Cyberpunk City AI

By the time NeuroCorp announced Lysarev, the city had already learned to worship its miracles.

Billboards folded open like black flowers along the Neon Spire; holo-ads bled warm light into rainy gutters, promising “ten years of sunlight” for one small vial and a week’s wage. Inside glossy clinics that smelled faintly of ozone and citrus, shiny nurses slipped micro-needles into tired arms and smiled like they were part of some tidy, benevolent future. The press called it a revolution: a single genetic edit that told certain neural cells to make more of something everyone called the Happiness Molecule. The technical papers—dense and dazzling—used words like “upregulation,” “epigenetic stabilization,” and “durability.” The legislature gave NeuroCorp tax breaks. The city gave them a tower on the edge of the Neon Spire, its glass face reflecting a dozen neighborhoods of neon, rust, and reclaimed ivy.

Ten years is a long time in Cyberpunk City and, for a while, it was long in a good way. People who had been locked behind the grey steel of depression came out of their apartments like people who had been given a second language. Streets filled with laughter that tasted a little processed, but real enough. The economy hummed. Lysarev became a household name, a line in the mouths of grateful parents and bored influencers. NeuroCorp’s stock swelled. Eron Vex—sharp-jawed, colder-than-ice in interviews—smiled in every shareholder report, his palms immaculate.

Mara Cline had been one of the scientists who believed in the miracle. She had been a junior geneticist in NeuroCorp’s Serenity Division, the kind of woman whose childhood bookshelf had contained equal parts biology texts and dystopian novels. She had watched the bench tests, the animal models, the initial clinical cohorts. She had seen patients come alive. She had signed nondisclosure agreements with clean hands.

What she did not—could not—see then was time stretching like a rubber band.

The first decade after Lysarev’s release was all PR and glitter. Then a trickle of odd cases reached NeuroCorp’s internal clinic: manic episodes that weren’t just euphoria but sharp, bright hysteria; headaches that felt like lights burning behind the eyes; an odd sweetness in saliva. The doctors chalked it up to co-morbidities. The city’s tabloids whispered of a new subculture—“Lysarev-floods,” kids who took video of themselves in rapture—then celebrated them.

By year eleven, the trickle became a flood. Entire blocs began behaving like electrical storms. People slept too little and spoke too rapidly, making risky trades and reckless promises. Some became obsessed, hoarding small objects with feverish attachment. Others simply melted into a lethargy that wasn’t the old depression but a heavy, gelatinous malaise followed by sharp terror. Emergency rooms were full of patients whose synapses had become over-amped; their blood tests showed markers nobody had expected. NeuroCorp’s labs found that the genetic edits—meant to be semi-stable—had drifted. Regulatory elements had been nudged by unknown epigenetic winds. Cells weren’t just making more of the Happiness Molecule; they had rewired themselves to prefer that state. The feedback loops that once moderated neurotransmitter production were frayed.

Inside the tower, Eron Vex called it a “complication,” then a “manageable consequence,” then, when the calls from the city grew louder, a “market opportunity.”

They named the second product Balansol.

Where Lysarev promised growth, Balansol promised restraint. Where the first was an unlocking, the second was a leash. NeuroCorp’s spokespeople—avatars on giant screens—spoke of the “responsible path forward,” of “dual-therapy stewardship.” They claimed humility and care. They promised to distribute Balansol to anyone who had taken Lysarev, free for the first month. Lawsuits filed by patients turned into quiet settlements. The media, hungry and fickle, alternated between moral outrage and relief that a solution existed.

Mara understood the science that NeuroCorp now offered as a fix. She had helped tune the promoter constructs that once sang with hope. She knew that the same edits that had been marketed as permanent salvation could, under slow molecular pressure, become runaway engines. She had written an internal memo years before the flood—an experimentalist’s caution note about long-term epigenetic drift. The memo had been archived under “low priority.” When she tried to bring it up again, the doors to strategy meetings closed. When she refused to approve a PR script that minimized the harm, her access was revoked.

NeuroCorp did not have to make Balansol. But capitalism in the city was not a simple engine; it was a machine that grinds incidents into profit. Balansol required daily tablets—fine-tuned inhibitors that lowered the target cells’ output enough to keep people functional. Take it, and you could live a life indistinguishable from the one Lysarev had promised—only now your days would hinge on a corporate-supplied pill. Skip a dose and the light returned with a vengeance.

The ethicality of a corporation that engineered dependence to extract profit is a moral noose. NeuroCorp avoided the noose by dressing it in velvet. They funded support groups and glossy ad campaigns about “shared responsibility.” They put clinics in the Neon Labyrinth and in Verdant Verge farmers’ markets, so both the rich and the green-haired activists could access Balansol. They sponsored festivals that celebrated recovery—while quietly renewing lifetime supply contracts when patients signed “consent” forms that read like contracts written for machines.

Word leaked. A smuggled dataset, an audio of a meeting where Eron’s voice said, “We knew the drift, but what’s stewardship when we don’t make the medicine they need?”—those things surfaced and vanished in the same hour. NeuroCorp’s legal team moved like a shadow army. The city protested in fits. Some demanded criminal prosecutions; others demanded the right to forgo Balansol without being ostracized.

It was not only the legal calculus that made the story grim. There were human stories folded into it: a teacher who had found herself full of daring creative energy only to fall into a manic spiral that cost her custody; a mechanic in Iron Alley who had rebuilt his life in year two and then spent years trading extra wages for Balansol pills; lovers who drifted apart under the soft tyranny of chemically moderated moods. The company sent condolence baskets with a tasteful note and an invitation to an exclusive webinar.

Mara left the tower with a single thumb drive and a shoebox of printouts. She gave the files to a ragged collective of journalists and coders who hid in a basement under a noodle shop in the Neon Labyrinth. They published everything they could: internal memos, emails that showed marketing plans tied to “recurring revenue,” the flagged note about drift that had been “low priority.” The story exploded for a day. NeuroCorp’s PR machine surged back; Eron Vex announced independent audits, pledged transparency, and—most injuriously—set up patient councils led by people paid to be grateful.

The city kept taking Balansol.

It is easy to be righteous from the edges. It is harder to reckon with the thousands who could not function without the second pill because biology had been rewritten. Calling the corporation evil becomes complicated when the victims are your neighbors, your teacher, the barista who remembers your coffee order. NeuroCorp had made a product that relieved suffering for a decade, then created another product that managed the consequences of that relief. It profited, yes—obscenely—but it also provided a kind of stability that the city came to rely upon. For many, balancing the scales meant swallowing a crimson tablet each morning and continuing to show up.

Mara often walked along the edges of Nature Alley at night, where ivy had conquered neon and rodents lived like tiny emperors. She thought of the ethics classes she had sat through, of the tidy hypotheticals about unintended consequences. She thought of the faces of patients she’d once helped—and helped to betray, however unintentionally. She thought of the tower where Eron Vex signed emails inviting her to “reengage” with the company. The city hummed with a million small moral decisions every day: take the drug, don’t take the drug, attend the rally, return to work.

In the end, the story did not close on a courtroom drama or a violent uprising—though both were whispered about in the Neon Labyrinth. It closed on the quiet complexity of dependence: a balancing act between corporate power and human need, between invention’s promise and its vanity. NeuroCorp kept its tower; Eron Vex kept his smile. Lysarev and Balansol became part of the city’s chemical grammar. And somewhere, in basements and in lamp-lit kitchens, people argued over what counted as salvation—and what counted as a shackle dressed as a hand.

Mara still slept badly. She still carried the shoebox. Once in a while, she’d replace the files with new ones—updates the coders sent—before slipping back into the city. She told herself she had done what she could: leaked truth into light and let the citizens decide. But sometimes, in the soft hour before dawn, she imagined a different kind of lab—one that returned edits to their original code, one that repaired drift without making new markets of human suffering. The city never built that lab. For now, there were tablets, towers, and the long, small compromises of people who wanted to live.