The all-night cafe was quiet except for the soft patter of rain on the window and a couple arguing in hushed whispers on the other side of the room. On the building across the street, a neon screen displayed an anime girl advertising some kind of supplement. My eyes drifted down, watching the flow of headlights along a twenty-lane road.

  The mayor was trying to get one more lane added, saying it would finally fix the traffic problem. I wasn't convinced. That was the same thing the last mayor said, and it seemed to make the situation worse, honestly.

  A tremor went through my hand as I took a sip of coffee, and I considered whether I should bail on the meeting and lie low until whatever storm I had kicked up had finished blowing over. He was late. He hadn't ever been late before. Not with the way I had him wrapped around my finger.

  Had I been burned? Maybe, but if I left, I'd die anyway. Was there really any difference if it happened now or in a year or two?

  Might as well hedge my bets, I suppose.

  Letting out a sigh, I checked my interface for text messages for the hundredth time and massaged my temples. My headache was worsening.

  One of the men who had been arguing got up and stormed out of the establishment. On his way out, he stopped for a moment to hold the door for someone. I could only make out their silhouette because my vision refused to focus.

  They made their way over to me as I blinked, trying to force my eyes to work.

  “Hey, Ren, sorry I’m late. Got caught up in a meeting,” Theo said as he reached the booth. He snapped into focus as he spoke, and I let out a breath I didn't realize I was holding.

  I was fifty-fifty there on whether it was one of Atlas’ cleaners coming to inform me that I was going to be taken out back and shot.

  “A four-hour-long meeting? And you couldn't take the time to even shoot me a text message?” Sliding out from the booth, I met him halfway and pulled him into a hug. “You know I was worried something had happened to you. I wouldn't know what to do with myself if you got into trouble over me,” I lied.

  “Sorry, I was having connection issues on the way over. It all worked out in the end. I got it,” he whispered in my ear as he ran a hand through my hair. I shivered both at the touch and the fact that I wasn't going to be rendered near brain-dead within six months.

  “Thank you,” I whispered back as he pulled me into the first and last genuine kiss between us. It was nice while it lasted, but I needed to skip town. There's no way Mr Boring over here didn't leave a trail leading straight to him.

  As we separated, he slipped a pouch into my hand that I seamlessly dropped into my hoodie pocket while I sat back down. I eyed the security camera out of the corner of my vision for a moment to confirm he hadn't just flubbed the delivery. It was fine; the angle would have obscured our arms.

  He joined me across the table and picked up his coffee to take a sip.

  When did he get that?

  “That won't last long out of the lab environment. You'll want to inject it as soon as possible,” he said, pulling me out of my confusion.

  “Yeah, I should probably just get it done,” I said, as I tried to steel myself. I couldn't tell if I was anxious or excited. Honestly, it was probably a bit of both. I had been working on this for months, and it had finally come through.

  “The medical nanites are designed to pass through your blood-brain barrier, but they don't handle muscles well,” the lab tech said with a soft smile on his lips as he leaned back in his seat and looked out the window.

  “I know how to run an IV. I'm not a child… seriously, thanks,” I replied sincerely.

  Then I left to find my way to the bathroom. My hand went to the pouch, clutching it just to reassure myself that it was still there.

  The single-occupancy bathroom was spotless, exactly as you'd expect in this district. Normally, that fact would annoy me, but given what I needed to do, this was better than the alternative. I washed my hands beforehand to ensure I didn't give myself an infection.

  Sitting on the toilet, I opened the pouch to reveal a metal injection tube designed to be plugged into a neural interface. It wasn't even a needle. Why did he mention an IV if… never mind.

  I decided taking the medication to fix my deteriorating mind was probably a better idea than trying to examine inconsistencies in my thoughts.

  Opening the port on the back of my skull, I spent thirty seconds failing to insert the injection tube in the correct orientation before it clicked into place. With a thought, I opened the internal access port, then depressed the plunger.

  Suddenly, I felt the most wonderful euphoria I had ever experienced. It was unlike any pharmaceutical substance available on earth; it felt as if my entire body was melting into itself and being replaced with pure joy. The spike of worry that he had somehow mixed up and provided me with a narcotic instead of nanites was wiped away as my mind vanished into a tunnel of pleasure. A golden hue filled my taste buds, settled beneath my skin, and filled the room with such volume that the rest of the world vanished beneath its synesthetic hum.

  After what felt like several minutes of swirling in that unthinking abyss of euphoria, I snapped back into reality and caught myself as I was falling forward. The feeling disappeared as quickly as it had come, the pounding in my skull vanishing along with it. Checking the time interface, only a couple of seconds had passed since the injection was logged.

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  Looking down at my arms and flexing my fingers for the first time in a long time, I felt like I was in total control of my body. After spending a minute confirming there were no tremors, no jerky movements, I let myself relax.

  I didn't care that he didn't mention the odd side effect during the injection. It worked, that's all that mattered. For the moment, I just let myself sob in relief. The nightmare I had been living with for the past year was finally over.

  As I collected myself, I detached the injector and dumped both it and the pouch in the trash.

  Standing to leave, I rinsed my hands out of habit and opened the door to leave. Waiting outside was the other guy who had remained in the café when his partner stormed off.

  Looking at him, I felt something odd. I didn't understand where this information was coming from, but it felt as if, on a conceptual level, he was a puzzle missing several important pieces.

  As he saw me open the door to the bathroom, his attention turned to me, and I felt something snap between us. I was thrown onto a metaphorical stage, and he was a single spotlight that was illuminating my act.

  Startled, I reacted instinctively, batting that ephemeral connection away. The spotlight and puzzle exploded, and I saw his expression go from sadness to completely blank, to confused, as I pushed past him.

  What the fuck was that?

  As I walked back into the café proper, I felt a wave of exhaustion followed by what felt like the world hiccuping. I caught myself stumbling as my limbs suddenly developed input lag.

  I couldn't tell what was going on, but I couldn't bring myself to care either. It was like there was some sort of disconnect between me and the rest of the world. My mind felt like it was stuttering, and I couldn't connect my thoughts.

  Rationally, I knew I should probably talk to Theo and ask him what the fuck he had just done to me, but instead of doing that, I found myself following my original plan, leaving the building without speaking to him. It was like I was stuck running on autopilot, unable to reconfigure my initial settings.

  As I left the cafe and descended the building in the elevator, I felt whatever had happened to my mind slowly undo itself. Panic bubbled in the back of my head as thought connections started forming again.

  I took a deep breath, attempting to calm myself down. There were obviously going to be side effects caused by an experimental cure using a technology that hasn't even been revealed to the public yet, and the random lab tech I had been sleeping with almost definitely didn't have access to a full safety profile.

  Checking my interface, I reviewed the file I’d swiped. An Atlas employee had decided it was a good idea to send confidential information unencrypted while on public Wi-Fi. I proved to them why that was a bad idea.

  Not that I submitted a vulnerability report to their information security team. They'd have to figure out who their little walking security hole was on their own.

  The document was an R&D status update on several different versions of medical nanites. I was interested specifically in AT-436, which the report said had shown success in curing Sudden Interface Rejection Syndrome, also known as SIRS, a neurocognitive disorder involving the brain suddenly rejecting the cognitive interface installed in my skull as a child. This disorder had no relation to the inflammatory response syndrome with the same acronym.

  The actual cause hadn't been found. All scientists knew was that rejection wasn't caused by an immune system response, which was why immunosuppressants didn't work. Halting use of or even removing the interface also did nothing for my previous prognosis. Not that I could even legally have it removed.

  This specific progress report was regarding an improvement in nanite instruction encoding, making it far easier to encode in batches. For the AT-436 model, that meant they were cheap enough to begin mass manufacturing with an estimate set for the end of the year, seven months or so after it would be far too late for me.

  Unfortunately, minutiae relating to industrial automation weren't really all that helpful for me here. It was a godsend that it even mentioned SIRS in the document at all.

  With a ding, the elevator doors opened, and I walked out into the lobby of the building, turning to nod at the receptionist on the way out. Only to notice that she was conceptually like a radio stuck between two stations.

  There was even a faint buzzing sound just barely perceptible but still within my range of hearing. As she noticed me standing there, that static resolved into a company jingle that I'd never heard before.

  “Can I help you with something?” she asked. As she spoke, it felt like I was slowly being put back on that metaphorical theatre stage. Except instead of a spotlight, this time she was barely a flashlight. I did my best not to touch that connection between us, even though I knew intuitively I could.

  “No, sorry, you just look like someone I know,” I replied, scurrying out of the building. As I left, the flashlight switched itself off, and I was able to leave the stage again.

  Only to be hit by a floodlight as I passed through the doors. I actually skidded to a stop and threw my hands up to shield my eyes, despite it being more of a metaphor than an actual light… I think. I was still getting used to my brain throwing random symbology at me.

  Despite all this, it was still better than being turned into wetware like I'd heard was happening to other SIRS patients once they reached the end of their lives.

  “Where are you headed in such a hurry?” Theo's voice came from just to my left, shattering the bravado I had been trying to build within myself.

  The months I had spent in a false relationship with him might have been a lie, but it wasn't like they didn't mean anything at all to me. I wasn't so coldhearted as to be able to withhold myself from feeling any sort of affection.

  The barriers in my mind lowered slightly. Maybe Theo could actually help me, and I had just been too hard-headed to accept that fact. If I just explained what was happening to him, we could work together to figure it out.

  I lowered my arms and turned towards the man whom I had been about to abandon. Only to freeze as my eyes met the thing that was wearing his skin.

  “Babe? You alright?” it asked, its hollow eyes burned with a golden light while it watched me with barely disguised hunger. I blinked, and it changed, no longer bothering to even try to appear as Theo. It moved further away from being human and closer to… I don't even know what.

  In that conceptual space, I watched as, for one moment, it was tearing me apart from limb to limb, the next moment it was feasting upon my marrow as I screamed, helpless to do anything but watch, then the scene changed again, and again. It was as if it couldn't decide how it wanted to maim me first.

  “Sorry… I have to… go?” I replied as I slowly backed away. “Something urgent came up, the nanites worked great. I'll message you, uh, tomorrow, ‘kay?”

  It smiled at me, “I'm afraid that won't work. See, I have responsibilities to fulfill, and you weren't supposed to surviv—”

  It was interrupted when I reached out and mentally slapped the floodlight coming from it. The floodlight exploded, and the form it had been wearing popped like a balloon filled with gold glitter, while I took off sprinting in the other direction.

  Before I could cross ten metres of distance, my mind began to sink back down into autopilot, and my pace slowed down until I was barely walking. As the golden dust washed over me, that same euphoria from the injection returned.

  If I weren't practically catatonic, that revelation would have shocked me. If I weren't catatonic, I might have done something when a group of people in hazard suits bearing Atlas's logo approached me and demanded I stop. If I weren't catatonic, I probably wouldn't have been tased and thrown in the back of a van.

  Well, maybe that last part would have happened either way.

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