Fifth Life

[Author's note: I wrote the bulk of this story between December 2020 and January 2021. This story was very much so an unfinished lockdown project, but I do plan to complete it eventually.]

Teej, an Eastern European expat working a dead-end job as a data cleaner for a megacorp in Kuala Lumpur returns to his apartment to find a gun in his face. The hand holding the gun is a teenage runaway and nightclub VR-girl named Juli, who has had her entire identity erased. She wants answers, and she is going to get them the only way she knows how.

Finding the answers involves unravelling a genetic puzzle, which involves a murdered prostitute and a Japanese researcher with questionable ethics. However, the megacorp has reasons for withholding those answers, and is prepared to do so with deadly force. Soon Teej and Juli are involved in a game of cat-and-mouse that takes them through the rainy streets and back alleys of Chow Kit, Raja Laut and Taman Keramat, from which they will be lucky to escape alive.