Simon counted to five because timing mattered. On six, he slipped through.

  The doors sealed behind him with a hiss like an exhale, leaving him alone in the threshold glow of a half-dead facility. Blue emergency lights jittered across the floor, stuttering with each power dip. The reflections from a hundred dark screens smeared the walls like oil. He pressed flat to the metal paneling and thumbed the badge—Jensen-23’s—until the authentication chip bit into his skin. A borrowed identity pulsed through the network.

  His HUD still stuttered with Iris-7 residue, status bars crawling with corrupted glyphs. He forced a manual flush, clearing enough to see straight, though the system still muttered warnings at the edges of his vision.

  The chamber ahead was massive—hangar-sized, maybe bigger. Rows of pods stretched in precise lines, spotless engineering surrounding bodies that had been anything but carefully tended. Full-immersion rigs, banned in half the city, rumored to chew your cortex like gristle. Simon recognized the make: polycarbonate shells, skull-mounted VR crowns, soft restraints that pretended to be humane.

  The blue lights never reached full wattage here. Everything lived in half-shadow. Drizzle leaked from a vent overhead, tapping against pod lids like impatient fingers. The floor was cold enough to burn through his boots in pulses.

  He walked the aisle, keeping low. The occupants ranged from intact to grotesquely unfinished. A few wore only the crown and collar. Others had grown pale NeuroSeed scaffolds from their temples, the filaments branching like infected roots. Some bodies showed signs of mid-upgrade interruption—lips cracked, veins flickering with artifacted code. One woman’s face was frozen mid-scream, her eyes glassy and blown, staring at something only she’d seen.

  Simon tapped into each pod with quick neural handshakes—metadata, user tags, fragments of life. A street violinist. A courier who overdosed on synaptic runners. A handful of Low Town ghosts, recognizable only because he’d once shared a street or a night shift with them.

  He wondered how many had someone on the outside who would still bother to care.

  His servos protested each crouch; the rooftop crawl had fried half the joints in his left leg, and every movement sent heat knifing up his thigh. He ignored it. Pain was noise; noise could be managed.

  He slipped between rows, keeping below the catwalk angles. Doc Chop’s security teams always hit from three ingress points; he’d mapped them before stepping inside. The badge helped, but it wouldn’t fool the threat grid if it decided to take a second look.

  Low Town rule: never cross the same street twice.

  He followed it here, weaving a jagged pattern through a digital mausoleum.

  His HUD blinked: ACOUSTIC SPIKE.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  He stopped breathing.

  At first, he heard only the vents and recirculators. Then the undercurrent—servo motors, high-end, moving in sync.

  He dropped flat, rolled beneath a pod, and triggered his jacket’s heat-scatter protocol. Not invisibility, but enough to make a sensor bored.

  He risked a look.

  Three figures marched the aisle—chrome limbs catching fragments of blue light. Their steps were perfectly timed, an honor guard stripped of honor. The lead unit was tall, reinforced, the jaw replaced by a vented titanium muzzle, the eyes by flat optic glass. The skin around the mods was cratered with suture scars, a map of pain overwritten by corporate necessity.

  Cyborg Minions. Chop’s brand of repurposed human.

  They swept the room with laser grids, never glancing at the pods. Hands shook slightly—an almost-human tremor that made them more unnerving. Something inside them remembered being alive.

  Simon pressed deeper into the cold tile, timing the sweeps. When the lead unit passed, he shifted under a pod with a cracked lid, half the occupant hanging out like they’d tried to crawl free and died halfway. He let the corpse’s fading heat mask his own.

  The Minions passed.

  The second unit twitched—head tilting like someone whispering directly into its brainstem. Simon heard the faint static too: a hiss, maybe a comms check, maybe something else bleeding through from the rigs.

  Then—silence.

  When they’d moved on, Simon slid out, pulse steadying by degrees.

  The rigs toward the back were worse. Newer hardware, but bodies more altered—wetware prototypes, neural bridges, early consciousness forks pulsing beneath the skin. He knew the designs. Elara’s lineage. Corrupted, brute-forced, stripped of the safety rails she obsessed over.

  She would have called it “efficient in a felony kind of way,” then spent the night rewriting half the architecture. The memory hit him like static against exposed wiring.

  A sound snapped him back—a small cough, close enough to touch.

  He froze.

  The cough came again, softer, like someone embarrassed by their own existence.

  Simon leaned out from behind a shattered pod.

  A girl—sixteen, maybe—was wedged between two rigs. More wires than flesh. Her eyes tracked him sluggishly, but they tracked.

  He gave her a small wave.

  She blinked. Her head jerked twice sideways, like resisting a manual override. When she spoke, two voices layered—raw human and synthetic afterimage.

  “Don’t touch the pods.”

  Simon looked at her, at the bodies around them, at the way her fingers clawed the tile.

  “Why?” he whispered.

  Her eyes rolled white.

  “They talk back.”

  Her whole body spasmed, like someone was pulling her strings from three network layers deep.

  Simon almost reached for her. Almost.

  But instinct—cold, precise—told him touching her was the wrong move in every possible way.

  He marked her location in his HUD. That was all he could do.

  At the final aisle, another patrol rounded the corner. This time he stayed upright, badge raised, shoulders loose. Jensen-23, bored tech, routine walk-through.

  The lead Minion scanned him. A sharp pause.

  Then it moved on.

  He didn’t let himself relax until the footsteps faded.

  The exit was tucked behind a cluster of dead pods—a narrow service hatch, human-sized. He slipped through. The latch sealed with a soft click.

  The corridor beyond was dim, power-starved, walls sweating condensation.

  At the end, a sign flickered:

  CORE — ACCESS RESTRICTED

  Simon wiped his palms on his coat, checked the map he’d built, and looked back once at the rows of bodies—modified, abandoned, waiting for nothing.

  He couldn’t save them.

  He didn’t pretend otherwise.

  But he might still save one.

  He reset his HUD and headed for the next door.

  He didn’t look back.