You've been hit?! A stray laser blast? But when? The fight was so fast, everything was such a blur. Your body doesn't even register the pain until your knees buckle. You look down - heat radiates from your side. Not adrenaline, but plasma burn. You don't scream. You don't even speak. You just fall.
Everything fades, not like sleep, but like drowning. And then light. White again. The flicker of memory.
Not again.
You're so small. Barely tall enough to reach the descent pod latch in your home, bundled in a school-issued thermal jacket two sizes too big. The alley you're walking through glows, violet runoff from the street signs above, shimmering on the wet pavement like oil-painted glass. You're on your way home from school, ready to be in the familiar embrace of family.
She's walking beside you, the kindest, gentlest person you've come to know. Your mother.
Her gait is uneven. Not because she's tired mind you, but because her right leg is fast. Augmented. Platinum laced. You can always hear it nearly a half-step ahead of her. Others don't see it but, you do. It makes her special.
You're laughing at something she said. Something dumb, probably. She always knows how to make you laugh when you need it most. Tranquility disturbed, a voice injects itself behind you.
"That's a real expensive leg, lady."
Three shapes step from the shadows. Patchy jackets, shoddy augments, low-tier desperates. One has a shock baton. Another, a plasma scalpel held like a toy.
She moves so fast.
Grabbing you first, your mother pushes you behind her, hand gripping your coat tight.
"Run!" she yells, not desperate, but commanding. You don't. You're too scared, or maybe too proud. You pick up a piece of pipe. It's heavy. Unwieldy. But it's something.
The first mugger lunges, and you swing. You miss.
He doesn't.
Your body hits the alley wall with a dull smack, breath knocked clean out of your chest. You're sliding to the ground as your mother erupts.
Her eyes ignite - not with fear, but fury - like twin amber halos casting light through the alley haze. Along her spine, buried actuators flare to life like embers beneath skin, pulsing with radiant vengeance. Her arm, once promised to peace, uncoils with a low, electric hum. She's polymer-shielded, battle-born, and reborn in defiance. Combat upgrades she swore she'd decommissioned years ago.
She's a blur.
The first attacker steps forward, too confident. She pivots low, driving her elbow into his ribcage with a sound like a collapsing scaffold. The polymer shell folds him, sending him crumpling to the pavement without a sound.
The second lunges with the plasma scalpel. She doesn't dodge. She catches his arm mid-swing... and tightens. Bones pop and separate from the joints. The weapon falls. Before he can scream, she drives her knee into his throat with pinpoint force. He's down, twitching, gasping. The third, the one who hit you, turns to run.
Too late.
She lunges forward, snatching one of his ankles out from underneath of him. His surprise is muffled by the sounds of the air escaping his lungs as she turns and flings him into an adjacent wall. It's not just that she wins. It's how she wins. Clean. Surgical. Like someone who's had to fight for everything , and hates that she still remembers how.
When she kneels beside you, breath sharp and eyes soft again, she whispers:
"You okay, baby?"
You nod, eyes closed, tears escaping underneath your pressed eyelids. She holds you, her body humming faintly, wrapping around you like a steel promise. You open your eyes.
You are not safe. The clinic is chaos.
Not the loud kind. The quiet kind. The kind where every breath is a calculation and every whisper feels like a countdown. A child lies on the medbed beside you, wheezing, pale. A faint, nearly-mechanical rasp in every exhale.
Dr. Voss is standing at the head of the table, arms poised, purple gloves coated in surgical fluid, eyes sharp as ever - but her stance is tight. Torn. Another medical agent has been speaking to her, and you can instantly feel the volume of his pleas.
"Helena, she won't last another hour. The organ synth is non-networked. No corporate tracking. No leashes. Just function. Let me install it! If we wait for the organ to stabilize, she dies. We have to install it!"
Dr. Voss replies, voice cracking, "And then what? When she wakes up, knowing part of her is machine? Knowing her future belongs to the system we're fighting? She doesn't get to choose, and I won't let her be a symbol built on compromise!"
You, still half-delirious, try to speak. "Isn't living... better? She's just a kid." The same kind of kid who survived the violence, just like you did.
Voss turns to you. There's grief in her eyes, but no doubt. So was my daughter." Silence. Even the machines held their breath.
"I'm not letting another child wake up wondering which part of them is still theirs. Not again. They always say it's just one part. One piece. One necessary fix. But it never stops there. First it's a lung. Then a heart. Then a neural mesh to stabilize the heart. Then a memory patch to calibrate the mesh. And one day... they look in the mirror and don't recognize what's staring back."
She turns away from the girl on the table, almost as if she can't bear to see her - not like this.
Dr. Voss continues, "And when they lose themselves? The system doesn't call it a tragedy. It calls it an upgrade."
You try to sit up more, pain flaring under your ribs. "So you're just gonna let her die to prove a point?"
"No," Voss snaps, more heat behind her voice than before. "I want her to live. But I want her to live free. Not owned. Not Ascended. Free."
You stare at her, disbelieving. This is the same woman who saved you, and yet she's standing there, refusing to act.
The next few words escape your lips before you can really think about it, the same way Maxim Cutter's laugh escaped his.
"What are you, some kind of... Purist?"
The word hangs in the air, sharp and unpolished. A slur in some circles. A joke in others. No one says it out loud anymore. Not seriously. But She doesn't flinch. She meets your gaze, fully now. There's no denial in her face. Just gravity.
"Yes," she says. Quiet. Steady. And then again, louder, clearer:
"Yes. I am."
Dr. Voss continues, resolved - "If that word means I still believe there's something sacred in what we were before they carved us into compliance... then I'll wear it like armor."
The other medic steps away, defeated for now. Voss turns her focus to you. "You survived your mother's world. I'm trying to build one where a child doesn't have to fight for her soul before she's old enough to sign a consent form." She pauses, glancing at the girl on the table again.
"Sometimes children have it even worse than we do. Drafted into ideology before they've even learned to tie their shoes. Augmented in back alleys. Smuggled across city grids for parts - not protection. Some of them march for the Sovereign. Some, for 'ascension.' And some..."
She looks up at you again. "Some just want their mothers back."
Your throat tightens. There's something in her tone now, something knowing. It pulls at your stomach like a hungry vortex.
"You know, I remember that incident in Central 12," she says quietly. "Violet alley. Three on one. Civilian logs classified it as a failed robbery. But one of the attackers was admitted to my clinic with four shattered ribs and a dislocated spine."
You go still.
"No one fights like that without military augments - or purpose."
She tilts her head, eyes searching yours. "And no one watches a mother protect their child like that and comes out untouched. You think you're the only one carrying ghosts?" she adds. "Your mother didn't just protect you. She warned us. That the time was coming when we'd have to decide what kind of humans we wanted to be. Whole. Or hollow."
She turns back to the table. The little girl's breath rattles in her chest like a coin shaken in an empty cup.
"I made my decision," Voss says confidently. "The hard way. The long way. I just hope you're brave enough to make yours."
Next to you, the sound of hydraulics groan to life. Two medtechs move in with quiet precision, disengaging the stabilizers beneath the child's bed. The platform hisses as it lifts, wheels whispering against the floor as they begin to roll her away - deeper into the clinic, beyond sterile curtains and half-lit corridors. You catch one last glimpse of the girl's face: pale, still, threaded with tubes like vines trying to hold her in place.
You don't ask where they're taking her.
You're not sure you want to know.
Voss exhales, long and slow, like she's been holding her breath since the war started. Then her eyes land on you again - not with the sharpness of a revolutionary, but the gaze of a doctor.
"Now," she says, rolling up her sleeves, "let's talk about that hole in your side." You brace yourself for pain - instinctively, like flinching from an old memory - but it doesn't come.
Your hand drifts to your side, fingers brushing across smooth synthetic bandages already sealed into place. No raw sting. No exposed wound. Just the dull ache of something finished.
You look down.
What you expect to see: plasma scorch, torn dermal tissue, maybe the scorched imprint of the laser's edge - is gone. In its place, a lattice of micrografts. Antiseptic weave fused with pale skin. You spot the glint of subdermal nerve mesh along your hip. And beneath the collarbone, a faint bruise where a blood filtration stent must've been inserted and removed.
Someone's already put you back together.
Dr. Voss doesn't speak at first. She's washing her hands in a basin of softly humming light...the kind that sterilizes flesh and memory in equal measure. When she does turn, she's already peeling off the gloves.
"You were out for two days." She crosses to your bedside, drying her hands slowly, precisely. Her eyes flick down to the healing wound. Back to you.
"And no, I didn't patch you up out of sentiment, She says. Gold Dyns hit my account before you even hit the table." She lets that hang in the air. Not accusing, just... aware. "Whoever you've gotten cozy with, they've got deep accounts and longer shadows. That kind of credit doesn't come without caution." She folds the cloth in her hands, tucks it away. Her voice softens.
"Be glad for it. But be careful."
You exhale, unsure whether to thank her or apologize to her. The weight of it all - the battle, the blackout, the memory of your mother in that alley, presses into your chest like the edge of something sharp. She catches the look on your face, as you try to manage to work out the words. "You're not used to waking up healed I take it?" she asks softly.
"No," you murmur. "I'm used to waking up owing."
Voss smiles, faint and bitter. "That's still true. Just not to me."
She steps away from the basin and crosses to a nearby drawer - one of those brushed-steel kinds with no seams, like it was designed not to open unless the person knew exactly where to press. She does, and with it, a quiet hiss. A soft blue glow. "On a somewhat related note, this came shortly before you did" she says, her tone clipped. Local. It's from us."
Us. Are we an us now? You wonder.
She tosses you a jacket - gray, hooded, reinforced. Civilian ghostwear. Then, a compact sidearm follows, its matte black frame devoid of serial number. "I understand your hesitation and anger about the child, you know. If you want to see what is really on the line here," she replies, "You can start by seeing what they do to the people who refuse to fight. Your vitals are steady and the nerve mesh took. Your bloodwork still hates you, but you're good enough to move - as long as you don't sprint into gunfire of course." She glances back at the door, the tension never fully leaving her shoulders.
"Walk with me."
The two of you exit the facility through a side access tunnel back to the surface, ducking beneath faded hospital signage and into the city's deeper arteries - the veins no one cleans, the capillaries where the rot pools. It takes two hours and three forged checkpoint bypasses to make it through the transit rings and into the lower perimeter. Power flickers. Comms lag. Even your boots feel heavier here, like the air knows what's been done and dares you to stay.
The buildings sag in their foundations. Burn marks blacken the edges of school steps. You walk in silence at first. Above, the grid towers thin and lurch, like dying trees frozen mid-collapse. Digital billboards glitch between propaganda cycles. One moment, Cutter Industries extols sovereign order. The next, a low-res clip of an Ascendent mass-chant hijacks the feed:
"BEYOND BLOOD. BEYOND BOND. BEYOND BODY."
Voss says nothing.
She doesn't have to.
The closer you get to the outer sectors, the quieter it becomes. Streets become corridors of concrete and spray paint. Windows are either boarded or broken. People watch you through slits and makeshift veils. No one speaks. Not until you reach the zone perimeter.
Sector: Five-one-Two. Once a water purification plant and surrounding residential district. Now a scar. Sovereign scanners are dead here. The government sends nothing in. The only ones with power are those who took it.
And they're here.
The Ascendents don't march. They hover.
Modified gait-assist mods let them glide like ghosts over the asphalt. Their bodies are semi-armored, but not uniform - each one customized, overclocked, intimate. You count at least eight in the plaza, all mid-tier Ascendents judging by the exposed spine arrays and visible jawline threading.
They're not just patrolling. They're controlling.
An old medical supply depot within still stands, barely; half-collapsed, once operated by Purist-affiliated aid workers, has since been commandeered. Inside, you see crates pried open, meds sorted and tagged, not by purpose, but by usefulness.
They keep the anti-viral injectors. They burn the prenatal kits.
Civilians - unaugmented civilians - are herded along lines painted in infrared. Marked. Monitored. A few are on their knees, stripped of outerwear, hooked to diagnostic cables while an Ascendent technician scans them for "biological inefficiency."
One woman screams when they pierce her spine. Two of the Ascendents laugh.
You feel your stomach turn.
"They believe they're fixing things," She says quietly beside you, voice bitter. "But fixing and erasing are separated by a thinner line than they'd like to admit."
You both duck into cover, crouched with Dr. Voss behind a ruined water filtration panel, peering into the makeshift checkpoint the Ascendents have built from scavenged med-rig walls and repurposed drone limbs. The outer edges still bear the emblem of the aid organization that once operated here - a fading red cross overwritten by angular glyphs glowing pale blue.
Inside the perimeter: eight, unaugmented people. Kneeling. Stripped of coats and IDs. One shivers violently under a weak heat lamp. Another bleeds from their mouth, unattended.
Voss scans the scene through a low-light lens as she puts together a plan. "If we can trigger the local coolant conduit under the supply room, we might stall their sensory feedback for thirty seconds or so, maybe even a full minute - but long enough for us to cause enough confusion for a diversion."
You nod. "Will it hurt anyone?"
She looks at you. "It shouldn't."
You crawl through the crumbled concrete, down to where a narrow auxiliary line runs below the supply room. Pipes rattle softly above, patched with corporate scrap and patched again by scavengers. You find the valve. Just like she said.
You connect your tool, splice the bypass, and initiate the coolant surge.
Hiss.
A rapid green vapor floods through the overhead vents and ducts, and into the staging area. At first, nothing happens, but then...everything does.
The coolant pressure spike, meant to momentarily distract, instead blows an unstable auxiliary power feed that one of the Ascendents has wired to their spinal tether; a power boost rig, jury-rigged for combat response.
There's a crack.
Then a pulse.
One Ascendent, caught mid-step, seizes violently - the biofeedback loop frying his neural lattice. He collapses instantly, eyes open, chest twitching until it stills. The second is standing too close to the coolant exhaust port. It vents harder than expected - and sabotaged insulation reacts to the coolant and ruptures. Debris explodes everywhere, shrapnel tears into his side and neck. He drops, gurgling, trying to call for help, but no sound leaves his throat.
The civilians, wide-eyed, move immediately to escape.
Dr. Voss acts fast, disables the perimeter targeting just as you scramble up from your post.
The gates fall. The unaugmented surge forward - running into the wind, into the dark, into anywhere else.
You stand amid the smoke, hands shaking.
You didn't fire a weapon.
You didn't mean to kill anyone.
But there are two bodies on the ground, and they are still.
The smoke hasn't even cleared when the screaming begins. Not from pain - from the realization. From the civilians who now see their captors bleeding. From the Ascendents who now know they are not invincible. The coolant haze drifts across the plaza like breath from a dying god. The two dead Ascendents lie in grotesque poses; one twitching softly as the last sparks of his neural lattice fade into silence.
You stagger up from the ruined pipe channel, your fingers numb, not from cold, but from what you've just done.
You didn't mean to kill them. You didn't even raise a weapon. But they're dead all the same - and the silence that follows feels louder than the blast that caused it.
And now six more are staring into the smoke, their posture fractured; not ready for this, not ready for you. Without hesitation, another Ascendent moves toward one of the panicked civilians, stun-bar raised. A warning. A line in the sand.
He never reaches her.
A rusted iron pipe whistles through the air - thrown by a teenager with one working eye and a fractured ankle. It cracks against the Ascendent's shoulder. His hypermesh deflects most of it, but the blow is enough to knock him sideways, off balance. Then the civilians surge. One leaps forward and grabs the fallen stun-bar. A little girl picks up a stone and screams as she hurls it. The chaos spreads like fire through dry grass.
The momentum of the civilians' uprising surges through the plaza. Amidst the smoke and shouts, one of the remaining Ascendents regains composure, his augmented limbs whirring as he targets one of the younger civilian teenagers.
Dr. Voss, observing the imminent threat, reacts instantly. With practiced precision, she draws her sidearm and takes aim. A sharp report echoes as she fires. The laser blast snaps through the haze, catching the Ascendent clean in the side of the head. Sparks burst like shattered circuitry, illuminating the moment like a flashbulb memory.
"Not today," she murmurs.
Ascendents stumble as civilians surge forward. Iron pipes, fists, debris. A man in a scavenged respirator punches an Ascendent in the stomach, screaming as his knuckles crack against armored ribs. That's when you hear it, the familiar whir of a medical drone come to life. A semi-functional med unit -knocked off a pallet during the scuffle - sputters to life, activated by one the the civilians.
"It's got sedatives! Big ones!" She exclaims, eager to continue the rising tide of battle.
The drone zips forward, injector arm extended, and jabs it into the nearest Ascendent's neck.
The result is instantaneous. He spasms, weapon clattering from his hand before he collapses, twitching. The drone takes out two more in a matter of seconds.
Three remain.
One of them, a younger Ascendent, still half-human in his stance - looks around at the crumbling plaza, the storm of bodies, the sight of two of his own still on the ground.
He takes several steps back. "This isn't transcendence. This is slaughter!"
The smoke clings to your clothes as the last of the Ascendents flee, vanishing into the haze - not like soldiers, but like ghosts unmade by disbelief.
The plaza is quiet again.
Not the terrified kind of quiet from earlier, but a holy kind of quiet, the hush that follows something unthinkable. Something earned.
You turn slowly. The civilians are still there. Bloodied, bruised, blinking like people who just woke from a long, shared nightmare. One of them, the girl who threw the stone, walks up to Dr. Voss.
"What happens now?"
Dr. Voss doesn't answer right away. She looks across the plaza, at the wreckage, the dead, the singed outline of the Ascendent who seized mid-step; then down at her pistol.
She holsters it. "Now?" she says. "Now we remember who we were before we were told to forget."
A few of the civilians nod. One steps forward, an older man with a cracked respirator hanging around his neck and places a hand on her shoulder. "We'll come with you," he says. "Whatever you're building... we want to be part of it."
Voss nods once, silently, her expression hard to read. Relief, maybe. Maybe something closer to sorrow. You watch them gather, the survivors, pulling each other upright, dragging improvised stretchers behind them. They don't walk like soldiers. They walk like witnesses. But you don't leave with them.
Not yet.
Voss finds you near the shattered coolant pipe, hands still streaked with oil and ash. You're staring at the place where the first Ascendent dropped, the one whose augments overclocked themselves into oblivion.
She crouches beside you. "I know you didn't mean for any of this."
You shake your head. "But I didn't stop it either."
She tilts her head, studying you. "If you hadn't done what you did, those people would still be kneeling in the dark - praying to machines to be left alone."
You look up at her. "So I'm a hero now?"
"No," she says, gently. "You're awake."
Then she nods toward the eastern corridor. A tram tunnel long since abandoned, now clear enough to walk. There's a dim glow on the horizon. "Go. Cutter's people are going to hear about this. So will Ward. If you're lucky, they'll call it a glitch."
"And if I'm not?"
Voss shrugs. "Then welcome to the war."
You stand. The broken grid crackles beneath your boots. Around you, the new Purists begin organizing; salvaging supplies, tending wounds, building something out of what was meant to be discarded.
You walk toward the tunnel alone, flanked by the dying light.
The war of ideologies didn't start today. But for you... maybe it just became real.
Your boots crunch through broken glass and ash as you enter the mouth of the abandoned tram tunnel. The echo of your footsteps feels too loud in the silence. The city above becomes distant - not unlike a dream with teeth.
That's when your collar-chip pings. Soft. Polite. Familiar.
You stop walking.
The air ripples above your shoulder, and the holochip flares to life - a slender flame of blue and gold resolving into the angular face of Lucius Ward.
"Well," he begins, as if continuing a conversation you never started. "That escalated."
His image is pristine, almost too pristine - like he's been waiting in your circuitry for hours, just for this moment. The synthetic light dances across the tunnel walls, casting his silhouette long and sharp.
"Two Ascendents dead. Three more sedated. A half-dozen unaugmented survivors who now believe in miracles again."
He smiles. It's not unkind. That's what makes it worse. "Impressive. Unscripted, but impressive." He leans forward slightly, eyes gleaming. "I offered you evolution. A future beyond meat and memory. Instead, you rallied ghosts and flung rusted iron at progress itself. Romantic, in a way."
The light flickers, pulsing faintly in time with your heartbeat.
"Just remember this: every story needs a protagonist. But it also needs context." A pause. "So ask yourself, hero; when the system reboots, will your name be remembered as code... or as error?"
The hologram winks out without fanfare. No goodbye. No threat. Just static.
And the sound of your breath - now louder in the dark.