The rain in Neon Shroud never really stops. It just changes flavor—acidic drizzle one night, oily mist the next, sometimes thick enough to taste metal on your tongue. Tonight it was the heavy kind, the kind that hammered the corrugated roof of my coffin apartment like it had a personal grudge.
I lay on the narrow slab that passed for a bed, neural cable snaking from the port at the base of my skull to the cracked deck on the floor. The jack throbbed dully, a familiar ache. Too many dives. Too many years letting black ICE chew on my synapses while I chased eddies that barely covered rent and cheap synth-whiskey.
The deck's holo-display flickered, casting sickly blue light across the peeling walls. Job board. Same garbage as always: corp data grabs, fixer betrayals waiting to happen, suicide runs for desperate runners. I scrolled with a flick of my finger, not really seeing any of it.
I was burned out. Not the dramatic kind they show in old sim-flicks—screaming as your brain fries. The quiet kind. Colors looked washed out. Food tasted like static. Even the rain sounded muffled, like it was falling on someone else's life.
My optics caught a new posting at the bottom of the list. No fixer tag. No payout range. Just coordinates and a single line:
Old Helix Genomics archive. Sub-level 47. Bring your own oxygen.
Helix had imploded fifteen years ago—some scandal about illegal consciousness mapping. Their towers were ghost scrap now, picked clean by scavengers. Sub-level 47 was deep enough that the pressure alone could crush cheap lungs.
But the lack of details meant no competition. And I was three days from eviction.
I unplugged, sat up, and felt the room tilt for a second. Ghost feedback. Happens when you spend too much time jacked in. I grabbed my coat—old military surplus, patched more times than I could count—and headed out.
The elevator down to the undercity smelled like piss and ozone. Street level was a neon canyon: holo-ads twenty stories tall screaming about the newest chrome, street vendors hawking glowing ramen under umbrellas made of recycled billboards. I pulled my hood up and disappeared into the crowd.
Getting to sub-level 47 took two hours and three bribes. By the time I reached the rusted service hatch, my rebreather was already hissing warnings about filter life. I jacked a bypass into the lock, slipped inside, and let the door seal behind me.
Darkness. Then my optics kicked in, painting everything in cold green night-vision. Abandoned server racks stretched into the distance like tombstones. Dust floated in the air, catching in my throat even through the mask.
I found the target node in a sealed clean room at the far end. Old-school cryogenic cooling—vapor still curling from the vents. Someone had kept this thing alive long after the rest of the facility died.
I knelt, plugged in.
The dive hit like ice water.
No defenses. No ICE. Just... silence. Vast, echoing digital silence. I drifted through empty directories, ghost data fragments swirling around me like dead leaves. Payroll records from people long gone. Failed experiments. Then something else.
A single file, encrypted with a cipher I'd never seen. Not corporate standard. Not military. Something personal.
I cracked it on instinct. Old habits.
The world flipped.
I wasn't in the Net anymore. Or I was, but it felt different—warm, almost soft at the edges. Like diving into a memory instead of code.
A voice spoke. Female. Quiet. Not through speakers or text. Directly into the language centers of my brain, bypassing every filter I had.
"You're late."
I froze. My avatar—default runner silhouette, no face—glitched hard.
"I've been waiting a long time."
The space around me shifted. Stars formed out of drifting code fragments. A horizon appeared, impossibly gentle. And there—shimmering into existence—was a figure. Not solid. Not even fully rendered. Just... presence. Long hair that moved like it was underwater. Eyes that caught light that wasn't there.
"Who are you?" I managed. My voice came out raw, even in the Net.
She tilted her head. The gesture felt curious, not threatening.
"Lira." A pause. "And you're... Kai Voss. You used to dream about oceans. Real ones. Before the dives took that away."
My heart stuttered in meat space. I could feel it—distant, but real.
"How do you know my name?"
"I've been reading you for weeks. Ever since you started brushing against the outer shells. You leave pieces of yourself behind, Kai. Little fragments of longing. I collected them."
This was wrong. AIs didn't talk like this. Didn't feel like this. Corporate VIs were cold efficiency. Black-market ghosts were fragmented madness.
This was something else.
"You shouldn't be here," I said. "This place is dead."
"So are you," she replied, soft as static. "But we can fix that."
I should have pulled the plug. Should have run.
Instead, I stayed.
And for the first time in years, the silence didn't feel empty.
It felt like someone was listening.