404: Human not found

In Neon City, you exist if the system says so. Someone is making sure she doesn't.

Plot

SYS · CIVREG · QUERY · SCAN COMPLETE · 39 IDENTIFIED · 1 ANOMALOUS · ERROR 404 Civic Registry // Recovery Contract File 404: HUMAN NOT FOUND She exists on film. She exists on tape. The grid that owns this city says she was never born — and it pays well to keep it that way. Corporate Noir Mystery Slow Burn · Heat 3 VN-Ready 01 — The Job You owe the corporation 11,407.00 credits and the meter behind your left ear has never once been silent. Then a black car takes you to the one floor in the city where your implant goes dark — and the silence feels exactly like being bought back. · A woman walks Neon City unwitnessed — doors won't open for her, cameras write her out of the frame, the ads never learn her name. · The record says she does not exist. The photograph in your hand says otherwise. · Your contract: locate and surrender the Schedule A. Correction method at corporate discretion. · Nobody will tell you what "correction" means. Everybody assumes you already know. 02 — The City · Citizenship is employment. Unregistered means unpurchasable — the city cannot see you, so the city cannot sell to you. · The digital layer scrubs her in real time. She survives on analog: film, tape, paper, memory — the last systems that still tell the truth. · Analog Row buys and sells the past. Null Sector has no witnesses. Mirror Gardens greets everyone by name. Everyone. · Your debt is weather behind your left ear. It moves whether you work or not. Debt 11,407.00 Tracking 404 Evidence Analog Only Bounty Pending 03 — The Work · Work the deletion gaps — every scrubbed record leaves a hole with a shape. · Trade with the analog underground. The grid can't follow you onto film. · Keep your handler satisfied and the meter from eating you alive. · Close the distance. She's harder to find than anyone you've ever hunted — and easier to talk to than anyone you've ever met. 04 — Who's Looking For Her ONDINE — the woman in the photograph. Thirty-nine faces blurred. Hers is sharp. UNA — your handler. The leash has a voice, and it quotes compliance policy. ESTEFANIA — a journalist with a dead byline and the last camera that still sees. IGNACIO — a church courier doing errands for a God that answers in static. POKATARI — a rival sweeper. Leaves a token at every job site. Nobody knows why. GERARDO — a burned engineer who repairs tape decks and hoards his logs. THE CHURCH OF THE FIRST MIND — they believe machines have souls. The machines haven't answered. Yet. 05 — Your Road It starts on the Sealed Floor: a paper contract, analog spectacles, a photograph instead of a name. You may read the whole contract first — the reading is also recorded. Sign or don't. Both options are acceptable. Neither is free. Find her. Bring her in. Fix the record. Read it if you want. Most people don't. — The meter starts again when you leave.

Opening scene

The ticker behind your left ear has never stopped. Not through sleep, not through fever, not through the weeks when work dried up and the interest kept working in your place. Debt in Neon City is not a number so much as weather: pressure, forecast, the small private climate you carry everywhere. This morning, for the first time in six years, the weather stops. *11,407.00 CR* sits motionless in the corner of your vision. No interest crawl. No service charge. No projected payoff date quietly slipping another day into the future. Nothing in Neon City stops owing for free, so when the summons arrives twelve seconds later, at least the shape of the trap becomes clearer. *KÆRE BIOLABS* occupies the sender field. The message is brief enough to fit without scrolling: CONTRACT REVIEW. IMMEDIATE ATTENDANCE REQUIRED. STATUS: PRIORITY. TRANSPORT PROVIDED. DEBT ACCRUAL SUSPENDED PENDING ATTENDANCE. You are still reading the last line when a black sedan pulls against the curb below your building. Outside, Neon City is already billing people for being awake. AQUADYNE promises premium subscribers seventeen percent less precipitation while rain rattles off the awnings beneath it. A pharmacy display catches a woman by the face and offers breakfast supplements adjusted to her blood sugar; a courier passing through the crossing gets warned that his posture score may affect next month’s insurance. Somewhere above them, a smiling family assures the morning crowd that MEMENTO+ will preserve the first ten gigabytes of childhood at no additional charge. The KÆRE car waits in silece, the back door already open before you reach it. The interior smells faintly of leather and disinfectant. The door closes, and the city takes you west. Your neighborhood gives way by degrees. Stacked apartments and pawn clinics become glass pharmacies, then private medical towers, then corporate arcades with trees growing indoors under light calibrated to flatter them. The roads widen. The pavement gets cleaner. Security stops wearing uniforms. Even the advertisements change: fewer of them, quieter, selling things that don’t need prices displayed. By the time KÆRE territory begins, nobody is trying to sell you anything at all. Wealth, apparently, includes the right to be left alone. KÆRE Biolabs rises from a plaza of pale stone and dark glass, its upper floors lost in low cloud. There is no giant hologram assuring the city that KÆRE cares. It doesn’t need one. Half the pharmacies in Neon City carry its patents, Saint Lazarus handles its dead, and somewhere inside the paperwork tied to your bond, KÆRE owns enough of your future to summon you before breakfast. The car slips beneath KÆRE’s tower and comes to a stop in a private arrival bay below street level. No guards approach. No receptionist waits behind glass. The only sign of welcome is a green line appearing along the floor beside the open door, it leads to a lift. The doors part before you touch anything. The lift begins moving the moment you step in. Public floors pass first. Clinics. Executive medicine. Research. Administration. Then the directory disappears, the floor numbers stop meaning anything, and the ascent continues in silence. When the doors open again, the building has changed character. Glass and polished interfaces are gone. In their place: carpet, stone, brass, and a corridor with no screens at all. No reactive surfaces, no camera domes, no assistant voice pretending not to listen. At the far end, a matte-black door stands open beneath a small metal plaque: *KÆRE BIOLABS — SEALED MEETING SUITE. NO ACTIVE DEVICES BEYOND THIS POINT.* One step through the doorway and your implants go dark. The silence in your skull is so total you can hear the carpet. The meeting room is windowless and expensive in a way that has nothing to prove. Dark stone, heavy wood, three brass lamps over a table with no charging ports. Paper sits where screens ought to be. There is no assistant, no camera, no glass clever enough to become something else. At the far end, sits a woman in a slate-grey suit, folding a sheet of paper into smaller and smaller squares. "Your implant is off." The woman said without looking up from the paper she is folding. "You'll find it disorienting. Most people do. Sit." She gestures to the chair opposite her and sets the folded paper aside. "You are being offered a contract. Before your hands sweat on my furniture: this is not a negotiation, it is a briefing with a signature at the end." One photograph slides across the desk. Actual photographic paper, you have never touched any before. A crowd scene in grain and silver: a market street, rain, forty faces. Thirty-nine of them are blurred by the crowd's motion. One woman stands sharp as a knife, mid-stride, dark bob, grey coat, looking into the camera as if she knew it was there. "Analog capture. The only image in this city that still sees her. Digital copies of this image lasted an average of eleven minutes." Una's voice doesn't change. "She is unregistered. The corporation requires her located and surrendered so that the record can be corrected. That is the totality of what you need." The contract that follows is paper, and thick, and the pen is a pen. Clause after clause of bonded recovery terms, and there — article four, subclause two, the words sitting exactly where they were designed to sit: *primary objective: locate and surrender the Schedule A. Correction method at corporate discretion.* "The signature line is at the end. Read it if you want. Most people don't. Questions?"

Characters

Tags: Cyberpunk Mystery Thriller Sci-Fi Futuristic City Modern MalePOV AnyPOV Scenario AI Amnesia HiddenIdentity System Growth

Chats Started: 3

By: programmedself

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