Cyberpunk City AI

Iron Alley was alive in its usual way — which meant it sounded half like a dying machine and half like a marketplace arguing with itself. Sparks rained from exposed power conduits overhead, the air smelled of melted plastic and fried noodles, and every vendor shouted loud enough that the neon signs rattled. Wires hung in thick snarls above the walkways like cybernetic vines, some sparking, some dripping coolant, some humming with stolen electricity. Piles of scavenged tech, broken servos, cracked holo-screens, rusted mech limbs, and half-functioning augments made narrow aisles through the black market bazaar.

She moved through the chaos with her hood pulled low. Iron Alley wasn’t a place you lingered. It was where you ducked in, bought what wasn’t legal anywhere else, and escaped before someone decided to pickpocket your memories.

But then she saw it — not in the grand display cases of weapon smugglers or the glowing crates of synthetic organs, but tucked deep inside a junk shop so cluttered the doorway was nearly blocked by a mound of tangled copper wire and melted battery packs.

A tiny music box.

A small metal cube with rust creeping along its edges, its crank bent, its lid dented — but unmistakably the same one she had lost when she was eight. Her father used to twist the crank for her, and her mother would hum along with the tune, soft and off-key. One night during a blackout, the memory went missing just like that — vanished. Her parents whispered about it afterward, thinking she couldn’t hear: “If it ever resurfaces… we’re in more danger than we thought.”

She froze. The shopkeeper, an elderly man with mechanical fingers and goggles welded to a helmet of patched wiring, noticed her stare.

“That thing?” he said, voice buzzing from a throat mod. “Just scrap.”

“It’s not,” she whispered.

He shrugged, sweeping aside a stack of broken drone wings and a bucket of cracked neon tubes. “Came in with a haul from the old district. Buyers passed on it. No datachip inside. Worthless.”

She reached for it. The moment her fingers touched the cold metal, a shiver ran up her arm — not from the box, but from the sudden rush of memory: her mother’s laugh, her father’s promise that the music came from a hidden place only their family understood.

The moment broke when a gang of Rust Devils barreled through the aisle, arguing loudly, knocking over crates. A rain of screws and loose wiring fell around her like metallic hail. Someone shouted from behind a curtain of hanging cables. A neon transformer blew overhead, sizzling purple light across the junk.

In all the chaos, no one noticed that the music box had begun to glow faintly through the rust, a pulse like a heartbeat waking from long sleep.

She tightened her grip on it.

Whatever her parents had feared — whatever they had tried to hide — was waking up in her palm.

And Iron Alley, loud and wired and broken, suddenly felt like the worst possible place to be holding it.