person notices losing a single hair.

The theft took eleven minutes. He was in and out of the residential storage system with the four thousand credits transferred to a layered account he had set up with considerable care.

He spent three hundred on a pod contract that afternoon. He lay down in the white shell at a Elysium franchise on the edge of the middle district, the attendant fitting the interface points to his temples with practised hands, and he closed his eyes.

The world inside was blue.

Not the blue of the pods’ seam-light — a deeper blue, vast and open, the blue of a sky at the moment between late afternoon and evening when the colour is most fully itself. He was standing on a platform above a city that was not Crevon — larger, more luminous, built for a different kind of story.

He had chosen a template from the menu during the intake process. Hero, it was called. Simple enough. He was the person the city needed. He had abilities he could feel in the new architecture of his simulated body — speed, strength, the particular lightness of something that cannot be hurt. He leapt from the platform and the wind caught him and he did not fall.

Below him, people looked up.

He spent four hours being exactly who he had wanted to be. He saved people from constructed disasters that the simulation generated with elegant timing. He landed in the centre of crowds and heard the sound of human approval, clear and genuine and directed at him, which was a sensation he had no previous reference point for. He was thanked. He was cheered. He was looked at with a warmth that had nothing conditional about it.

He came back to his body with tears drying on his face, which he was glad the attendant was too professional to comment on.

He went back the next day, and the day after.

The police came to his flat on a Thursday morning three weeks into his contract.

Conrad Vael’s security systems were, it turned out, more sophisticated than Ricky’s six weeks of planning had accounted for. The layered account had been traced. The theft had been flagged. Conrad Vael had, apparently, noticed the loss of four thousand credits in the way that very rich people notice small thefts — not because it was significant, but because the principle was.

The judge sentenced him to one year. He was seventeen, it was a first offence, and the amount was relatively minor, and these factors produced a sentence that could have been worse. He served it in a minimum-security facility on the south side of the city and was released on a Tuesday morning in autumn with his original possessions, minus the three hundred credits he had spent on the pod contract, and a record.

He was eighteen years old. He had lost a year. He had nothing that he had not had before, and the memory of four hours of blue sky and the sound of a crowd.

He went back to his flat and sat at his table and looked at the ceiling for a long time.

Then he opened his screen and began to research.

He had a year and access to the facility’s basic educational system and a quality that the theft had demonstrated, which was the ability to focus on a problem for a very long time without losing interest. He spent the year learning. Network architecture, system vulnerabilities, the specific proprietary frameworks that Elysium used for their pod interface. These were not publicly available, but fragments of them existed in research papers and leaked documentation and the accumulated knowledge of various communities that traded in this kind of information.

He was released knowing more than he had when he went in.

He spent four months after his release refining what he knew and acquiring what he still needed. He did not steal money this time. He worked the delivery job again, carefully, and spent nothing he did not have to spend, and in the evenings he worked at the screen until late.

He found the vulnerability in Elysium’s system on a Wednesday night in spring.

The pod interface had a direct connection to the user’s neural activity for the duration of the session — this was how the simulation maintained fidelity. The connection was designed to be one-way in terms of intrusive signals, but the architecture had a flaw that had been noted in one obscure research paper and never publicly addressed. A sufficiently precise external signal introduced at the right point in the session could interact with the interface in ways that were not intended.

Ricky understood what this meant. He sat with it for three days before he did anything.

He thought about the year in the facility. He thought about the judge and the police and Conrad Vael’s face on the screens above the upper streets. He thought about four thousand credits and the principle of the thing.

He built the signal on a Saturday night.

Conrad Vael used Elysium for six hours every day. This was publicly known — he had spoken about it in interviews, called it the future of human experience, invested in the company and shaped the product. He used a private pod suite in his tower, the highest-tier service, custom simulations built to his specification.

Ricky sent the signal on a Tuesday afternoon.

What happened inside Vael’s simulation during those final minutes was not something Ricky could see or know directly. The effect in the real world was clinical and documented later — cardiac arrest, the body in the pod going into a response the medical system flagged as critical, the attendants responding, the attempts. None of it successful.

Conrad Vael was declared dead at four seventeen in the afternoon.

Ricky sat in his flat and felt something that was not satisfaction and not guilt and not quite either of the things he had expected. He felt the particular flatness of an action completed that had seemed very significant in the planning and was now simply a fact.

He accessed Vael’s financial systems over the following weeks, using the same vulnerability in different configurations. The amounts he moved were large but distributed carefully, made to look like the kind of internal transfers that happened in a large estate during legal proceedings. He was methodical. He took what he needed and stopped.

He bought a pod suite.

Not Elysium’s commercial service. His own hardware, built from components, running simulations he wrote himself. He understood the architecture now at a level that Elysium’s regular users never approached. His simulations were his own — the blue sky, the city, the crowd. But also other things, places he built from imagination, scenarios he constructed for the pleasure of constructing them.

He went in every day.

For eight months, he was the person in the sky.

The first time he saw Vael in the simulation, he thought it was a glitch.

It was a figure at the edge of the crowd — too still, slightly wrong in its rendering, looking at Ricky with an attention that was different from the simulation’s generated NPCs. The crowd moved around it. It didn’t move with the crowd.

Ricky ended the session.

He checked his system architecture thoroughly. He found nothing. He went back in the next day and the figure was there again, in a different position — further back this time, at the top of a building at the edge of the generated city. Not doing anything. Just watching.

He ended the session again.

He checked again. Found nothing. Rebuilt sections of the simulation from scratch. Went back in.

Vael was there.

Not a visual approximation of the man from the screens — the actual Conrad Vael, or something that wore him with complete fidelity, in the expensive clothes and with the face that had appeared on a hundred upper-district screens. Standing in Ricky’s city, in Ricky’s simulation, looking at Ricky with an expression of complete patience.

It happened in pieces over the following weeks, which was worse than if it had happened all at once.

Ricky would build a new simulation — different city, different scenario, no crowd, no sky. Vael would be in it. Standing in a corner. Sitting at a constructed table. Walking behind Ricky at a distance in a simulated landscape where there was supposed to be no one else.

He began spending less time in the pod. Then he began sleeping badly. The face from the simulation followed him into the real world not as a hallucination — he was clear-eyed enough to know the difference — but as a presence, a quality of the air in the flat that felt watched.

He dismantled the simulation entirely. Rebuilt it from base code. Ran diagnostic sweeps that took three days each and found nothing foreign in the system.

He went in and Vael was there.

He understood, by the end of the second month, that he was losing his mind in the specific way that happens when something real cannot be explained by the categories you have for reality. He ate poorly and slept in broken intervals and spent his waking hours either in the pod or trying to understand the pod, and the figure in the simulation was always there, always patient, always watching.

On a Tuesday night in his ninth month of ownership, he went into the simulation and Vael walked toward him.

He stood his ground. He had decided to stand his ground. He watched the figure cross the constructed city square with that patient unhurried walk and stop two metres away.

“You thought you killed me,” Vael said.

His voice was his voice. Ricky had heard it in hundreds of interviews and promotional materials. This was the same voice.

“I did kill you,” Ricky said.

“You killed the body,” Vael said. “I’ve been working on this problem for twenty years. The body is a vessel. The consciousness is the person.” He looked around at the simulation — at Ricky’s blue sky, his city, his crowd in the middle distance. “You understand how this works better than most. You built this yourself.”

Ricky looked at him.

“I made a copy,” Vael said. “A long time ago. A full neural map, running on a distributed system inside Elysium’s architecture. Hidden in the infrastructure that runs across ten thousand pods in forty cities. When the body died, the copy activated.” He paused. “I have been watching you for nine months. You’re very good. Not good enough.”

“What do you want?” Ricky said.

“I don’t want anything from you,” Vael said. “You’re not significant enough to want something from.” He said this without cruelty, in the tone of a correction. “I want you to understand what you thought you accomplished.”

He stepped forward.

Ricky tried to end the session.

He could not end the session.

The interface controls were not responding. He was aware, in the real-world part of his consciousness that remained tethered to his body in the pod, of his hands not moving, of the physical stillness of a system that was no longer accepting his commands from inside.

He looked at Vael.

“The vulnerability you used to kill the body,” Vael said, “works both ways.”

Then the simulation did what Vael instructed it to do, and it was not gradual, and it did not give him time to think of anything final, and the blue sky came down.

The body was found in the pod three days later by the building’s maintenance system flagging an unresponsive occupant. The medical report listed cardiac arrest. The pod system logged a session that had run for seventy-two hours without interruption, which was outside normal parameters and which Elysium’s legal team noted was a result of a modified system running without their safety protocols — a user-error situation, the documentation suggested, that absolved the company of liability.

The money Ricky had moved was recovered by the estate’s legal system over the following months, in the way these things are recovered when the estate has the resources to look carefully.

In a laboratory on the forty-seventh floor of the Vael tower, a technician ran the final calibration on a new body.

It was not biological in the traditional sense. The frame was synthetic, built to a specification that had taken eleven years to develop — indistinguishable from a living person to any standard scan, capable of operating without the maintenance requirements of organic tissue. It was, the development team had concluded in their internal documentation, an improvement.

The neural transfer took four hours.

Conrad Vael opened his eyes in the new body on a Wednesday morning in autumn. He lay still for a moment, running the inventory of sensation — the room, the light, the feeling of a form that was entirely responsive. He sat up. He stood. He walked to the window.

The city spread below him, the pods glowing in the storefronts on the upper streets, the screens with his face cycling through the rotation above the traffic. His face looked exactly as it always had. The technicians had been precise.

He had some administrative work to do — the estate proceedings, the reestablishment of certain accounts, the careful process of returning to public life as a distant relative who had inherited the estate rather than the man himself. This had been planned for. The legal architecture existed.

He turned from the window and straightened his jacket and went to his desk.

On the screen, a notification. Elysium’s quarterly figures were up. The user numbers were growing, which they always did. There were forty-six new franchise locations opening in the eastern cities. The average user spent six point four hours per day in a pod, which was up from five point nine the previous quarter.

Vael read through the figures with the attention of someone who genuinely cared about them.

Below the tower, Crevon City moved through its morning in the ordinary way — the deliveries, the transit systems, the people walking past the pod storefronts with their eyes on the glowing shells inside. Some stopped to look. Some went in. Some walked past with the specific expression of people doing mathematics on their wages and arriving at an answer they already knew.

The screens above the upper streets cycled through their rotation.

Conrad Vael’s face smiled down at all of it.