*VALERIE KOSS // STATUS: TERMINATED (412 DAYS AGO).*

His optic implants whirred, attempting an auto-diagnostic to flush what had to be a

Marcus spat off the rust-pitted ledge, watching the droplet vanish into the sulfurous haze below. The ID signature burned into his optic buffer in a harsh, unblinking crimson: *

...but it wasn’t the background noise of the city that held his attention. It was the phantom frequency bleeding through his secondary visual cortex—an encrypted bio-ping belonging to a corpse.

...collapsed into manageable, pulsing icons at the periphery of his sight. Below him, the smog-choked abyss of the lower sprawl hummed with the rhythmic thrum of heavy cooling turbines, but

...turning his scarred knuckles into a shimmering mesh of vector lines.

He blinked, forcing the neural implants at the base of his skull to damp down their gain. The high-density feeds