The invite turned up out of nowhere. Military-grade encryption. It took Ronan four minutes to decode it. 

A bank of monitors attached to the wall—the only furniture aside from the bed—dribbled an insipid blue sheen into his tiny grey apartment. Sheets crumpled. 

A handful of clothes lay scattered on the bed under the monitors. An unbranded bottle of water rested on a thin shelf welded to the wall at the foot of the bed. Lying against the far wall, Ronan tapped away on his keyboard, letting code stream down the screen, a mosaic of characters and symbols. The room was silent, except for the sound of his fingers tripping across the keys, and small enough for him to not need the heating, his body providing sufficient warmth on a stagnant day.

A message flashed across the screen.

Haz > Ro (Private)

U UP FOR A GAME OF ANNIHILATION?

Ro

GOT AN INVITE TO A PARTY

YOU GET ONE?

Haz

NO

FUCKER

IS THIS TO DO WITH THE 0-DAY BREACH U FOUND?

Ro

DUNNO

Haz

U EVER BEEN TO A PARTY?

Ro

LIKE HUNDREDS

Haz

LIAR

PING IF U NEED A RYDE:AFTER

Ronan shut down the main terminal, his conduit into the dataverse, but set up a notification alert on his AI.Device for any breaches. The unexpected invitation had thrown him. His identity was well concealed behind scrambling utilities regularly flipping through rotating DNS configurations, but he had still been found. It wasn’t life or death, but it was a concern. He set up another notification alert to catch any use of his name. He tucked the AI.D and two short, thin metal rods into his back pocket and slipped on a hooded, black pseudo-military jacket, now faded and adorned with badly stitched sergeant’s stripes. 

The lift, a vertical coffin of steel and crusted bodily fluids, was out of power and a recharge would take ten minutes, so he hiked down the dozen flights and shouldered his way out the service doors into the city.

The noise hit him first. The usual assault of urban life, from sirens to fights, and tonight the additional sound of wheels hissing on wet roads accompanied by the pinging of the rain on metal roofs. The rain was keeping most people off the pavement, with a handful of prostitutes, pimps, low-level office workers, all in their own numbed universes, defeated by their pointless and relentless service to others. Buses crawled along beside the pavement, the brittle interior lights washing out the passengers’ faces.

The cold night air rushed in, making him gasp. The smell of rotting rubbish followed; it was pungent, almost alive. Steam coiled from manholes on street corners, venting heat from subterranean cavities, representing a world that he didn’t understand or find interest in. He avoided involvement in anything outside the dataverse. People were too tied up with what they saw, ignoring what others were. Life was more honest behind the keyboard, where actions defined character.

The bus network flowed through the street, the multiple lanes dividing into speed-defined zones, creating a revolving puzzle. Ronan trekked alongside the buildings, keeping under the infrequent shelter of the tattered canopies until he came to an enormous multilane intersection.

He checked his AI.D. The next pedestrian crossing was still fifteen minutes away. Many people, for multiple reasons, chanced their judgement by ducking between the buses. Many didn’t make it across, often by choice. 

But he had time. The cold settled around him, his breath billowing as he waited. The community battery-bank indicators, thin glowing bands wrapped around the streetlamps at waist height, were a solid green. The city should have light until well after midnight, before the solar storage was depleted. 

He’d heard stories about what happened once the city streets went dark. Life existed between two worlds, two kinds of people: those who were forced into the dark, and those who chose it. Everyone else was a ghost, irrelevant identities in eternal cycles of pointless activity, adding nothing, using everything, burning a future that wasn’t theirs to destroy.

The invitation directions led him across town to the central business district. The traffic thinned and he suddenly felt like the only person out, just him and the buses braving the inclement weather. His AI.D led him onto a street where the battery-bank indicators glowed a dim green, meaning it was a low-density area. The bus terminal at the end of the street sent a constant stream of buses down an otherwise quiet road. 

His AI.D beeped. He checked the address against the building it indicated: a low-rise office block with dead, abandoned windows like empty eye sockets. The front doors were open. Inside, a derelict foyer strewn with paper and broken furniture.

A dim yellow light shone from a heavily graffitied lift. He stepped in and pressed the top button. When the doors creaked open again, the dazzling light from a stand of multicoloured spotlights hit him in the face, forcing him to shield his eyes. On the other side of the glowing tower was an open expanse: a rooftop garden surrounded by dark and evacuated skyscrapers.