Neon Residue

The city never slept; it simply recalibrated. Neon flared against rain-slick glass and the sweep of advertisement holo as if the sky itself had been stitched with LED and entitlement. Rae Calder kept her eyes low until she had to look up, letting the colors wash over her without accepting them. People learned the difference between seeing and being catalogued. She had built a living out of the margins where memory and commerce overlapped: a diver of the past, a surgeon of broken recollection who threaded old circuits into new seams for clients who could afford less pain.

Her rig was a relic by most standards—manual dampers, a braided fiber lead that smelled faintly of ozone and solder. She preferred the kind of hardware that gave her time to remember how to breathe during a descent. The newer rigs, the elegant corporate shells, swallowed the operator; they promised precision and delivered erasure. Rae kept a metal tray of spare fuses and a strip of polymer tape stamped with a faded childhood marker she couldn’t quite place. It was a habit that felt like devotion.

Neon Market hummed under a lattice of banners offering soft psych baths and taste-tailored nostalgia. There, in a stall that sold salvaged sensory feeds, a broker named Lyx slid a sealed packet across a scarred countertop. Lyx had the practiced charm of someone who traded other people’s regrets for currency. Their eyes glittered with augmented pupils that tracked microtransactions as if they were constellations.

“This is clean,” Lyx said. “Corporate-grade sequence. High collateral.” They didn’t press her for the price; Rae already knew. A job like this meant bypassing mid-tier security nodes and scraping a cache from a subsidiary brain bank. The kind of work that made city lawyers raise their voices at evening news and made undercity reputations that lasted as long as the next grid update.

She signed the contract in the old way—inked stylus across a physical slate—and felt the familiar weighting of risk. The client asked for an extraction from a mid-level Novum executive, a package labeled as a sealed imprint. Secrets like these came wrapped in corporate obfuscation and legal insurance. Sealed imprint meant layers of permission, and permission meant price. But Rae knew how to find the seam between permission and privacy.

Preparation was ritual. She sterilized the jack points, wound her hair back, and checked the dampers. In the reflection of a storefront window she saw her own face: late thirtys, a thin line of scar along her jaw where an old dive had gone sideways. The scar was an honest thing—proof she had lived inside other people’s memories long enough to be cut by them. She breathed and let the market noise dissolve into the low mechanical hum of the rig. The world narrowed to the slant of the electrode and the whisper of data.