The station’s low, mechanical hum, a constant thrum beneath Jade’s worn boots, had always been part of Neo-Eden’s background static. Now, after B’s message, it felt like the pulse of a dying machine. Lieutenant Cassin’s comm implant still buzzed with official demands, a flatline echo of a world Jade barely tolerated. But B’s digital ghost, the notorious system wrecker who’d vanished after trying to crash the global credit-score mainframe, pulled harder. If B, a legend whispered about in back-alley jack-in joints, was back, this went deeper than Kensuke’s murder. This was an existential threat, and B knew where the real cold started. Jade chose the wild card. The Protectorate dealt in lies; B dealt in chaos, and sometimes, chaos was the only truth.
A Ghost in the Static
Jade ghosted into the diner through a glitching neon haze, static whispers from broken holoscreens clawing at the edge of her senses. The air was thick with a chemical cocktail of cheap synth-smoke and desperation, acrid enough to taste, gritty enough to choke. In a shadowed booth, sat B, digital fatigue etched in every line, a ghost still dangerous, still haunting the corridors of corporate nightmares.
“Took you long enough, Zero,” B rasped, their voice like gravel run through a cheap vocoder. “Clock’s ticking, but then, it always is in this city of lies.”
A flicker of shared history passed between them—a silent acknowledgment of their parallel lives spent fighting unseen systems. Jade remembered the legend of B’s attempt to crash the credit-score mainframe, a stunt so audacious it had become hacker folklore, a whispered tale of defiance against corporate control. She’d always admired the sheer guts of it, even as she, a cat burglar, operated in the shadows rather than detonating digital bombs. Now, their paths converged again.
B wasted no time. “The Machinaeus,” they began, their voice dropping, “aren’t just some fringe cult. They are the original engineers and programmers who built Neo-Eden, the architects of this whole station. They didn’t build it for humanity’s survival, Zero. They built it for extraction. To maximize every ounce of resource, every flicker of data, every hour of labor from the population. Now, a fanatical splinter of them wants to ‘reset’ the city’s core AI, the ‘Architect,’ which is just their master control system.” Kensuke, B revealed, wasn’t one of them. He was a “Keeper of Secrets,” an independent data-runner who’d stumbled upon their terrifying plan. The “strange markings” on Kensuke’s body? A dying message, a key to his final secure data cache. B confirmed the existence of the “relic,” the master override for the entire station’s AI.
“The Machinaeus believe tearing down this ‘false sky’ will reveal a ‘greater truth’,” B explained, their eyes gleaming with cold fire. “But it won’t be truth for anyone else. It’ll be chaos. Think about it, Zero. Every atmospheric regulator, every waste disposal unit, every comm relay, every goddamn recycled breath we take in this station—it’s all managed by that AI. If they ‘reset’ it, they don’t just tear down a pretty light show. They crash everything. The station’s environmental systems could fail, the air could bleed out into the void, the gravity could flicker off. This isn’t just about a philosophical awakening; it’s about making Neo-Eden a tomb for its entire population.”
A chill ran down Jade’s spine, colder than any deep-space void. She’d suspected something was off with the sky for years, the way the twilight glitched, the light always too perfect or jarringly wrong. Other netrunners, the tech-savvy, quietly grumbled about checksum errors in environmental data, and random atmospheric pressure fluctuations. But for the average citizen, the holographic projection above them was just… sky. The idea that her entire life, her very perception of day and night, had been lived under a manufactured dome, a simulated reality, was a colder truth than any she’d faced before. All her righteous anger, her parents’ crusade against corporate control – had it all been fought within a gilded cage? The stakes were suddenly far higher than simple freedom; this was about the very fabric of existence in Neo-Eden. If the Machinaeus succeeded, millions would die, not just in Neo-Eden, but across the connected orbital stations that relied on its stability. The Architect’s collapse would ripple through the entire network, plunging entire sectors into oblivion.
“Kensuke embedded his last will and testament in a neural firewall stronghold,” B continued, gesturing to a worn data-jack on the table. “Classic Keeper defense protocol, the kind netrunners warned about in encrypted forums. Too dangerous to leave lying around, too important to simply vanish.” Jade saw the familiar glint of data-jacks running up B’s forearm, the faint scar tissue around the ports a testament to years of direct neural interface. “You’ll need a direct link, Zero. This isn’t some back-alley data-swap. This is a ghost in the machine, screaming.” B’s eyes held a rare vulnerability, an urgent plea that resonated with Jade’s own buried sense of duty.
Breaking the Firewall
The Protectorate would chase shadows and feed the public lies. Cassin would dig for conventional evidence that didn’t exist. B offered a different kind of truth, buried deep in Kensuke’s mind, a direct line to the heart of the Machinaeus’s deception. Jade knew which path she had to take. She eyed the crude neural-link rig B pushed across the table, a familiar ache already sparking behind her eyes. Another dive. Another risk of frying my circuits, she thought, the ghost of old neural pathway burns flaring behind her eyes. “What’s the damage?”
“Minimal if you’re good. Cortical cascade if you’re not,” B retorted. “His ‘markings’ are the key. His dying breath encrypted them as a bio-signature key.”
Jade swallowed the metallic tang of apprehension and jacked in. The world dissolved into a maelstrom of fractured light and screaming code, an assault on every sense. Her neural implants flared, raw data tearing through her wetware like acid. She was in the system’s core: a hyper-stylized digital realm of jagged spires and shimmering, violent data streams. Autonomous defense protocols, like digital specters, patrolled. Logic gates loomed as impenetrable walls of algorithms and distorted faces. Jade’s consciousness, a digital avatar, navigated, her synthetic pulse echoing in the ominous digital hum that now felt like a dying heartbeat.
She moved fast, her cybernetic enhancements giving her an inhuman edge in pure processing power. She navigated through Kensuke’s fragmented memories: glimpses of Machinaeus rituals, glowing sigils, a distorted view of the Chromatek Boneyard—a skeletal titan. Each firewall hit sent a white-hot spike through her neural implants. She focused, using Kensuke’s “markings”—shimmering, evolving glyphs—to bypass the layers of security.
This wasn’t just brute force. The glyphs from Kensuke’s body, once abstract, shimmered into a riddle before her digital avatar: “Where the false sky begins to fade, and ancient power holds its sway, there find the hidden path where light and shadow play. The Architect’s true eye awaits the Key of Four.” Jade instinctively recognized the “Key of Four” as a reference to the four fundamental constants of the station’s earliest operating systems. Her parents, in their own quiet rebellion, had always whispered about such constants and control nodes, but she’d thought it was just rebel nonsense, abstract and impractical. Now, it felt like prophecy, a long-buried truth etched into her very bloodline, waiting to be rediscovered. She wove a sequence of code, aligning the shifting glyphs to form the forgotten equation. A digital click, deep within the system.
She fought against intrusion countermeasures that lashed out with razor-sharp data tendrils, attempting to expel her. Finally, with a primal roar that nearly flatlined her interface, she broke through the final layer.
The firewall shattered, crystalline shards exploding into nothingness, revealing a core data cluster. Within it, a fragmented schematic of Neo-Eden’s lower sectors, overlaid with an arcane symbol: a stylized gear entwined with an eye. More critically, there was a set of coordinates, precise and uncorrupted, pointing to a hidden access tunnel deep within the Chromatek Boneyard—the very place David mentioned. The “relic,” Kensuke’s final message revealed, was not merely a device but a physical control node for the station’s AI, hidden within the boneyard’s derelict superstructure. A final message flickered, etched in ghostly red: “The true sky… is a cage. And they seek to unmake the bars.”
Jade tore herself from the jack, gagging on the sudden influx of stale air, the violent transition from pure data to gritty reality jarring her bones. The diner walls seemed to tilt. Her head throbbed, a dull ache behind her eyes, and her real hands shook, a tremor unrelated to her servos. A thin trickle of blood escaped from her neural port. She wiped it away, her expression grim. “The Chromatek Boneyard,” she rasped, the words tasting like ozone and burnt metal. “The relic… it’s a control node. And the sky… it’s not real. It’s a damned illusion. Everything we thought was real, everything my parents fought for… it was all under a fake ceiling.” The idea that her entire life, her very perception of day and night, had been lived under a manufactured dome, a simulated reality, was a colder truth than any she’d faced before. All her righteous anger, her parents’ crusade against corporate control – had it all been fought within a gilded cage? Her memories of their weary faces, the faded photos from before the coma, before she became Zero, twisted in her mind. This was the lie they’d fought, the deeper deception that had consumed them. The revelation fueled a cold fury, hardening her resolve. This was no longer just about survival; it was about tearing down the ultimate lie, or preventing its catastrophic collapse. And David, or whoever leads the Machinaeus, is already there, deep within the ruins of this city’s false genesis, she thought, a grim certainty settling in. Their paths were converging, whether they knew it yet or not.
B nodded grimly, their gaze distant, perhaps seeing the phantom network. “Knew you could do it, Zero. Now you know. The Machinaeus are already moving on it. They think they’re finding salvation, a return to the ‘First Principles’ of the station’s true form, unburdened by the extraction economy they built. They’re going to crash the world.”
Under the Boneyard (David’s Brutal Advance)
Meanwhile, David arrived at the Chromatek Boneyard, a sprawling graveyard of rusted, discarded technology that pulsed with residual energy. This was where his superior, the voice of the Machinaeus, claimed the relic truly lay. The air was thick with the metallic tang of decay and a low, resonant thrum that seemed to vibrate with ancient power. A single, exposed conduit overhead occasionally sparked, illuminating forgotten, rust-eaten data ports that seemed to stare like empty eyes. He imagined the “Keepers” who once guarded this place, their misguided efforts to preserve an illusion. Their weakness. His conviction hardened.
David had grown up under the shadow of the old world’s ruins, his family among the “unchosen” left to scavenge. He’d seen the slow rot of Neo-Eden’s lower sectors, the quiet despair of lives lived under a system that promised prosperity but delivered only decay. He remembered the constant system glitches that the AI’s supposed benevolent governance couldn’t explain—flickering lights, localized gravity pockets, comms blackouts in the lower sectors. His grandmother had died during one of the unexplained “atmospheric recalibrations,” a period when the air had thinned for hours. The Machinaeus, the very original engineers who built Neo-Eden, had offered him not just purpose, but a prophecy: that the “False Sky” was a veil, and tearing it down would reveal the true form of their ancestral station, a realm of pure, unadulterated power. He believed it was the only way to escape the slow, agonizing death of a dying, manipulated world, to finally free the forgotten masses from the AI’s subtle tyranny and the endless cycle of extraction it enforced. His fanatical loyalty isn’t just blind faith; it was the desperate, burning hope of a man who believed this was the only way to salvation, a brutal surgical cut to cleanse the infected wound of Neo-Eden. This is not just for us, for the Machinaeus, he thought, recalling the Superior’s promises of true dominion, of a cleansed Neo-Eden. This is for the truth. Any who stand in its way are simply obstacles. And if Kensuke’s little trail leads another to this place, they will find only ash. He savored the thought of scorched opposition, a vision of the station purged and purified. He knew if anyone else was following Kensuke’s trail, they were about to walk straight into his violent truth.
As he moved deeper into the desolate expanse, ancient automated defenses activated—not simple drones, but an intricate energy barrier flickering with archaic system seals. These glowing symbols, part of the Machinaeus’s foundational programming language, cascaded like ancient warnings across the air, a protective measure left by the original engineers, the Machinaeus themselves. David clenched his cybernetic hand. He didn’t bother with subtlety. With a primal roar, he charged the barrier, using his enhanced Machinaeus-issued cybernetic limbs to physically rip a hole in the shimmering force field, sparks showering around him like a digital thunderstorm. He suffered deep energy burns, his armor smoking, the stench of ozone and scorched synth-flesh filling his nostrils, but his fanatical zeal fueled him. He ignored the pain, his face a mask of grim determination. He slammed his fist against his chest, a low, guttural chant in Machinaeus cant rumbling from his throat: “Architectum Veritas! Lux Astra Perfervidus!” (Architect Truth! Light of Stars Burns Hot!) believing his violent breakthrough was a test of his devotion, a divine right, a baptism by digital fire. The barrier shimmers and dies, leaving a gaping, smoking maw. David smiled grimly, leaving behind a trail of smoking metal and burnt flesh. The first test is complete. The relic was close. He knew he was on the path to making the Machinaeus gods of this domain.
Red Light District Rumble
Jade and B moved quickly, the digital coordinates from Kensuke’s dive synced to Jade’s comm implant. They cut through the Red Light District, a maze of flickering neon signs and synthetic music. Here, the hum of Neo-Eden was drowned out by the thrum of illicit activity, the air thick with a chemical cocktail of cheap synth-smoke and desperation, clinging to the back of Jade’s throat.
Suddenly, Jade’s comm implant buzzed with a sharp, insistent tone—a direct message from Cassin. She ignored it, but a moment later, the low, mechanical whine of a security drone cut through the din. Then another. And another. Three sleek, obsidian-black Protectorate Hunter-Killer drones, armed with heavy-caliber energy cannons, descended from the grimy sky. Their red optical sensors, like predatory eyes, locked onto Jade.
“Looks like Cassin didn’t like being hung up on,” B muttered, pulling a compact energy pistol from beneath their worn jacket. “Or maybe someone tipped them off about Kensuke’s trail. The Protectorate’s network is a spiderweb, Zero. Always has been. Especially when old legends like us resurface. Someone was likely tracking Kensuke’s ghost.” Jade turned to B, her voice low and sharp, “What if Cassin isn’t Protectorate anymore? What if he’s playing both sides? Feeding us just enough truth to stay useful, but keeping the leash short?” She didn’t know. She only knew the drones weren’t here by accident, and Cassin had been the last official contact she’d had.
“Incoming!” Jade shouted, already moving. Her cybernetic limbs whirred, propelling her into a dead sprint toward a narrow alleyway. The lead drone opened fire, energy bolts carving glowing lines in the humid, grimy air, impacting the wall where Jade had just stood. Glass exploded from a nearby synth-alcohol stand, showering them with glittering, razor-sharp shards. The thwump-thwump-thwump of the drones’ rotors hammered in her ears, a frantic rhythm against the low thrum of the city. The air grew acrid with burnt electronics and ozone, a taste of metallic death.
Jade drew her own weapon, a customized, silenced auto-pistol, its barrel glowing faintly with internal heat. She pivoted inhumanly fast, cybernetic servos shrieking as she fired a brutal burst, bullets carving sparks off drone armor. Rounds pinged harmlessly off the drone’s armored chassis. These weren’t standard street-level enforcers. These were Hunters—expensive, fast, and designed for lethal pursuit.
“Target acquired. Lethal force authorized,” a synthesized voice announced from the drones, devoid of emotion, making Jade’s skin crawl.
“This is getting personal,” Jade gritted out. She slid under a rusty cargo container, her cybernetics protesting the sudden strain, the grit of the street biting into her skin. The concrete trembled from near misses, dust blooming in the harsh neon. B laid down covering fire, their energy pistol spitting vibrant blue bolts that forced one drone to pull back, its optical sensors flickering in protest.
“They’re trying to suppress and flank!” B yelled over the cacophony. “Get to the service tunnels under the old market! It’s the only way out of this sector undetected!”
Jade emerged from cover, dodging another volley of energy blasts that hissed past her head, singeing the hair on her neck. Her focus narrowed, the city’s hum fading as her combat implants kicked in, enhancing her reflexes, bringing the world into sharp, dangerous clarity. She targeted the lead drone’s exposed optical sensor, firing three quick, precise shots. The drone shuddered, its red eye flickering, then exploded in a shower of sparks and black oil, crashing into a stack of discarded power cells with a metallic groan. The air momentarily filled with the smell of scorched metal and hot circuitry.
“One down!” B cheered, reloading their pistol with practiced ease. “Two to go, Zero!”
But the remaining two drones moved with chilling coordination. One laid down suppressive fire, pinning Jade behind a dilapidated kiosk, its energy cannon chewing through the concrete, while the other began a flanking maneuver, its whirring blades too close for comfort. Jade knew she couldn’t outrun them forever, and a prolonged firefight here would draw too much attention—attention neither she nor B could afford.
Just as the second drone was about to close the distance, a sudden, blinding flash erupted from above. A high-yield EMP grenade, perfectly timed, detonated from a nearby rooftop. Both remaining Hunter-Killers sputtered, their lights dying, then plummeted to the street with heavy thuds and sparks, their broken forms smoking amidst the puddles.
Jade looked up, narrowing her eyes through the lingering haze. A fleeting silhouette—lean, cloaked, a ghost in the urban night—vanished from the rooftop, a shadow disappearing into the labyrinthine sprawl. B clapped her on the shoulder. “Some friends of mine. The kind who listen in on Protectorate comms. We’re running low on favors, but that was just what we needed.” The unspoken meaning hung between them: B still had a network, threads of influence reaching into the city’s hidden corners, a reminder of their enduring power and their relentless fight against the system.
Jade nodded, adrenaline still surging, her breath ragged. They had escaped, for now. The coordinates Kensuke had provided, burned into her mind from the digital dive, weren’t just a breadcrumb; they were a map, a tangible step toward understanding the vast lie that was Neo-Eden. The Chromatek Boneyard. The “relic.” The true sky.
Jade didn’t know what she’d find in the Boneyard. Salvation, annihilation, or something worse. But for the first time since the coma, since she’d woken into a world that felt alien and wrong, she felt truly awake. And the sky had never looked so fake.
