The city's east sprawl was a tangle of forgotten rails and ferrocrete veins long since bypassed by the main transit grid
Wei moved through them like he'd been born there
Every overhead pipe hissed with entropy, every broken sign hummed with static ads from another decade He kept his steps light, Echo dimmed behind his eyes like a pilot light waiting
Forty-seven percent sync
It was climbing faster now.
He ducked into a side tunnel where the walls sweated rust and the floor sloped down into the guts of the sector below, where the mainframe used to keep its backup cores before the upgrade, before the culling
Back when Lina used to joke about the rats being smarter than half their professors
His pulse stayed steady, one finger flicking through Echo's interface like a surgeon preloading a sequence
[Trait Status: Stable]
[PULSE-TYPE MODULATION: PAIN INHIBITION — LVL 1]
'Temporarily inhibits nociception by stimulating endogenous enkephalin release through the periaqueductal gray region. Reduces neural spike response to peripheral injuries. Allows subject to bypass pain-induced motor inhibition. Best paired with traits that increase muscular coordination or reflex enhancement. Subject may experience reduced sensitivity to danger stimuli.'
[Auxiliary Slot: Pending Detection]
Then the unexpected
[Environmental Scan Triggered]
[Biometric Flare Nearby: Trait Residue Detected]
Wei froze
Echo wasn't built to scan environments- not like this. At least not when Lina had it. He'd never seen this module before
But it was there now, a faint pulse on the HUD map overlay blinking like a sonar ping. Somewhere beneath the tunnel junction, thirty meters off and descending
He didn't hesitate
The climb down was rough- half rebar, half falling He scraped his hand, but the pain blunted instantly. His trait dulled the edges, his body accepting the abrasion as nothing more than texture.
That was new.
He adjusted his coat as he moved, reversing the outer lining with a flick of embedded magnets. The high-collar black synthweave reversed to a slate-gray layer marked only with a few faded field sigils. It was Lina's old design, refit for stealth, layered with enough thermal baffling to trick low-tier scanners
He'd thought to swap it back in during detox. Better for heat suppression. Less traceable.
The room the crack fed into was small, circular, filled with dead hardware. Old sync chambers from before the Hive started limiting access based on tier value spaced around the room like columns
But the signal wasn't from them.
It was from a corpse layig next to one of the chambers.
Male, mid-30s, spinal port still glowing faintly, neural feedback still active
Echo pinged
[Trait Fragment Detected]
[Tier: Unknown — Source Corrupted]
[Assimilation Possible — Manual Confirmation Required]
Wei stepped closer, eyes narrow
The man had bled from the nose, ears, and the back of his head Skin burned in a jagged arc across the base of the skull—classic overclock rupture. He'd tried to integrate a trait without a stabilizer. Maybe even forced a second sync
But something remained
He reached into his coat, pulled a stabilization node, and linked it to Echo's override kit. He jacked the interface into the man's spinal port, Echo hissed with a low-frequency hum that made Wei's jaw ache
[Sync Anchor Initialized]
[Compatibility Map — Conflict Detected — Trait Pattern Incoherent]
[Compensatory Strategy: Modular Overlay — Engaged]
Then:
[Trait Acquired — Fragmentary]
[BIOCONDUCTIVE MESH MEMORY — LVL 0.5 (FRAGMENT)]
'Enables partial reflex imprint storage through conductive neural scaffolding. Residual action patterns are cached in spinal ganglia, allowing predictive motor mapping. Effectively reduces reaction latency by simulating pre-learned motion sequences. Enhanced synergy with traits that suppress feedback inhibition or manipulate real-time sensory input. Conscious recall is limited. Fragment status may reduce reliability under stress.'
Wei staggered a step back as a wave of foreign memory hit him Not visual, not auditory- just pure tactile recall
His feet knew how to move before his brain gave the order
He spun, heel-planted, counterweight shifted like he was dodging something he couldn't see
Then it passed
He gasped and knelt, one hand on the wall
Echo pulsed.
[Trait Compatibility Achieved — Auxiliary Slot Activated]
[Trait Slot 2/—]
[Bioconductive Mesh Memory: LVL 0.5 (Fragment)]
He laughed once, sharp and dry
It wasn't just about stealing traits anymore
Echo was stitching them.
Using his own nervous system as a loom
It made sense now
Pain Inhibition dulled the recoil Mesh Memory bypassed reflex latency. Fed feedback into the spine directly, letting him move faster than conscious reaction
Individually low-tier
Together?
A combat shell
Wei stood, pulled up the diagnostic again. Checked heat load, metabolic impact, neural spiking
Manageable.
For now.
He slowed his breath and began thinking biologically, analytically, like the surgeon-scientist he used to be
Pain inhibition didn't simply deactivate discomfort. The brain's perception of pain was a function of nociceptive signals routed through the dorsal horn of the spinal cord to the thalamus, then the somatosensory cortex. Wei's trait flooded the gray matter with custom enkephalins- endogenous opioid peptides, triggering mopioid receptors to downregulate ascending pain pathways while simultaneously activating descending inhibitory fibers via the medulla. The result wasn't analgesia in the conventional sense, It was priority reassignment. The brain no longer regarded the signal as urgent- Pain became background noise.
Mesh Memory introduced an entirely separate system. Using a bioengineered conductive mesh interfaced with spinal interneurons, it bypassed conventional afferent-efferent synaptic delays. The key neurotransmitter here wasn't dopamine or glutamate It was gamma-aminobutyric acid- GABA. The mesh's embedded fibers accelerated GABAergic inhibitory postsynaptic potentials, effectively short-circuiting hesitation in conditioned motor responses. Reflex arcs that usually looped through the cerebellum and premotor cortex were instead simulated and cached in artificial ganglia. This meant Wei didn't just react faster- He pre-reacted. Pattern completion began before stimulus identification concluded.
And together?
The dampened nociceptive pathways from Pain Inhibition allowed his system to ignore strain signals. While Mesh Memory's spinal scaffold rerouted motion planning to sub-cortical centers. He was turning himself into a closed feedback loop. Conscious thought could lag behind instinct. But the instinct wasn't wild. It was trained- Synthetic.
Echo wasn't just a tool. It was architecture.
He climbed out of the chamber slower this time. Hands flexing with each step Mind buzzing as he simulated attacks in his head.
A jab would be faster now. A dodge—almost predictive.
Nothing supernatural, Just refined. Elevated.
Echo whispered at the edge of his thoughts. Not words, but frameworks. Prebuilt logic trees he could click into with the right movement, the right combination of breath and motion.
It was learning
And so was he.
Wei didn't know how long he walked, but when the tunnel sloped upward again, he found himself at the edge of an old interchange turned black-market nest
A hundred vendors lit under jury-rigged light trees, selling everything from counterfeit QSI shells to caffeine bricks to minor blood-cleaners and cold-cast trait stabilizers
He slipped into the crowd unnoticed. Echo damping his signature like a predator masking scent
He needed a map. He needed a contact.
-----
The black-market interchange was louder than Wei remembered. It pulsed with noise and heat and the sharp stink of ozone from half-legal trait stabilizers cooking in open vats. Someone had rigged a synesthetic sound system over the entrance—every few seconds, a bass note rumbled through his chest, and a flicker of violet light responded like a heartbeat.
Narrow alleys meandering between stalls, dim hanging lights and merchandise around every corner. Packed yet somehow everyone kept their space. Rain came down hard, running along with dirty steel plated alongside Wei.
This place hadn't always been a market. Twenty years ago, this district—officially known as Sector 6-Echo, had been a Hive R&D staging zone, meant for testing early trait interfaces in low-risk populations. But after the Signal Riot of 32 AT, the entire subgrid had been decommissioned. The riots began when prototype QSIs triggered mass synaptic feedback loops in over a hundred test subjects. Most were unlinked civilians. Few survived with sanity intact. The Hive never claimed responsibility, but their retreat spoke louder than any statement.
The void left behind was filled by refugees, scavs, and eventually black-market engineers. Trait tech didn't die in the wreckage. It just got cheaper, dirtier, and more desperate. Wei had been here as a student, once- back when he and Lina scoured half the dead grid for ghost signals and illegal firmware. The average resident of where Wei lived never was fully in the light side of the law, but Wei and Lina especially took some detours with their expertise and intelligence driving them to learn more.
He remembered wandering through these corridors after hours, documenting abandoned mesh readouts and manually tracing old fiber junctions. Some of their earliest prototypes had been reverse-engineered from junk salvaged here. Lina called it a graveyard of broken promises. Wei called it a library
Even then, he had known this was where the future would grow—quietly, chaotically, without permission.
He knew the corners that hadn't been mapped. He knew where the conduits behind the market led- down to crash dens, rogue clinics, and hidden mesh layers of forgotten data centers. Somewhere in these depths, the earliest rumors of Echo had emerged. Not from Hive labs, but from the edges of the discarded and the dying
It had always bothered him, how innovation seemed to sprout in the cracks left by systemic failure. It wasn't the Hive's perfection that produced breakthroughs. It was their mistakes.
Wei moved through the crowd with purpose. Echo silently mapped the terrain, scanning for known vendor signatures and biochemical traces. It was like having a tactical suite embedded in the cortex. He caught flickers of potential threats— minor, mostly. Pickpockets. Occasionally overclocked thugs with shaky Tier-1 traits.
He shuttered at the idea of overclocking. The users were walking malfunctions- people who'd forced their QSI systems to run beyond their rated thresholds using hacked firmware or bootleg stimulants. It made them faster, stronger, sometimes terrifying in short bursts— but their systems degraded fast. Neural feedback loops cooked executive function, synapse misfires scrambled coordination, and most burned out within weeks. The Hive classified them as Class-C liabilities: unstable, expendable, and often unaware of how broken they already were. In a fight, they were dangerous not because they were smart— but because they had nothing left to lose.
He passed rows of stalls stacked high with QSI junk. Fake interface ports, cracked stabilization nodes, empty trait shells etched with false codes. Most of it was garbage. Some of it was lethal. The real stuff didn't get sold here openly.
Echo pulsed. [Environmental Marker Identified — Vendor: LICIT TRACE]
He followed the signal to a recessed booth nestled beneath a collapsed tram bridge. The vendor was a woman with a thermal visor and gloves etched in surgical steel. Her stall was clinical: rows of sealed trait cultures, neural amplifiers, and biochem kits arranged with obsessive precision.
Wei leaned on the counter, head brushing the steel shutter that likely came down at night. He didn't speak right away. Instead, he leaned further forward- just enough for the sync node behind his ear to catch the ambient scanner field humming behind her terminal. Echo responded with a low-frequency pulse, almost imperceptible, but targeted.
The vendor paused mid-task. Her visor flickered once.
Then she looked up—slowly.
"That signal," she said. "I thought they scrubbed it."
"They tried," Wei replied. "Echo found you."
She stared for a long second, then exhaled. "Figures. I helped build its diagnostics branch. Back when it wasn't classified."
"You're on Echo's registry?"
"I was. I buried that link a decade ago, but I guess Echo never forgot."
Wei nodded slightly. Echo's search module had flagged her while parsing old biosignature logs embedded in black-market vendor networks. Not a name—just a match on neural response patterns. He hadn't directed the scan consciously. Echo had run it in the background, feeding him subtle prompts until his eyes landed on the right stall.
"How much of it survived?"
"Trait diagnostics. Loadout pairing. And something field-stable."
She whistled as Wei let her tap into the information of his parasite. "You're running two?"
Wei nodded. "Pain Inhibition and Bioconductive Mesh. Fragmentary."
She let out a long breath. "That's a weird synergy. You're skipping pain signals while accelerating spinal loop predictions. Your body's gonna outpace your conscious feedback in a fight."
"I'm counting on it."
She gestured him into the back. He slid across the counter and adjusted his coat as he followed.
Behind the curtain, the booth became a lab. Proper insulation. Med-chairs. A real neural scaffold station. As he seated himself, she flicked on a cranial scanner and jacked Echo into her system using a cleanline adapter.
Diagnostics streamed across her terminal. Her eyes widened.
"This isn't a normal sync. Echo's rewriting itself on the fly. You're not just accepting traits, you're adapting them. Like it's using you as a processor."
Wei stayed quiet.
She ran a few stim trials, activated a motor loop challenge, then held up a trait capsule.
"This might help. Tier-0.75. Temporary cognitive augmentation. Works with GABA and glutamate thresholds to improve time compression. It's not reflexive like Mesh, but it boosts predictive analysis. You might get better pre-fight reads."
"It's not a real trait," she said, catching the flicker in his expression. "More like a mimic—pharma tech. We reverse-engineered a few Tier-1 signatures from collapsed Hive databases. This one triggers GABA-glutamate threshold shifts through synthetic precursors. No sync required. Anyone can use it… though most people shouldn't."
Wei studied the capsule. A trait mimic, then. Temporary. Dirty. But if Echo could interface with it, maybe that was enough.
"How long does it last?"
"Sixty seconds of compressed perception," she said. "Maybe less. Comes at a cost."
"What's the drawback?"
"Overuse leads to burnout. You lose peripheral awareness for a while. Like tunnel vision, but worse."
Wei took the capsule and nodded. "I'll risk it."
She paused before sealing it in a case. "Echo doesn't have limits, does it?"
"No."
"That scares me."
"Me too."
He stepped back into the noise and light of the interchange, but the colors looked different now. Sharper. He could feel the edges of everything- like Echo had peeled away another layer.
His next step wasn't random.
He needed to test, and he could already tell his entry into the marketplace with his nice clothes and boots hadn't gone unnoticed. Thugs always appreciated new shoes in a city that never stops raining.