Bitstream

11.1

When Rhea's consciousness began to return, it came in brief, barely aware bursts. She caught a glimpse of many things: red and blue lights, small hands, and a shadow of a man bearing two eyes that were lost and haggard and hopeless. Even in the haze, she could tell, through her dark and damned mind, that the eyes belonged to her father.

She only heard one sound: a voice, and it said, "Please… I love you…" through strained, underwater sobs. Then, she reached out her… arm? No – that arm was gone; there was nothing that could pull her out of this desperate plea to continue living. All she could do was drift, slowly now, let the cold embrace of death catch her by the neck and pull her back, towards a place where nothing hurt.

And in that strange, quiet place, she saw more: a face, wrinkled, solemn, and gaunt, drained of life yet achingly familiar. It was her mother. Ornella Steele (that name… it was beautiful) lay motionless on a hospital bed, an IV threaded through her arm, the heart monitor pulsing with that relentless beeping, each tick dragging her closer to the end. Rhea remembered crying so hard it felt like her body might split open, the love inside her twisting into something monstrous. What could a child do? What could a husband do?

Nothing. There had been nothing. Her mother had closed her eyes to the ceiling and never opened them again. No miracle, no cure, no divine hand reaching down to intervene. There was only the quiet of a hospital room and the finality of a flatline.

Rhea had turned away, cried into her father's arms, and she could only remember. Remember those days when she would hurry over to the lab and up to the second floor to help her with her gardening. Watering the weeds, planting the tiny seedlings in rows, brushing soil off her knees while Ornella hummed a song half-remembered from her own childhood. Her mother's hands had always been dirty: earth under the nails, stained fingertips from crushed leaves, but to Rhea they were beautiful. They were the hands that mended broken pots and bandaged scraped knees, because Rhea had never been one to 'keep away from those thorns'. She had a way of running towards the danger. Part of it was young ambition, though the other part was a desire to impress, to do brave things; all kids were that way, at some point.

Back then, the world was slower. Softer. Rhea remembered asking questions about everything: why the beans grew crooked, why flowers wilted even with sun, why machines broke even when built perfectly. Ornella didn't mind one bit.

"Why do you think God exists?" she'd asked once.

And Ornella had smiled. Had looked at her and responded simply: "Because if He doesn't, then I've been talking to the ceiling too long."

Rhea didn't understand the joke, not back then. But she did now. In this hazy, dark, and lonely place, where consciousness faded oh-so-slowly into the beating wind of nothingness and stretched her inert in some floating limbo.

Because now she was the one talking to the ceiling.

To the void.

And praying someone, anyone, might answer.

After a time, someone did:

"Please!" It was her father. He was shouting, calling out to her.

The darkness began to fade, but only just; she could make out subtle details, such as the whites of a hospital room, the shadow of a body folding over a bed on which she lay undisturbed. She wasn't awake enough to move, to make a sound. Could only hear that terrible cry, and that beeping. It was here, still here. Forever ticking.

"Don't go," he called, and this time he had more texture. He was on his knees, glasses off, tears streaming down his face, hot and red and struggling for air.

Where were the doctors? Had they gone? Had she already died? No, she couldn't have. Her heart was still beating. There was still a chance. But why…?

"It really is unfortunate it's had to come to this, Viren."

That voice: her.

In the back of the hospital room, Rhea could see another shadow begin to take form, one with a blurred-out head.

[Redacted].

"You knew what was at stake. You should have given me the shard when—"

"Shut your mouth!" Viren's voice echoed, but it was muffled, somewhat unclear. He wiped the tears from his eyes with the bed sheet. "She's not your fucking experiment."

"She is going to die," [Redacted] said. "Be reasonable. There's not a doctor in this town that can save her. And she's too far from the city to get any real help. This is the only offer you'll ever get."

The shadow of Viren's face was fixed on Rhea. His hand hadn't left hers. In a low voice, he said, "You're a monster, [Redacted]."

"Call me whatever you want," she said. "But this will keep her alive. You just need to make a promise."

"To hurt people?" Viren said. "To let you use my work to kill people?"

[Redacted] took a step closer to the bed, the heels of her boots clicking too cleanly against the tile. Her blurred face tilted, watching Rhea. She didn't care. It was a calculative look. "To change the world," she said simply. "And sometimes change costs blood."

Viren's grip on Rhea's hand tightened. His lips trembled, but he didn't cry again. He just stared at Rhea, at her pale skin, the way her chest rose in tiny, stubborn breaths. The way she refused to die, even now.

"You're asking me to sacrifice the city's life for hers," he said. "To damn it all…."

"Don't be so dramatic," [Redacted] said. "Our technology is the only solution. And let me be clear: we don't just hand out these microbot prototypes to anybody."

In her hand, in the shadow, something began to take form. It was small, blue, and sloshing. For a moment, Rhea didn't know what she was looking at, but slowly her mind filled in the shape.

A syringe.

"I'm offering you a way to save her. Damn yourself if you like. But she doesn't have to pay the price for your conscience."

He turned his face away, pressing his forehead to Rhea's wrist. She could feel the warmth of him, even in this liminal space between awareness and oblivion.

Then, he spoke, and the words were broken and hollow: "Why did I have to make this stupid, fucking algorithm?"

Then there was silence. Then there was a sigh.

"Alright," he said slowly.

"Viren—" [Redacted] began.

"I said alright!" He backed away from the bed. "But let me do it. I don't want your filthy hands anywhere near her."

[Redacted] chuckled. "Your wish is my command, Dr. Steele." She sounded casual, too casual. She held out the syringe, glowing cold in the light. "Right into the neck," she instructed. "The microbots will do the rest."

Viren took the syringe and stepped in close, his hands trembling as he knelt beside Rhea. "Hey… I'm going to give you something now, alright?" His voice cracked. "It's gonna help. I swear it'll help." He hesitated, eyes locked on hers, even though she couldn't respond. "I'm so sorry, Little Spark. I love you. I – I don't know what else to do."

And the syringe came down, little by little, second by second, until his arm completely shadowed her view.

Stick.

The sensation came. It was strange at first: prickly, even in this limbo state, as if electricity was being pumped through her body at a low voltage. Her brain went fuzzy. Everything felt like the human variation of a TV stuck on white noise. But the noise didn't last long, because soon all she could feel was pain. Hot, searing pain, tearing at her skin, her muscles, her organs.

The darkness faded, the light bloomed, and… and…

"... aaaaaaAAAAAAA—"

December 2055

"—AAAAAAAGHH!" Rhea shouted, her voice taut. "That hurts like a motherfucker. You sure you're doin' it right?"

"Calm down," the ripperdoc gruffed, squinting through his scratched lenses as he adjusted the calibrator. "Christ, you kids and your damn impatience. Every installation's the same: panic, screaming, then ten seconds later you're seeing better than God."

Rhea sat upright in a stained recliner, blinking through a haze of dying fluorescents and buzzing cables. When it cleared, she could see the same old dump she'd been visiting for the last three years: Benny's Rip. She found it funny, because the letters 'R.I.P' certainly came to mind given that this place looked like a hardware graveyard: wires spilling from broken panels, old cyberware piled in greasy bins, a ceiling fan that threatened to fall from its screw on more than one occasion, and air that smelled in tune with overdue bills. But hey, it wasn't too bad. The lady out front had a nice ass.

Something whirred above her brow: servo-clicks tapping bone. A cold sting burned behind her eyes. Fair enough. She'd just had them torn out and replaced with whatever this tech was to go along with her new Arotoshi operating system. Not like she asked for it. She had Corporate N.A. to thank for that. "Forgive me," she said. "I'm just not used to this whole 'corporate change'. Didn't realise joining the force came with mandatory firmware updates."

The doc snorted. "Welcome to the future, sweetheart. Vision's a privilege now. Corps just rent it back to you."

She flexed her mechanical arm – the right one – and let the mantisblade creep out. It was long, curved, and raptorial, but also very strange. There were technically no nerves from the shoulder down, but after so many years, she'd developed these phantom sensations. Doctors called it neural ghosting. She supposed it was her limb's way of demonstrating homesickness. "Guess it's not all bad. Though I do think it's kinda scary that a lot of this stuff can be fiddled with."

"You don't trust me now, is that it?" The ripperdoc unhooked Rhea's neural wire from the recliner computer and let it zip back into her temple. Even if she didn't trust him (which she did), it wouldn't be so far-fetched. His name was Hacksaw Benny – called that not because he was good with a blade, but because he'd once accidentally left one inside a client. Twice, actually.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Benny grinned with three gold teeth and one that blinked red when he lied. In an age of affordable beauty, she couldn't understand why he didn't fix himself up; there was something to respect about it, she figured. His left arm was made entirely of mid-grade titanium, and the hand was replaced with a grubby pin-pointed claw where each fingertip was no thinner than a needle. "C'mon, kid, I've been in the biz five years. Only lost vision in... what, seven patients?" His tooth blinked red. Of course it did. He scratched at the scarred wiring along his jaw. "'Sides, you flinched during the install. Can't blame me for everything that goes wrong in your life."

Rhea raised an eyebrow, then blinked, and her new optics auto-focused with a mechanical whirrr. Benny snapped into sharp detail. Unfortunately. "Lovely," she said flatly. "I can see the grease in your pores."

"Means they're working," he beamed. "And hey, that's a premium feature."

"'Preciate it Bens," Rhea said, and she realised that she hadn't called him that in sometime. It was very rare that she gave anyone a nickname at all. In the force, you got called by your surname. No exceptions. Didn't matter if you were on the same squad for five years or if someone saved your ass during a drone raid. The system processed people as data, and surnames were cleaner. Easier to categorise. Easier to delete. Calling someone by their first name meant attachment. Calling someone anything else? That meant memory, and in this world, you couldn't afford to remember.

"You know why they're implementing the Arotoshis, don't you?" Benny said, swabbing his hands with a rag.

"To set us up on the neural cloud," Rhea said. "Why?"

"I knew the blues would eventually amp up their artillery, especially with the release of some of that black-market crap," Benny said. "Hardware used to be enough. Now you need your own defence systems. Damn world's a ticking timebomb for technological collapse."

He had a point there. Ever since the implementation of Halycyon into scientific practices, progress sped up pretty damn significantly. The northern side of N.A. got a lot of government funding, and with the help of AI, progress turned into acceleration. Labs that used to run one trial a month now ran fifty a day. Diseases were catalogued, analysed, and broken down into fixable code. Energy grids were refactored in weeks instead of decades. But it all came with a cost.

The south didn't see that kind of breakthrough. They got patches: automated bureaucracy, workforce layoffs, surveillance systems that watched you starve. And now, with Arotoshis being rolled out as militarised brain-linked defence units, as well as portals into neural interfaces, it wasn't just about control. It was about preemption. About plugging every rebel and hacker into a network where the system could constantly find out who was where and who was what.

Rhea leaned against the steel cabinet, arms folded, watching Benny swab grease from the same spot he'd already wiped twice. "They're trying to protect the people," she said. "They're trying to protect the code, too."

"Eh, at what point does protection become oppression? That's the age-old question, isn't it?"

It was an age-old question. Orwell, Huxley, Philip K. Dick. She'd read about the idea quite often as a child. Perhaps not so much these days, because finding the time to read on a tight schedule was… well, tight. Regardless, she'd already spent enough time in this place – well over an hour – and she had work to do.

It was a sunny, winter's day in The Scrubs, and the clocks were striking just past noon. She stepped out of Benny's Rip, past the long stretch of tech-zombies getting ready for their next install, towards her police car on the other end. People looked at her funny these days, and it wasn't difficult to understand why. She always wore the uniform: the real one, not the softened community-service variant they handed out to keep the locals from panicking. Black polyweave plates over carbon mesh, built to absorb a knife and deflect a round. The shoulders were stiff with interface tech, LEDs glowing dull blue along the seams. Her badge was embedded on the left breast, not pinned – grown into the fabric via micro-thread, flashing her ID on any nearby scanport that tried to ping her. The helmet hung at her side: matte, visorless, with a neural relay that could link her straight to dispatch or override nearby drones. On her belt: the standard issue plasma-pistol, a collapsible baton, and a shard-holster lined with static-null foil in case someone got stupid with a bootleg AI.

And across the back, in clean white block-type: N.A. ENFORCER UNIT 7. No insignia or rank or anything of note. It was only the city's authority burned into fabric.

She didn't walk as though she belonged to The Scrubs anymore. She walked as though she belonged to the system.

She hopped into the cruiser and joined the town's traffic, along the old concrete paths cracked from decades of frost and heat with no government fix. The Scrubs didn't have real roads anymore. Just worn-out lanes stitched together by patch jobs and citizen effort, uneven as a bad memory. Streetlights blinked where they shouldn't, and holographic billboards coughed over steel rooftops, advertising neural implants and mealpaste sachets to people who couldn't afford shoes.

She drove slow. Not because of the speed limit – there wasn't one here – but because that was the rhythm of the place. A kind of grinding patience. In Neo Arcadia's upper sectors, cars zipped by with AI assistance. Down here, everything coughed, groaned, moved only because it had no choice. The people did, too. And she supposed it was also part of regulatory training: it was easier to catch one of those white-wearing bastards looking to commit class-A felonies when you drove slow.

The Syndicate.

But luckily it was a quiet day, and she made it the whole back to the station without any interruptions. Her radio didn't hop that much either, and thankfully her new optics had been steady for the trip. It really was amazing how quickly AI affected neural technology. [Redacted] might not have had entirely pleasant motives behind the implementation, but with the help of her father's algorithms, the artificial intelligence could script code that connected with their neural core at rapid rates. Really rapid rates.

Perhaps too rapid.

She parked outside the station, where the reinforced ferrocrete walls rose from the cracked pavement. The glass was one-way, tinted blue, wired with smart-filament to detect explosive force. No signs, no emblems. There was a steel badge bolted above the door that read 'Precinct 9' and that was it.

Precinct 9 wasn't like the upper-tier stations: it didn't ask questions, and it didn't file reports. It filed body counts.

Inside, the air buzzed with stale coffee and overstim: old stimulants cycling through recycled lungs. The station was dim and half-lit by energy-saving strips that always took too long to boot. Officers moved through it in staggered routines: half in real-time, half checking HUDs only they could see. Uniforms were black and blue, lined with kinetic mesh and subtle pulse-thread along the ribs, barely visible unless the tech lit up just right. Their visors were either cracked or custom; no one wore regulation anymore. Regulation was for the upper tiers.

Here, you brought your own armour, your own rules, and maybe a prayer or two if your partner had gone dark the night before. It wasn't too uncommon, not in this line of work.

"Hey hey hey," one of the officers called, but no one really thought of him as a cop. Most of the station knew him as the engineer. Hell, he was halfway up a step ladder, elbow-deep in the hydraulic joint of something big right now. Something serious: a suit of armour the colour of burnt steel and old smoke, plated in staggered segments that locked together.

It was Lucian.

Older now. Taller. His hair was cropped short on the sides, thick on top, streaked with silver. Lately she couldn't tell if the colour came from the same dye he always used to don or if it was the stress of having to deal with people's bullshit for so long. There were burn marks along one wrist, cybernetic overlays coiling beneath the skin. He didn't have that high-pitched voice anymore; it was mid-range, not quite deep, not quite not either.

The suit he was working on (Prototype Hydra-Class A12) wasn't built for your typical patrols or riot lines. It was built for war. Microshock actuators on the knees. Reinforced carbon ribs. Shoulder mounts for AI-guided ordnance. Its chestplate carried a black emblem half-worn from impact, but the code was clear: this was off-books, probably [Redacted]-approved tech.

Lucian hopped down from the large step ladder, and she was immediately hit with the memory of when they were kids working on Scrapboy. He wiped his hands with a plaid cloth he pulled from a dusty chest pocket. He was dressed up in a black button-up and cargos. Lately, he started to wear safety goggles more seriously. He pulled them back. He'd had his optics changed, too. The irises were yellow now. The colour wasn't necessary; he was just very particular about the type of tech he wanted to install. Legend said yellow meant luck.

She couldn't remember where that myth started, only that no one ever questioned it.

"I saw your dad on the news again," Lucian said, stripping off the safety goggles completely now.

Rhea didn't answer right away. She stepped closer, arms crossed, gaze flicking to the prototype armour behind him, then back to his face. "Which time?"

"Does it matter?" He tossed the cloth onto the tool cart and leaned against it with a casual kind of weight. "Same narrative every week. Either he's a genius or a terrorist. Sometimes both in the same broadcast."

"He's not a terrorist," she said, too fast, too sharp.

Lucian raised his hands. "Hey. Didn't say he was. Just tellin' you what people say."

"I would appreciate it if you didn't bring it up," she said. "Not like he asked for any of this."

"I know." He said it quiet. Real quiet. "Neither did you."

Something about that made her blink. She huffed. "You always this dramatic now, Strider, or is it just the yellow eyes?"

Lucian cracked a smile, tilted his head. "Only when I'm trying to impress a girl who got her arm ripped off by a malfunctioning deathbot."

"Technically, it wasn't malfunctioning. Just… misinterpreting its primary directive as a result of outside interference."

"That's still a malfunction. Not that it matters now." Lucian gestured to the suit behind him. "This thing? It's not just for show, you know. Word is, they want to deploy these next quarter. Targeted ops. Deepzone extractions. Maybe even Syndicate control."

Rhea squinted. "You think it's enough to stop them?"

Lucian looked back at the armour. His smile dropped. "Nope," he said. "But it's a start."

"Just be sure not to spray it with water then." She'd gotten used to making jokes about that night; it was easier than trying to treat it as some traumatic experience, which it was, but that wasn't the point. Sometimes you had to live and forget, and sometimes you had to look back and laugh.

Soon, the squad leader, Cmdr. Reeve Strannik, showed up to gather the platoon together. He wasn't a loud man – didn't need to be. His presence did all the talking most of the time. Heavy boots, gloves stitched with tactile sensors, a neural relay embedded just under the skin of his temple, blinking soft green below a thin patch of dermal glass. He wore the standard black-and-carbon fatigues of Enforcement Command, but his coat was custom: longer, lined in Kevlar weave, and tagged with squad glyphs no one dared ask about.

"All units, conference room three," Strannik said, voice low, calm, absolutely unignorable. "Move."

Later, not much later mind you, inside the debrief chamber, the walls glowed with soft-blue HUD projections, maps of Zone 7-D stitched with moving tags, threat markers, and terrain overlays. Static hummed in the overheads. The air smelled of gear oil, and Rhea didn't enjoy that smell very much; it always left a taste at the back of her throat that she couldn't quite wash out. Every enforcer found their seat without needing to be told.

Lucian was already there, arms folded, sitting beside the holo-table. Rhea slid in beside him. Up close, he smelled like machinery.

Strannik, the old bastard, stepped to the centre and raised a palm. A wireframe of the infiltration target bloomed into place: a multilevel complex deep in the northwestern sector, tagged SYNDICATE INTEL HOLD / PRIORITY RED.

"This," he said, "is where we cut the feed. Rebel communication servers. Off-grid. Encrypted. Short-wave bounce. We've been chasing this node for five months. Now we've got it." Cmdr. Reeve Strannik turned slowly, cybernetic eye clicking as it calibrated across the squad. Nobody shifted. Nobody coughed. Good. Professionals. "We breach at 0300. Clean, quiet, cold. No fire unless fired upon. This isn't a burn job. This is a grab." He tapped the node's location on the map overlay: a power-cooled warehouse buried beneath a solar farm near the Eighth Sector faultline. "We're taking Vasker Tolen. Alias: Priest. Calls himself a voice of the people. Been running neural-laundering hubs and arming ghost cells across five districts. This man is not a symbol. He's a tactician. We want him alive."

A few eyebrows rose.

"He'll be inside the inner sanctum, behind a sealed door and at least a dozen meatshields with auto-rifles and patchwork mod-ware. Probably hopped up on stim. Maybe a kill-switch in his jaw. Don't give him the chance to use it."

Strannik let the tactical feed roll. It switched through the warehouse layout: narrow vents, secondary hatches, a spiderweb of corridors that funneled into the heart. Hell, Rhea could almost hear the thing pumping blood through its damn arteries. Pump, pump, pump. A fortress with one way in and no clear way out.

"Steele, Vev: you're entry team. Tunnel breach. No flash. No chatter. You pull Priest, you tag the location, and we send in Sweep Three for lift. No getting curious, either, and I'm lookin' at you Steele. Clockwork. Got it?"

She nodded. They all did. Rhea admittedly did have a problem getting too curious on her missions, wanting to know more than she needed to. It was difficult to help something like that; once, she'd broken formation during a sweep in the Scrubs just to follow the hum of an unregistered generator. It led her straight into an abandoned laundromat where a gang had been cooking black-market implants. The bust had earned her praise, but her commanding officer still chewed her out for taking that risk alone.

Strannik clipped the holomap shut. "We bring him back breathing. Or we don't come back at all. Questions?"

Vev raised her arm. She was an intriguing-looking individual, with blue hair cut in a punkish mo, full-black overalls. "Yeah, I got a question." Her accent put her South; it had that countrified drawl. The skin below her digitised visor was pale and unhealthy-looking; parts of her flesh were mixed up with cybernetics and metal. "How armed will they be?"

"Armed enough," Strannik said flatly. He didn't turn to look at her, just keyed a few commands into the feedpad on his wrist. "These aren't kids playing rebel in a basement. This is ex-military, black-market, aug-heavy stuff. Think converted dockworkers with tank-class prosthetics. Think surplus drones, turrets, shocknetting along the corridors. They've had time to prep, and they've spent that time well."

Vev made a low whistling sound. "So it could be a party."

Lucian muttered, "One with no music and lots of knives."

Strannik looked up at that, just briefly. "They bleed the same as anyone else. If it comes down to it, aim true, keep your breathing steady. And remember: this mission's not about winning. It's about extraction." He gestured towards the lockers lining the far wall, where their armour and suppressors had been pre-loaded. "You'll suit up. Channel stays dark until we breach. I want you all running local comms only. If Priest so much as hears a ghost of our signal, he'll scatter the entire cell."

Rhea glanced towards Lucian, who was fiddling nervously with his fingers, then back at Strannik. "Why's this person so important anyway?"

Strannik said: "Because if we don't bring him in, he'll light this whole city on fire, and half of you already live in the kindling."

Rhea nodded. She could not argue that.