Cyberpunk City AI

The bar was little more than a rusted shell with flickering signs bolted to its walls, the kind of place where daylight never dared to crawl. Smoke coiled from cracked vents, mixing with the sour tang of burnt synth-liquor. Marcus Cain sat at the counter, one hand wrapped around a chipped glass, the other resting on the steel plating of his arm.

He wasn’t here for the drink—it barely qualified as liquid. He was here for the voices. Iron Alley’s bars were confessionals for the desperate, and desperation always spoke louder than truth.

A pair of Rust Devils hunched at a nearby table, their laughter sharp and hollow. Between slurred boasts and the clink of bottles, Marcus caught fragments:

“…shipment came in last night… not gear, not NeuroBliss…”

“…they don’t scream once they’re under…”

Marcus’s cybernetic eye adjusted, zooming in on the faint reflections in their glasses. Their hands shook—not from the liquor, but from the weight of what they carried in their words. Something bigger than contraband. Something alive.

Behind him, a broker argued with a tired medic over payment, his voice rising above the static haze of neon. “I don’t care how you patch them. Just keep them breathing long enough to make delivery.”

Marcus took a slow sip, the taste bitter metal on his tongue. His instincts—the ones honed in Zenith’s service and sharpened in betrayal—buzzed like static in his skull. Something was moving through Iron Alley, hidden beneath the gangs’ usual chaos. And it wasn’t weapons, or circuits, or drugs.

It was people.

The ghosts of the MagRail stirred in his chest, heavy and unrelenting. Marcus set the glass down and rose without a word, the hum of his cybernetic arm the only sound that lingered as he stepped back into the rain-soaked streets