Max sipped his oat milk cortado, the crema still swirling from a recent stir, though his attention was nowhere near the ceramic cup in his hand.
He sat in the corner booth of Static Bloom, a Williamsburg coffee shop that once prided itself on live vinyl sets and typewriter poetry. Now, it was known mostly for being quiet — not cozy-library quiet, but eerily, digitally silent.
Sunlight filtered through plants hanging from repurposed bike frames on the ceiling, casting leafy shadows across customers who barely moved.
Nearly every seat was taken, yet no one spoke. No barista called out names. No laptop keys clacked. Just bodies in stillness — some smiling faintly, some blinking slowly, all deeply somewhere else.
Max was watching a remix of a cat DJing to an old Mitski track while skydiving.
The video played directly in his vision, overlaid neatly against his field of view like a faint hologram. It was clipped from someone's feed — algorithm-fed to his Q-Link, the quantum neural interface he'd gotten implanted on his twenty-first birthday.
It hummed invisibly behind his left ear, wirelessly syncing with the city's NetGrid and pushing terabytes per second straight into his cortical layer.
A gentle pulse of music played in his mind — an indie folk loop he'd chosen to underlay all personal sessions. He could have made it more immersive, mapped the reverb to his limbic rhythm, but he liked the rawness. It made him feel more there.
Asking his AI companion, "Gipsi, what's the name of this cafe again?" he asked silently, just thinking the words with slight vocalization in his internal monologue.
"You're at Static Bloom, Max," replied the voice. It was crisp, warm, and perfectly casual — his personalized AI instance, whom he had named "Gipsi" and tweaked to sound like a cross between his childhood babysitter and Cate Blanchett.
"Would you like to leave a review or check the most popular drink today?"
"Nah, just vibing. Thanks."
"Vibe noted."
A soft indicator in the top-left of his vision told him his friend Nadia had just "ghost-linked" into his vicinity — she was nearby and letting him know without initiating a full mind ping.
He turned his head slightly and saw her sitting three tables over, chewing slowly on a croissant. Her eyes were still. Her hand moved mechanically to the cup near her. She was probably deep in a simulation, or co-editing some video in Zurich again.
Max could have reached out mentally, but decided against it.
There was something beautiful about not interrupting the silence. Not because it was sacred — but because it was shared.
All around him, everyone was alive in their own streams. People were gaming, traveling, meditating. One woman in a denim jacket was probably deep into a language-learning module, her eyes flickering with the subtle micro-movements of subvocal rehearsal.
Max's Q-Link brought up his schedule. A tiny translucent calendar floated into his view, annotated with icons: therapy at 2 PM, part-time UX job review at 4:30, neural gym at 6.
He could feel himself getting a bit overstimulated. The mental music dimmed slightly, auto-adjusting to his biofeedback.
"Would you like to activate ambient mode?" Gipsi asked, reading his mild cognitive strain.
"Yeah, drop me into soft focus," Max whispered in his thoughts.
The cafe sharpened.
Not the physical one — that had always been clear — but the experience of it. The Q-Link dimmed all non-essential overlays.
Light warmth spread in his chest.
A breeze from the air vent became more noticeable.
The smell of espresso and cinnamon intensified.
He felt himself back in his body, still sipping, still tethered, but gently reminded of gravity, wood, time.
And it was nice.
Just as the scent of cardamom and espresso settled into Max's senses, a soft mental chime echoed through his consciousness — a kind of gentle thought-tap. Incoming presence: Clara Y., trusted connection.
Before Max could consciously accept, their neural links synchronized.
His Q-Link spun up a shared virtual instance — a café-bar hybrid modeled after a late-night spot in Shibuya, Tokyo, where the baristas wore cat ears and the cats wore tiny aprons. Clara liked it here; she always said it felt like "if Studio Ghibli designed Tinder."
The scene shimmered into clarity in less than a blink. Lantern lights glowed warm against rain-specked windows. Futuristic jazz whispered overhead. Cats lounged on polished wood counters, blinking with semi-sentience, their textures rendered in immaculate detail.
Clara sat on a velvet ottoman, in digital form just slightly idealized — same sharp eyeliner, same undercut streaked rose-gold, same slight smirk — but polished with a softness she probably dialed in herself.
"Hey Clara," Max said, settling in beside her.
The bar auto-materialized his usual — a tall glass of matcha whiskey — which he ignored. "I was hoping you'd call. Did you review my AI-edited reels from last night yet?"
Clara scoffed, tilting her head as a multicolored calico leapt into her lap, tail flicking upright as it began kneading.
"No. I've been knee-deep in… believe this or not… laundry."
Max burst into laughter — not a sound in the real world, just a bright shimmer across his shared signal.
"LOL. Yeah, they still haven't cracked that one, huh?"
Clara shrugged, stroking the cat's back, which arched under her touch in that familiar, exaggerated tail-lift gesture. "I mean, they've cracked the washing and drying — that's easy. But folding? Still iffy. And I'm still not comfortable letting my homebot handle my, you know, delicates. There are lines."
Max grinned, his eyes wandering. A long-haired white Persian jumped gracefully onto the booth beside him, brushing against his side. He looked at it, confused. "Hi there… wait, where's Tigger? My regular furball?"
He reached out and double-tapped the white cat's pink nose. It glitched for a moment — a flickering mesh of polygons and code — then resolved into a pudgy orange tabby with mismatched eyes and a snaggletooth. "That's more like it," Max murmured, lifting the hefty feline into his lap.
"How have you been, you fat old cat? I've missed you."
Tigger purred loudly, a low thunder vibrating through Max's lap. Its warmth wasn't physical, but the illusion was close enough to cause an emotional flicker — a neural simulation of comfort, nostalgia, memory.
They sat for a few more moments in companionable, low-latency silence.
Eventually Clara looked up from the cat still draped over her legs. "Wanna meet IRL tonight? There's that new club in Bushwick — SubEcho.
Underground. Neural-responsive lights.
Real DJ, but the whole floor syncs to your mood output."
Max nodded. "Sounds good. Let's sync location tags around nine?"
"Done."
They tapped fingers in the air — a gesture both symbolic and coded — and the world around them softened, blurred, and dissolved as they each exited the instance.
Back in Static Bloom, Max blinked, the light in the café now angled slightly differently. Time had moved — just a few minutes.
He swirled the last of his cortado and mentally toggled his Q-Link into Sleep Mode — not full unconsciousness, just a gentle neurological dimming, lowering alertness, reducing feeds.
A space to breathe. Not every moment needed optimization.
Around him, the café remained silent — a chorus of inner lives, of curated realities humming behind still faces.
And Max, drifting into a soft mental haze, smiled faintly at the thought of real music, real bodies, real neon heat in a real club later that night.
For now, though, just stillness.
After finishing the last sip of lukewarm cortado, Max stood, pocketed nothing — out of habit — and mentally whispered: "unplug."
His Q-Link dimmed, retracting overlays, soft-disconnecting from the local NetGrid. The café's ambience returned to raw analog: the scrape of chairs, the clink of mugs, the whisper of clothes shifting.
He nodded absently at the barista (who may or may not have noticed), pushed open the door, and stepped into the late-afternoon Brooklyn sun.
He tapped a neural marker for subway routing but stayed mostly disconnected. Sometimes, Max liked walking with just himself. Or as close to "just himself" as a post-link human could be.
He crossed the street without thinking — a practiced urban drift, earbuds of the mind still playing his mellow playlist even in low-bandwidth mode.
As he stepped off the curb, a voice pinged sharply in his head:
"Max, WARNING: Autonomous vehicle approaching. 32 mph. Blind corner. Vector 32° right."
— Gipsi, his AI in Urban Mobility mode.
He jerked back a step just in time.
A matte black delivery vehicle — no windows, all sensor arrays — whooshed past him with surgical precision, its wheels whispering across the asphalt.
It didn't honk. It never needed to.
Max's heart rate spiked — briefly — then settled.
He muttered under his breath, "Thanks, Gips."
"Always watching," Gipsi replied with programmed warmth. "Please consider using legal crosswalks to minimize threat vectors. Fatality risk at 32 mph is—"
"Okay, okay," Max cut her off, already walking again.
He glanced back at the retreating vehicle. It hadn't even slowed — probably calculated he'd clear its path. It was right. But the optics could've been bad.
Just last week, a case uptown had blown up on the local infostreams: a pedestrian with low-grade cognitive assistance had stepped into an autonomous taxi's blind spot and suffered a fractured hip. The AV had obeyed every traffic law. The pedestrian's AI had issued a late warning.
The City Council's AI Ethics Committee was now caught in a web of arguments over "augmented agency" — who's truly responsible when part-human, part-machine decision-making leads to injury?
The AV manufacturer blamed the human's AI-assistant for delayed signal prioritization.
The AI company countered that the pedestrian was distracted and had reduced safety filters manually.
Legal scholars argued that with overlapping decision layers, liability becomes a statistical grey zone.
Some were calling it the "Blurred Street Problem."
Insurance companies were already piloting "Cognitive Reflex Scores" — a kind of mental reaction-time rating — to calculate how much someone should be compensated, or charged.
Max sighed, stepping onto the subway stairs.
In truth, everyone knew the real issue was philosophical: when no single mind controls a moment of danger, who gets blamed for the outcome?
Sure, we are all empowered with artificial intelligence and endless array of sensors, but pedestrians should still be protected in case of an accident.
He adjusted his thoughtstream to suppress his mild anxiety. Gipsi auto-set his vitals back to baseline.
"Subway ETA: 3 minutes. Local train. 43% probability of seating."
He nodded, almost smiling.
Brooklyn hummed around him — half analog, half alive with data. It was easy to forget the difference these days.
Clara – 4:47 PM
Location: Home Unit 81B, Lower Manhattan CoHab Block
Clara stepped into the bathroom, pulling off her hoodie and letting it crumple onto the recycled cork bench beside the sink.
Her eyes scanned the mirror — half-present, half-distracted by background processes humming quietly along her neural link. A smart overlay of her vitals glowed subtly in the corner of the glass: hydration 76%, serotonin trending positive, hormonal cycle warning at 85%.
She exhaled through her nose. "Thought so."
A low, familiar flutter bloomed at the base of her spine. Not pain — not yet — just the signal her body had always sent her a day or two before her period: a vague electric ache, as if her nerves were preparing for something archaic and unnecessary.
"Clara," whispered Vanna, her Q-Link assistant, "you're approaching the start of your luteal phase. Projected discomfort index: moderate to high. Would you like to initiate cycle suppression?"
Clara ran cold water over her fingers and leaned toward the mirror, thinking.
Tonight's club. Tomorrow's pitch review. The shoot on Sunday. All three would be complicated by cramps, fatigue, or the nagging emotional haze that sometimes bled in with the rest.
"Yeah. Let's run the override," she muttered. "Full sync."
She pulled open the small drawer beneath the mirror and retrieved a silver-gray pill case. Inside: a single N-Sync Capsule — translucent, matte-frosted, with a faint pulse like a sleeping firefly. Developed just two years prior, it was one of the latest approved neural-biotech crossovers: a nanotech pill that not only delivered cycle-suppressing hormones but also linked directly to the Q-Link to optimize timing, side effect mitigation, and emotional regulation.
She popped the capsule and washed it down with filtered water.
Within seconds, the pill initiated sync.
"Nanocascade initiated," Vanna intoned. "Hormonal regulation in progress. Neural override in 3… 2… 1."
Clara closed her eyes.
A warm wave spread through her gut, followed by a subtle hum in the back of her mind — the feeling of her brain chemistry being gently steered.
It was never aggressive. More like someone smoothing wrinkles out of silk.
She could still feel the biology of her cycle — the tiny background pulses, the layered signals from her endocrine system — but they were quiet now, managed. Like an orchestra that had been playing over itself and suddenly found the conductor again.
"Cycle suppression complete," Vanna said, gently.
"Would you like to log a mood profile or continue with your routine?"
"No need," Clara replied, already stepping into her clothes again. "Just remind me to hydrate."
"Already added."
She glanced at the time: 5:02 PM.
That gave her just under four hours to finalize her shot list for the brand collab, pick an outfit, and grab a power nap before heading out to SubEcho. She wondered briefly if Max would be late again — he had a bad habit of showing up just after the vibe settled in.
Pulling her hoodie back on, Clara blinked her smart closet into view — the interface popped open in her left visual corner, cycling through tonight's saved looks.
"Okay," she muttered. "Something breathable. Danceable. Something that says I still know how to surprise people."
And with that, she got to work.
SubEcho – 9:18 PM
Bushwick, Brooklyn
The entrance to SubEcho pulsed with low-frequency bass, the kind you felt in your sternum before you heard it.
Outside, a line of people filtered through a soft membrane of privacy veils and facial sync barriers. No bouncers. Just presence verification.
Clara stepped through first. Her Q-Link shimmered as it passed the handshake protocol — verifying ID, preloaded cover charge, and emotional readiness score. Inside, the world bloomed around her.
It was more than a bar.
The space flexed and breathed with the crowd — a lounge fused with reactive architecture. Surfaces changed color in response to dominant moods. Lighting adjusted automatically to micro-expressions and heartbeats. Neural ambient music flowed through individual links, personalizing beats based on your physiological tempo.
To Clara, it smelled like warm ozone and citrus, felt like velvet and static.
She paused just inside the threshold and blinked once — long and deliberate.
"Locating Max…"
Her eyes adjusted instantly, pupils contracting as her Q-Link locked onto a pre-synced pairing beacon: Max's.
Their settings — mutual, trusted, exclusive — triggered the visual overlay.
Suddenly, in the sea of movement, dozens of bodies blurred to a soft gray.
And there: one figure remained crystal clear, outlined in soft, glowing purple light, like heat through glass.
Max.
He was already scanning, standing just off-center in the main lounge under a canopy of kinetic fabric that pulsed in time with the crowd's collective heartbeat.
Their eyes met, and with a nearly imperceptible flicker, his pupils glowed purple in return — the exact hue of hers.
The sync was mutual.
Like private infrared, but emotional.
Identity-based. Unmistakable.
Neither smiled — not yet. Just that small, electrically still moment of connection as they threaded toward each other through the crowd, every other body gently fading into the background.
People danced and laughed around them, oblivious, wrapped in their own custom audio and neural feeds. But for Clara and Max, the path was clear.
When they reached each other, Clara raised one eyebrow. "Nice sync."
Max grinned. "Couldn't miss you. The purple suits you."
Their Q-Links shifted ambient mode — subtly cross-connecting just enough to share local sensory data. Clara could feel the temperature Max felt.
He could hear a strain of the synthwave Clara was tuned to.
The club around them shimmered, colors deepening as if recognizing the bond.
Connection stabilized. Neural link shared. Environment adapting.
Max gestured toward a cushioned alcove that was just now emerging from the wall, forming itself in anticipation of two linked guests. "Shall we?"
Clara slid her fingers into his. "Let's."
And the night deepened around them — lights blooming, pulses aligning — two humans in a sea of curated stimulation, carving out something real in the soft violet glow.
The alcove retracted its translucent divider, dimming just slightly to offer a sense of privacy without disconnecting them entirely from the ambient pulse of SubEcho. Clara crossed her legs, her boots brushing the woven bioluminescent carpet, and leaned back into the couch's reactive foam, which adjusted to her spine like memory putty.
Moments later, an UBer server approached — not a robot, but human, albeit with a glossy neuro-tab embedded into her clavicle, flashing service metrics in soft green.
She wore a shoulder holster lined with transparent film cartridges — thin, flexible rectangles, each faintly glowing with a different hue.
She offered a friendly, synced smile.
"Cocktail patches tonight?"
"All neuro-compliant, link-synced, fully calibrated to your tolerance profiles."
She fanned the selection like a magician showing cards — glittering blue for vodka variants, warm amber for whiskeys, a pulsing rose for sangria mod. And down in the corner, nestled like a dare: a dark amber labeled "Long Island Iced Tea // LVL 3" and a blood-orange square marked "Tequila Sunrise // Float Mode."
Max plucked the Long Island patch with a smirk. "Classic chaos."
Clara tapped the Tequila Sunrise, watching it shift colors slightly in her fingers. "This one's nostalgic. Makes me think of rooftop sunsets and very bad decisions."
The waitress nodded, pleased.
"Patch at the neck or forearm. Auto-calibration enabled. Sober-up window programmable."
Max leaned forward, peeling off the adhesive backing. He pressed it to the inside of his forearm — just above the inner elbow, where skin was thin and veins close. Clara did the same at the side of her neck, tucking her hair behind one ear.
A moment later, both of their Q-Links pinged.
"Cocktail sync detected."
Max: Long Island Iced Tea // Intoxication Level: Moderate-High // Duration: 3h 45m // Sobriety Countdown: Manual override allowed.
Clara: Tequila Sunrise // Intoxication Level: Light-Float // Duration: 4h 10m // Sobriety Countdown: Auto-cleanse 02:30 AM.
For a second, nothing happened. Then, a delicate tingle — like a microstatic wave — spread out from the patch site.
Their eyes fluttered in sync.
Clara felt her muscles loosen first, a warm ease trickling into her shoulders, her limbs sinking deeper into the couch. The club's ambient sounds became crisper, more rhythmic. The lighting gained a faint, almost imperceptible bloom, as if the edges of the room were dipped in honeyed light.
Max exhaled with a grin, eyes half-lidded. "Okay… that's the good stuff."
The chemicals by themselves were inert — water-soluble, safe. But once activated via Q-Link's proprietary neuro-harmonic algorithm, they became something else entirely: Mood-induced immersive intoxication.
It wasn't just drunk. It was targeted.
The precise blend of dopamine and serotonin modulation, mild motor damping, and personalized memory-circuit nudging. There were even optional memory recording filters if you wanted to "blackout without losing data."
Max never used those.
The beauty of it was the control.
No vomiting, no tipping over unless you chose that profile. If needed, a sobering snap could bring you back in sixty seconds — not pleasant, but effective.
Clara tilted her head toward Max, her lips curving.
"I feel like I'm floating in orange light."
Max chuckled.
"I feel like someone polished my soul with a lemon wedge and a bar fight."
They both laughed — a little too hard, which was part of the point.
Around them, the bar shifted — colors flowing to match the subtle biofeedback emitted from the alcove. Someone nearby was deep in a melancholic wine haze; another corner pulsed with jungle-drunk chaos.
But for Clara and Max, the world was syrupy and slow and full of private joy.
"I could stay in this feeling forever," Clara said.
Max, blinking slow and easy, replied, "We almost can."
They clinked invisible glasses in the air — old tradition, still worth preserving — and let the night roll forward, golden and purple and free.
The booth around them pulsed with soft plum and amber, the color signature of a deepening emotional bond — or at least mutual intoxication.
Their cocktail patches continued to hum quietly, feeding measured chemical microbursts into their bloodstream, modulated in real time by their Q-Links.
Max leaned forward, elbows on knees, grinning like a boy as he finished retelling a wild TikTok they'd both seen earlier.
"…and then he actually duct-taped his arms to the hoverfan drone and let it lift him ten feet off the ground — until his pants ripped and he spun out like a broken wind chime."
Clara burst out laughing, nearly choking on nothing.
"The sound he made when he hit the compost bin — like an off-key modem scream. Priceless."
Max was wiping tears from the corners of his eyes. "And the comment section was worse! One guy wrote, 'This is how humans will exit evolution's chat.'"
They both laughed again — but this time, Clara's laughter tapered into a slow, dazed sigh. She gave her patch a casual double tap — and it shimmered, acknowledging the boost with a faint temperature shift in her neck. Her vision subtly widened, lines softening, thoughts slowing just enough to turn reality into something almost cinematic.
Max's smile lingered but dimmed.
He turned slightly more serious, voice lowered just under the background neural ambience.
"Clara… you know I love you to death," he said, brushing his fingers along the ridged edge of his patch. "But some of the stuff we've been filming for YouTube Xtreme lately — it's getting kinda scary."
She tilted her head at him, still smirking but curious. "You're talking about the near-death rides?"
"Yeah," he said. "The VR skydive into a volcano? The cyberfreezing chamber with simulated frostbite down to the nerve level? The fake hostage scenario with the brain-stutter override?"
Clara leaned back and splayed her hands theatrically.
"Max. Come on. That one had a 0.2 second neural delay buffer! The viewers love it. There's nothing like a casual brush with death — from the comfort of your own brain."
She chuckled lazily and closed her eyes, clearly feeling the cocktail's amplified warmth now.
Max didn't smile. "Yeah, but… did you hear about the kids in Germany?"
Clara opened one eye. "What about them?"
"They tried replicating the free-climb sim we did — in real life. No link, no neural failsafe. One fell from a tower in Hamburg. Broke half his bones. Another was streaming while dangling from a crane — trying to 'beat the lag' manually. The second one died, Clara."
Clara's face didn't change much, but her breath hitched almost imperceptibly. She sat up straighter, composure reasserting.
"Pshaw," she said, waving it off. "That's their own problem. We've got all the disclaimers up front. Seizure risk, mental stress risk, do not attempt IRL. That's standard. Legal and everything."
Max frowned. "But don't you ever wonder? If what we're doing is just… refining the poison? Making it prettier?"
Clara hesitated, eyes distant. Somewhere in her periphery, a girl on the dance floor collapsed laughing in sync with a virtual reality loop — her Q-Link glowing neon green.
"Max," she said finally, her voice quieter. "That's our reality. People don't want safety anymore. They want curated danger. Controlled chaos. And we're giving it to them."
Max looked at her, unsure whether to be impressed or horrified.
"And what about us?" he asked. "At what point do we forget where the line is?"
Clara didn't answer right away. Just leaned over, resting her head briefly on his shoulder, her cheek warm and flush from the patch.
"We don't," she said softly. "That's why we have each other."
And for now, that was enough.
The pulsing warmth of the cocktail patch dulled Max's limbs, but his mind refused to float like it normally did.
Clara's head still rested on his shoulder, but her words — curated danger — were echoing in ways that scraped against his conscience.
He stared across the bar — the place was alive with glowing eyes, haptic pulses, digital joy. But beneath the surface of it all, something felt wrong.
"Clara," he said quietly.
"Hm?" she murmured, half-lulled.
"I didn't come here just to drink with you."
She opened her eyes slowly. "Okay…"
He looked at her — really looked — then leaned in, shielding his voice with a neural dampener flicked on from his Q-Link. A shimmering distortion bubble formed around their booth. No recordings. No leaks. Old-school privacy, ironically the most expensive kind.
"I've been watching a thread," Max said.
"A long one. Hidden in the deep clusters, buried under biometric spoof protocols. Some serious dark-web operators."
Clara sat up now, sensing the shift in tone.
"What kind of thread?"
"The kind you don't just stumble on. You follow rumors. Broken links. Ghost servers. And even then, you get half a truth — if you're lucky."
"Max," she said flatly. "Just tell me."
He nodded. His voice dropped to almost a whisper, even though the bubble held.
"There's been chatter… that someone's figured out how to intercept YouTube Xtreme neurofeeds. Not just stream-snipe or overlay ads. Full Q-Link intrusions. Hijacking feeds in real time."
Clara's brows furrowed. "That's… impossible. We use triple-locked neural encoders. Custom quantum key shuffles. You can't just—"
"You can, if you're not hacking the platform," Max interrupted. "But the person."
Clara blinked. "What?"
"They're not cracking the code. They're exploiting the person's own trauma imprints. Old neural scars. Depression markers, addiction tendencies, micro-mood loops."
He leaned forward, voice like steel now.
"They use the person's own brain to convince them to do something. Something dangerous. Something final."
Clara was silent.
"It's subtle, - essentially brainwashing at its finest." Max continued.
"The feed makes it look like the user's still running the sim. Viewers think it's just another Xtreme dare. But in the background — there's just enough emotional suggestion, just enough algorithmic whispering in the right pathways — that it pushes someone over. All while keeping the audience entertained."
Clara's mouth was dry now. "That's…"
"There's a kid in Colorado," Max said. "Fifteen. Did a 'Walk the Edge' sim — you remember that rooftop balancing act we ran?"
She nodded slowly, her skin pale beneath the cocktail glow.
"He wasn't even streaming. No public post. But his Q-Link indicated possible signs of third-party neural manipulation. Not traceable. But I know the pattern. And the timing matched our feed. Exactly. Right down to the heartbeat beatdrop we used."
Clara's voice was barely audible. "Are you saying… someone piggybacked on our content and used it to push that kid?"
"Yes."
A long, cold silence passed between them, made all the more terrifying by how loud the club still was outside their privacy dome — dancing, drinking, glowing, oblivious.
Clara shook her head slowly. "We put disclaimers on the videos…"
"Disclaimers won't stop a black-box neural whisperer with access to backdoor psychometrics," Max snapped. "Someone's building something — or already has built it. Something that turns trending content into personalized death scripts."
Clara stared at him, chest rising and falling faster now.
"And you think… we're being used?"
Max didn't answer. He didn't have to.
Clara reached up and peeled her cocktail patch off her neck. Her skin was damp beneath it. Her high was gone in an instant.
"We need to find out who," she said, eyes hardening. "And if they're inside YouTube Xtreme…"
"They are," Max said.
Another beat.
Then Clara, whispering: "We're gonna burn it down, aren't we?"
Max nodded, eyes glowing faintly violet under the booth light.
"From the inside."
The club's synthetic bass thumped on, oblivious to the storm brewing inside the privacy dome. Outside their bubble, bodies shimmered in rhythm, minds adrift in carefully curated intoxication.
But Clara and Max sat still, eyes locked, their cocktail patches discarded on the table like spent skins.
Max broke the silence. "I traced one of the ghost logins. It bounced through five anonymized neural nodes… but the last ping before it vanished?"
He paused. Clara leaned in, barely breathing.
"It came from Q-Labs."
Clara blinked. "The original implant developers?"
Max nodded slowly. "They're supposed to be closed. Bought out. Absorbed by the Conglom. But someone's still in there. Someone with root access."
She stared at him. "You think this goes deeper than viral content?"
"I think," he said, eyes narrowing, "that we've been test subjects this entire time."
Behind them, someone at the bar laughed too loudly — and for a moment, Max thought he saw their eyes flash red before fading back to purple.
Clara turned slowly, sensing it too.
The music faded to a slow, eerie tempo. The color scheme in the club subtly shifted — deepening blues, corrupted magentas.
Something had changed.
Across the room, a woman in a shimmering jacket was watching them.
No cocktail patch. No visible Q-Link glow.
Just a small, knowing smile.
Then she vanished into the crowd.
Clara swallowed hard. "We're not the only ones awake, are we?"
Max's voice was barely audible.
"No. And I think… we were never meant to be."