The message arrived on a Thursday morning while he was still in bed.
He had been awake for forty minutes already—the nightmare had ended at 4am and sleep had not returned after it, which was the standard pattern now. He lay on his back looking at the ceiling water stain with CV on his shoulder and the training schedule on the desk and the pre-System log on the nightstand, running through the previous night's fragment in the methodical way he had developed for extracting useful data from the Integrator's leaked impressions before the details faded.
His phone buzzed.
He reached for it without sitting up. Read the message.
Horizon Gaming. Formal letterhead, which Horizon Gaming only used when the content was contractual rather than conversational.
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Dear Kai Mercer,
