Cyberpunk City AI

She used to measure time by him.

By the intervals between messages. By the hollow hours when his presence lingered in the apartment even after he left—fingerprints on glass, warmth fading from sheets, the faint chemical sweetness that clung to everything he touched. Neon Spire taught her that absence could be louder than noise.

Tonight, she sits high above it all, wrapped in quiet luxury, watching the city vibrate beneath the glass. The restaurant hums softly around her—muted conversations, cutlery murmuring against porcelain—but none of it reaches her. Her mind keeps slipping backward, snagging on memories like exposed wire.

He hadn’t always been broken.

At first, he dealt because it was easy. Then because it was lucrative. Then because stopping meant admitting he’d built himself out of substances instead of bones. She watched his appetite change—first for money, then for risk, then for oblivion. He began touching her like he was checking if she was still real, like she might dissolve if he looked away too long.

Desire curdled into dependency. Love into surveillance.

She learned to read him by the tremor in his hands, the way his pupils swallowed light, the paranoia disguised as affection. He asked where she was too often. Asked who she was with. Asked questions that weren’t questions at all. At night, when the city glowed through their window, he would whisper plans that didn’t exist yet and fears that already controlled him.

She stayed longer than she should have.

Because chaos can feel intimate when it’s shared.

The wine trembles slightly as she lifts it now. Her reflection fractures across the glass wall—one version calm, another hollow-eyed, another already mourning something she doesn’t fully name. Somewhere below, Neon Spire exhales a plume of light and smoke, indifferent as ever.

Her comm buzzes.

Just once.

She doesn’t open it, but her body reacts anyway—a spike of dread, a wash of relief, and beneath it all, something shamefully familiar: anticipation. Even now, part of her expects his voice, his excuses, his promises stitched together by desperation.

Instead, silence.

Her thoughts turn invasive, looping, cruel. She imagines him pacing in some forgotten corridor, sweat soaked through synthetic fabric, convinced he’s still in control. She imagines the moment realization arrives—the precise second the city withdraws its permission for him to exist.

Neon Spire is merciless like that. It doesn’t rage. It removes.

The candle beside her flickers, briefly guttering out before stabilizing. She feels it in her chest—something extinguished, something stubbornly refusing to stay dead. Guilt presses in from the edges, distorted by memory and desire. She wonders whether loving him was a choice or a symptom.

The sirens rise eventually, faint at first, then layered. Too far away to be urgent. Too late to matter.

She exhales, slow and deliberate, as if practicing how to breathe without him for the first time.

When she finally stands, the chair barely makes a sound. She doesn’t look down again. Looking implies attachment. Looking suggests regret.

Neon Spire continues to glow behind her as she leaves—beautiful, predatory, unchanged. And somewhere in its depths, the man who once defined her hours becomes just another absence folded into the city’s memory.

She steps into the light alone.

Not healed.

Just unfinished.