The sun 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.
I am Gu Yihang, a candidate to the throne that is the Gu Corporation, the handsome son of
Gu Jinyu, that 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 would be 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 fragile and iridescent and all things spiritual 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, my privileged opti-lenses filtering out the grime, seeing only the kingdom that awaited him.
I stood oblivious to that suffering. Always satisfied and content and breathing in filtered-to-the-brink air.
I lived a completely different life from those below. I survived and thrived because of the fact that the inhabitants of my society's underbelly die off, lured into it with promises of a better life.
The city ate them up and despite my indignation and want for equality and godly virtue and all that good stuff, I was grateful for it.
The sun did nothing to affect my 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.
I 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 me with hunger, nor with the cheap poison of the brainchemmies, nor with the dulling comfort of prosthetic flesh. Instead, it had etched itself into my gaze, into the way I watched men die as if their deaths were happening inside my own lungs. Everyone below was an abomination and in that sense, I was too.
I'm the only person alive without cybernetic and synthetic augment.
"Gu Yihang" was many things, depending on who you asked. My blood-brothers talked about him as if he was almost immune to the disease of desperation for more that plagued 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 my eyes, 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."
My mother's death didn't leave me alone. It left something in her place. I would call it a scorner—a sprite of the devilish kind—but to me, it was simply what remained after her warmth went out.
It moved without moving, thought without speaking, and lingered at the corners of my life. I used to hear it at night, between the static hum of the ventilation and the sound of her labored breathing. Sometimes I'd wake to her whispering into the dark, answering questions no one had asked.
When the fever took her, she said she could hear it crying: small, wet sobs that lived between her heartbeats. I didn't believe her then. Now I think I've been hearing them my entire life.
What is a child but a vessel waiting for love that never arrives? What is a ghost but the shape that love takes when it's denied?
I was born to three parents: my father Gu Jinyu, whose gaze never softened; my mother, whose eyes dimmed too soon; and the shadow that came after, born of her final breath and my unspoken guilt.
It was resentment made flesh, hatred turned lucid. A being born from true hate for what is now and hate for what comes after. It was with me in my sleep, in my holy rites, in my word-wrestling with my siblings and figures. I felt it in my hunger, in the long hours when I'd pretend the city lights were stars. It became as familiar as breathing, an extra presence at the back of my skull, something I carried the way others carried their conscience.
I bore it like one would carry the knowledge of their mortality. Always there at the edge of thought.
At first it was only a blur on the mirror in my head, a smudge that wouldn't come off no matter how many times I blinked. Like limescale that stuck to the glass ever-stubborn. But years pass, and blurs gain names.
It was a blur and it followed me and it slept with me and it woke up with me.
It started to speak.
That night, the room pulsed with its own heartbeat. 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.
Do you hear me, child?
I froze. My breath catches in my throat.
I turn, but the room is empty. The voice wasn't coming from anywhere. It was in my mind.
It was a dream. Just a side effect of too many nights lingering with other people, too much filtered air. But then the mirror beside me rippled about, and something in me answered before I could stop it.
Not a dream. Not anymore.
My mind became clearer than ever. The voice of that sprite finally took form in one definite audible phenomenon.
"Who… what are you?" I asked.
You would know.
"I don't."
You don't want to. That's closer to the truth.
The stars above me pulsed like they were laughing. They were alive?
"I'm not afraid," I lied.
Every man begins with that lie. Fear is your inheritance; fear of your father, of the city, of becoming one of them. But what you fear most is being honest. You're afraid of what you could be if you stopped pretending to be human.
Its words crawled under my skin, digging like moles and parasites to the bone.
"Why now? Why speak after all these years?"
Because you're ripe. Because the boy who swallowed his mother's grief has grown into a man choking on it. I'm not your sickness, Yihang. I'm your cure.
The words left a pressure in my chest. My heart drummed like a cathedral.
"You've been bred for stimulation," it went on. "Fed nothing real. A hothouse prince raised under glass, dreaming of tempests and lesser things. Inside you there's a great white hall where nothing echoes back. You call it virtue, but it's a famine of the soul."
I had seen too much and felt too little. My father trained me to observe without trembling, to speak without conviction, to live without hunger. As all of the Gu bloodline should.
The ghost, the thing that was grief pulled back the curtain.
I could see through others' eyes: the heron gliding through the towers; the orphan wrapped in plastic fiber; the dying woman coughing red; the corpse of a jackal devoured by machines. I became them all, and when I returned to myself, I was empty.
"You're not supposed to be here," I told it.
I've always been here. You just refused to look.
"What do you want?"
To sit with you and to speak. Not as a ghost but as what's left of you.
Sleep now. We've got work to do.
I stared at my hands under the false starlight. The city outside seemed to hold its breath, as if waiting for me to exhale first.
And I did rather slowly. Like someone confessing in a church from another age.
And the city, vast and wounded, seemed to lean closer, as if it too wished to hear what would come next.