The year was 2155.
Neo-Tokyo.
The city did not sleep. It didn't even blink. It pulsed with neon veins of purple and electric blue. Cars didn't drive; they hummed through the air on magnetic highways. The rain was synthetic, programmed to fall at 2 AM to clean the streets.
Alex Finch sat in the locker room of the "Sector 7 Youth Academy".
He was ten years old. Again.
But his eyes were old. They held the weight of three lifetimes.
He looked at his boots. They weren't leather. They were made of "Hyper-Weave" and had small thrusters on the heels.
Gravity Ball.
That was the game now. It was football, but vertical. You could run on the walls. You could jump twenty feet in the air. The ball was heavy, made of a dense alloy, but it floated if you hit it with the right spin.
"It is just physics," Alex whispered to himself. "New variables. Same equation."
The door to the locker room slid open with a pneumatic hiss.
