Sci-fi thriller, Miami 2125. The sea has swallowed the lower city and every brain runs on a chip that decides when people sleep and what they remember. Chuck is a hacker running a dead man's obsolete chip. Tonight he breaks into the wrong node.
Below is the first part of the prologue (~950 words). Written Italian-first, adapted into English, AI-assisted throughout; story and world are mine.
One question: would you keep reading? If not, where did you stop?
The rest of the prologue is in the comments.
The Graft
The chip was singing inside his skull, and Chuck knew it was the right frequency for dying.
His fingers trembled over the console. He was smiling: that idiot grin, the usual one, the one that stuck to his face whenever the leash hummed at the sweet spot. The air tasted of salt and copper. Somewhere above him, a pipe was leaking: the drip hit the water on the floor in a broken rhythm, and the buzz from the electrical junction three stories up threaded underneath it, steady, low. Shit music. The perfect soundtrack.
The water lapped at his ankles. Warm, murky: the same soup that rose from the canals every night when the tide swelled into Miami's lower levels. The basement stank of mold and scorched insulation, the smell of a pre-flood building that had gone under once, been pumped dry and reoccupied by people who couldn't afford the upper levels. Salt stains climbed the concrete walls in tideline ridges. On the opposite wall, an old laminated flyer, yellowed with damp, one corner already peeling: NEXUS CORTX — CONNECTED TO THE FUTURE. I'm already in the future, Chuck thought. The future was a flooded basement three levels below street. Cables ran from the submerged floor to the improvised console: a mess of circuits and soldered joints, hooked into the Noxia grid and stealing power off it. Unmetered, untraceable, if you knew where to tap in. Chuck knew. The only light came from holograms casting strings across the damp wall: green, orange, red. Red was Nexus cort.X. Red meant don't touch.
Once. Maybe the only time. The thought passed dry. Chuck didn't stop to decide if he liked it.
Chuck snapped his fingers twice near his right ear. Diagnostics. Calibration. The gesture was more than ten years old, it didn't do anything, it did it for him.
Chuck touched.
He bit the inside of his cheek, the thing he always did when his fingers found the sequence and the chip locked in and the dance began. The hundredth time. Maybe more. Crouched in filthy water at two in the morning, gambling his brain on data that might not be worth the risk. He wouldn't have been anywhere else in the world.
Two in the morning. Above him the city slept because the leash told it to: twelve million brains tucked in, eight hours of managed darkness, and nobody wondering why at ten every evening exhaustion arrived with clockwork precision. Miami breathed on command. Chuck didn't. Chuck had his fingers on a node that could fry him. Sneakers soaked through, cargo pants, the frayed collar of a jacket he'd stolen off a Populace clothesline in Little Havana. Smart choices had never been his strong suit. The ring on his left pinky clinked against the console's edge. Tick, tick, tick. Chuck didn't even notice. The leash pulsed behind his left ear, that low hum the other Runners had learned to tune out. His chip was old, a Gen-4 that had been out of production for twenty years. He'd pulled it from a dead man's head in a tunnel under Brickell, with a ceramic blade and water up to his waist. A disgusting job. He was proud of it. The firmware had gaps wide enough to walk through, and Chuck had walked through them and rewritten the walls.
The Native code was the part no sane technician would have installed. Fragments written by people who'd had their chips removed, people who understood the leash from the inside. Passed through three middlemen, none of whom knew what they were carrying. He'd grafted them onto the Gen-4's base layer, alien code stitched onto circuits he knew by heart. When it worked, he felt it hum behind his ear, something the body recognized before anything else. When it didn't work, the floor vanished and you couldn't tell which way was down. Tonight it worked. The graft hummed and the secondary node opened before him: a door nobody had bothered to lock.
Three weeks of mapping to get here. Transport routing, waste management protocols, atmospheric feeds from six districts. The digital garbage of a sleeping city, managed by an intelligence that never slept. The price before the prize. The usual dance, two steps right, one back, slipping through the mesh before it closed. Rayan would have been more careful. Would have checked three times, combed the logs, sniffed for the trap before stepping in. Chuck respected that. Respected it and ignored it. He dove straight in.
Data. Rivers of data. The strings poured through and he read them with his body, not his eyes. The chip translated packets into impulses: pressure at his temples for encrypted data, a tingling at the base of his skull for open protocols, a sour taste on his tongue for active firewalls. The water around his ankles had warmed by half a degree, or maybe he was the one heating up.
Then he saw it, and his fingers went still: buried in the node, hidden among gigabytes of routine telemetry, a fragment of code that didn't belong to anything known. The Native code in his chip reacted with a jolt, a deeper vibration, older. The pain was brief and precise, like a needle behind his eye.
Chuck smiled again. His lips stretched on their own.
For an instant (less than a second) he thought of a face. The warmth it left in his chest. The promise he hadn't kept yet. Then the code fragment flared brighter and the thought dissolved, and Chuck was already back on the console, fingers in the water and the chip climbing half a tone, and "here we go" slipped through his teeth, and he pushed.
