NANITE

The apartment was dark when he returned. Quiet. Still. His mother lay asleep on the couch, wrapped in a thermal blanket. The soft, flickering light from the kitchen cast long, dancing shadows, reflecting off the fresh, sterile medication containers, which Ray placed gently on the table beside her. He crouched beside her for a moment, brushing a stray lock of hair from her forehead, his touch feather-light. He pressed a gentle, lingering kiss on her cool skin. "Sleep easy." he whispered, the words a silent prayer.

Then he retreated to the oppressive solitude of his own small room. The narrow cot felt too big, too empty. He lay there, staring up at the familiar, cracked landscape of the ceiling, not counting seconds, because that would only make the suffocating silence louder, more unbearable.

He tried to call Johnny again. Still no answer.

He opened Monica's contact file on his HUD. Just a name. No image. No personal data. Just encrypted metadata. He stared at it for a long time.

He'd promised his mother—no more night runs. No more gunfire. No more blood. Just a clean job. Something stable and safe.

But he was about to break that promise. He was cornered and trapped.

How much time does she have? The thought, sharp and agonizing, pierced through his carefully constructed composure. The last flare-up had been worse, much worse. The disease, relentless and cruel, didn't wait. Her legs were already mostly gone, her mobility dependent on the rickety old wheelchair. Next, it would be her arms. Then her lungs. Her voice. How long until she couldn't even speak his name? How long until she…

No. No. Don't go there. He slammed a mental door on that particular abyss.

Part of him, the pragmatic, cowardly part, wanted to delete Monica's contact, to pretend this option didn't exist. To pretend there was still another way out, a cleaner path. But there wasn't. Not one that would get him the kind of NEX he needed, not fast enough.

His fingers, moving with a will of their own, typed out the message. Short. To the point. Irrevocable.

Ray: Still need muscle? I'm available.

He had crossed the line. Again. And this time, he wasn't sure he could ever find his way back.

Ray checked the timer on the left side of his HUD. 3:04 AM. The city outside was a distant, muted roar, a beast in restless slumber. The lack of any biological need for sleep, a gift from his nanites, had its advantages—more time to work, to plan, to think. But not tonight. Tonight, the endless, silent hours stretched before him like a barren desert.

"This sucks," he muttered, his voice hollow in the small, stuffy room. His hands, rough and calloused, dragged down his weary face. He didn't need sleep. But he needed something. A moment of silence that didn't echo with his own racing thoughts. A break from the crushing weight pressing behind his eyes, the constant, low-level hum of his own altered biology. He couldn't sit there any longer. The oppressive stillness of the room, the faint, recycled heat, the familiar pattern of cracks on the ceiling—it was suffocating him.

Then he heard it: a faint, high-pitched buzzing sound, metallic and erratic, faltering... followed by a sharp, splintering crash from the main living area.

He snapped upright, every nerve, every nanite, flaring to instant alert. He grabbed his Glock from under the thin pillow and stormed out of the room, his breath caught in his throat, his mind already cycling through a dozen threat assessments.

His mother was already stirring, her small, frail body struggling to push herself upright on the couch, her eyes wide with alarm. "Ray? What was that?" she asked, her voice groggy with sleep and sudden fear.

"Stay down!" Ray ordered, his voice sharp and commanding, as he swept the small apartment with his gaze, his weapon held ready. The sound had come from the broken window—the one they'd covered with a thick, patched blanket against the city's perpetual grime and chill. He approached it cautiously, his pistol raised, every sense straining.

A drone. Small, sleek, and compact, its aerodynamic body painted a utilitarian matte black, but streaked with incongruous, vibrant slashes of neon green. Its multiple rotor blades stuttered, stopped, then twitched back to life with a faltering, uneven spin. A collection of brightly colored, irreverent stickers decorated its scuffed casing—NO STEP!, BOOP ME!, and a crudely drawn smiley face scrawled over a grinning skull.

Ray kept his gun steady, his aim unwavering. "A drone crashed through the window," he told his mother, his eyes still locked on the unexpected and twitching intruder.

A moment of tense silence passed. Then a voice, tinny and distorted, crackled through the drone's small, external speaker—a man's voice, surprisingly casual, almost cheerful, despite the circumstances.

"Hey! Uh... hi there. Friendly! Don't shoot, okay?"

Ray didn't answer. His pistol didn't move. This was Virelia. Nothing was ever just friendly.

"C'mon, man. No teeth, no boom-boom. It's just a surveillance and delivery drone, I swear on my favorite wrench and my left pinky finger. Promise."

Ray held his stance a moment longer, assessing, then stepped forward cautiously and placed his hand on the drone's surprisingly warm shell. His nanites surged inside, a silent, probing tendril of consciousness. What he found was… chaos. Wires tangled like a nest of metallic spaghetti, capacitors patched with mismatched electrical tape, processor boards crudely cobbled together from what looked like at least three different, incompatible drone models. It was a miracle the thing had ever managed to power up, let alone fly. Whoever had built this abomination was either completely unhinged—or a bizarre kind of savant, making functional art from absolute scrap.

Still, his nanites confirmed its basic nature: it was, as the voice claimed, a heavily modified civilian surveillance and light cargo drone. No explosives. No weaponized software. Just barely functional, jury-rigged tech, stitched together with ingenuity and desperation.

"Yo, uh—would you mind, like, super much, bringing that back to me?" the voice crackled again from the drone's speaker. "Address is—uh, Apartment building 18-B, floor 9, apartment with the obnoxious, custom neon-green door. Can't miss it. Five minutes away, tops. Please? Pretty please with synth-cherries on top?"

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

Ray's HUD blinked, automatically opening the local map overlay. Sure enough, Apartment building 18-B was just a few hundred meters away. But still. It was 3 AM. He wasn't raised to be an idiot. He'd heard too many cautionary tales, too many sob stories that started with "just a quick, harmless errand." He wasn't about to add his name to that long, ignominious list—not tonight. Not with everything else already on his plate.

"I'll be at your door at 8 AM," Ray replied flatly, his voice devoid of inflection.

"What? Why? Dude, come on! Seriously? For the love of all things Mechatronic and holy—I'll give you pizza! Microwave pizza! And, like, maybe only 60 percent synthetic, I swear!"

Ray said nothing. He simply scooped up the damaged, twitching drone.

A pause. Then the voice spoke again, weaker now, a note of genuine panic creeping in. "Wait—what are you doing? Hey! Don't manhandle the drone!"

"Taking you out of my apartment," Ray said, his voice still flat as he moved towards the broken window.

"WAIT! Okay, fine! Fine! Bring it at 8! Whatever! Hope you're happy—you just missed your golden opportunity for some truly epic, triple-synth-cheese!"

Ray ignored him. "See you then," he muttered, more to himself than to the disembodied voice. He sent a silent command through his palm. His nanites, efficient and precise, severed the drone's main power connection. The lights in its multiple optical sensors dimmed like closing eyes. The buzzing of its damaged rotors stopped. The voice cut off mid-protest.

He set the now-inert drone carefully aside, near the window. He stood by the broken window for a long moment, letting the cool, polluted early morning breeze wash over his face, carrying away some of the suffocating tension, the weariness that had settled deep in his bones.

Who the hell was this guy?

And what other weirdness was this city going to throw at him before the sun finally, reluctantly, decided to rise?

After his mother had calmed from the abrupt scare of the crashing drone, her breathing evening out into the shallow rhythm of uneasy sleep, Ray returned to the oppressive quiet of his own room. He placed the damaged drone carefully on the table beside his ancient laptop and sat down, exhaling a breath he didn't strictly need but took anyway, a lingering human habit.

He checked the glowing numerals on his internal HUD: 3:49 AM. Still hours to kill before his self-imposed 8 AM deadline to meet the drone's eccentric owner. The city outside was a low, distant rumble, a beast stirring in its fitful slumber.

The drone sat beside him, a quiet, twitchy machine, its matte black casing streaked with incongruous neon green slashes. The irreverent stickers—"NO STEP!", "BOOP ME!", and the grinning skull—still clung to its scuffed, battle-scarred surface, a testament to its owner's peculiar brand of humor.

I could just surf PulseFeed until it's time to go, Ray thought, the idea unappealing. The usual digital noise felt particularly grating tonight. He glanced at the drone again, a flicker of something akin to curiosity stirring within his usually guarded mind. Or… I could play a little with this thing.

It was, in its own chaotic way, perfect for practice. Its insides, as his nanites had briefly revealed, were a glorious, unholy disaster. A Frankenstein's monster of salvaged tech.

Ray placed his hand on the drone's cool, metallic shell. Nanites, silent and invisible, surged forward, blooming from his palm in fine, almost imperceptible tendrils of light. White, ghost-like lines traced invisible circuits across the drone's casing like veins awakening beneath sleeping skin. His mind, his consciousness, sank into the machine, interfacing with its crude, jury-rigged systems.

One processor was dangerously underpowered, dragging the entire flight stabilization algorithm down with it. A crucial solder point on the main logic board had snapped clean, likely during the crash. The power cells were recycled, third-rate trash—barely usable and dangerously unpredictable.

How this thing even managed to crash through my window without completely disintegrating is a miracle, Ray thought.

He began to subtly reinforce the broken connection, to optimize the power flow, his nanites working with an intuitive, alien precision.

A soft, internal chime from his HUD cut through his concentration. 7:40 AM.

He blinked, snapping out of the focused trance, surprised at how quickly the hours had passed. "Time really flies when you're having fun," Ray murmured to the empty room, the irony thick in his voice. With a flick of his will, his nanites reversed the subtle changes they'd made, restoring the drone's internal chaos to its original, precarious state. He wasn't about to hand over a perfectly repaired machine without knowing more.

He stood, grabbed the now-inert drone, and headed toward the door. His mother was awake, sitting up on the couch, her datapad resting in her lap, though her eyes were distant, unfocused. When she saw him, a small, knowing smile touched her lips.

"Morning, Mom," Ray said, his voice softer than usual.

"Morning, Ray." Her gaze lingered on the drone in his hand, a silent question in her eyes.

"I'm just going to return it. After that, I'm heading to Julia's for a bit. I'll be back by noon, probably earlier."Ray explained, offering the truth because, for once, it wasn't dangerous.

She nodded softly. She didn't need him to tell her his every move—he was an adult, after all. But hearing it, knowing he wasn't vanishing into the city's maw without a word, still helped. It eased the constant, gnawing worry that was her unwelcome companion. Especially when he could tell her the truth, however mundane.

"Take care, Ray," she said, her voice a little stronger this morning.

"Always."

The morning air was damp, heavy with the city's usual perfume: a cloying mix of ozone, hot grease from all-night food stalls, and the acrid tang of vehicle exhaust. Ray stepped into the street and was immediately swallowed by the cacophony. The city was alive, a relentless, churning machine, even this early. Neon-lit skyways, crisscrossing the perpetual twilight above, buzzed with automated cargo haulers and sleek passenger drones, their engines pulsing in a layered, discordant harmony with the low, guttural rumble of street-level delivery trucks. Pedestrians, a river of anonymous faces, moved like liquid, weaving through crowded vending stalls, idling, battered scooters, and packs of street kids shouting over each other in a Babel of dialects. Speakers mounted outside a corner noodle cart blared distorted, mind-numbing pop music, while a rusted, three-wheeled beggar drone wheeled past on sparking treads, its synthesized voice repeating a looped, pathetic plea for spare credits. The cloying scent of fried soy-chicken mixed with the sharp, chemical smell of coolant leaking from a nearby, open maintenance pit. Burnt ozone, sharp and metallic, stung his nostrils—likely leaking from a cracked, overhead mag-rail conduit. Even the ferroconcrete beneath his worn boots seemed to sweat a greasy film.

Ray kept walking, a ghost in the urban machine.

After a short, unpleasant walk through cracked sidewalks littered with discarded stims and pathways riddled with layers of vibrant, angry neon graffiti, Ray reached Apartment building 18-B. He navigated to the ninth level, the air here slightly less choked with pollutants, and found the unit with the promised, and indeed obnoxious, neon-green door. The building was, in some marginal ways, a step up from his own crumbling tenement. But only barely. The walls were still stained from years of acid rain and accumulated grime, though the creeping black mold was less aggressive here. The hall lights flickered, but with a sleepy, reluctant persistence, not the frantic, staccato sputter of impending, total failure. The cracked concrete tiles underfoot were fewer and slightly cleaner, interrupted by discarded trash that hadn't yet gathered into the familiar, depressing nests of urban decay. Faded, peeling posters still clung precariously to the corridor walls—advertisements for defunct VR arcades, shadowy back-alley upgrade clinics, and long-forgotten renegade synthwave concerts. They curled at the corners, paper ghosts whispering of a louder, more vibrant past.

The green door itself glowed faintly, as if someone had left a very bad, and very bright, idea running on standby.

Ray stood before it, the damaged drone held loosely in his hand. He took a breath, steeling himself for… well, he wasn't sure what. Then he knocked.

He heard the sound of rapid, slightly uncoordinated footsteps from inside, a muffled yelp, and then the door flew open. Ray looked at him.