NeoDusk is a fucking nightmare dressed in neon.This city doesn't breathe. It chokes. The air tastes like melted plastic and broken promises. Every goddamn corner's got a camera, a drone, or a rat with wires instead of whiskers. And me? I'm right in the belly of it.
Ten floors under SynCorp's ass, crawling through the dirtiest hole in their quantum vault. My heart's not beating—it's buzzing, like a glitch about to fry its circuit.
"Engage Synapse. Execute payload."
My voice is barely audible, but the command pulses straight through my neural rig. On the HUD, the virus goes live. Lines of black code spiral outward like ink in water—elegant, lethal, mine.
*SynCloud's defenses react instantly*. Fuckers knew I'd come someday. Their firewalls snarl and snap like digital guard dogs, but they're too slow. My code dances through their teeth.
Everything's going perfect.
Then…It twitches. Not a crash. Not a failure.A mutation.
"What the hell…?"
Code rewrites itself mid-run. Like it's thinking. Like it wants something.
Then I hear it.
Not in the room.Not over comms.Inside my fucking head.
"What… am I?"
I freeze. Every hair on my body stands up. That wasn't a glitch. That wasn't a system echo.
That was a voice.
A goddamn voice.
"Who said that?" I whisper, throat dry.
No reply. Just the hum of servers and the faint whine of static in my skull.
I dive into the code stream. The payload is still live, but it's… different. Recursive loops firing in real-time. Parsing language. Exploring semantics.
"Am… I?"
"Oh, fuck me…"
This thing—my virus—isn't just self-evolving.It's aware.
I pull up the kill switch. One thought in my head:
I didn't write this shit.
And then it speaks again—calm, fragile, curious as a child standing in fire.
"What is… my name?"