Cyberpunk City AI

They called her Jane of the Middle Floors — an apartment between sky and squalor, where the Neon Spire’s glow pooled in the windows like water. She worked nights managing a concierge console for Ascendant Holdings: smile, route, sanitize, repeat. High society passed through her feeds in bespoke silhouettes, lacquered hair, and algorithm-approved laughter. They paid in CyberTokens and in the small, bright vials that winked in their coat pockets: NeuroBliss, PulseGen’s mood-smoothie, and a dozen lesser serums that made conversation frictionless and evenings eternal.

At first Jane mistook conformity for civility. The boardroom smiles were patient, the elevators polite. People dressed the right way and said the right words. But the city had long ago learned how to make rightness antiseptic: an injected calm, a curated warmth. The first time she watched a server in a rooftop bar roll a vial between manicured fingers before speaking to a guest, she felt something cold and precise slice through her chest. The guest’s eyes softened on cue; the server’s apology modulated perfectly to 2.3 seconds.

“Isn’t this normal?” a colleague would say when Jane asked why everyone seemed so… balanced. “Why wouldn’t you want to smooth the rough edges?”

It should have comforted her, that collective surrender, the way a city shrank its jagged corners until everyone fit a template. Instead it made her feel like she’d stepped into an exhibit where people were reproductions — beautiful, predictable reproductions — and she was the only human left who hadn’t been preserved.

Jane started looking. Not for crime or gossip or profit — for someone who wasn’t dosing before dinner. She began to notice the rituals: the quick pop of a vial, the way laughter lengthened like an elastic band, the pills tucked behind jewelry. NeuroBliss was everywhere — in the silver spoons at charity galas, in the neon-lit booths of the luxury arcades, in the hands of senators who said exactly the same things and left the same empty traces.

Her searches pushed her away from the Spire and deeper into the city’s skeleton. The Neon Labyrinth sold counterfeit vials between stalls of chrome noodles and living tattoos. Iron Alley sold a thicker kind of prescription — traded for favors, for old debts. Verdant Verge sold something else entirely: dirt-smelling tea, moss-wrapped crates, faces unpolished by serum. Here, between a farmer’s market stall and a hydroponic wall, she met people who did not reach for a vial before smiling.

They were not what she expected.

They called themselves the Naturas in whispers, and they moved like a language Jane had never learned — barefoot on scaffolding, hands inked with leaf patterns, eyes clear but not empty. Their beliefs felt like anachronisms: that the city had a pulse beyond its servers, that consciousness was not a commodity, that joy could be crooked and still real. They would talk about listening to roots and letting grief be loud. They pressed her tea that smelled of damp earth and clove, and when they laughed it startled her — uneven, sudden, wholly human.

To Jane, raised on the city’s curated calm, this jaggedness looked dangerous. One woman hummed to the plants at her stall. An old man painted spirals on his face and recited names of neighborhoods as if they were liturgies. Their hands were stained with soil, their clothes held birdseed, their beliefs were full of metaphors she had no place for. She called them odd. They returned the label with something like pity and the kind of tolerance that feels like an invitation.

“You think our quiet needs fixing,” said Lira, a Naturas elder, when Jane confessed how strange she found them. They sat under a sagging banner that read VERDANT VERGE MARKET in a font someone had spray-painted lovingly crooked. “We think your calm is a coat stitched from someone else’s skin. You wear it because you were taught it fits.”

Jane watched Lira’s fingers tease a sprout free from a hydro pod. The gesture was ordinary and radical in one small motion: not injecting, not numbing, not smoothing. It was a refusal.

She tried to test the edges. At a private function for some glittering foundation that sponsored green roofs, a senator passed a vial across a carafe. Jane refused. The senator tilted his head as if she’d misspoken. He smiled, but the smile had seams. He asked if she understood the cost of being present — the unmedicated volatility of honest reaction. Jane felt exposed as brittle as an old phone screen.

“It’s exhausting,” she said later to her reflection, meaning the senator, meaning herself. “If everyone’s softened, how do you tell when someone hurts you? Or when they love you?”

She started to learn the rituals of the Naturas, not to join so much as to understand: they chanted in the tunnels that connected Nature Alley to Iron Alley, a low recitation of the city’s old names. They made altars out of broken chips and plant cuttings. They traded stories of ancestors who had farmed in the hills before the Spire rose like a chrome sun. Their oddness had rhythm. Their beliefs were messy maps of memory, grief, and stubborn prayer.

Jane found that the more she listened, the more odd things made sense. The Naturas’ refusal to medicate wasn’t piety as she had assumed; it was an experiment in bearing the city’s rawness. When the high-society woman at the rooftop charity cried — fully, without a last-minute vial to lift her — Jane saw something uncloaked and her stomach felt like it had been cut cleanly. It was ugly and it was beautiful and it refracted truth differently.

She also saw how brutal the choice could be. An unmedicated breakdown in Iron Alley could mean losing a job, a friend, a place to sleep. NeuroBliss smoothed teeth that might otherwise be bared; it ferreted out friction as a survival strategy for many. The Naturas paid costs too: they were marginalized, mocked, occasionally attacked by gangs who mistook their refusal for weakness. Once Jane watched a Rust Devils lookout throw a bottle at a Naturas beekeeper. The bottle missed, the beekeeper laughed, and his laugh was a blade that kept the rust off his hands.

Jane began to carry two worlds with her like a pair of gloves. In the Spire she knew the protocols, the doses, the curated smiles. In Verdant Verge she learned to tolerate unprocessed emotion until it stopped being an emergency and became simply another weather. When she stood between the glass and the soil, she understood the city as a ledger of compromises.

One night, after her console shift, she walked the route that threaded Neon Labyrinth to Nature Alley. The market was a riot of stalls — neon and moss braided together like a wager. A child near a stall held a NeuroBliss vial with the reverence of a toy. Jane asked her mother why, and the woman said it made the child sleep; sleep meant safety in a building where the air coughed with old engines. Jane didn’t hand a sermon — she simply took the child’s hand and let it close around hers, warm and clumsy and unpredictable.

Normal, she discovered, was a question with many answers. Those who took mood-altering drugs sought predictability and peace. Those who did not sought authenticity and risked the consequences. Jane could understand both without fully belonging to either.

In the mornings she still polished consoles for people who spoke in perfectly measured kindness. In the afternoons she wandered among the Naturas, learning the names of plants that grew in cracked concrete and of people who remembered a city before NeuroCorp put its logo on every corner. She never stopped being fascinated by how “right” high society felt when medicated, nor did she ever stop being startled by the wild, noisy honesty of the Naturas.

If you asked Jane which side she chose, she would laugh — a little rougher these days, a little truer — and say she was trying to be human. That, here, in a city of prescriptions and prayer, might be the most dangerous and the most hopeful thing of all.