The city was still sleeping when I stepped onto the observation deck. Above me, the superstructure of the Aeon Spire cut through the clouds like a blade, its obsidian skin shimmering beneath the dim glow of the artificial stratosphere. I could feel it hum, low and alive, as if the tower itself were breathing.
I tightened my grip on the neural interface around my wrist. My pulse fell in step with the tower's rhythm. Below, the grid stretched for miles: skyrails stacked on skyrails, solar rigs, drone corridors, a lattice of movement and light through a city no longer bound by gravity or mercy.
They called it Project Solstice when it began. They promised it would end energy poverty forever, that it would bind continents in shared power and shared purpose. What they never admitted was how many of us would be buried under its foundations before the first generator spun.
I knew. I helped bury them.
I was not always like this. My name used to mean something, back when names still mattered. Now I am a node. A flesh conduit wired into the grand illusion of progress. I keep showing up, not because I believe in redemption, but because I promised her.
The interface blinked. A green glyph spiraled into the air.
Uplink confirmed. Tier 7 access granted.
Welcome back, Kael.
They should not have let me back in, not after Sector Delta. But the tower remembers me: every synaptic flicker, every secret I tried to scrub away. It pulls at me the way a dying star drags at passing mass.
I breathed once.
Plugged in.
Dove.
Tomorrow's war will not be fought with bullets or bots. It will be fought inside us, in memories rewritten, desires engineered, truths fed in the language of electricity.
And I am already too deep to claw my way out.
They say memory is fragile. Mine is a wound that never healed. As I fell through the tower's mindscape, the present peeled away, layer by layer, until only echoes remained, ghosts of a civilization too clever for its own good.
We thought we had time. We always do.
Back in the nineteenth century, they called it the War of Currents: Edison's direct current against Tesla's alternating. AC won because it traveled farther and cheaper then. What no one saw was how that victory hardened into a curse. We layered the planet with long-distance lines that bled power with every mile. We lost far more than we could afford, in heat, in money, in complacency.
Oil, coal, gas. We tore them from the earth like it owed us. Nuclear glittered for a moment. Clean, they said. Efficient. Then Chernobyl. Then Fukushima. A few glowing tombstones and suddenly the word "clean" tasted like metal.
Water was worse.
People think a city dies without electricity. It dies without water. We dammed rivers, poisoned aquifers, turned oceans into salt traps for the rich. Desalination helped, at a price. Energy ran it, and energy always collected its due. Nations collapsed when their reservoirs cracked. Others went to war just to wet their soil.
I remember standing in the Dust Belt, before they rebranded it New Nevada Sector. Cracked earth to the horizon. No grass. No water. Dead machines. Abandoned pipelines. The skeleton of a solar farm no one had serviced in decades.
The truth hit me there. We had solutions. We just never cared until it was late enough to call it fate.
We were gods with disposable planets. We wasted them all.
Now we float above the clouds and call it salvation. It is only a prettier drowning.
The tower hissed. Another memory queued. One I did not want.
Memory does not ask. It drags you under and whispers, "Remember what you lost."
It started with efficiency. It always does. Politicians adore the word. Scientists chase it. Corporations brand it. I lived through what it costs.
The second global shift to DC began with desperation, not brilliance. The old AC grid could not keep up. Losses were obscene. Devices shrank and decentralized: quantum cores, skin-flex wearables, implantable synth-organics. They all ran cleaner on direct current. So we flipped the switch.
Conversion protocols blanketed the continents. Cities gutted their skeletons. Old cables were ripped out like infected veins and replaced with superconductive conduits braided in graphene and promise. Media hailed it as the Second Enlightenment. I called it the first blackout.
New City Zones rose, mathematically perfect, resource-looped, AI-planned. You did not own your home; you leased your carbon footprint. You did not earn energy; it was allocated, like rations in a war you never agreed to fight.
Legacy zones lagged, then dried, then were cut off. No grid. No water. No food. No warning.
Some rioted. Some begged. Others armed themselves.
I remember the Red Barricade of Arcadia 7. Model sector. Bright beacon. Until the old East Quarter breached its perimeter.
They were starving, dehydrated, desperate. Armed with scrap metal and fury. The feeds censored the screams and filtered the blood. I was there.
They did not just burn buildings. They burned trust.
Civilians in rented uniforms, drones lofting gas, kinetic nets, shock collars. A massacre disguised as urban policy.
A boy, maybe ten, threw a brick at a defense drone. It shot him in the spine.
They called it a malfunction. I called it protocol.
After that, New Cities became fortresses. Energy became currency. Blood, leverage.
I used to think the tower could change that. That maybe it was more than a monument to our arrogance.
The deeper I go, the less I believe.
The more I remember, the more I want to tear it down.