CHAPTER 1: The Echo That Watches Her
Time moved differently in Tier-13.
Viressa's cube was no bigger than a shipping container, its walls lined with bio-responsive polymers that shifted between opacity and transparency based on her neural rhythms. From the outside, it looked like every other unit in the vertical slum: a monolithic gray tooth in the mouth of the megacity. Inside, it pulsed with the quiet hum of illegal tech and stolen bandwidth.
She was twenty now. Had been for three months, though the date on her legal identity flux-shifted between eighteen and twenty-two depending on which jurisdiction scanned her. Biometric mutability was expensive, but Viressa's fingers were artist-trained, her code poetry written in living flesh. She spliced avatars the way other people applied makeup--subtle adjustments to bone structure, eye colour, the angle of light on skin.
Her clients called her Moire--a name that shimmered with interference patterns. They were upper-tier corporates needing alibis, politicians craving deniability, executives who wanted to slum in the undergrowth without consequence. She gave them faces that would fool cameras, voices that would pass AI verification, identities that would sink without trace in the data-sea of the lower tiers.
And watching it all, kneeling at the workstation she'd designated as his, was Eidolon.
The neural collar around his throat was her second favorite piece of tech. It was a Prometheus Industries prototype she'd acquired through channels that didn't technically exist, its quantum-encrypted neural mesh interfacing directly with his vagus nerve, creating direct pathways to his parasympathetic nervous system. It synced his biometrics to her location, his stress responses to her mood, his very heartbeat to the rhythm she set. Every beat logged at 120 BPM baseline, spiking to 160 when she spoke, dropping to dangerous sub-40 lows during her absences. The collar looked almost decorative, etched with patterns that resembled traditional rope work but were actually antenna arrays broadcasting on frequencies only she controlled, each pattern a microscopic circuit running at 5.2 GHz.
"System maintenance report," she said, not looking up from the identity matrix she was weaving.
His voice came immediately, flat and precise: "Trace scrubs complete on seventeen avatars. New mirrors established in Hokkaido, Lagos, and Neo-Berlin. Your name has been purged from six underground databases, quarantined in two others. Anomalous pattern detected in the São Paulo servers; someone may be hunting your signature, using recursive search algorithms with a focus on biometric variance patterns that suggest flesh-modification work."
"Handle it."
"Yes, Ma'am."
She did look up then, studying him with the same intensity she brought to her work. At forty-nine, he was still handsome in the way that broken things could be beautiful. His face carried the geography of his fall. Stress lines etched by political scandals, crow's feet deepened by professional failure, a mouth that had forgotten how to smile except when she commanded it, his facial asymmetry parameters now permanently altered by chronic submission postures, left side 2.3 degrees lower than the right from years of lowered gaze.
Eidolon Kessler had been a systems architect for Nexus Corp, responsible for security protocols that protected trillions in assets. Now he knelt on a cushion she'd positioned precisely, wearing clothes she'd selected, waiting for instructions she might or might not give. His hands--once steady enough to perform neural surgery with 0.1mm precision, steady enough to code reality itself, now exhibited Type-B essential tremor with 4-6Hz frequency when he thought she wasn't watching, a neurological response to sustained dopamine conditioning.
"Sometimes I feel like it's stupid," she said, the words coming out before she could censor them. "Me owning someone like you. I don't even know everything yet."
The confession felt dangerous, like showing weakness. She was twenty. She'd been alive for two decades while he'd accumulated nearly half a century of knowledge, experience, failure. What gave her the right to own him? What qualified her to be his structure, his meaning, his world?
But when he spoke, his voice carried certainty she envied: "That's why you own me. Because you don't need to."
The answer hit her like a revelation. Of course. Need implied lack, and lack implied weakness. She owned him not despite her inexperience but because of it. Her youth was power. Raw, undiluted, not yet constrained by disappointment or the slow accretion of compromise that came with age.
She laughed then, a sound like wind chimes in a storm, and watched him shudder at the frequency. Later, she would learn he'd recorded that laugh, that he played it through his earpiece during his permitted masturbation sessions, timing his release to the exact moment of joy in her voice.
But now she just turned back to her work, letting him exist in the wake of her attention.
The active service began with tiny rituals. She didn't want a pet; she wanted a tool that happened to be conscious, a biological algorithm with built-in optimization protocols. He maintained her digital footprint with obsessive care, scrubbing trace data before she even knew it existed, using molecular-level data destruction protocols that operated at the quantum level, making recovery impossible even with military-grade forensics. He mirrored her avatars across dozens of servers, each copy subtly different, making her simultaneously nowhere and everywhere.
When she worked, he prepared the space. Cleaning the optical lenses of her AR rig with nanoscale precision cloths that removed particles down to 0.3 microns, calibrating the haptic gloves she used to sculpt identities to within 0.05 degrees of rotational accuracy, even selecting the ambient lighting that would optimize her focus--6500K color temperature, 800 lux intensity, carefully managed to maintain her circadian rhythm integrity. He learned her patterns, anticipated her needs, became the invisible support structure for her art.
