NANITE

Ray lay dying. Oil, rotting garbage, and the metallic tang of his own blood formed a cloying perfume in the forgotten alley. Rain-slick concrete warped the flickering glow of distant city drones and passing cars into meaningless streaks of light, none of which dared to penetrate the darkness where he lay. No one ever came here.

His vision blurred, a smear of color and light. Each breath was a ragged, shallow gasp, like sucking air through a straw too narrow to sustain. He could feel the warmth leaking from his chest—one, two, three, too many bullet wounds—and each heartbeat, a fading drum, grew weaker than the last. Trembling fingers, slick with his own bright crimson, pressed against the wounds. Too bright.

"Fuck me," he rasped, more air than voice, staring at the hand that shook like a dying leaf.

For a moment, an image of his mother's hands surfaced—frail, trembling, always cold. What would happen to her without me? The thought lodged itself in his chest, a shard sharper than any bullet.

A faint clatter reached him, too light to be a threat. He barely turned his head, vision swimming. Something had fallen beside him, bouncing once before settling in the puddle at his side. An injector, he thought, though it seemed larger than usual. His eyes couldn't focus; blood and shadows painted everything in a macabre wash.

Through the haze, it looked like any other injector—sleek, dark. But something was off. A strange shimmer pulsed within, like liquid mercury threaded with veins of faint violet light. It might have been his fading vision playing tricks. He couldn't tell. All he knew was that it was there.

His body was numb, yet a primal instinct, the raw will to survive, propelled his arm. His fingers, clumsy and weak, wrapped around the injector. It vibrated gently in his grip, warm and humming like a living thing.

With the last dregs of his strength, he brought it to his mouth. The moment the contents surged into him, pain returned—not from his wounds, but something far worse. A violent, electric jolt ripped through his veins, his back arching off the ground in a brutal spasm. Thousands of needles pierced every nerve, every muscle, every bone. His skin bubbled with an eerie silver light as the wounds on his chest began to close. He watched, wide-eyed, as his flesh stitched itself together, veins glowing for a heartbeat before the skin smoothed over, pristine. A scream tried to claw its way out of his throat, but blackness swallowed him whole.

When Ray opened his eyes again, the world hadn't changed. Still night. Still raining. The puddle beneath him was deeper now, filled with dirty water and the ghost of his blood. But the pain… the pain was gone.

He blinked, then slowly, cautiously, sat up. He braced for agony, for the protest of torn flesh. Instead, he felt… fine.

"How?" he croaked, his voice rough. He ran his hands over his chest. Nothing. No blood. No holes. Even his torn shirt was intact, as if the bullets had been a nightmare. The alley was the same grim tableau, but his body was an anomaly.

He pinched his arm, hard. He winced. "So, not dreaming."

There was no blood on the ground, no trace of his near-demise. Above him, a flickering billboard buzzed to life, its cheerful synth-voice proclaiming, "Aethercore Biomedical – We Don't Heal. We Rebuild." He scoffed, the irony a bitter taste, and looked away.

He tried to call up his HUD, the familiar mental shift. Nothing.

A cold tendril of panic crept in. He reached for the neural port at the base of his skull, just below his right ear. His fingers met only smooth, unmarred skin.

"No fucking way..." he muttered, his voice a shaky whisper. He searched again, fingers trembling as they combed through wet hair, over skin that should have had a jack, a port, something.

"Calm down, Ray," he told himself, though his voice cracked. "There has to be an explanation." His mind raced, grasping for logic where none seemed to exist. Maybe someone had saved him. But who? And why erase the evidence so completely?

He stood on unsteady legs. The rain plastered his hair to his face, soaking his clothes, the chill of it strangely muted against his skin. Everything around him felt real. Too real.

He stepped out of the alley and into the street. The glow of Bastion's lower levels stretched before him, an endless vista of urban decay. Holoscreens blinked erratically above broken vending machines. Shattered windows and layers of cybernetic graffiti marked the bones of forgotten buildings. In a shadowed doorway, a vagrant with modded eyes watched him silently before melting back into the darkness.

He couldn't take the maglev. Couldn't afford a cab. The shards stored in his ports were gone—and so were the ports themselves.

So he walked.

Kilometers of urban rot lay between Lower Bastion and Hollow Verge, a landscape of undercity violence punctuated by the sweeping gaze of surveillance towers. Each step was heavy, not from physical pain, but from an unknown weight pressing down on his chest, a sense of profound displacement.

Ray moved through the shadows, a careful, silent wraith weaving past the glow of sickly neon lights that painted the crumbling streets in hues of rust and bile. The night air thrummed with the sounds of clandestine deals, whispered threats, and the desperate hum of survival. He didn't want to bump into the Red Obsidian—not again.

It had been routine, a delivery route he'd taken a hundred times without trouble. But one wrong turn, one misstep into the wrong alley, and they were there—as if they had been waiting for him.

Ray tsked under his breath. If only he'd had some mods, maybe the whole thing wouldn't have happened. But what was done was done. He was alive. Somehow, still in one piece.

It was strange, though. The Red Obsidian were harvesters—body scavengers with a twisted taste for ritual. They didn't just kill. They collected. Limbs. Organs. Mods. They took pieces of you back to their dens, offerings to whatever techno-god they worshipped. For them not to take anything from Ray, young and relatively healthy, was beyond strange. It gnawed at him.

His gaze landed on a nearby wall where their symbol was freshly painted, the crimson pigment looking too thick, too real. A stylized red stone mask crowned with jagged feathers, evoking a war-god idol. The symmetrical design blended ancient Mesoamerican geometry with brutalist lines, a stark symbol of tradition fused with raw cybernetic power. The eyes were hollow, unblinking—death watching from behind a visor.

"Crazy fucks," he muttered, the words a puff of condensation in the damp air. He would never forget their feathered tattoos, the glint of their dark blades, the LED ritual masks that lit up like devil faces, or the biotech scarification that twisted their flesh into messages only they understood.

Rain slicked the streets and soaked through his clothes, yet he felt no chill, no discomfort. His body seemed untouched by the cold, indifferent to the elements. That wasn't right. The injector, he reasoned, must be its effect. He flexed his fingers. No stiffness. No fatigue. Just a disturbing sense of… neutrality. Why don't I feel anything? Not even tired?

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By the time Ray reached his apartment complex, the sky had shifted from deep black to a bruised, reluctant gray. Dawn's first light crept like a thief through the narrow gaps between the towering, oppressive buildings. The mega-apartment block loomed ahead—a rusting monolith choking on its own smog, clawing for the sky like a dying Tower of Babel.

Inside, the lobby was a husk of what it might have been decades ago. The walls were streaked with mold and grime, the lights flickered in protest against the years of neglect. Floor tiles, cracked and uneven, were littered with discarded wrappers, empty stim-packs, and old posters peeling from the walls like sunburnt skin. A rusted drone buzzed weakly in its charging socket, a flickering holoscreen beside it blinking the hollow words: "Welcome Home, Citizen."

Ray stepped into the lift, jabbing the button for floor 32. The panel sparked faintly. He slapped it, a familiar percussive maintenance. The lift groaned, shuddered, then began its slow, wheezing ascent. "One of those days…" Ray muttered as the cabin rattled upward. Always too slow.

The hallway on his floor was just as decrepit—narrow and dim, the lights overhead pulsing like a dying heart. The walls were stained, patched with makeshift repairs and duct tape. Doorways lined the corridor like coffins standing upright, some hanging open, others sealed with metal bars or scavenged parts. Static-laced music leaked from one, a groan from another.

Ray stopped at his own door. He reached to the left, behind a pile of scrap and under a loose piece of metal, retrieving a small plastic card with a chip embedded in its center. Without an interface, he had to do things the old-fashioned way. He swiped the card along the lock. After a mechanical swirl, the door clicked open. He slipped inside quietly, careful not to make a sound, his gaze sweeping the small, cluttered room.

It was filled with the weight of unspoken memories. Old furniture, scuffed and mismatched, crowded the living space. A blanket, draped over the broken window frame, swayed slightly in the draft. The flickering light from an outdated holo-frame bathed the walls in a soft blue shimmer, looping old family photos.

And there she was. His mother, asleep on the couch.

She was curled under a thin, worn blanket, her dark hair matted against a pillow stained with old tears. Her once-beautiful face was drawn and pale, the lines of her illness carved deep. Multiple sclerosis had stolen the vitality from her limbs, robbed her of strength, but not her grace. Even now, in sleep, there was a dignity in her presence—like a masterpiece left to fade in a ruined gallery. He remembered her laughter—warm and golden like sunlight—before sickness had turned it into a fragile whisper.

Ray's throat tightened. He walked over silently and knelt beside her, brushing a damp strand of hair from her face. Leaning down, he kissed her forehead gently.

"I'm still here, Ma," he whispered, the words a vow. "Still fighting."

Then he rose and made his way to his room, the weight of the night, and all its unanswered questions, trailing behind him like a second shadow.

The door to his room closed with a soft, nearly inaudible click. It was barely more than a box—frugal to the point of austerity. Bare concrete walls, stained by time and moisture. No posters. No color. Just a narrow cot in the corner, a battered table with a single chair, and an aging PC that buzzed quietly like a dying insect. A small vent above the bed wheezed out air recycled too many times to feel fresh. The only personal touch was a cracked photo frame, turned face down on the table.

Once inside, he tried to undress, but something was wrong. His clothes seemed to be fused to his skin. They peeled off only to a certain point before sticking, as if glued.

"Ahh, come on, get off already," he groaned, tugging and twisting in frustration. No matter how hard he tried, the fabric clung to him like a second skin, bonded at the seams. The shirt refused to budge. Panic, cold and sharp, began to rise in his chest.

Frustrated, he slumped down at his desk. He needed to contact Johnny—tell him what had happened. Everything about tonight was off. Maybe someone had rattled him, set him up. Maybe the Red Obsidian had done more than just leave him alive.

He reached to power on his computer. The moment his fingers touched the casing, his arm shifted.

The skin rippled. Metal, black and grey, crept outward like spreading ink, gleaming faintly under the flickering light. His fingers stretched, morphed, coiled into a tendril that wrapped tightly around the device. A sharp tingle ran up his spine, like static dancing along his nerves. His stomach turned, a lurch of profound wrongness.

Before he could react, the entire computer shuddered, then collapsed into itself—consumed and absorbed in seconds. It simply disappeared.

Ray recoiled in horror, yanking back his arm. "What the fuck just happened?" he whispered, eyes wide, staring at the empty spot where the machine had been.

Then, without warning, something bloomed inside his head. A system interface. Alien. Digital. Cold.

Strings of sharp, jagged letters flowed across his vision—too fast, too unfamiliar. Then, just as quickly, they flickered and reassembled themselves into English. Two bars appeared in the top left corner of his mind's eye: one grey, completely full, and beneath it a blue one, nearly topped off. The grey one pulsed faintly. The blue one flickered like a loading bar nearing completion.

He flexed the fingers of the hand that had just consumed his computer. It looked human again.

Am I having a bad trip? he thought. But this wasn't a hallucination. He looked down again. The computer was gone. Completely.

He stood, stumbling to his bed, his legs stiff, movements jerky. Kneeling, he reached under the frame and pulled out an old, dust-covered laptop. The casing was cracked, but it still powered on. Relief, stark and immediate, washed over him that it didn't vanish like the other. The whirring fan and sluggish loading time were oddly comforting.

With trembling fingers, he opened his comms and messaged the only person who might understand—or at least try to. He hesitated before typing. Julia had always helped without asking too many questions. If anyone could look past the weirdness, it was her.

Ray: Hey, Julia?

Julia: Hey, Ray. How are you?

Ray: Fine... I guess. Are you at your clinic?

Julia: Yes, do you want a check-up?

Ray: Yeah, I'll be there in a few hours.

Julia: Okay.

Ray dropped onto his bed, face first. He was still wet from the rain, his clothes clinging awkwardly, fused to his skin, but he didn't care. Right now, all he wanted was to rest, to shut down and process what he had just experienced.

But sleep wouldn't come. His mind spun, a frantic loop of the alley, the injector, the Red Obsidian, his mother's sleeping form—her fragile breath, her faded beauty. And now this: his body consuming a computer like it was food. A cold dread settled in his stomach, heavier than the undigested fear.

He lay still for minutes, but something gnawed at him. Not exhaustion. Not fear. A realization, stark and unsettling.

He wasn't tired. Not at all.

It was as if his body had shut out fatigue completely—as if rest was now unnecessary. Something deep inside him buzzed, alive and alert, even as his thoughts spiraled into bewildered chaos. He stared at his hands, flexed them again. They looked normal—but what if one day they didn't?

What the hell am I becoming?

Ray walked to the bathroom—a narrow, dim space with cracked tiles and a rust-stained sink that groaned when the water ran. A flickering fluorescent bulb buzzed overhead, casting a harsh, uneven glow. The mirror above the sink was chipped in the corner, its steel backing corroded by time and humidity. Everything reeked of cheap soap and recycled city air.

He splashed cold water on his face and took a long, hard look in the mirror. His reflection stared back—early twenties, average build, wiry from a life spent running rooftops and squeezing through alley gaps. His dark hair was short and unkempt, as always, and his deep blue eyes looked tired but still carried that sharp, alert glint. Pale skin hinted at long hours spent in shadow, smeared faintly with the city's grime.

He wore what he always did—simple, utilitarian gear. A hooded coat with internal pockets, scuffed boots worn thin from use and a simple dark shirt. Gloves, old and frayed, kept him from leaving prints behind.

On the surface, everything looked the same. But Ray knew—nothing was normal anymore.

He leaned in closer, narrowing his eyes. Opened his mouth. Checked his tongue, his teeth. All of it looked normal. Too normal. And that, somehow, felt profoundly wrong.

He couldn't wait.