Neon Requiem

Prologue

Vantage never sleeps — it just dims. The corporate spires above the smog line blaze white and cold, while the lower districts drown in neon and rainwater, their streets patrolled by Crucible Squad enforcers who stopped asking questions years ago. It is a city of vertical distance: the higher you live, the less you see of what holds the whole structure up. Something is coming that will change that. NovaCorp calls it PANOPTIX — a neural surveillance network threaded through the city's augmented population, capable of watching through their own implants. What the public doesn't know, what almost no one knows, is that the system doesn't just watch. Buried in its architecture is a behavioral modification layer, a quiet hand on the back of the skull, designed to smooth away dissent before it can form into thought. Activation is 72 hours away. A resistance cell called the Undervolt has the only known exploit that can destroy PANOPTIX from within — and they are already compromised. Safe houses are burning. Trust is a liability. And the exploit itself arrived from an anonymous source inside NovaCorp, which means someone with power wants this system dead, and no one knows why. The clock is running. In the flooded maintenance tunnels of Sublevel 9, someone is about to decide what they're willing to risk — and what they're willing to become — to keep the city's mind its own.