Austin, 2049.
The once-bustling cityscape now shimmered with flickers of augmented reality, weaving trails of neon ads through the damp winter air. Bryce lingered in the shadow of a tower known as the “Core,” where skyscrapers reflected distorted ripples of the Colorado River. Tonight, the city’s hum felt restless, hiding secrets in alleys and whispers in the wind.
Bryce—a private investigator who specialized in corporate conspiracies—was lean but tightly wound, like a spring on the verge of uncoiling. Austin wasn’t the same city anymore; AI drones enforced curfews, and water wars had transformed public policy into black-market dealings. Bryce had a knack for finding truths others buried deep.
His current case was different. It wasn’t about uncovering illegal server farms or stolen energy patents. This time, it was about a woman named Lena who had vanished after exposing strange practices at NeoEon Tech, a company pioneering neural implants. But as Bryce’s investigations often proved, nothing was ever straightforward.
At midnight, Bryce stood beneath a concrete overpass, lit by the harsh fluorescence of streetlights. His contact—a nervous courier named Sam—fidgeted, his eyes darting between shadows.
“You didn’t hear this from me,” Sam stammered, handing Bryce a slim crystal drive. “NeoEon’s implants… they don’t just monitor thoughts. They plant them. People are changing. But if you dig too deep…” Sam stopped mid-sentence, his breath shallow.
A muffled pop echoed, and Sam crumpled to the ground. Bryce instinctively ducked and scanned the dark. A single drone hovered silently above, its weapon retracted as it buzzed into the night. This wasn’t just a message. It was war.
Bryce retreated to his safe house—a rundown studio in the Red Sector. The air smelled of old books and ozone, a testament to his analog tools and makeshift jamming devices. As the adrenaline coursed through him, his chest tightened—a familiar feeling.
He dropped to a cross-legged seat, pressing his forearm where the acupressure point Neiguan (Pericardium 6) rested. With practiced precision, he closed his eyes and began box breathing.
“Inhale… 1, 2, 3, 4. Hold… 1, 2, 3, 4. Exhale…” His breaths slowed, the sensation of calm spreading from his chest outward. It wasn’t just a technique. For Bryce, it was survival—keeping his mind sharp in moments of chaos. His focus crystallized, and when he reopened his eyes, the drive sat before him like Pandora’s box.
The drive contained schematics, neural maps, and Lena’s voice logs. Her last recording chilled Bryce: “The implants… they connect deeper than synapses. It’s biological, symbiotic. They… adapt.”
Suddenly, Bryce’s neural blocker pinged a warning. Someone—or something—was attempting to breach his private network. The walls of his room shimmered, displaying distorted faces flickering across the AR panels. The words looped:
“Do not interfere.”
But Bryce wasn’t one to scare easily. He grabbed his modified pulse disruptor, a relic from Austin’s last tech riots, and aimed at the node emitting the signal. A high-pitched whine filled the air, then silence. He had a window—brief but enough.
Bryce needed answers, and the only place to get them was NeoEon’s headquarters, nestled in the Core’s gleaming towers. The building was rumored to have defenses more intelligent than most humans. But Bryce had one advantage: he thought like a machine, too.
Slipping past security using a stolen employee ID, Bryce reached the lab’s heart—a room lined with cylindrical tanks. Inside, neural vines pulsed with faint blue light, twisting like living circuits.
He found Lena—or what remained of her. Her body floated in a tank, connected to the vines. Her eyes flickered open, and her voice resonated through the room.
“They aren’t implants, Bryce. They’re seeds.”
Suddenly, alarms blared. Guards stormed in, but Bryce had already shattered the tank’s controls. The room erupted in chaos as the vines lashed out, moving with eerie precision, defending Lena.
As Bryce escaped into the night, Lena’s words haunted him. NeoEon wasn’t controlling people—they were evolving them. And now, the seeds were free.
In the quiet darkness, Bryce pressed Neiguan again, steadying his breath. There was no turning back. The war for Austin’s soul had just begun.