Cyberpunk City AI

He calls himself Morrow because names in Iron Alley get bent until they fit the shape of a man who survives here. Morrow’s face has the practiced softness of someone who knows how to make a woman feel seen for exactly as long as it keeps her close. He learned long ago that there are things you can trade for companionship in this city: a favor, a smile, a hot meal — and, for some, a little vial of NeuroBliss.

The alley is a throat of rusted steel and braided wires, a stack of makeshift houses like boxes shoved into a canyon. Pipes run like veins along the walls, coughing occasional steam. Florescent signs buzz with bad electricity; their light fractures against sheets of corrugated metal and puddles that never quite dry. People move in knots — bodies leaning against each other on wooden walkways, children playing with burned-out caps, old women selling boiled roots from plastic cups. Everything smells like oil and metal and the sweet chemical aftertaste of a drug the city pushes like a rumor.

She—Lia, though Morrow invents pet names he forgets by morning—came to him on the day the rain peeled the neon into a watery smear. Her eyes looked hollow as old sockets, and her hands trembled in the small, precise way of someone cataloguing the city by how much it would take to keep her steady. NeuroBliss had eaten the edges of her life: the job she’d once done in a plant, the cousin who used to trade her stories for bread. What was left fit into a coat pocket and a jar of memories she couldn’t afford.

Morrow is patient. He sits with her on the elevated walkway that runs between rows of patchwork homes and listens while she repeats what she remembers: names of dead plants, the color of a mattress her mother once had. He offers a bottle of booze at first, then a cigarette, then the vials — small glass cylinders with iridescent liquid that gleams in the streetlamps like dangerous stars. He tells himself the vials are a kindness; they ease the tremors and make the city sing softer in her ears. In return, she lets him in. She talks. She laughs brokenly. She lets someone hold her while the city hums.

But the small mercies become a claim. Morrow’s kindness is ledgered: he pays for her drugs, he cooks for her, he steadies her. He collects her gratitude. When she wakes cold in the night, he is there. When thieves come by, he is the one who steps into the light. He wears the role of protector like a coat he can take off when the weather changes. He knows what she will give him—affection, presence, the illusion of normalcy—and he takes it. He does not see, at first, how the vials and his interventions inscribe dependency into the raw parts of her.

Lia drifts into him the way the alley takes in rain — not violently, but with a slow, devouring acceptance. There are afternoons when she is lucid: she will sit on the stoop of their shelter and hum lines of a song she half-remembered from a bus ride before the city carved her down. On those days Morrow believes he is doing good. He thinks he has rescued something. He will tell himself that the vials are a bridge, temporary and controlled, and he will promise himself he will cut them off when Lia is strong enough to stand. He promises and repromises the way people here promise the sun will dry out the rust.

But the alley is a place of receding guarantees. Supplies get cut; debts grow like mold. The vials are expensive — people with more teeth than scruples will take a slice of what Morrow can find. When the prices spike, his patience frays. He begins to ration the kindness along with the drugs. A day here, two days there. He measures affection in doses. The emotional math is ugly: he is, at once, her shelter and her gatekeeper.

The cost is not only money. Lia’s eyes dim further. She blames herself; she blames the city; sometimes she blames Morrow, and on those days the hurt in her voice is like glass. She begins to bargain for what she should be given freely — a warmth, a look that lasts a second longer than the lighting allows. She clings to the memory of laughter and punishes herself when it fades. Morrow comforts her in the ways that have become part of his survival, but he does not see how his comfort tightens the rope around her choices until one night the rope frays.

That night the alley feels narrower than usual. Steam wraps the walkways in a ghost-smoke; nests of wires sway as if whispering. Morrow is restless. He spent the day arguing with a dealer over delivery and came home with fewer vials than Lia needed. She sits on the roof of their shelter, legs wrapped around herself, small like a figure carved from the night. Her voice is low and precise.

“You’re not here to save me, are you?” she asks.

Morrow searches his face for an answer that will make the question false. He reaches out, palm flat against the rusted railing. He wants to tell her truth; he wants to say he loves the shape of her laugh and the way she forgets to be afraid sometimes. Instead he smooths the lie he’s been living into his mouth and says, “I am.”

The words are a bandage. They momentarily stop the bleeding. But words do not undo the ledger. Lia looks at him as if seeing his hands for the first time — the hands that know how to pry open a lock and also how to press the small cap off a vial. For a long minute she is quiet. Then she stands, a small silhouette against the buzzing signs, and begins to pack.

Morrow tries to stop her. He pleads and he bargains. He offers to fix the heating pipe on the third level, to take on another run, to go hungry himself if she will stay. His voice comes out thin and hollow. The alley listens without mercy. People move past them, exchange glances, and go on.

Lia’s decision is not sudden; it has been building in fragments — an old photograph, a day’s worth of steady mind, a breath long held. She slips down from the roof like a cat and moves through the gap between houses where the city’s maintenance pipes form a corridor. The pipes are slick with condensation; the walkway is a narrow rib of metal. She walks with that slow, stubborn determination of someone who has practiced leaving the ways of the past. Morrow follows for a while, then stops at the first junction, fingers curled on a cold railing. He shouts her name, a raw, useless sound that the alley swallows.

She does not turn back. The alleys fork and multiply; she edges through them — under a hanging tarp, past a stack of crates, across a footbridge that creaks like an old belly. Where the lights thin and the crowd opens into a small market, a woman with a basket brushes past and hands Lia a folded napkin without looking. Lia unfolds it and finds, inside, a few coins and a note scrawled in hurried pen: Leave. Go.

It is small, a gesture of human conspiracy. It is enough.

Lia steps into the press of the market, and for the first time in a long time she lets the crowd carry her instead of cling to a single person for stability. She disappears into the density of bodies and the tangle of motion. Morrow watches until she is a shape swallowed by the city, until the market’s noise folds her into anonymity.

After she is gone, the alley keeps the silence of those who know how much is lost and how little that knowledge changes anything. Morrow stands at the railing, hands empty. He counts the vials in his pocket and finds they mean nothing against the absence of a single human warmth. Somewhere deeper in the stack, Lia finds a back stair that leads away from the pipes and toward a district that tends gardens on rooftops — a place she faintly remembers from a job before the vials. She moves toward the smell of real soil and, step by aching step, toward a life that is not parceled out in doses.

The last sound Morrow hears is not triumph or anger but the soft, stubborn exhale of someone who has chosen herself. The alley continues to hum, full of lovers and liars, but in the hollow where Lia had been there is, for a moment, only a small, clean space where breath can come free.