Cyberpunk City AI

He counts profit the way other men count breaths. In the spreadsheets on his wall — glass panes that glow faintly when his fingers pass — every column is a planet he helped shift into orbit. His title is printed on cards people in meetings clear their throats for: Senior Integration Director. His apartment, perched like an observatory at the crown of Neon Spire, shows the kind of taste money buys when you want everyone to see you’ve left the street behind: clean angles, a living room that folds into itself, a modular sofa the color of wet chrome, floor-to-ceiling glass that frames the city as if it were a painting that refuses to be still.

From up here the rain forgets how to fall — it fractures into neon and glass and the skeletal geometry of scaffolding. Below, the city hums on its old frequencies: exchange, hunger, the soft metallic laughter of things being sold and sold again. Up here, the sounds are curated. Lucien buys playlists the way he buys men — small, precise, transient. The parties are always on schedule: weeknights for the young VPs who still believe themselves immortal, weekend spectacles for investors who like their conscience served on ice. Holo-art drifts lazily over a bar of light, and guests raise cocktails that flicker like invalid data. They call it living luminous. Lucien calls it necessary.

Because of what he helped build, his hands have fingerprints that never quite rinse clean. The company — one of many names in the ledger of his life — makes devices that dissolve discretion. Tiny embeds, sutured into the soft weight of a life: a choice here, a convenience there, a promise of belonging that rewires the lonely into dependency. It starts as help; it ends in hunger. People come to him with empty faces and full schedules and leave with a hollowed cadence that matches the rhythm of the rigs. He watches graphs and user curves and retention rates that look like heartbeat tracings. He signs his initials and the lines deepen.

Sometimes, alone in the late hours, he imagines the faces of those who made the payments on his rise. Old clients he’d never seen, a mother who became a ledger, a child whose laugh was an optimization. He asks himself the one question executives rarely let themselves voice — did the convenience outweigh the cost? And there is no answer he can accept awake.

So he blots. He bottles forgetfulness and pours it under his tongue in the neon hours. NeuroBliss comes in slender vials with labels that are more suggestion than medicine; it tastes like relief, like the last thing before falling. A single dose smooths the serrated edges of memory until the shapes of his deeds blur and his hands feel clean. Two doses fold guilt into the wallpaper; three lets him stand in a crowd and believe that laughter is authentic. The vials sit lined on a mirrored tray by the lamps — he likes lamps — their glass catching the city and refracting it into a kaleidoscope without faces.

The parties continue because parties are contracts he can hide beneath. Guests are the moving parts of a life he can still pretend is normal: friends who nod without question, clients who toast the future they helped fund, lovers who arrive with contracted smiles and leave with transaction histories. He watches them orbit his living room like satellites, never touching ground. He smiles; he hosts; he offers more NeuroBliss in discreet, tasteful syringes to people who linger too close to the throb of the rigs, who ask the wrong question in the wrong tone. He markets solace in small vials, the irony sharp as broken glass.

Once, in a moment that did not obey his usual arrangements, a woman stayed behind after a party. She sank into the sofa and looked out at the city with a kind of exhausted hunger that gnawed past his defenses. “How do you sleep?” she asked, not looking at him. It was the one question that could have been a mirror.

Lucien could have told her the truth then — that he sleeps in doses, that each dream is purchased — but confession requires a spine he had long ago sold to appetite. Instead he poured two doses into a glass, told her they were tonic, and watched her soften into what she believed was peace. He watched her sleep and saw, in the rise and fall of her chest, the exact same blank cadence his company had tuned into millions of others. He felt as though he had made a map of the human heart and then sold the directions to the highest bidder.

The solitude is not dramatic. It does not announce itself with thunder. It arrives in the small things: the way his laughter peels thin at the edges, the way the plants in his kitchen bend away from light that isn’t sun, the paperbacks on his shelf with spines unbroken because he never opens them. Money buys immaculate surfaces but not the weight of another hand. NeuroBliss buys the absence of noise but not the absence of memory. He keeps taking more because the gap between what he has built and what it has done widens with every ledger he signs; the pills fill it temporarily like dyed plaster. Each morning he wakes in a clearer room and a murkier heart.

There are nights when he stands on his balcony, the city a living circuitboard below, and counts the tiny, perfunctory lights that are people. He imagines them as candles and for a flash — a reckless, dangerous flash — wishes to put his own out. Instead he pours another dose and lets sleep take him like a tide. In the quiet between the neon and the glass, the suits he keeps in the walk-in whisper of meetings and mergers, and the mirrors promise him he looks faithful to his face.

He keeps making the deals. He keeps hosting the parties. He keeps buying the vials that make remorse manageable. The city continues to hum. Inside his high flat, the lamps glow like small beacons against the dark, and Lucien, hands steady and heart numbed, reaches for another light and another vial and another reason to believe that the loneliness can be engineered away.