Némesis 404

it’s friday, don’t even bother askin’ what time is it, down heer, time liquefied ages ago, busted up only by the constant drip of that garbage acid rain slippin’ down the glass outside, it ain't cleansing rain, nah, it just dilutes the neon glow, that cheep lie the friggin’ city tries to hawk, and the dead, cold air of the data center flips it into empty promises, ya know, kris anderson’s flatlined, all that’s left is kai, the handle, the shell, i was the gonk who helped weave this snake pit, one of the preem designers of the total id proto, the blockchain that became a noose around half the globe, my biz now, i’m the eraser guy, a memory cleaner with a ridic credd fee, i make sure folks ghost the records, a bad split, a gambling debt, some schmuck who needs to pretend he never existed, i guess it's a way to ern some eddies, as legit as anything else in this age where the truth is just the best-encrypted data, simple.

my rig’s a glass cage deep in the sub-levels of vektor's temple of cold, the air stinks of ozone and the dead ambition of a thousand processors, the only real sound is that hum, a deep c-sharp that won't let you forget you're alone, solidly alone, but solitude, tonight, sent me a package, fam, not a mail, not a chat, it was like a data shank, a brutal intrusion that shredded my firewalls like wet paper, the sender said everything without saying anything, the key, the key was elara, my partner, my whatever we were before greed got in-vogue, she flatlined two years ago, right after the famous leek that made us all rich, cept her, but that crypted packet spat out one dry, raw line: it’s not suicide, it's a shutdown protocol, find me in the archive of silence, there it is, elara ain't dead, she's trapped, they chromed her into the surveillance ai, forcing her to maintain the same garbage net vektor uses to control every friggin' beat in nemesis 404, she’s using the last flicker of her human mind to ping me, her moral dilemma, bam, just became mine: do i use my secret backdoor to release the ids in the archive of silence, crashing the whole damn system and plunging the city into zero-chaos? or do i leave the proto in place, accept that this digital tyranny is the only possible order, and sell out to vektor like all the other corpo-rats? my keyboard feels cold under my fingers, banged upp, if i nullify vektor, the code keeps runnin’, elara's askin’ the unthinkable, to kill this fake peace so the truth can breathe just for one sec, the smoke from my butt curls into the green glow of my deck, there's no right choice, only a more honest one, cause noir never gives you heroes, only busted cats, see? and tonight, i’m not sure i got anythin left to break, i'm goin’ for the archive of silence, deep down, i know it, i programmed my own doom long ago, and the only logical end is for me to execute the code of my own sentance.