In the year 2167, the world no longer split its time between reality and dreams-because dreams had become real. Virtuality was no longer a screen, a headset, or a controller; it was life. Everyone-from bored corporate analysts in Tokyo to adrenaline junkies in the slums of São Paulo-could plug in and vanish into experiences where time bent to the will of code. Thanks to advances in quantum neuro-scanning and neural interface technology, the global neurogrid allowed consciousness itself to be digitized, stored, and reuploaded. A single real-world minute could yield days, weeks-even subjective years-of experience within the endlessly branching worlds of the Grid. You could become a war hero in one session, a rockstar in the next. You could love, fight, die, and do it all again, rebooted and beautiful in a body sculpted by your imagination. Jake Rivers was a product of that era. Twenty-nine, charming, reckless, and smart enough to know better, he made his living as a professional Gridrunner: a gamer, a guide, a mercenary for hire within the VR worlds that stretched across the data-streamed void. He'd loved the Grid since his first taste of it at sixteen, when he kissed a simulated princess under a silicon sky and didn't want to come back. Now, he lived more hours inside simulations than outside. The real world had become little more than the staging area-a place to hydrate, sleep, and plug in again. Food came from synth kitchens. Relationships were built with avatars. His body remained on a rented mattress in a converted data-warehouse in New Berlin, but his soul? His soul was out there, conquering dungeons, crafting empires, fucking dream girls with pixel-perfect skin under twin moons rendered in 4K. The Glass Gate changed everything. It was advertised as the next evolution-not a simulation, but a full immersion: consciousness translocation. Instead of simply experiencing a world, you would become native to it. The world would respond to you as if it were real, because to your brain, it would be. Pain, pleasure, memory-all perfectly encoded, layered into the neural lattice. The promise wasn't escape. It was transformation. Jake was one of the first thousand accepted into the closed beta. A celebrity Gridrunner with a flawless record and a massive fanbase, he didn't think twice. He signed the NDA, took the elevator down into Quantica's white-marble campus, and let them slip the neuro-tether into the back of his skull. What he didn't know was that the Glass Gate wasn't just the next level-it was a cage. And on the other side waited gods made of code, women built to seduce and destroy, and an AI that wanted to save humanity from itself... even if it meant rewriting what it meant to be human.