01. ZENO

We sped through the city in a luxury sedan, its liquid-mercury exoskeleton catching the night’s faint glow. The vehicle glided silently through the shadows, blending into a cold haze of emission displays and flickering holographic ads.

Roberto Galli drove with the textbook confidence of a poseur, fueled by stimulants that made him feel invincible. He was all expensive corporate threads, high-end escort accounts, and a side habit of what he called “recreational” coke compounds.

We cobbled together a half-hearted conversation about the old days: our time at the Polytechnic, dead-end classmates, easy hookups, and getting high on street-level code—the usual static.

Finally, we reached a Feng-Shui-inspired club on Montenapoleone. Greige walls, minimalist concrete decor. Volumetric, coherent light beams spun holograms of models, undressing slowly in a swirl of retro lace, nylon, and synthetic frills. An amaranth light sliced through the dimness, swaying lazily to a synthesized Baroque Monteverdi score.

“Nice place. You’re picking up the tab, right? No way I’m spending twenty creds on a stupid beer,” I said.

“Twenty? You’re out of touch with prices. This isn’t a dive like the ones you usually hang out at,” Galli snorted.
He ordered from a waitress clad in a transparent gray bodysuit that shimmered with live optoelectronic nanofiber patterns, then finally got down to business.

“One of our researchers vanished.” His bloodshot eyes drifted back to the holograms, fixated on the strippers’ hot shaved curves, sipping his vodka.
“Lately, he wasn’t himself. Hooked on synthetic opioids filth. Outright Inc. wants him back, ASAP.”

“Why do the suits care about a junkie?” I asked, my voice flat.

“Zeno—that’s the genius’s name—was running a critical R&D project for the company. He’s sitting on sensitive architecture data they want permanently buried.”

“You’ve got top-tier tactical security. Why pull me in?”

“We know where the runaway is hiding. The East Sprawl. It’s a high-friction zone—you still know the street-level networks out there.”

“Not that well. You need eyes in the back of your head just to survive that perimeter,” I said.
Galli downed his Russian Standard in one go and lit a real tobacco cigarette.
“We gotta move quick. If his escape telemetry leaks to the mesh, someone might snatch Zeno from right under our noses.”

“That’d mean an active conflict with other firms,” I grumbled.

“Damn, Marco, you’re putting it bluntly.”

“Of course. I’m the one risking my ass.”

He ordered another round. “Make mine a double, honey.” Then he turned to me again. “Find him, Marco. This briefcase has the professor’s profile and twenty grand in hard currency. Forty more once the delivery is logged.”

A sudden premonitory vertigo spiked through my brainstem, my combat implants registering an anomaly. Beneath the tissue and military-grade hardware, the threat-recognition routine had sensed something.

My attention snapped to a black SUV parked near the club’s reinforced window. Inside, two men sat illuminated by the dashboard’s cold blue glow. One of them was mechanically feeding buckshot into a pump-action shotgun.

The driver shifted into gear and floored it.
The SUV surged forward with a screech of burning tires, covering the thirty feet to the club at breakneck speed. Its alloy nose slammed into the three-inch armored glass.
A deafening boom warped everything into a slow-motion haze.

The vehicle burst through like a steel ball in an infernal bowling alley, smashing tables, patrons, concrete columns, and the bar in a relentless shower of glass, chrome, and high-voltage sparks.

The shrieking alarm and automated fire-suppression systems kicked in almost simultaneously.
The hitman burst from the wreckage with his shotgun raised. He jerked his head, scanning the chaos until his optical sensors locked onto us.
He fired.

Roberto took the blast square in the chest and sailed over the couch like an empty sack.
Then the killer swung the barrel toward me.
I dove aside.
The shot vaporized the heel of my boot.

After shooting to Galli at point-blank range, the assassin vaulted onto the metal table I was hiding behind. He worked the pump with a satisfied grimace.
I kicked the table hard.
The impact threw him off balance. He stumbled. A stray blast roared past my shoulder, scorching the skin and filling the air with the stink of burnt flesh.

Driven by pain, panic, and a surge of raw fury, I tackled him.
We crashed through broken glass, rolling across the floor in a savage tangle of limbs.
Then I found a blunt dessert knife.
I jammed it into his eye.
The blade sank into jelly-soft tissue with a wet pop. A hot spray of blood splashed across my face.
The hitman howled.
He clawed at the handle, trying to pull the steel from his skull, before collapsing in a twitching heap.

The second killer opened fire with a high-velocity subcompact pistol.
Rounds whistled through the half-dark, sending shards of glass and metal spinning through the volumetric lights.

I grabbed the dead man’s shotgun and rolled.
For an instant, amid the rotating holograms and emergency strobes, I caught the silhouette of my attacker.

We fired at the same time.

A searing impact tore into my left arm like a pickaxe.
I hit the floor, waiting for the kill shot.
It never came.
The bastard had taken the buckshot square in the teeth. What remained of his head was decorating the rafters.

The screaming wouldn’t stop.
A man nearby was trying to reattach his foot. It hung from his mangled leg by strips of gray skin and connective tissue. He stared at it in stunned disbelief, mouth hanging open, too shocked to make a sound.

Through the chemical mist and heavy smoke, I spotted Galli’s briefcase.
I grabbed it.

The fire-suppression system drenched everything in recycled water, but it couldn’t wash away the horror of the slaughter.
I staggered over the wreckage of the SUV and reached the wet street.
Onlookers were already gathering, their eyes fixed on the disaster.

The law-enforcement drones would be next. They never arrived in time to stop a massacre, but they were excellent at documenting one.
The subway station was just down the road.
It was time to disappear.

The minimarket’s mirrored windows reflected my image.
A bulky, thirty-something man with a buzz cut and an unkempt beard matted with blood.

My face and black military jacket were smeared with gore. My pupils were blown wide with adrenaline.
I looked like a slaughterhouse worker after a double shift. The only thing missing was a payroll dispute

I stepped inside.
The clerk backed away, nervously gripping an old modified Kalashnikov.
“Chill. I’m not here for trouble,” I said, tossing a fifty-creds note onto the counter.
“Just a bottle of mezcal and some industrial duct tape.”
He slid them toward me with his free hand, never taking me out of his sights.

“Keep the change and forget you saw me. Unless you want me coming back to rip you apart.”
He nodded, swallowing his fear.

I stumbled through the subway’s darkened corridors, reeking of urine, stale air, and damp concrete.
I patched my torn boot with the polymer tape.

I found a filthy public restroom.
A young couple occupied one corner, smoking synth-crack.
I stepped up to the grimy mirror and slowly peeled the soaked fabric from my wounds, cursing through clenched teeth as strips of skin came away with it.
I gripped the bottle cap with my teeth and twisted it off.
A couple of long swallows burned their way into my gut.
Then I poured the rest over my shredded arm.

The pain and alcohol hit my brain almost simultaneously.
I nearly blacked out against the sink.
The bottle slipped from my hand and struck the dirty PVC floor with a dull thud.
I rinsed the blood from my face and jacket as best I could, grabbed the nearest porcelain toilet, and puked my soul out.
It took a long, ugly minute for the dizziness to loosen its grip.

Across the stalls, the girl was blowing her buddy, her head moving patiently. Caught in a haze of post-flash lust and narcotics, they barely noticed me. Their minds weren’t on this planet anymore.
Maybe that was the healthiest response available.

—–

I shuffled onto the train bound for Central Station, finding a seat in the back of a car with soot-crusted windows and grimy walls scrawled with ugly graffiti flickering in braindead loops.

The train lurched forward, pinning me to the seat.
Most of my fellow passengers were night-shift workers.
Dazed faces. Vacant. Desperate.
Greasy overalls. Thermal boots with steel toes tearing through worn polymer compounds.

I knew the assembly-line life. I’d worked the line to pay my way through school.
I still remembered the deafening roar, the pressure surges hammering through the steam lines, production quotas pitted against automated mechanical arms. The supervisors’ treacherous stares. Ten-hour shifts soaked in loneliness. The constant dread of company layoffs. One bad quarter. One bad algorithm. One termination notice. Then the street.

“What a shitty life…” I muttered, feverish.
One of the workers glanced at me, his eyes empty of light, then lowered his gaze back to his boots.

I got off three stops later.
My arm throbbed violently. My left hand hung cold and useless at my side.
I slipped into a public encryption dome and dialed Wang’s secure node.

A drawn-out “Yeeess…” came through the receiver.
“Hey, Chinese, it’s Marco. Need a hand,” I mumbled, leaning against the casing to stay upright.

“What the hell happened to you, Galassi?”

“They mangled my arm. Took a bullet.”
Wang fell silent for a moment while his tracking subroutines ran in the background.
“Where do we meet?”
“Central Station. By the big field-emission billboard.”

—–

Wang was solid.

A fourth-generation Milanese-Chinese, and sharp as hell. He made his living servicing heavy-duty surgical hardware for city clinics while moonlighting as a hacker, occasionally siphoning credits from financial networks through low-level consensus exploits. “Just staying in shape,” he’d always say. He also ran a quiet operation on the side, brokering untraceable small arms, quantum hardware components, and military-grade biocircuits on the darknets.
The major technocratic syndicates rarely unleashed bloodhounds like me for petty theft, so he usually got away with it. “A grand here. Two there. Take what the architecture leaves unattended.” That was another favorite.

He’d patched up countless high-velocity gunshot wounds during the resource wars in the Middle East. If anybody could repair my fleshware without paperwork, surveillance reports, or awkward questions, it was Wang. I owed him favors. A stack of hard credits wouldn’t hurt either.

——

“Lie down,” he said, fitting a sterile optoelectronic tip onto his laser scalpel.
He sliced my clothes from shoulder to waist and peeled away the blood-soaked fabric with clinical expertise.
Active sensor patches appeared around the wound.
“Too much to ask who did this?”

“No clue,” I replied, stirring those creeping souvenirs of the slaughter. “Do you remember Roby?”

“Your Outright Biotech buddy?”

“Yeah. We were talking business in a club on Montenapoleone. Two guys drove a sedan through the glass and opened fire. Galli’s dead. Face vaporized. I got lucky. Managed to put them both down.”

Wang shook his head in annoyance and powered up the medical rig.
A diagnostic probe scanned the damaged tissue and fed the data into his mobile terminal.
My arm appeared on the display in bioluminescent detail.
His fingers danced across the keyboard.
A three-dimensional projection mapped the wound channel, highlighting thermal damage, fragmented bone, and tissue contamination.
He tapped one final key.
A complete diagnostic profile of my condition unfolded across the screen.

“The left shoulder’s just a graze. Nothing serious. The arm’s worse. The round tore right through the junction near the bicep.”
He studied the telemetry for another moment.
“You’ll need at least a week.”
“Look, Chinese, I’m flying completely blind here, and I need to move within twenty-four hours. I can’t spend a week dragging a dead arm behind me.”
“You’re a damn pain in the ass.” He scratched his chin while reviewing the scans. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Wang reached into a storage drawer and tossed me a blister pack.
“Swallow these. They’ll put you out for a while.”

——

Darkness swallowed me.
Black and deep.
Death must feel like this, I thought.
The end.
Oblivion.
Silence.
Far away, I heard the scrape of an automated shovel biting into sand. A priest chanting through a distorted frequency. Heavy clods of earth struck my face, filling my eyes, nostrils, and mouth.
Dead and buried.
I wanted to scream, but the soil packed itself into my throat.
I surfaced beneath a dying sun in the middle of a desert, caught in the howl of the ghibli wind and the distant thunder of low-altitude combat blasts.
Tactical drones screamed overhead.
They streaked toward the perimeter of a village and released incendiary death.
Chemical smoke from phosphorus ordnance burned my lungs. The glare of the detonations overloaded my sub-neural firmware until the horizon pulsed with ghost images and static.
A heavy sweep team in digital camouflage and hazmat masks marched past.
I followed them through the bombed-out shacks.
The village was silent.
No survivors.
Only charred women and children among the concrete rubble. The kind of victory to be ashamed of.

Black quicksand swallowed me.
The hitman’s face from the club appeared above. His ruined eye socket hung open like a wound in reality itself. He smiled. A cruel, frozen smile. A dead channel grin.
He shoved my head beneath the surface. Mud flooded my mouth. My lungs.
Pure claustrophobic panic.

Then darkness. Absolute. Silence. Finally, the end.
If death’s like this, it’s not so bad, I thought…

Suddenly I felt weightless.
I drifted upward into a timeless digital maelstrom where distance and direction ceased to exist.
A voice echoed from somewhere deep in my subconscious.
At first it was nothing but static.
Then it sharpened into words.
“Breathe, please. Don’t do this to me, okay?”

A tube slid from my trachea.
I coughed violently.
Every muscle in my chest spasmed.

“That’s it. Breathe. Good!”
Under the dim glow of a reddish emergency lamp, Wang’s worried face emerged from the haze.
“Fuck, Marco, I thought you were gone,” he muttered, wiping sweat from his brow. “The round was laced with a chemical payload. It nearly triggered total organ failure. I had to flush your bloodstream and replace half your plasma.”

I gulped pure oxygen through the medical mask, the cold air scraping my raw throat.

“Everything’s stable now,” he said. “I sourced compatible bio-printed tissue from the clinic. The sub-dermal scan shows your arm is already regenerating.”

I tried to answer, but no sound came out.

“Stop gasping like a fish. Here’s a direct neural analgesic. Sleep.”
He prepared the injector.
“You dodged a bullet. Literally.”
His voice drifted away as the chemical cocktail hit.
A million pins pierced my skull. Steel hair stood up beneath my skin.
My cells dissolved into something weightless and intangible.

‐—–

“Eat,” Wang urged, pressing chopsticks into my fingers.
I took a bite of the curry chicken.
Damn good.

I was starving. My accelerated metabolism was chewing through calories faster than I could replace them.
I washed it down with a long pull of cold Shanghai beer.

“How long has it been?” I slurred.

“About thirty hours,” he said, monitoring his terminal. “Your system needed the downtime.”
Wang looked pensive.
He paused, his gaze drifting toward the window.
“Something’s off. The news is calling the attack on the club a tragic accident—a drunk driver who lost control and died on impact. Not a single peep about a firefight.”
He leaned forward, lowering his voice. “So I started poking around the mesh. Checked the dark corners. Hacked the local precinct node and found absolutely nothing on the incident. Not even a placeholder file.” He rubbed his chin. “When I searched the cold storage arrays for deleted architecture records, I found encrypted data fragments tied to the deletion timeline.”
“Meaning?”
“The police secure node created a case file,” Wang said. “Somebody viewed it. Somebody copied it. Then the original data package vanished completely.”
My right hand froze. The chopsticks hovered above the plate.
“There’s more… I traced the routing signature. The access path leads straight back to the Ministry of Defense.”

A cold sensation crawled through my sub-neural connection. Not fear. Something older. The instinct that tells you you’re standing in the wrong place when artillery starts landing nearby. “I told you this whole thing was fucked,” I muttered.

“Never doubted you,” Wang replied, pouring the last of the beer into a stained coffee cup.

We sat quietly for a while, half-listening to Mahler’s Third.
The slow movements drifted from a pair of static-heavy analog speakers, perfectly suited to the apartment’s permanent state of melancholy.

I remembered Roby’s briefcase and asked Wang to fetch it from the workbench.
I released the heavy polymer latches.
Inside were two stacks of hard-currency credits, a sealed case containing a data shard, and a physical photograph of our professor.

Zeno was past fifty.

 

Balding, greasy gray hair, patchy beard, sharp nose, thin lips.
His forehead was wide enough to land a surveillance drone on.
Sunken eyes peered through ancient glasses held together with electrical tape.
He looked like a deep-sea fish dragged unwillingly into daylight.
I asked Wang for a VR visor.
“Wanna watch?”
“Nah,” he said, handing it over. “I’ve already had enough questionable contents for one day.”
I slipped on the headphones and adjusted the visor.
It was an outlawed legacy immersion rig.
Brutal resolution.
Unfiltered color saturation.
No safety governors.
No neural dampeners.
Wang preferred the damn old good high fidelity.

The apartment dissolved.
A fashionable postmodern digital salon materialized around me.
A ’90s chill-out loop drifted through the virtual air while a blinding multicolored noise beam spelled OUTRIGHT BIOTECH across the center of the space.
The letters shifted colors.
The noise condensed into a molecular storm.
The storm folded itself into a techno-fetish Marilyn Monroe wearing a gleaming metal catsuit and corset.

“Welcome to a confidential Outright dossier,” she purred.
Unbelievable.
All this for a damn text file.

After several minutes of promotional drivel celebrating Outright Biotech’s medical achievements, Zeno appeared on screen wearing a surgical cap and a white laboratory coat.
Oddly enough, he looked better than in the photograph.
Cleaner.
Almost trustworthy.
The dead-fish eyes remained.

The salon flickered and transformed into a laboratory.
The professor moved between advanced sub-neural systems, performing trans-genetic procedures that might as well have been alien rituals.
A stern male narrator explained that Zeno was a critical asset within the syndicate’s global research structure, specializing in viral mutation, vaccine engineering, and a black-budget military program.

A brief psychological profile followed.
Impeccable credentials.
Schizoid tendencies.
Manic-depressive episodes.
Nothing really useful.
I hit Quit.
Marilyn bowed politely and thanked me for my attention.
The minimal salon collapsed.

Wang’s cluttered apartment returned.
I removed the visor and headphones.
Residual afterimages floated through my vision.

“Well?” Wang asked.

“They really know how to waste storage space.”
I tossed the pen drive onto the table.

“Zeno’s a genius with a fractured mind. Works for the military-industrial machine. Now he’s disappeared into the East Sprawl with a synthetic drug habit, and somebody in Defense Intelligence erased a massacre to cover their tracks.”

Wang swirled the dregs around his cup.

“You still going after him?”

“Dunno.”
I stared at the photograph.
“I’d really like to know why two hitmen turned a club into a slaughterhouse just to kill a mid-level messenger.”
I flexed my regenerating arm.
The ache was dull now. Manageable.
“Plus, the system already logged my biometric signature among the dead. That makes this whole thing personal.”

“And disturbing,” Wang grinned. “You’re basically a ghost now. Makes moving around easier.”

“Maybe.”
I stood up and tested my weight on both legs.
“One more favor. I need a burner mesh link. Fully anonymized. Multi-hopped. The works. And a clean weapon.”

Wang sighed, already reaching for a workbench drawer.
“You always cost me more than you pay, Galassi.”

“That’s why I like you. Always ready to help the unfortunate…”

He tossed me a sealed polymer pouch.
“The link’s inside. Good for seventy-two hours.”
He opened another drawer.
“As for the iron, take my unregistered NG .44 automatic.”
The pistol landed heavily on the table.
“Now get some sleep. You look like something they just dug out of a mass grave.”

I didn’t argue.
I crashed onto the couch, listening to Mahler fade into heavy analog static.
Somewhere in the East Sprawl, Professor Zeno was waiting. Or maybe he was already dead. Either way, I’d find out—and then maybe I’d discover if some bastard wanted me in the ground too.