Year: 2346
The night sky was a masterpiece of impossibly deep blues and mesmerizing purples—a vibrant, swirling nebula that could only exist through synthetic projection. Countless white stars, sharp and artificial, were sprinkled across the vast expanse. Amina gazed up at the miraculous canopy, feeling the cool evening breeze—manufactured, filtered, and entirely sterile—caress her face. It played with the thick, coiled crown of her hair, which caught the indigo light of the sky.
Her eyes traced the colossal pillars. They were hundreds of stories high, thick industrial trunks of steel and light that extended from the cavern floor to support the fabricated heavens.
"Beautiful," she whispered, the word tasting like bitter irony.
Amina ducked into a narrow alley, weaving through a labyrinth of brightly lit hab-blocks. The sounds of the city were just as artificial as the sky: she heard the canned, cheerful laughter of children playing to their heart's content. She caught the synthetic scent of savory, home-cooked meal substitutes wafting from recycled air vents.
Whirrr. "Shit!" Amina dove sideways, her boots skidding on the slick composite. A sleek, autonomous transport slid past in a silent blur of chrome, missing her by inches.
"Concentrate, Amina," she hissed to herself, her voice ragged and thin.
On the surface of the maps, New Lekki was a thriving Utopia, a megalopolis of millions. But beneath the glittering facade of prosperity lay a rot of foul injustice. Amina had unspooled one of those threads—a mystery that was now demanding her life as payment.
She leaped over a low security fence, hitting the ground in a practiced roll. Her smooth, caramel skin glistened with a fine sheen of sweat, her lungs burning with every labored breath. A small, glowing stream cut through the sector ahead—part of the city's closed-loop irrigation. Pushing off the ground with a burst of adrenaline, Amina reached for a thick, pulsing Leyline vine that dangled near the water.
The organic cable thrummed with bio-energy as she swung across, landing heavily on the far bank.
Amina scowled, shoving a damp lock of hair from her eyes. "Don't they ever get tired?"
She didn't wait for an answer. The slick, composite sidewalks became a gray blur beneath her feet. She knew the truth now. Even the sky above her was a cage.
Several kilometers overhead, thousands of gargantuan machines projected that flawless night canopy. Colossal turbines hummed in the dark, mimicking wind and regulating the subterranean heat.
The most deceptive of them all was the Illuminator—the artificial sun that existed in every quadrant of the world, a hollow imitation of a predecessor the earth hadn't seen in centuries.
The entire city and the other last surviving colonies of man were buried thousands of kilometers deep. Those majestic pillars she had admired weren't monuments; they were structural crutches designed to keep the roof of the world from crushing them all into dust.
Amina glanced back.
They were still there—dark silhouettes against the neon glow. She cursed under her breath, her chest feeling like it was filled with hot coals.
"Don't let her escape!" an amplified voice boomed, distorted by a helmet's vocoder. "Pin her down!"
The men were closing the gap. Amina grit her teeth, her vision tunneling. She was running blind, deep into the industrial guts of the city. I have to try.
Suddenly, a sharp, electric tingle erupted at the base of her neck—a warning from the hardware buried in her nerves. Her eyes widened. Reflexively, Amina jerked her head to the side, dropping her shoulder in a desperate crouch.
CRACK.
A high-caliber bullet hissed through the space where her skull had been a millisecond before, shattering the concrete road ahead into a spray of jagged shards.
"No!" Amina gasped as she tumbled, her momentum failing as she lost her balance from the evasive maneuver.
Before she could scramble up, the shadows converged. Four men surrounded her.
Three were Enforcers, clad in baggy, slate-gray leather coveralls with opaque black visors. The fourth, the leader, stepped forward. He wore a black, high-collared coat over a tactical bodysuit, his expression as sharp and cold as an ice-shelf.
"Cease your futile attempts," the leader commanded, his voice a deep, electronic growl. "Surrender, and I will make your extraction swift."
Amina scowled up at him, wiping a mixture of dust and copper-tasting sweat from her lip. He raised a suppressed rifle, the barrel leveling perfectly with her forehead.
Gritting her teeth until they felt like they might snap, Amina reached inward. She searched for the Psychic-Implant at the base of her skull, hooking into the chaotic, kinetic energy vibrating in the dark corners of her mind.
This is how it all started…