His thumb hovered over the screen. He could recruit three people. He knew a dozen desperate grad students. He could feed them to the crown, buy himself another month of godhood.

He laughed. It was a joke. An ARG. But when he opened the app to uninstall it, the dashboard had changed. The three nodes were still there, but now a fourth had appeared: . He opened it.

The real question—the one that would haunt him in the analog days to come—was whether that breath was worth the price of everything he’d already spent.

The rain hammered against the windows of the small apartment, blurring the city lights into smears of gold and red. Elias hunched over his laptop, the glow of the screen casting deep shadows under his tired eyes. On the monitor was the logo for "Monarch"—a stylized crown over a circuit board. Below it, in bold letters, was the question he’d typed into every forum, every review site, every dark corner of the internet:

Another user, , disagreed: “Too late for that. The only way out is to become a Collector. Recruit three new users. Their onboarding debt pays down your own. Monarch loves virality.”