The city was a symphony of decay, and Kaelen was its most attuned listener. From his cramped booth at "Static," a club buried deep in the underbelly of Aethelburg, he wove soundscapes for the neon-drenched masses. He was a Audio-Savant, his neural implants allowing him to manipulate soundwaves on a quantum level. But his true talent was filtering out the noise to hear the truth underneath—a lie in a vocal tremor, a threat in a shifted heartbeat.
Tonight, the air was thick with the smell of synth-whiskey and ozone. He was cleaning up a recording for a client, a corporate snitch, when he heard it. Beneath the man's panicked voice, a low-frequency thrum, organic and complex, pulsed like a second heartbeat. It was a biological signature he'd been hired to erase before.
A hand slammed on his console, jolting him from his focus. A woman stood there, her silhouette sharp against the holographic bar signs. She wore the severe black armor of the Aethelburg Enforcer Corps, but her eyes held a wildness the city could never breed.
"Kaelen," she said, her voice a gravelly alto that resonated with a surprising, clean timbre. "I'm Lieutenant Anya Rostova. I need your ears."
"I'm retired from freelance work, Lieutenant. The City's noise is bad for my health."
"Not this kind of noise." She slid a data-slate across the console. On it was a spectral analysis of an audio file—a roar, captured at a grisly crime scene in the Derelict Sector. It was layered, brutal, and utterly impossible for a human vocal cord. And woven within it, clear as day to Kaelen's enhanced perception, was that same low-frequency thrum.
"This is the fourth body this month," Rostova said, her eyes locked on his. "Torn apart. But this is the first time we caught the… perpetrator… on audio. My forensics team says it's an animal. My gut says it's something else. You hear things they can't."
Kaelen's own heart hammered against his ribs. He had heard this signature before, a week ago, in the voice of a high-ranking OmniCorp executive he'd been paid to make sound trustworthy. The executive was now pushing a new "adaptive security" bill through the city council.
He looked from the data-slate to Rostova's intense face. This was no coincidence. Someone was cleaning house, and they were using monsters to do it. And he, by simply doing his job, had already heard too much.
"Play it," Kaelen said, his voice barely a whisper. "The raw file."
Rostova nodded. As the roar erupted from his high-fidelity speakers, it wasn't just sound that filled the booth. It was a primal, technological terror. And deep within Kaelen's own augmented DNA, something dormant and forgotten stirred in response.