The wind cut through the alley, carrying the smell of wet garbage and cold iron.
Miles didn’t move, fingers still locked around the silver drive, the metal biting into his numb palm.
The man in the canvas jacket stepped further out of the shadow, the yellow grid lines from the streetlamp mapping across his face — a jagged scar running from the corner of his lip down to his throat, his eyes wide, glassy, bloodshot, two faint rings of blue light spinning beneath his pupils like miniature gears.
“They don’t tell you about the heat, do they?” His voice was flat, raspy, unblinking.
“The way your brain feels like it’s boiling in the socket at three in the morning because the bandwidth is too high.”
Miles felt his jaw clench until his molars ached, his throat thick with the metallic taste of old adrenaline.
The blue lines in his eyes rearranged violently, the text expanding until it blotted out the man’s chest.
COMPETITOR IDENTIFIED.
CURRENT INFLUENCE INDEX: 12% (DEGRADED).
PRIMARY SKILL: AUDIO COMPRESSION (REVERTED).
SYSTEM DIRECTIVE:
Do not engage in verbal synchronization.
The competitor is attempting to siphon your active bandwidth.
Terminate the proximity.
“Siphon,” Miles muttered, the word like gravel in his mouth.
“Yeah.
Siphon.” The man’s head tilted at an unnatural angle as he took another step, hands still buried in his jacket pockets.
It doesn’t just make the music out of nothing.
It takes the pieces of you that you don’t need anymore — your friends, your focus, the trade you spent months learning.
It eats all of it to turn the numbers into dollars.”
A sharp thud echoed from the dark interior of the idling sedan behind them — thud, thud — the same heartbeat frequency looping on Miles’s laptop upstairs, vibrating up through the asphalt and into the soles of his boots.
The text in his vision flickered a frantic purple.
BANDWIDTH DROPPING: 84%…
81%…
CRITICAL EXPOSURE.
ELIMINATE THE CONNECTION OR EXECUTE RETREAT.
The man stopped five feet away, the blue gears in his eyes spinning faster, casting a sickly glow over his cheekbones.
“Give me the thumb drive, Miles.
You take that upstairs and plug it into your rig, and you won’t belong to yourself by sunrise.
You’ll just be a node.
Another ghost in the network.”
Miles looked from the man’s twitching mouth down to the drive in his own hand.
The blue LED on the casing pulsed once, and heat rushed up his arm, clearing the numbness from his fingers.
His production skill was still locked at eighty-seven — he could feel the waveforms waiting in his head, clean, heavy, perfect.
Back to the green-flickering screen.
Back to twelve views and a life spent staring at peeling paint on the ceiling.
“No,” he said, shoving the drive deep in his front pocket and spinning toward the building’s entrance.
“Miles!” the man rasped behind him.
A sharp crack shattered the silence — a digital pop, like a speaker blowing out at full volume.
The yellow grid lines mapping the street snapped, the broken lamppost dying completely and plunging the alley into darkness.
Inside his head, a high-pitched shriek tore through his ears, loud enough to buckle his knees, and his palms slammed against rough concrete as he scrambled blindly for the door.
The system screen didn’t show text anymore.
Just a solid wall of flashing red static.
CONNECTION COMPROMISED.
HOST UNDER ACTIVE HARVEST.
00:10…
00:09…
He threw his weight against the glass doors of the lobby, the tape ripping open with a dry shriek, and burst into the pitch-black stairwell, boots pounding as he sprinted up the stairs blind.
Behind him, at the bottom of the landing, the heavy glass doors creaked open again.