The Seraphim: A Cyberpunk Novel

Prologue

No one could prepare for a time in their life where they cease to exist. A daughter to a loving mother and father erased from all photographs. The top of her class replaced by the second-in-line. Her position at the Ministry of Finance replaced by a man named bob. Her desk cleared out, her apartment sold, and her entire digital footprint wiped from the world. Lana Rio never existed. She was able to recall anything and everything. If someone wanted to know when the first episode of The Good Seraph Life aired on the UnityNet, she could answer with perfect recall. If someone asked her what she remembered being six years old, she could retell them the stories of growing up on her family's algae and sunflower farmplex in the country. Lana knew just about anything there could to know but one thing: How to never exist. How to be an unperson.

The raw spear of winter jabbed her gut and sliced cleaned through her. The gnarled talons clawed at her brick cheeks. Its howling cry split her in two and battered the remains. Ghosts projected from shopfronts waltzed through the sidewalk and passed through her.

Lana had her head low and her slender frame shadowed in the glow of neon.

"Did you hear about Fyrta?" A man said somewhere in the crowd, his accent northern Estria heights. She recognized it from her first semester Ecology professor.

"Yeah. The place has gone straight to hell," answered another.

She shouldered her way through the arm-to-arm mass of people in the sidewalk toward the intersection. Her sneakers turned to stone on her feet. Her knees wavered. Mutters about how she needed to sit down were quick to be silenced with reminders about how she could never.

The crowd stopped. She looked up at the holographic lettering reading DO NOT CROSS.

A police drone hummed a meter above. Lana kept her eyes down on her feet. Her fingers scratched the inside of her pockets.

She didn't know why she was doing this or where she was going at this point.

The drone hum faded off and she looked back up at the timer on the crosswalk that started the light change sequence.

"I hear they are trying to get their own independence if the election botches up." Pointed leafy ears broke through his oily black hair draped past his shoulders. Lana looked up at him. "Zaitsev is just another human zealot."

"Goo' for dem," said the bronze woman standing beside him. Her accent tropical from Soiga or Maratt. "I would leave the Alliance too if I could. This place is complete hell."

"Shhh." A man with a wrinkled triangle face of high cheekbones and blemishes craned his neck at the couple. "That is treasonous talk. You can get locked up for that."

"These Hefren don't care about us anyways," said the shae man, "they beat us and shoot us Locaste like vermin."

The woman took his arm in her skeletal hands. The police drone returned. The circular ball hovered over the crowd for a few beats, then hummed off down the street. The man spat.

The light blinked green. The crowd synchronized down the street. Across the street there was shouting. A lot of it. A mass of bodies pressed against the glass of a Patsy's Bar and Grill.

The wheels of a police car screeched from the south. Two more white and blue stripped cars raced down the wide four lane street from the north and came to a halt. The doors swung open and men in black armor and sallet helmets with glowing visors stormed out. A body was thrown from one of the cars and a women screamed. Lana recoiled. The shae man rolled his eyes.

"See my point," he gestured for the woman's gaze.

The body on the street didn't move. His scarf thrashing in the wind stream. His face red and disfigured. His fingernails missing and his hands outstretched. Six men armored men wearing black armbands reading MP, Military Police, their faces hidden behind filtration masks, gathered in a semi-circle around the sports bar.