The sun, that ancient, impartial orb, had long since decided to play favorites in this city. It used to bath the earth in its rays and lovingly clothe it with a saffron greatcoat over its lands, teeming with life.
Gu Yihang, a candidate to the throne that is the Gu Corporation, the handsome son of
Gu Jinyu, grew up in the shadow of his kingdom, in the midnight sun of the neon-glowing riverbanks, in the shade of the concrete forest, and in the black beneath the towers.
A hundred years in the future, there lied a city of vagrants, of injustices, of spirits full of indignation.
Dominated by the sacrifice of moral agency within every man and woman that inhabited it. The place that the sun forgot.
It was vast, grinding mechanism fueled by injustice and the raw, undifferentiated grief of the lowly people. It was a necropolis of the living.
A citadel where every second that ticked on everyone's life-clock was a measure of the sacrifice of humanity within the human. To live in this city was to kill the self.
The land of zombies and unfeeling humans and dying humans and humans.
The spirit, that fragile, iridescent thing, had been traded for an extended warranty on the flesh, a cheap, synthetic immortality tethered to a corpo server.
Death is a daily thing. Through starvation, through OD-ing, through some kid messing around and accidentally pulling the plug on every possible victim's psychosplice on a three-hundred-meter radius.
Those who died were people. With dreams. With minds and with wants and needs and the hunger for more.
Midsentence in their escapes, they died electrocuted and spasming on the ground like some spiked-up mongrel whose limbs and synth-vessel shriveled up from rabies and genetic rejection.
Police brutality, misuse of authority, immorality, and more runs rampant in the streets. Ginebra addicts with their splices tweaking on hallucinogens and automated sex machines sprawl the underneaths of every bridge, roof, and yard. Their splices, the small, chrome ports embedded behind the ear or at the base of the spine, were tweaked to the breaking point, feeding them synthetic brainchemmies and cheap, automated dreams.
Their desires, stripped of all human complexity, were catered to by sleek, silent automated dopamine feeders, their chrome limbs patiently working amidst the filth.
Infected. No shame and no hope and no desire and no dreams to characterize their once-human fate.
And somewhere above, inaccessible and luminous, he looked down, or perhaps, he looked through the city, his privileged opti-lenses filtering out the grime, seeing only the kingdom that awaited him.
Yihang stood oblivious to that suffering. Always satisfied and content and breathing in filtered-to-the-brink air.
He lived a completely different life from those below. He survived and thrived because of the fact that the inhabitants of their society's underbelly die off, lured into it with promises of a better life.
Instead, the city ate them up and despite his indignation and want for equality and godly virtue and all that good stuff, Yihang was grateful for it.
The sun did nothing to affect his complexion as the sheer air pollution required to sustain the level of synthetic brain chemmy fabrication in this city made the sky look like the dark at the end of everything.
And in place of it, as if to satisfy and lull its inhabitants to sleep, it had stars and celestial bodies projected through glow-globes floating in the sky through Leylines of some magical variety.
Yihang was ever-so thankful for the suffering of those below because that was the reason he could live in this city.
That he could live as a human being. That he didn't need to sacrifice his humanity.
And the city, ah, the city had left its mark as surely as a sculptor leaves the gouge of a chisel. It had not touched him with hunger, nor with the cheap poison of the brainchemmies, nor with the dulling comfort of prosthetic flesh. Instead, it had etched itself into his gaze, into the way he watched men die as if their deaths were happening inside his own lungs. The necropolis taught him that to live untouched was itself an abomination.
The only person alive without cybernetic and synthetic augment.
Gu Yihang was many things, depending on who you asked. His blood-brothers talked about him as if he was almost immune to the disease of desperation that plagued even the children of the Gu bloodline. The eyes casted upon his back and the spotlight that came with that attention was overshadowed by the tragedies of the lives led by those in the underbelly. Perpetuated by the others in his home.
Those others, the highest elders in the shade, those decrepit wise magi, thought of him as an animal.
He rejected the civilization that came with the embrace of the machine. He was a heathen that needed to be tamed.
They saw in him a latent clarity that stood apart from the compromises and necessary cruelties and weak justifications their shade and respite from the dangers outside was built on.
The deep abyss up above oozed and radiated in all directions from his being, from the edges and the rims of his pupils.
How stern are the woes of the desolate mourner, indeed, how enanguished he turns to the face of the scorner.
Yet if Yihang was marked by privilege, he was never truly alone. The death of his mother marked the arrival of the aforementioned scorner. In the words of Yihang, a sprite of the devilish kind.
It moved without moving, thought without speaking, and lingered in his life like an unexplained mysterie across genera.
His mother once confessed, half in the fever that is soulburn, that she could hear it weeping in the darkened hours of the night.
Others insisted it whispered in the pauses between her words, in the static hum of the horrors in the basement of their living, breathing pavilion.
What is a child after all, but a vessel eternally waiting for the love of its creators? What is a ghost after all, but a semblance and a memory of those that came before?
Thus did Yihang become the son not of one parent, nor even of two, but of three: his father Gu Jinyu, his mother whose eyes had dimmed too soon, and the spectral presence that slowly made itself apparent.
A man that was resentment made flesh, a being born from true hate for what is now and hate for what comes after. It was with him in his sleep, in his holy rites, in the word-wrestling with his siblings and figures.
It was with him in his laughter, in his hunger, in the pale hours of his loneliness. He bore it as one bears the knowledge of mortality: unavoidable, unshakeable, always there at the edge of thought.
It started slowly. The mother's dying breath gave him a smudge that couldn't be removed from the mirror in the back of his head. Like limescale that stuck to the glass ever-stubborn.
Yihang still could not say what it was. He only knew that when he closed his eyes, the ghost closed them too.
It was a blur and it followed him and it slept with him and it woke up with him. And slowly that smudge gain clarity. Some years ago, it started to talk.
A cavernous room inside that sentient palace whose walls thrummed with the beat of artifices made from an unknown substance. Projected constellations spread along the firmament of the polluted sky.
The smell of the air below did not reach him in any way. Yihang watched the stars through his balcony, sealed by that same unknown substance, invisible but its effects evident.
Suddenly, a ping. He was alarmed, but after seventeen years of being a prime target for assassins, he jumped off the balcony and ducked under the awning and leapt through the window of the floor beneath his room.
Do you hear me, child?
Yihang's breath catches. He turns, but the room is empty.
A dream. Just a dream, he thought to himself.
The mirror beside him rippled faintly, though nothing touched it.
Not a dream. Not anymore.
Then he realized. He wasn't forcefully administered chems in his CedarSleep chamber, nor was it some hallucination onset by the depravity of the day before.
His mind was clearer than ever. The voice of that sprite finally took form in one definite audible phenomenon.
'Who… what are you?'
A pause, heavy as a confession.
You would know.
Yihang grips the sill.
'I don't.'
You don't want to. That's closer to the truth.
The stars above flickered like some ghost comedown from heaven.
'I'm not afraid.'
Every man begins with that lie. Fear is the air you breathe, princeling. Fear of your father. Fear of the masses. Fear of becoming one of them. Fear of becoming nothing.
That ghost from up above seemed to strike a nerve.
Ah. I take it back. No. You're afraid of becoming something honest. Something superior.
The words burrow into him like moles scratching their way to his soul.
'Why now? Why speak after all these years?'
Because you're ripe. Because the boy who swallowed his mother's grief has become a man who can't keep swallowing. I'm not your sickness, Yihang. I'm your cure.
Indeed, under the watchful eye of his father, he learned many things. To repress the emotional and base side of his brain function and to deny the spirited man within.
He assumed denial but without sacrificing that side of himself for the comfort of steel, he could never. He denied the self and assumed another, coping with the temporary loss of his cognition.
He saw a heron. He knew birds don't fly in this city yet he saw it. A heron glided its way through the towers where the highborn lived in, and Yihang took it into his soul.
He flew beside the towers, he fed upon the miasma and hungered with the heron's hunger.
He saw a babe, heartened and uninfected by the influence of cybernetics. He became that babe, cushioned only by the synth-weave fiber the babe's mother left it in, draped in a plastic box for anyone to take.
Orphaned and abandoned, never to feel the love of a mother again.
He saw an old man, hedonistic and shriveling up, whose face was ridden with wrinkles. He became that old man and suppressed himself in his presence and took on that old man in his soul, suspended and sustained only by mechanical servos to replace the dying musculature beneath his skin.
He saw a sick woman, coughing and coughing in a red fever, consuming herself in a likeness that reminded him of his late mother, destroyed by Identity Dissolution Disorder (IDD).
He knew that husk was already dead as the connection only lasted for a second. He took on that woman in his soul, and took the last breath for her.
Lastly, he witnessed a corpse. A dead jackal lay there on the street, as the bots in the city got to disposing it. It was one of the last few canines in this city, as zoonotic epidemics spiked up in the last few years.
He was the dead jackal. His ribs exposed and his jaw split from a roadside accident. His blood coagulated and his nervous system going haywire with what energy left. He felt the machines eating his whole body up and burning, turning into pure biomass to be translated into whatever type of product made from biomass is in the underbelly.
He turned into a skeleton then into dust and then he blew into the skies. Then Yihang returned.
Because you're ripe. Because the boy who swallowed his mother's grief has become a man who can't keep swallowing. I am not your sickness, Yihang. I am your cure.
And yet the words were not words but tides. They moved through him like saltwater through an estuary, filling hidden channels, seeping into the hollows he had built inside himself.
"You've been bred for stimulation," the voice went on, slow and liturgical, "but fed nothing real. A hothouse prince raised under glass dreaming of tempests. Every taste a simulant. Every danger sterilized before it reaches you. Inside you there is a great white hall where nothing echoes back. You call it training and duty and virtue, but it is only a famine of the soul."
Yihang's lips parted, but nothing left them. His heartbeat was a drum in a cathedral.
"I—" he began.
"You," the voice whispered, "you are already broken, but you have broken inwards. In you lives all the faces of the city. The babe bereaved, the old man held up by servos, the woman dead on the streets, the jackal's stiffening carrion. You are their memory and they are yours. But you still walk as if you were whole."
"You're not supposed to be here," Yihang said.
"I am always here," the shadow replied. "But now you are willing to look."
"What do you want?"
"To sit with you," it said. "To speak with you. Not as a ghost but as a companion."
"Sleep now. We've got work to do."
Yihang doesn't move. The star-projections flicker like a heartbeat above him. He stares at his own hands, flexing them, as if they might not be his anymore.
The air around him felt suddenly thick, as though the whole city had inhaled and was holding its breath. In the distance, neon flared like foxfire, restless, waiting.
Gu Yihang closed his eyes. And the city, vast and wounded, seemed to lean closer, as if it too wished to hear what would come next.
----2279 words. hoping people will like this one.