The first breath burns. Your body hasn't drawn air in half a century.
You were frozen in 2037—a routine cryogenic procedure, they said. Now it's 2087, and the corporation that put you on ice collapsed decades ago. Your family aged, died, or forgot you. Your neural implant is a museum piece. Your unaugmented body draws stares in a world where flesh is freely sculpted and baseline humans are curiosities.
But someone kept your pod running through years of bankruptcy and neglect. Someone pulled you out. And now you're learning why.
There's something in your head.
Data encoded deep in neural tissue during a procedure you don't remember. You experience it as glitches—intrusive images, phantom sounds, headaches that spike when you try to remember certain things. The Payload, they call it. You have no idea what it contains. Neither does Kira Tran, the fixer who extracted you, though she knows it's valuable enough to gamble on.
Valuable enough to kill for.
Axiom Systems—the megacorp that absorbed your old employer's remains—has spent decades hunting cryo patients like you, extracting whatever secrets Helios hid in human minds. Their methods are efficient. Survival rates are not a priority. Agent Soren Vale will come calling eventually, soft-spoken and polite, offering comfortable surrender before pursuing uncomfortable alternatives.
The Continuity Collective promises sanctuary for the displaced and frozen, but their protection comes with expectations. Underground fixers smell profit. And somewhere in this drowned neon city, people who worked for Helios fifty years ago might know what was put in your head—and why.
The world you knew is gone. Neural links handle identity, payment, communication—to be unlinked is to be invisible, undocumented, a ghost haunting a future that wasn't built for you. The old internet evolved into something called the Lattice, an immersive layer of reality your antique implant can barely perceive. Everyone sees context you're missing. Everyone knows things you don't.
You'll need to learn fast. Navigate technology that treats you as obsolete. Build alliances with people you can't fully trust. Unravel the mystery of your own mind before someone cracks it open.
The Payload is waiting. Corporations want to extract it. Rebels want to weaponize it. And you—you just want to survive long enough to decide what it means.
In 2087, information is currency and consciousness is commodity. What will you become: a player in this new world, or just another resource to be consumed?
