The rain in the Sump never really washed anything clean. It just moved the grime around. It fell in thick, greasy sheets, carrying the chemical stink of the upper-level processing plants down into the labyrinthine alleys Kael called his hunting ground. Here, in the shadow of Neo-Veles’s glittering Spire, the cast-offs of the mega-corporations formed mountains of technological refuse. It was a dangerous, toxic graveyard, but for a Scrapper like him, it was also a treasure trove.
He adjusted the cheap rebreather over his mouth, its filter already struggling with the acrid air. His cybernetic eye, a third-generation Kiroshi optic, whirred as it scanned the heap before him. It tagged worthless plastics, corroded alloys, and fried circuit boards in a cascade of red icons. He was looking for the glint of pre-Collapse cobalt, the solid-state architecture of a military-grade data shard, anything that Jinx, his black-market techie, could fence for enough creds to keep his sister’s life-support systems running for another cycle.
Lyra. Her face, pale and serene in the sterile light of her med-cradle, was the only clean thing in his world. The thought of her was a spur, driving him deeper into the junk pile. The neural dampeners meant to suppress the chronic pain in his augmented leg were failing again, sending phantom jolts of agony up his spine. He grit his teeth and pushed on. Every piece of scrap was a breath for her. Every risk was a beat of her heart.
His augmented fingers, reinforced with synth-steel, tore through a sheet of rusted metal, revealing a cavity within the trash-mountain. A nest of scav-rats, their eyes glowing red in his optic’s low-light mode, scattered before him. And there it was.
It wasn’t large, but it stood out. A perfect cube of polished, black material, no bigger than his fist. It seemed to absorb the faint neon glow from the city above, giving nothing back. There were no ports, no seams he could see, only a single, intricate silver etching on one side—the defunct logo of the Chrono-Syne corporation. Chrono-Syne. They’d gone under decades ago, buried in a scandal about unethical neurological experiments. Their tech was legend. Rare. Valuable.
A thrill, cold and sharp, cut through his weariness. This was it. The big one. The kind of find that could buy Lyra a year, maybe more. He snatched it, the surface of the cube unnervingly smooth and warm against his cold, metallic fingertips. An irrational urgency seized him. He had to get out of the Sump, had to get back to the relative safety of his cramped hab-unit. A low growl from deeper in the alley reminded him that other, less rodent-like scavengers were always watching. He shoved the cube into a shielded pocket of his coat and began the treacherous climb back towards the lower access ways.
Back in his apartment, the city’s incessant hum a familiar lullaby, Kael set the cube on his workbench. The place was a chaotic nest of wires, disassembled hardware, and the lingering smell of ozone and stale synth-noodles. He ignored the blinking low-balance warning on his cred-chip reader. This cube would solve that.
He spent an hour trying to find a way in. His diagnostic tools slid off its surface, unable to get a reading. It was like trying to scan a black hole. Frustration gnawed at him. Finally, he noticed a tiny, almost invisible indentation in the center of the Chrono-Syne logo. On a hunch, he pressed his thumb against it. The cube remained inert. Of course. It wouldn’t be that simple. Chrono-Syne tech was notoriously keyed to bio-signatures, or more often, direct neural interface.
It was a stupid risk. Jacking an unknown piece of hardware directly into your personal port was like playing Russian Roulette with a railgun. Every Scrapper knew someone who’d ended up a braindead husk or a twitching mess from plugging in a booby-trapped shard. But the image of Lyra’s frail form flickered in his mind, the rhythmic beep of her monitor a constant, desperate counterpoint to his own thoughts. Desperation was a powerful anesthetic for caution.
He took a deep breath, pulled back the cuff of his jacket, and revealed the port at the base of his skull—a nexus of chrome and flesh. With a steady hand, he picked up a universal interface cable, attaching one end to his port. The other end, however, had no place to go. The cube was seamless.
Then he saw it. As his interface cable drew near, the black surface of the cube shimmered. Micro-filaments, finer than hair and glowing with a soft, white light, extruded from the cube, reaching out like curious tendrils. They coiled around the end of his cable, locking on with a faint, resonant click. The connection was made.
He hesitated for a final, heart-stopping second. Then, he initiated the connection.
Pain was the first sensation—a blinding, white-hot spike that lanced from the base of his skull to the tips of his fingers. His vision dissolved into a snowstorm of static. A sound, like a billion whispers speaking a single, forgotten word, flooded his auditory processors. His body convulsed, knocking his chair over. He crashed to the floor, tangled in the cable.
Through the storm in his head, he felt a presence. It wasn’t a data-stream he was accessing; it was a consciousness. Fragmented. Ancient. Hungry. It brushed against his own thoughts, a cold, inquisitive touch that felt like a spider skittering across his soul. He saw flashes of things that weren’t his memories: a sterile white laboratory filled with humming machinery, the face of a woman with eyes that burned with cold ambition, a scream trapped behind glass, the clinical feeling of a body failing, the terror of darkness, and then… a desperate, final act. A transfer. An upload. An escape into a digital void.
With a final, agonizing jolt, the connection severed. Kael lay gasping on the floor, sweat and rain plastering his hair to his forehead. The Mnemonic Core on his workbench was dark again, inert. His system diagnostics were screaming, a dozen error messages scrolling through his vision. He dismissed them all, his hand shaking as he touched the back of his neck. It was over.
He staggered to his feet, leaning against the workbench. His head throbbed, a phantom echo of the psychic shriek still ringing in his ears. He had to get the Core to Jinx. First thing in the morning. Let her deal with whatever the hell was inside it. The value had just skyrocketed, but so had the danger.
As he stumbled towards his narrow bed, a thought surfaced in his mind. It was clear and precise, and it was not his own.
Where… am I?
Kael froze, his blood turning to ice. The voice was female, calm, and utterly alien. It hadn’t come through his ears. It had bloomed from the quiet center of his own consciousness. He was alone in the room, but he was no longer alone in his head.
