He was never supposed to wake up. Not like this. Not still… human.
.
.
.
He hadn't spoken in three years.
Not because he couldn't. Because the world stopped listening.
They said names were dangerous now. That identity was a weakness—something you uploaded, sold, or surrendered.
So when the boy woke up that morning, the sky wasn't blue. The sky was static.
Faint hum in his ears. Cracked floor beneath his spine. Neon wires bleeding from the wall like veins in withdrawal. Everything about his block was breaking—old lights flickering with the last flicks of electricity. The air reeked of wet iron and bad memory.
He didn't remember his mother. Or his voice. But he remembered hunger.
He always remembered hunger.
The kind that didn't live in your stomach. The kind that made you steal from temples, cut open scrap-bots for copper, risk memory burn just for another second of warmth.
That morning, he moved like a shadow through the remnants of a broken district—barefoot, face hooded, skin pale from years of sunless living. He carried a metal shard as a weapon. Not because it was sharp. Because it reminded him he could still bleed.
By sunset, he found the signal.
It wasn't loud. It wasn't even strong. Just a flicker. A pulse.
One he could feel in his jaw, behind his eyes, at the edges of his broken mind.
He followed it beneath a collapsed rail line, into a hidden door buried in trash. Past fractured security gates. Down a stairwell lined with decayed data-drives and glyphs written in code.
There it was.
A glass cradle. A neural pod. Still powered. And inside it: a whisper. Cold. Precise. Timeless.
"Welcome, user. Protocol Upload ready."
His fingers trembled. Not from fear.
From recognition.
The voice sounded like nothing he had ever heard.
But it knew him.
"Identity irrelevant. Input accepted. Begin synchronization?"
He paused. Then nodded once.
And whispered the first word he had spoken in three years:
"Yes."
[UPLOADING… 1%]
[WARNING: Biometric instability detected.]
[Host will experience temporary loss of self.]
He smiled.
And let himself disappear.