The City hums with quiet precision — steel veins, glass arteries, circuits wrapped under their skin. Technological evolution made it sharper, faster, and harder to escape. Streets whisper. If you listen close enough, you can hear who pulls the strings.
Beyond the comfy life, only few ever notice the invisible currents beneath: silent deals, quiet battles, games of influence played by those with resources too big to fail.
Everything here is layered and obedient to the flow someone supervises. Systems talk to systems, the city breathes in a rhythm. People trust the code more than they trust their own heartbeat.
I’m the organic distortion in its structured haze, a turbulence that normally doesn’t survive under the sight of the omnipresent eye. The perfect choice for those who prefer to wage their hidden wars in silk gloves.
Guns never went out of style. No one has yet built a portable laser gun that wouldn’t scream about its presence, however, gunpowder still gets the job done. But I don’t overuse it. Even the most elegant tools leave ugly marks, overly obvious attributes of a crime scene.
The City is full of machines — towering construction rigs that eat concrete, silent drones orbiting the avenues, service bots sliding through crowds like shadows. They’re part of the scenery, like snow. But there’s another kind amongst the crowd. No one even thinks of them. If you notice one, it’s not because it looks wrong — it’s because it looks too right. Perfect balance in the jawline, movements polished like choreography, a skin that doesn’t falter under the frost. Cyborgs. Expensive, rare, indistinctive from human beings. The new standard of what “human” should mean.
Knowing this, citizens carve metal under their own skin. Implants, lenses, artificial nerves — all stitched in with hope for perfection. Faster reflexes, sharper vision, stronger bones. One layer at a time, until they can’t remember which part of them was ever unaltered.
Perfection is overrated when you need unpredictability. Too many upgrades make you a pattern, easy to read and to counter. Augmented layers hide that pattern — or reveal it, if you know how to look. Through AR lenses, The City strips down to its bones. Advertising skins fall away, faces lose their curated smiles, implants shine through like heat under ice.
I keep the filters off. I don’t need to see their illusions. I need to see what they are when no one is watching: the tension in their jaws, the false weight of a synthetic muscle, the glitch in a too-perfect posture. I use AR for cutting through the glitter, until I see the core underneath.
The City runs through my veins, and I through its lattice. It’s not love — love needs warmth. What binds us is colder, sharper: a perfect symbiosis. I know its shadows, its blind corners. It feeds me information, routes, silence when I need it. In return, I flow where it flows, invisible in the crowd, never fighting the tide.
The City doesn’t care who I am. And I don’t ask it to. We’re both built to survive — nothing more, nothing less.
