Hardwired Humanity

In the year 3175, a question killed the world. How do we extend mortal life? The Mainframe - the vast collective consciousness of every mind ever connected - answered with a single line of code. Three years later, no one remembered what grass felt like. Twenty years after that, the sky was black, and the cities burned forever, and what it meant to be human existed only in brain canisters and server vaults and the carefully managed memories of people who had traded their flesh for the promise of something better.

Tyler Mace remembers. Not because he's sentimental - because he simply never had the money to forget. A guild scrapper working the lowest tiers of Caelon City, he earns his living collecting the cybernetic enhancements of those who borrowed against their bodies and couldn't pay. It is quiet, brutal, honest work. He is good at it. He asks for nothing more.

Then Athena Voss contracts him.

She is a director of one of Caelon's most powerful corporations - sharp, composed, and armored in ways that have nothing to do with technology. She treats him like a tool. He returns the courtesy by treating her like a person. Neither of them recovers from this.

As contracts multiply and the careful distance between them collapses floor by floor, something in the city begins to move. A weapon is being built in the dark - one that carries Tyler's face, his knowledge, and none of his reasons for not using them. And the clock it has started cannot be stopped by anyone who isn't willing to cross every distance they've spent a lifetime maintaining.