X
The last thing I remembered was the coppery taste of my own blood and the relentless downpour that tried to wash it away. Rain in Neo-Kyoto was a constant, a gray curtain that fell over the city’s sins, but it did little to cleanse the filth. I was just another stain on the asphalt, a data courier who had run out of luck. A searing pain in my chest, then the sweet, dark embrace of nothingness.
But nothingness, it turned out, was temporary.
My first sensation was light, a blinding, sterile white that burned my new eyes. Not my old eyes—those were gone, along with the rest of me. I was… rebooting. A system check flickered in the corner of my vision, a cascade of green text scrolling at an impossible speed.
SYSTEM ONLINE. BIOMETRICS STABLE. NEURAL INTERFACE… CALIBRATING.
I sat up, the movement unnaturally smooth, a whisper of servos and hydraulics accompanying the motion. I was on a cold, metallic table in a room that smelled of ozone and antiseptic. My hands, when I held them up, were not my own. The skin was a pale, flawless synthetic material, crisscrossed with faint, glowing blue lines that pulsed with a soft light. I flexed my fingers, and the response was instantaneous, perfect. Too perfect.
A voice, calm and detached, echoed from an unseen speaker. “Welcome back, Subject 7.”
I tried to speak, but my vocalizer produced a burst of static. I cleared the feedback loop, a new instinct I didn’t know I possessed. “Where… who am I?” My voice was a stranger’s, a smooth baritone with no trace of the gravelly tone I remembered.
“You are a work of art,” the voice replied. “A second chance. A new beginning, courtesy of OmniCorp’s Re-Life Division. Your previous life ended twenty-four hours ago.”
Twenty-four hours. It felt like an eternity and a second all at once. Fragments of my past life flickered at the edge of my consciousness—the neon glow of a noodle stand, the feel of a data chip in my palm, the ghost of a woman’s laughter. But it was all smoke, intangible and fleeting.
“What do you want from me?” I asked, swinging my legs off the table. My body felt powerful, agile, but utterly alien.
“The same thing we wanted from you before,” the voice said. “Compliance. And a small piece of information you failed to deliver.”
A sudden, jarring image flooded my mind: a dark room, a computer terminal, and a string of encrypted data. It was followed by the sharp crack of a gunshot and a woman’s scream. The vision was so vivid, so real, that I stumbled back, my synthetic hand clutching my chest where a phantom wound ached.
“It seems some residual memories remain,” the voice noted, a hint of something that might have been satisfaction in its tone. “Excellent. We have questions for you, Jax. And this time, you have all the time in the world to answer them.”
I looked at my reflection in the polished chrome wall. The face staring back was not the one I had known for thirty-two years. It was sharper, more angular, with eyes that glowed with an unsettling blue light. But behind those new eyes, something old and familiar stirred. Rage.
They had brought me back, but they had made a mistake. They thought they had created a compliant machine, a puppet to do their bidding. But they had only given their ghost a new shell. And this ghost was going to haunt them. My name was Jax, and I was going to find out who killed me, even if I had to tear their chrome-plated world apart to do it. My second life had just begun, and it was going to be a hell of a lot more interesting than the first. I could feel it in my circuits, a ghost in the machine, an echo of a past that refused to die. And the first thing I needed to do was get the hell out of this sterile white room.
My new body was a weapon, and I was just starting to learn how to use it. With a surge of newfound strength, I ripped the metallic table from its moorings and hurled it at the chrome wall. The impact was deafening, leaving a massive dent in the reflective surface. An alarm blared, and red lights began to flash.
The voice from the speaker was no longer calm. “Subject 7, cease your actions immediately. Sedatives will be administered.”
I wasn’t waiting around for that. I spotted a panel on the wall, and with a calculated punch, I shattered it, revealing a mess of wires and circuits. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but my instincts guided me. I ripped out a handful of cables, and the lights in the room flickered and died, plunging me into darkness. The only illumination came from the faint blue glow of my own synthetic skin.
The door to the room hissed open, and two figures in heavy armor stormed in, their weapons raised. They were OmniCorp security, and they were not here to talk. But in the dark, I was faster, stronger. I moved like a phantom, a blur of motion as I disarmed the first guard and used his own weapon to disable the second. It was brutal, efficient, and utterly terrifying.
I stepped out into a long, sterile corridor, the alarm still blaring. I needed to get out of this facility, back to the rain-slicked streets of Neo-Kyoto. I needed to find answers. And I was willing to go through anyone who stood in my way. My past life was a ghost, but my future was a clean slate, and I was going to write it in the blood of those who had wronged me. My reincarnation was a curse, but I would turn it into my greatest weapon. The hunt had begun.
