🌃 COAST GROVE

Night. Rain drumming on the rooftops, the neon of the Corner Store bleeding into the wet asphalt. A car pulls up outside the shop on the corner. Four men. A near-routine call — some punk kids figured they'd knock over a spot under their protection.

One of the four looks at the storefront longer than the rest. He remembers when he was one of those kids himself — fifteen years ago, in this same neighborhood.
⸻
He was fourteen when his mother fell ill. The insurance ran out before the sickness did. He wanted to save her — and he was ready to do anything.

That same night he talked his way into tagging along with the older boys. A warehouse in the next district over, after sacks of "unmarked goods." Getting in was easy enough, but they were spotted before long. The older ones bolted first. He didn't make it out in time.

When they took him down, he yanked out the kitchen knife he'd grabbed in a hurry the night before. A hopeless gesture — one that only egged the warehouse men on.

They tied him up and sat him on a chair. Laid the knife in front of him, on a crate.
⸻
In the morning, a man came. Sat down across from him. Stayed silent a long while. Looked at him like he was deciding something the boy no longer had any part in.

Then he picked up the kitchen knife and snapped it apart with his bare hands. Pressed the handle back into the boy's palm. On his way out, he said just one thing: "Come find me, if you want to."

A package was already waiting at the boy's home. More money than the treatment even needed. They knew.
⸻
The car outside the Corner Store cuts its engine. The four step out into the rain. The one who lingered on the storefront adjusts the cord around his neck. On the cord — a wooden handle with no blade, hanging beside a gold chain.

He walks in first.

🌃 AETHER IO

Zoe Kashin's day begins at 5:47. Not 5:30, not six — exactly the time she needs to be ready by six. Coffee that will go cold untouched. The treadmill by the window. The ring. She strikes clean and without anger — like she's solving an equation. It's not that she has no fury. She just spends it on schedule.
⸻
At nine — the board of AETHER IO, the corporation she built alone. A man older than her explains to her how the market works. She listens, nods. Then she answers in a way that leaves him two weeks to find a new use for his experience. No threats, no raised voice. She doesn't fight — she just stops including people in the next email chain.
⸻
Lunch is always the same shabby café on the outskirts. Alone. Across the street, a boarded-up store: CLOSED on the door, grass pushing up through the asphalt. A girl once stood behind that register, counting out other people's change. Now she counts a whole city. And the store everyone used to walk past without a glance — she bought it out three years ago. And shut it down.
No one dares ask what she's thinking in those minutes.
⸻
Evenings — the ghost construction sites behind AETHER IO's fences, the ones that made her insane money without rising a single floor. And dinners with the people who run this city: they wander into the web of her cold charm, never noticing they're signing the death warrants of their own careers.
⸻
Late at night, she stands at the window. The city burns below her.
Esparza clings to blood. Coast Grove to respect. Sim-Genetics to an idea. She clings to nothing. That's why it's easiest for her.
And she knows: she is the city.

🌃 SIM-GENETICS

Danny Pereira had forty thousand viewers and not a single face he could've named. Crime Danny went where you weren't supposed to go and came back with the exclusive. Tonight he was going into the most closed-off organization in the city. "I'll be back," he promised in the first minute.
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Inside, it was unsettlingly calm. No basements and chains — just clean light and quiet people. Nobody grabbed him. "We were expecting you. You can leave the camera on — we welcome guests."
He came to expose them, and there was nothing to hide. The chat was typing run. Danny was still cracking jokes, but they were landing worse and worse. He was shown to a door with a nameplate: Pyotr Dovlatov. Invited in, of his own free will.
⸻
The professor stood with his back to the city. He didn't preach, didn't try to convince. He spoke quietly, like he'd known for a long time that Danny would come. Not "the world isn't real." He said Danny had been living in numbers for years now — in viewers he didn't know, in likes that filled the silences. That a man who's spent ten years living for a counter no longer tells reality apart from what films well.
"Look at this city. Remember it the way it is — you're about to stop seeing it that way."
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What happened next, the camera didn't show. The signal warped, the image broke apart into bands. Forty-one thousand people watched a streamer dissolve into static — and couldn't tell whether it was scripted or not. Then the stream ended, like the connection had simply dropped.
⸻
A week later, he went live one last time. The camera didn't shake. Danny looked healthy and calm.
"I'm fine. Happy. I see now. Come to Sim-Genetics — I'll help you see too. To everyone else — goodbye."
The man who'd spent ten years living to film turned the camera off himself. His subscribers decided he'd lost his mind. He would have put it differently — that for the first time in ten years, he was off the air.