Cyberpunk City AI

The rain hadn’t let up in days. Iron Alley glistened with its own decay—neon bleeding into puddles, steam hissing from broken vents, the constant hum of survival layered over every corner. Marcus Cain moved through it like a shadow, guided less by sight and more by instinct.

That’s when he saw it.

Wedged between a rusted-out gear shop and a liquor den with its neon half-dead, stood a storefront that didn’t belong. Its glass was clean. Its panels unbroken. A pale white sign glowed steady and strong above the door, untouched by the flicker and grime that marked every other building in the Alley.

Zenith Dynamics.

The name hit him like a ghost. This was no coincidence. Corporations didn’t plant storefronts in Iron Alley—they crushed it from the outside, or bought it piece by piece through gangs. For Zenith to show its face here meant one thing: they weren’t afraid.

Marcus lingered by a vendor’s stall, pretending to scan the wares while his cybernetic eye zoomed in. The store didn’t move product like the other shops. There were no crowds, no workers hustling to make a cut. Just a steady trickle of figures slipping inside, none emerging. Men and women with vacant stares, moving as if pulled on strings.

His pulse tightened. This wasn’t commerce. This was collection.

He thought back to the whispers at the bar, the talk of “shipments,” the fear behind the word harvest. And now he saw it clearly—Zenith had set up its pipeline right in the heart of Iron Alley. Gangs like the Rust Devils weren’t just tolerating it. They were feeding it. Delivering the city’s forgotten straight to the glass doors of that too-clean facade.

Marcus clenched his jaw, servo-motors in his arm groaning softly. The MagRail massacre replayed in his mind—families burned in the name of efficiency. He’d sworn to never again be their weapon. But staring at that sign, he realized Zenith hadn’t stopped harvesting lives. They had only refined the process.