Ryan stood in the doorway, holding a stolen neural-drive that promised a way out of the dying city.
"Open the door, man. I know you are in there."
John did not move. He lay flat on the bare mattress, staring at the cracked plaster of the ceiling. The fan in the corner of the room rattled on its axis, pushing the same hot, exhausted air in a slow circle. It was August in Winnipeg. The sky outside the single window was a bruised, sickly yellow, choked with the smog drifting east from the prairie wildfires.
"John. Come on. I have ten minutes before the drone sweeps this block."
It was Ryan. Of course it was Ryan. John closed his eyes. His stomach turned over. He had not seen Ryan in three months, not since the mandate locked down the southern transit lines and everyone retreated into their own little survival routines.
John rolled off the bed. His bare feet stuck to the cheap linoleum floor. He walked past the humming towers of his data farm. Four stripped-down desktop units, their casings removed, wired directly into the apartment's main power grid. They were mining micro-transactions, processing fractional data packets for an offshore server farm. It paid enough to buy soy-paste rations and keep the water running. Barely. The heat coming off the processors made the small room feel like an oven.
He unlatched the deadbolt. He pulled the door open two inches.
Ryan shoved his way inside before John could stop him.
"What are you doing?" John asked.
"Saving your life," Ryan said. He locked the deadbolt behind him and leaned against the door. He looked terrible. His hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat. He wore a dark, heavy jacket despite the thirty-degree heat, zipped all the way to his chin. He kept shifting his weight from foot to foot, his eyes darting around the cramped apartment.
"Get out," John said. "I am working."
"You are farming pennies," Ryan said. He gestured at the exposed computer towers. "Look at this. This is depressing. You are going to die in this room, John."
"It pays the rent."
"There is no rent anymore. The city is bankrupt. The autumn lockdown starts in four days. They are going to barricade the perimeter. You think the supply trucks are coming through in November? We are done."
John crossed his arms. He felt the familiar exhaustion creeping up his neck. Life with Ryan was always a crisis. It was always the end of the world.
"Why are you here?" John asked.
Ryan reached into his jacket pocket. He pulled out a small, rectangular object. It was wrapped in a layer of static-shielding plastic. He tossed it onto John's unmade bed.
"What is that?" John asked.
"A neural-drive. Military grade. Stripped the serial numbers myself," Ryan said. He grinned. It was the same manic, desperate smile he used to get right before doing something stupid in gym class. "It holds a terabyte of raw, unencrypted bandwidth."
John stared at the drive. "Where did you get that?"
"Does not matter. What matters is what we are going to do with it."
"We are not doing anything. Take it and leave."
Ryan stepped closer. He dropped his voice. "I have two tickets on the underground rail to Neo-Toronto. The actual rail, John. Not the cargo holds. Real seats. But the broker wants a down payment. Cash is useless. He wants data. Clean, secure data. Access codes. System bandwidth."
John looked at the drive, then back at Ryan. "I do not have access codes."
"No," Ryan said. "But the school does."
John laughed. It was a dry, scraping sound. "You are out of your mind. Central High is sealed. The corporate drones patrol the perimeter every hour."
"The drones are blind in the smog," Ryan said. "And the school's mainframe is still running on legacy power. The city never shut it down. They forgot about it. It is sitting there, packed with raw, unallocated bandwidth. We plug this drive into the server room, siphon the bandwidth, and we walk away. We trade the drive to the broker tonight. We are in Neo-Toronto by tomorrow morning."
John looked at his data farm. The screens flickered, displaying endless rows of green text. The progress bar for his current batch was at two percent. It would take six hours to earn four dollars. He thought about the winter. He thought about being trapped in this room for six months, the snow piling up against the window, the power grids failing, the dark. The isolation was already crushing his chest, a physical weight that made it hard to breathe.
"You have the bypass codes for the school?" John asked.
"I know the physical locks," Ryan said. "I need you for the digital side. You are the only one who can navigate that old mainframe. Fifty-fifty split, John. We both get out."
John wiped the sweat from his forehead. The fan rattled behind him.
"Okay," John said. "Let's go."
The heat outside was a physical wall. John stepped out of his apartment building and immediately felt his t-shirt stick to his spine. The sky was the color of a dirty penny. The smog advisory was at level four. It meant the air was thick enough to leave a layer of ash on the parked cars lining the street.
Ryan walked fast. He kept his head down, his hands jammed into his jacket pockets. "Keep up," he said.
"I am keeping up," John said. He pulled his collar up over his nose, trying to filter out the taste of exhaust and burned pine needles.
They walked down Main Street. The storefronts were mostly boarded up with cheap plywood. The few places still open had heavy iron grates pulled over their windows. A line of people stood outside a municipal water station, holding plastic jugs, their faces blank and tired. Nobody spoke. The city was operating on reserve energy.
"Drone," Ryan hissed.
He grabbed John by the shoulder and shoved him into the recessed doorway of an abandoned electronics store. John stumbled, his shoulder hitting the dirty glass.
Above them, a low mechanical whine cut through the heavy air. A corporate security drone, painted matte gray, drifted over the intersection. Its red sensor light swept across the pavement, cutting through the yellow smog. It paused over a rusted sedan, scanned the license plate, and then slowly moved toward the next block.
John let out a slow breath. His heart was hammering against his ribs.
"They are increasing the patrols," Ryan said. He peaked his head around the corner of the brick wall. "Trying to lock down the grid before the autumn mandate hits."
"Remember when we used to just ride bikes down this street?" John asked. He did not know why he said it. The words just slipped out.
Ryan looked at him. His expression was flat. "No. I do not remember that. Stop living in the past, man. The past is dead. We need to focus on right now."
John swallowed hard. He felt incredibly stupid. He pushed himself off the glass and stepped back out onto the sidewalk.
They walked for another forty minutes, weaving through back alleys and cutting across overgrown empty lots to avoid the main avenues. The heat radiating off the asphalt baked through the thin soles of John's sneakers. He was thirsty. His mouth felt like it was coated in sand.
Central High sat at the edge of the industrial district. It was a massive, brutalist concrete structure built in the late nineties. It looked like a prison. High chain-link fences surrounded the perimeter, topped with coils of rusted razor wire. The windows on the ground floor were covered in steel plates.
"How are we getting in?" John asked. They were crouching behind a row of dead juniper bushes across the street from the main gate.
"Loading dock," Ryan said. "The service door in the back. The electronic lock is dead. It is just a mechanical deadbolt now. I wedged it open yesterday with a piece of scrap metal."
"You were already here?"
"I do the prep work, John. That is why you need me."
Ryan checked the sky. The smog was thick enough to obscure the sun, casting everything in a flat, shadowless light. "Let's move."
They bolted across the empty street. John's lungs burned. The air was too heavy to breathe deeply. They reached the chain-link fence. Ryan dropped to his knees and pulled back a section of the wire mesh that had been cut near the bottom. He crawled through the dirt. John followed him, the sharp edge of the cut wire scraping the back of his neck.
They ran across the cracked asphalt of the parking lot. Weeds grew waist-high through the fissures in the ground. They reached the loading dock at the rear of the building.
Ryan climbed up the concrete stairs and grabbed the handle of the heavy steel door. He pulled hard. The door groaned, the rusted hinges protesting loudly in the quiet afternoon. It opened just enough for them to squeeze through.
John slipped inside. The air in the school was cooler, but it smelled like old dust and damp concrete. It was totally dark.
Ryan pulled a small flashlight from his pocket and clicked it on. The narrow beam cut through the darkness, illuminating a row of dented blue lockers.
"Server room is in the basement," Ryan said. His voice echoed down the empty hallway.
"I know where it is," John said. He walked past Ryan, taking the lead. He remembered this hallway. He remembered walking down it every morning, worried about math tests and lunch periods. It felt like a hundred years ago. Now, the floor tiles were peeling up, and the ceiling panels were stained with water damage.
They found the stairwell and descended into the basement. The darkness here was absolute. The air grew colder.
They stopped in front of a heavy fire door. A faded plastic sign bolted to the metal read: SERVER ROOM B - AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
"The mechanical lock is picked," Ryan said, shining the light on the door handle. "But the digital override is still active. The mainframe will not let us interface without the administrative handshake."
John knelt in front of the door. Beside the handle was a small digital keypad. The screen was dark. He pulled a small flathead screwdriver from his pocket and wedged it under the plastic casing of the keypad, snapping it off. A tangle of red and blue wires spilled out.
"Hold the light steady," John said.
He pulled his own modified datapad from his back pocket. He stripped the ends of two wires from the keypad and clamped his datapad's interface cables onto them.
He booted up his pad. A stream of green text scrolled down the cracked screen.
"It is a legacy firewall," John muttered, his fingers moving rapidly across the touchscreen. "Stupidly basic. They never updated the firmware before they abandoned the building. I am bouncing a synthetic authorization token through their local loop."
"Just hurry up," Ryan said. He kept looking back over his shoulder at the dark stairwell.
John ignored him. He focused on the screen. The code was simple, predictable. He found the backdoor access port and injected the token.
The heavy metal door clicked loudly. A green LED above the handle blinked on.
"Got it," John said. He disconnected his pad and stood up.
He pushed the door open. The server room was massive. Row after row of black server racks stood like monoliths in the dark. Small indicator lights blinked in the gloom—red, green, amber. The low, steady hum of the cooling units filled the air, a deep vibration that John could feel in the soles of his feet.
"Beautiful," Ryan whispered. He stepped into the room, holding the neural-drive tightly in his hand. "Let's get rich."
John walked down the narrow aisle between the server racks. The temperature in the room was aggressively cold, a sharp contrast to the suffocating heat outside. The cooling fans roared.
"The main terminal is at the back," John said, raising his voice over the noise.
They found the central console. It was a bulky, outdated workstation with a thick glass monitor. John brushed a layer of dust off the keyboard. He hit the spacebar. The monitor flickered to life, casting a harsh, pale blue light across their faces.
"Okay," John said. He cracked his knuckles. "Plug the drive into the primary auxiliary port."
Ryan stepped forward and jammed the neural-drive into the heavy metallic slot on the side of the console. The drive blinked red, syncing with the school's mainframe.
John began to type. The mechanical keys clacked loudly. He opened the command directory and began parsing the server clusters.
"I am looking for the unallocated bandwidth pools," John said, his eyes scanning the directory paths. "It should be stored in the tertiary drives. Just raw network capacity."
"Yeah, yeah, just grab everything you can," Ryan said. He was pacing behind John, checking his watch.
John bypassed the primary security protocols and accessed the root directory. He opened the largest data cluster he could find. He initiated the transfer protocol.
A progress bar appeared on the screen. It was moving fast.
John frowned. He leaned closer to the monitor. He opened a secondary window to monitor the data packets as they flowed into Ryan's drive.
He read the headers of the files streaming past.
`Student_ID_74839_Bio_Scan` `Medical_History_Class_2024` `Retinal_Map_Primary_Database` `Financial_Dependency_Records_Complete`
John stopped typing. He felt a sudden, sharp coldness in his chest that had nothing to do with the air conditioning.
"Ryan," John said. His voice was quiet.
"What? Is it done?"
"This is not bandwidth," John said. He turned around in the chair. "This is the student database. You are downloading the biometric profiles. Medical records. Retinal scans. Home addresses. Financial data."
Ryan stopped pacing. He looked at John. The blue light from the monitor reflected in his eyes. He did not look surprised.
"Bandwidth is cheap," Ryan said evenly. "Identity data? Clean, verified identities from a closed system? The broker in Neo-Toronto will pay triple for that. It guarantees our tickets, plus enough credits to set us up in a high-rise sector when we get there."
John stared at him. "These are our classmates, Ryan. You are stealing their identities. You are selling their retinal scans to a black-market broker. Do you know what they do with that data? They clone it. They drain whatever reserve credits these families have left. They ruin them."
"Bro, nobody gives a shit about privacy anymore, we are literally starving," Ryan yelled over the hum of the servers. "Do not be a simp for the system. They are going to die here anyway! The lockdown is going to starve this whole city out!"
John stood up. His chair scraped violently against the floor.
"Cancel the transfer," John said.
"No," Ryan said. He stepped in front of the drive, blocking John's path. "We need this. I need this. Do you want to go back to your apartment? Do you want to sit there farming pennies while the snow buries the building? Look at me, John. Look at how pathetic we are. This is our ticket out."
John looked at his former best friend. He saw the desperation in Ryan's jaw, the frantic, panicked energy that had been driving him all day. John felt his own profound loneliness swelling up inside him. He wanted to leave. He wanted to sit on a real train and ride away from this dying city. He wanted to walk out into the sunlight in Neo-Toronto and not taste ash in the back of his throat.
But he looked at the screen. The names were scrolling past. He saw the name of the girl who used to sit in front of him in history class. He saw the name of the kid who lent him a charger when his pad died. Real people. People trapped in their own sweltering apartments right now, completely unaware that their entire digital existence was being siphoned into a stolen drive.
"I am shutting it down," John said. He stepped forward.
Ryan shoved him hard in the chest. John stumbled backward, hitting the edge of the server rack.
"Back off!" Ryan shouted. "It is at eighty percent. We are almost done!"
"You lied to me," John said, catching his breath.
"I managed the situation!" Ryan countered. "I knew you would get soft if I told you the truth. You always do this. You always sabotage yourself because you care about rules that do not exist anymore. There are no rules, John! There is just survival!"
"I am not selling them out," John said. He lunged forward.
Ryan threw a punch. It was wild and sloppy. It caught John on the side of the jaw. The impact sent a shockwave of pain through John's teeth. He tasted blood.
John grabbed Ryan by the collar of his heavy jacket. He twisted the fabric tight and shoved Ryan back against the console. The keyboard clattered to the floor.
"Let go of me!" Ryan screamed. He brought his knee up, catching John in the thigh.
John ignored the pain. He reached around Ryan, his hand grasping blindly for the neural-drive sticking out of the terminal.
Ryan grabbed John's wrist. They wrestled against the console, their boots slipping on the dusty floor. Ryan was stronger, driven by pure panic. He twisted John's arm back.
John slammed his elbow backward into Ryan's ribs. Ryan gasped and loosened his grip.
John tore his arm free and grabbed the plastic casing of the neural-drive. He ripped it out of the port.
The monitor flashed bright red. A loud error chime echoed through the room.
"No!" Ryan screamed.
Ryan tackled John. They went down hard on the concrete floor. The drive spun out of John's hand, skittering across the room.
They rolled into the base of one of the massive server racks. Ryan threw a heavy elbow into John's face, disorienting him. John pushed up blindly, his shoulder slamming into the side of the cooling unit attached to the bottom of the rack.
There was a sharp crack of plastic breaking. Then, a loud hiss of pressurized gas.
John scrambled back. The damaged pipe on the cooling unit was venting thick white vapor into the room. The temperature around them plummeted instantly.
A mechanical siren began to wail. It was deafening. Red strobe lights on the ceiling activated, bathing the server room in a harsh, flashing glow.
"Automated security," John yelled, covering his ears. "We tripped the thermal alarm!"
Ryan ignored him. He was on his hands and knees, frantically searching the floor. He spotted the neural-drive resting near a bundle of cables. He grabbed it and shoved it into his pocket.
"We have to go!" Ryan yelled. He turned and bolted toward the open fire door, leaving John on the floor.
John scrambled to his feet. His jaw throbbed, and his thigh burned where Ryan had kneed him. The siren was so loud he could feel it vibrating in his teeth. The server room was filling with white vapor from the ruptured cooling unit.
He ran for the door. He burst out into the dark hallway.
Ryan was already halfway to the stairwell, his flashlight bouncing wildly off the walls.
"Wait!" John yelled.
He sprinted after him. The adrenaline pushed the pain aside. They hit the stairs and climbed fast, taking them two at a time. John's lungs burned.
They reached the ground floor and ran toward the loading dock. Outside, through the dirty windows, John could hear the approaching wail of a different siren. The city's automated enforcement vehicles. The thermal alarm was hardwired to the municipal grid.
Ryan hit the heavy steel door of the loading dock, shoving it open.
The oppressive heat of the afternoon hit them instantly, thick and suffocating. John stumbled out onto the concrete platform.
"They are coming!" Ryan shouted. He pointed toward the front of the school. Blue and red lights were flashing through the thick yellow smog, illuminating the chain-link fence.
"The alley!" John yelled.
They jumped off the loading dock and sprinted across the overgrown parking lot. They hit the hole in the fence. Ryan dove through first, tearing his jacket on the wire. John scrambled through right behind him.
They hit the street. The enforcement sirens were louder now, echoing off the concrete buildings. They ran down the sidewalk, heading toward the main intersection.
"We need to split up!" Ryan yelled over his shoulder.
"No!" John shouted. "We stay in the blind spots!"
They reached the crosswalk. The automated traffic signal overhead was flashing yellow, malfunctioning. A corporate drone dropped rapidly from the sky, its spotlight cutting through the smog, sweeping the intersection.
"Drone!" John yelled.
He stopped, ready to pull back into the shadow of the building.
Ryan did not stop. He bolted directly into the crosswalk.
John ran after him, realizing the drone was tracking their movement. "Ryan, get out of the street!"
Ryan looked back. He saw the drone's light lock onto John.
Ryan abruptly stopped and planted his foot. As John ran past, Ryan stuck his leg out.
John hit Ryan's boot. His momentum carried him forward. He pitched forward, his arms flailing. He hit the asphalt hard. The impact knocked the wind out of him entirely. He slid across the rough street, tearing the skin off his palms and knees.
He gasped for air, paralyzed on the ground.
The drone's spotlight hit him, pinning him to the asphalt in a circle of blinding white light. A digitized voice boomed from the drone's speaker.
"REMAIN IN YOUR CURRENT POSITION. ENFORCEMENT UNITS ARE INBOUND."
John rolled onto his side. He looked up.
Ryan was standing at the edge of the light. He looked down at John. His chest was heaving. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the neural-drive. He checked it quickly, ensuring it was intact.
"I am sorry, man," Ryan said. His voice was completely flat. "I am not dying here."
Ryan turned and sprinted down the cross street, vanishing into the heavy yellow smog.
John lay on the ground. The drone hovered directly above him, its rotors kicking up the ash and dust from the street. The enforcement sirens were screaming, block away.
John forced himself to move. His entire body screamed in pain. He dragged himself out of the spotlight. The drone tracked him, but he rolled under the rusted chassis of an abandoned delivery truck parked on the curb.
The drone hovered over the truck, unable to lock onto him through the metal.
John crawled on his stomach, dragging himself through the garbage and broken glass in the gutter. He reached the opening of a narrow alleyway between two brick buildings. He pulled himself into the shadows just as the first automated enforcement vehicle screeched into the intersection.
He lay in the darkness of the alley, pressing his back against the cold brick wall. He watched the red and blue lights flash across the street. He listened to the heavy boots of the enforcement droids hitting the pavement.
He reached into his pocket.
His fingers brushed against something hard plastic.
He pulled it out. It was the neural-drive.
John stared at it in the dim light. When they tackled each other in the server room, the drive must have slid across the floor. Ryan had grabbed the wrong piece of plastic in the dark. Ryan had grabbed John's broken datapad interface.
John held the military-grade neural-drive in his bleeding hand.
He looked closely at it. The casing was cracked down the middle. The metal connector pins were bent and snapped off from when he ripped it out of the terminal.
It was destroyed. Corrupted beyond repair. Completely useless.
John let out a sound that was half-laugh, half-sob. It scraped against his dry throat.
He sat in the alley for two hours, until the sirens faded and the enforcement units moved on to the next sector.
He finally stood up. His legs felt like lead. He walked slowly, avoiding the main streets, navigating the maze of back alleys back toward his block.
The temperature was dropping rapidly. The smog advisory was lifting, blown away by a harsh, biting wind coming down from the north.
John walked up the concrete ramp of the main transit overpass. The highway below was completely empty, a vast stretch of dead infrastructure.
He stood by the railing. He looked out over the city. The sky was turning a deep, bruised purple as the sun set.
Something cold hit his cheek.
He looked up. Small, white flakes were falling from the sky. They drifted down, mixing with the lingering gray ash of the wildfires. The first snow of the year. The start of the lockdown.
He gripped the cracked plastic of the dead drive, watching the first white flakes dissolve into the gray ash of the street below, wondering how long it would take them to find him.
“He gripped the cracked plastic of the dead drive, watching the first white flakes dissolve into the gray ash of the street below, wondering how long it would take them to find him.”
