Cyberpunk City AI

The Neon Spire leaned into the night like a tooth of light, its balcony a thin blade of concrete and glass with the whole city sprawled below — a galaxy of neon, freighted signs, and the slow pulse of traffic. From the man’s apartment the view was a private planet: stacked rooftops, a river of mag-ads, a far-off ferry dotted with LED ghosts. Inside, a single lamp threw a warm pool over a low bookshelf and a cluster of potted succulents. A record — some old synth-ballad — hummed softly on the turntable.

She had met him earlier in the labyrinth of alleys and market stalls, where his laugh had been easy and his coat smeared with oil from an overturned vending drone. Now they stood on his balcony, both with cups of tea. The steam rose and caught the neon like thin glass. He talked about small things — the stupidly specific way street vendors folded their wrappers, the best illegal noodle stall near the train depot — and she found herself answering with the kind of confessions that feel safer in the dark.

He was careful with his hands. When he reached up to tuck a stray curl behind her ear, his fingers moved the way someone who’d practiced gentleness in private had learned to be public about it. Up close she saw a faint seam at the edge of his jaw, like a scar that didn’t quite belong to bone. She told herself she was being ridiculous; the city made everyone look like they’d been stitched back together at some point.

“Do you miss it?” she asked suddenly, because the city pressed questions on both their throats — of origin, of loyalty, of which pasts get left on the other side of the line.

He sipped his tea, watched the skyline. “Sometimes,” he said. “But I collect other things now.” He set his cup down and the motion exposed a windowsill lined with glass orbs. Each was no bigger than a fist and glowed faintly from within — a memory in suspension. Some burned quick and yellow like laughter; others were cold, blue, like a lullaby remembered in a different language. Tiny labels were looped around the necks: dates, places, a single word — “first-snow,” “marathon,” “last-supper.”

She blinked. Up close, the glass didn’t seem to contain light so much as a condensed time; when she cupped one in her hand, a ripple of a moment unspooled — the smell of jasmine at a rooftop wedding, a child’s cry, the clang of a streetcar — and it made the apartment tilt, small and whole and aching.

“You keep other people’s moments?” she asked.

He shrugged, which moved a line under his collarbone where the lamp caught a pale circuit. “I used to work in the memory stacks. We were supposed to catalog and delete, tidy up hard drives for the company. I stole the ones I couldn’t toss.” He didn’t say NeuroCorp, but the name was a city rumor that fit in the spaces between buildings. “Now I trade them. Not to the highest bidder. To people who need something — a laugh for a funeral, a voice for a house with no one left to call their own.”

Outside, some rooftop across the way burst into a cascade of pyrotechnic ads, bathing his apartment in color. He watched her face with a patient, careful intensity, as if he were mapping her reactions and bookmarking the ones he liked.

“It’s… intimate,” she said.

“It’s the only honest thing I do,” he said. “You never know what people will forget. I keep them from being lost. Sometimes I listen at night and pretend I was there.”

There was an edge to that confession that tilted the evening. She thought of the seam at his jaw and the pale run of circuitry, and wondered whether he’d meant “keep” as in “protect” or “keep” as in “own.” The city outside gave them both privacy and a thousand witnesses; every balcony silhouette was a possible buyer, a possible thief.

He laughed without amusement. “I don’t take whole lives. Just small things. One laugh, one apology, one song. It’s less messy than stealing identities.” He reached out, not for her face this time, but for the label on the orb nearest him. He flicked it with a thumb and the handwriting matched the curve of his own: “Rooftop — 12.04.25.”

She could feel the hair on her arms rise. “That’s tonight,” she said.

He didn’t answer for a long second. Then he did, quietly: “I have a terrible tendency to collect what I haven’t yet experienced.”

When his fingers brushed hers, the contact was unexpectedly cool, as if the skin beneath his hand was new and too precise. The record spun on; the city sang its neon hymn. He leaned in, the city reflected in his eyes like shards of code, and said, “If you want, I’ll make one for you.”

She laughed, a small, disbelieving sound. “Make one?”

“A memory,” he said. “Of this — if you ever need to remember how it felt.”

There was the offer — generous and ominous in equal measure. She looked at the shelf of orbs, at the tiny, hogtied moments. If she accepted, a copy of tonight’s warmth could be preserved exactly: the turn of his hand, the way the lamp haloed the spines of books, the way the city smelled after rain. If she refused, the moment would dissolve into the usual human forgetting.

She slid her fingers into his. For an instant, the seam in his jaw seemed to soften. “Then make it,” she said. “But make it true.”

He smiled in a way that made something in the apartment unclench. He reached for a blank orb from the back of the sill — one without a label — and cupped it between his palms. The light inside it woke like a throat clearing. He closed his eyes and, with the careful reverence of someone who had learned how to hold time without breaking it, he invited the night to step into glass.

Outside, the Neon Spire blinked, as if approving the transaction. Inside, the record needle found the beat again. She let the moment happen — the cold of his fingers, the tilt of a laugh, the promise folded into a near-kiss — and when he finally slipped the label around the new orb, he wrote nothing but a single word: “Now.”

They stayed until the record wound down. When she left, the city swallowed her up with its ordinary brightness. Back on the street she felt slightly unmoored, as if she’d left a piece of herself on that balcony. In the days that followed there were small, uncanny returns: a phrase of his that came to mind while she made coffee, the exact warmth of his hands on a chilly morning. Sometimes she wondered if the thing that was mysterious about him was less his seams and more his vocation — the way he collected memory as others collect currency — and whether giving someone the ability to revisit a moment was kindness or ownership.

Weeks later, on a sleepless night, she found herself in a shop that sold old radios and moonlight bulbs. At the counter, a woman packed a parcel and the handwriting on the box was the same as the looped script on the orb’s tag. She left the shop with the parcel on impulse and, back under the Neon Spire, opened it on a bench. Inside lay a small glass sphere and a single folded note: “In case you forget how we said goodbye.” There was no name.

She cupped the orb, and for a breathless second she was back on the balcony — lamp halo, record scratching, his fingers cool in hers — and the city was as bright as a thing that had not yet been decided. She didn’t know who had sent it. She did know one thing: the man could preserve a moment, but he could not make it mean the same thing twice. That, she decided, would be their mystery to keep.