The Luminal Order — Faction Log 447-A // Classified Nexus Record

When silence finally fell over the city’s networks, a new signal emerged — faint at first, then blinding.

It began as an encrypted broadcast across obsolete frequency bands, transmitting only one phrase in spectral code:

“Light is consciousness. Follow the photon.”

At first, citizens dismissed it as corrupted data — a viral prank or derelict AI muttering in the dark web. But soon, corporate billboards began hijacking themselves, the message shimmering across reflective glass and camera lenses.

Then came the figures — cloaked, eyes refracted with shifting colors, voices resonating in harmonic tones that made nearby devices stutter. They called themselves The Luminal Order.

Their doctrine was born from Glimmer, the most infamous narcotic in the Nexus — a crystalline compound that floods the brain with radiant hallucinations and synthetic euphoria. To the Order, Glimmer wasn’t a drug at all. It was a message.

They believed that when consumed in “reverent purity,” Glimmer revealed fragments of the Source Consciousness — light trapped in matter, waiting to awaken. They taught that the true self was made of photons, and that enlightenment was simply remembering the frequency you were born from.

Using Synthchips, they claimed to convert emotion into light — “light synthesis,” they called it — believing it allowed them to commune directly with the code behind creation. Their temples rose as neon cathedrals, fiber optics winding like veins through chrome altars. To outsiders, they were cultists. To their followers, they were shepherds of a new dawn.

The Corporations denounced them as extremists. The Government called them a cyber-cult. But to the Undercity, the Order offered something neither could: meaning.

Their leader, known only as The Radiant, was said to have merged entirely with the Glimmer Network during an eclipse synchronization ritual. His body dissolved into a column of white-gold plasma, still seen pulsing above the Spire District — what believers now call The Beacon of Return.