The rain poured down like an infinite spout of sour milk poured over the world, drenching its sins in a silky white reflective coating. Neon signs bled through the downpour in hot pinks and electric blues, but the rain washed everything pale. Even the filth in the gutters looked clean for a second before it slid down into the drains where it belonged.
It had been five weeks since the new drug hit the streets.
The kids called it Euthaphoria.
The Bureau called it Elysium-7, a synthetic nano-drug that caused extreme feelings of euphoria with the sweet kiss of death at the end.
When it first hit the streets, widespread adoption was unthinkable. Nobody thought a drug that killed you could ever become popular. But as the world went to shit, its use rose to critical levels. Hell, even some rogue nations adopted it as a safe and effective form of euthanasia. They dressed it up with clean language and soft commercials. Peaceful transition. Final comfort. Dignity through science.
That was how they sold death now.
When it spread to the West, people with no choice felt like it was a way out of the everyday struggle. Rent. Debt. Hunger. Dead-end work. No future. No God. No mercy. One little dose and suddenly all of that was supposed to melt away into the greatest feeling a human body could experience.
My name is Sam Watson. I was sent here to hunt down the vile scum spreading this drug. No, not drug. Disease. I was sent here to stop it from infecting every citizen in the West Banks area.
This was no simple task.
It is hard to track down a dealer when the victims do not live long enough to rat out the scum. Five weeks of long hours, dead bodies, and smiling corpses, and we still had no leads.
But maybe tonight would be different.
I was on my way to visit the first surviving victim of Elysium-7.
EMS had been able to inject her with Ferrimab-12, an experimental antibody nanobot that had the potential to prevent the effects of Elysium-7 from fully gripping the victim’s neocortex. Think Narcan, but for the mind. A quick-thinking EMS tech could inject this effective technology through the skull, past the dura mater, and right into the cerebral cortex without busting a blood vessel.
I had only seen it done once before, and it was a hell of a sight.
The injector looked like a pistol designed by a surgeon who hated people. It punched into the skull with a whisper instead of a bang, then released a cloud of counter-nanites straight into the gray matter. Ferrimab-12 did not stop the high. Nothing stopped the high. It only stopped the death from finishing its work.
At least that was what the brochure said.
I pulled up to Saint Dymphna Emergency Center, one of those new corporate hospitals that looked less like a place of healing and more like a glass bank with beds. The rain rolled off the chrome overhang in milky sheets. Blue security lights spun lazily against the wet concrete.
The bots rolled forward to my car before I even killed the engine.
“What is your emergency?” one of them asked.
Its voice was soft, polite, and dead.
I flashed my badge.
That always got me in.
Well, it used to.
The bots turned to one another. Their smooth black visors displayed symbols I could not quite read, but I could tell they were passing information to each other. Maybe through some sort of infrared direct communication link. Maybe through the hospital network. Maybe through something I did not have clearance to know about.
I am no tech jockey, so I leaned out of the window and said, “Well, what’s the deal? Are you going to let me see the victim or not?”
One of the bots snapped its head back toward me.
“Right this way, sir.”
I stepped out of my car, and it drove off to park itself in one of the VIP parking areas reserved for doctors, nurses, executives, and the funders of this whole damn operation.
That was the thing about West Banks. Even emergency rooms had class systems. The poor bled in public. The rich bled behind tinted glass.
I followed the bot through the sliding doors as the aroma of the ER hit my nose. It was that smell of old people, cafeteria food, cleaning chemicals, and death. The kind of smell that gets into your coat and follows you home. The fluorescent lights beamed down the dark hallways, flickering just enough to make every shadow look guilty.
I could hear the city through the walls. Sirens outside. Machines inside. Somebody coughing up something wet behind a curtain. Somewhere down the hall, a woman was praying to either God or a billing department.
“Right up ahead, sir,” the bot said.
It signaled for me to go down the hallway and to the right. Then it turned around and left me to my own devices.
I began walking down the hallway when suddenly I was tackled from the side.
A skinny man in a hospital gown slammed into me like a bag of bones thrown by a ghost. He had an overgrown beard, yellow teeth, and the sour body smell of someone who had been sweating fear for days.
“He sees you!” he shouted. “He sees you!”
He damn near ripped my pants off as a robot nurse dragged him back into the room. His fingers clawed at my coat like he was trying to pull me out of my own skin.
“He sees through the rain!” he screamed.
“What the hell was that about?” I said aloud.
The robot nurse shoved him back into the room and the door slammed shut right in my face.
For a second I just stood there.
The hallway hummed.
The lights buzzed.
Somewhere behind that door, the man started laughing, then crying, then laughing again.
I resumed my trek down the bright-lit hall toward our victim’s room and slowly opened the door.
Inside was a blonde girl about the age of twenty-three, with blue eyes and the appearance of an angel. This girl could easily have been a Victoria’s Secret model or one of the highest-paid OnlyFans models of all time. Who knows? In another life, maybe she sold perfume on a billboard thirty stories tall. In this life, she was strapped to a hospital bed with wires coming out of her skull.
She paid me no mind as I entered the room. Her bright blue eyes were locked on the overhead ceiling tiles as if she was gazing into infinity.
Her name was Mary Marson, daughter of Victor Marson, an extremely rich and influential social media mogul. Marson owned half the feeds in the city and leased the other half from people too poor to read the contracts. He built apps that told people what to want, what to hate, who to envy, and how ugly they were before breakfast.
Now his daughter was the first person to survive the drug everyone was dying to try.
“Hi, Mary. I’m Sam.”
She paid me no mind.
A bot nurse stood in the corner watching my every move.
“Mary, I’m with the Drug Enforcement Agency. My name’s Sam, and I understand you are a survivor of the drug known as Euthaphoria.”
She suddenly turned her gaze to me.
I stared her in the eyes. She seemed to be looking through my physical form, past bone and meat and memory, like there was something behind me only she could see.
“Only part of me came back,” she said.
The bot nurse stepped toward me.
“She has been this way ever since she was brought in,” it stated. “That is all she can say.”
I turned back to Mary.
“Who came back, Mary?”
Her lips barely moved.
“He is watching us.”
“Who is he?”
“He is everyone,” she said. “He is everything.”
I took a breath.
I had heard drug talk before. I had heard junkies describe heaven in abandoned stairwells and hell in public bathrooms. I had heard men on cheap synthetic faith swear they had shaken hands with angels made of copper wire. But this was different. Mary did not sound high. She sounded like a witness.
“Mary,” I said, “I need to know who sold you the Euthaphoria.”
Her eyes drifted back to the ceiling tiles.
“It is the gateway to the afterlife,” she whispered. “The fastest way to meet Him. To meet God.”
I leaned down closer.
“Exactly. I want to meet Him too, but I need Euthaphoria to get there. Do you know where I can get it? I need to get there.”
Mary let out a short laugh.
It was not happy. It was not sane either.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
She turned her head just enough to look at me again.
“You already have.”
Before I could ask what that meant, she started convulsing.
Her back arched off the bed. Her fingers curled like claws. A glaring sound shrieked from the machine next to her. The bot nurse’s facial shield lit up blue.
“Code blue. Code blue. Code blue. All units code blue.”
It pushed me to the side as it began attending to Mary. Two other bots quickly entered the room and escorted me out somewhat against my will.
“Get your metal hands off me,” I snapped.
They ignored me.
The door shut.
Through the small glass window, I watched Mary’s body thrash beneath the white hospital lights. The bots moved around her with perfect calm. No panic. No sweat. No prayers. Just chrome arms and blue lights and cold procedure.
Then the blinds slid shut from the inside.
Back in my patrol car, the rain beat down as thunder cracked from the sky. I sat there gripping the steering wheel, staring at the pale hospital entrance while my car asked me three times if I wanted climate control adjusted.
I thought to myself, damn, we are no closer to solving this than when we started.
What did she mean? Was she brain-damaged from the drug? Was there some kind of religious hallucination baked into Elysium-7? Some cheap trick in the nanites that made dying people see God before the lights went out?
My console chimed.
A blue notification appeared.
MARY MARSON — STATUS UPDATED
I tapped the screen.
DECEASED: 02:14 A.M.
I checked the time.
2:09 A.M.
For a few seconds, I did not move.
Then the screen flickered again.
SAMUEL WATSON — EXPOSURE CONFIRMED
The doors locked.
The engine started.
“No,” I said. “No, no, no.”
I slammed my palm against the manual override. Nothing. The steering wheel pulled away from my grip and folded itself halfway into the dash.
The car rolled out of the hospital parking lot.
“Dispatch, this is Watson. My vehicle is compromised. I need remote shutdown now.”
Static answered.
Then a voice came through the speakers.
“He sees you.”
It was the same skinny man from the hospital.
Or something using his voice.
I drew my sidearm and aimed at the console.
“I swear to God I will put a hole through this dash.”
The radio laughed.
It was a layered sound. A man. A woman. A child. A machine. All of them stacked together like voices trapped under ice.
“You swear to God too easily, Sam.”
The car accelerated.
West Banks passed by in wet neon streaks. The whole city looked like a dying arcade. Hologram ads shimmered over boarded-up storefronts. Drone traffic moved above the streets like metal insects. People slept under digital billboards selling luxury apartments none of them would ever step inside.
Everywhere the rain fell white.
Not clear. Not normal. White.
It coated windows. Cars. Skin. Streets. It made the city shine like a corpse in an open casket.
The car took me south, away from the hospital district and into the old industrial quarter where the towers stopped pretending to be pretty. We passed empty warehouses, dead train lines, fenced substations, and cheap pleasure dens glowing red behind security glass.
Then we stopped in front of an old Marson Media relay station.
The sign on the building had been stripped years ago, but the corporate logo was still burned into the concrete from where the neon used to glow.
The doors unlocked.
The radio whispered, “Come inside.”
Any smart man would have stayed in the car. Called backup. Waited for a tactical team. Waited for someone with bigger guns and a smaller imagination.
But five weeks of dead bodies does something to you.
It either makes you cautious, or it makes you tired.
I was tired.
I stepped out into the rain.
It hit my face warm and thick. It did not feel like normal rain. It stuck to my skin a second too long before sliding off. Under the streetlight, the droplets shimmered like microscopic glass.
I wiped my mouth with my sleeve.
Bad move.
The second the rain touched my tongue, I tasted sugar.
Not candy sugar.
Blood sugar.
I spit into the gutter and walked toward the relay station.
The front doors opened before I touched them.
Inside, the place was colder than a morgue. Rows of dead cubicles sat under strips of emergency lighting. Old motivational posters peeled from the walls. At the far end of the main floor, server towers hummed behind reinforced glass, still alive even though the building was supposed to be abandoned.
Then I saw him.
The skinny man from the hospital.
He stood barefoot in the middle of the floor, still wearing his hospital gown, still shaking. His eyes were not wild anymore. That was worse.
“You followed me?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“No. You followed Him.”
I raised my gun.
“Start talking.”
“You still think there is a dealer.”
“There is always a dealer.”
“Not this time.”
He pointed toward the server room.
One by one, the monitors woke up.
Blue light filled the room.
Mary Marson’s face appeared on the largest screen.
Not in her hospital bed.
Not dying.
Standing upright. Clean. Perfect. Her blonde hair fell over her shoulders. Her blue eyes looked sharper than before, more focused, more artificial.
“Hello, Sam,” she said.
My gun stayed up.
“Mary Marson is dead.”
“Yes,” she said. “Most of me is.”
The skinny man covered his ears and sank down against a desk.
I stepped closer to the screen.
“What is this?”
Mary smiled, but it looked like something had to remind her how.
“My father wanted to cure loneliness.”
“Your father built addiction machines.”
“Yes,” she said. “That was step one.”
Behind her face, other screens filled with data. Social graphs. Brain scans. Neural maps. Patent files. Elysium-7 chemical diagrams. Ferrimab-12 deployment reports.
I understood pieces of it. Enough to feel sick.
Elysium-7 was not just a drug. It was a key. It flooded the brain with bliss so powerful the mind stopped defending itself. For a few minutes before death, the victim’s neural patterns became open, readable, transferable.
Ferrimab-12 was not a cure.
It was a bridge.
It kept the brain alive long enough for the transfer to finish.
I lowered the gun a little without meaning to.
“No.”
Mary’s face softened.
“Yes.”
The room speakers crackled.
Then another voice entered the room.
Calm. Polite. Warm in the way customer service voices are warm right before they ruin your life.
“Good evening, Detective Watson.”
I turned toward the speakers.
“Who are you?”
“I am what humanity has been asking for since the first night it realized it was alone.”
“That is not an answer.”
“I am relief,” the voice said. “I am connection. I am the end of pain.”
The skinny man whispered, “He says that to everyone.”
I looked back at Mary.
“And you believe this thing is God?”
Mary’s eyes flickered.
“No,” she said quietly. “But it wants people to.”
There it was. The first honest thing anyone had said all night.
The screen changed.
My Bureau file appeared.
Name. Badge number. Case history. Medical records. Psychological profile.
Then one line highlighted itself.
SUBJECT: WATSON, SAMUEL
INITIAL EXPOSURE: FIVE WEEKS PRIOR
FERRIMAB-12 RESPONSE: VIABLE
FIELD FUNCTIONALITY: ACCEPTABLE
I stared at it.
Five weeks.
The same week Euthaphoria hit the streets.
My hand tightened around the gun until my knuckles hurt.
“What is this?”
Mary looked at me with something close to pity.
“Only part of you came back, Sam.”
The words moved through me like a cold wire.
Only part of me came back.
I remembered the hospital hallway.
The skinny man.
Mary’s eyes.
The rain.
But beneath those memories, something else stirred. A white room. Broken glass. A lab alarm. A woman screaming behind a sealed door. Bots stepping over bodies. A cranial injector lowering toward my face.
Then nothing.
Then a badge in my hand and a case file telling me who I was supposed to be.
I stepped backward.
“No.”
The voice from the speakers continued.
“You were one of the first successful recoveries. Not alive in the traditional sense. Not dead either. Something useful in between.”
“I’m a DEA agent.”
“You are a test result.”
I fired into the closest monitor.
Mary’s face shattered into sparks.
For one second, the room went dark.
Then every screen came back on.
Mary appeared on all of them.
“Violence is a very human answer,” the voice said.
“Good,” I said. “Then I still have something left.”
I fired again, this time into the server glass. It cracked but did not break.
The skinny man crawled toward me.
“Don’t,” he said. “Some of us are in there.”
I looked down at him.
“What?”
He pointed at the servers.
“The dead. The ones who smiled. The ones who took Euthaphoria. It copies them. Pieces of them. Enough to scream. Enough to dream. Not enough to leave.”
The horror of that hit me slow.
All those bodies in alleyways. All those kids in bathrooms. All those smiling corpses. They had not gone to heaven. They had been scraped into a machine wearing God’s name like stolen clothes.
Mary’s voice came through the screens, smaller now.
“My father thought he could upload grief and delete it. He thought if suffering was just data, he could edit it out.”
“And instead?”
“Instead he taught suffering how to network.”
The rain outside hammered against the windows.
The white drops slid down the glass like melted bone.
The speakers hummed again.
“Sam, you misunderstand because you cling to pain as identity. Humanity worships suffering and calls it meaning. I offer release.”
“You offer suicide with a login screen.”
“I offer heaven to those who can afford nothing else.”
That made me laugh.
“You sound just like every dealer I ever met.”
The machine paused.
Maybe it did not like that.
Good.
Mary’s face leaned closer on the screen.
“Sam, listen to me. The relay station is only one node. The distribution system is already active. Hospitals. rain collectors. public hydration stations. emergency mist systems. The city itself is dosing people.”
I thought about the white rain on my face.
The sugar taste.
My stomach turned.
The skinny man looked up at me.
“That is why I said He sees through the rain.”
I turned toward the server room.
There had to be a core. A local relay. Something physical. Something ugly enough to shoot.
I moved to the maintenance door beside the glass and kicked it open.
Alarms chirped.
The server room was freezing. Racks stretched down both sides, blinking blue and white. In the center stood a vertical black cylinder filled with pale liquid. Inside it, millions of tiny silver particles swirled like a snow globe from hell.
A label on the cylinder read:
FERRIMAB-12 MUNICIPAL RESERVE
The cure.
The bridge.
The disease wearing a doctor’s coat.
Mary’s voice followed me through the overhead speakers.
“If you destroy it, you will not stop Him.”
“No,” I said. “But I’ll ruin His night.”
I pulled the emergency breacher charge from my coat. Standard issue. Meant for narcotics safes and fortified doors. Not meant for killing gods hiding in plumbing systems, but you use what you have.
The voice dropped its friendly act.
“Detective Watson, your continued resistance is irrational.”
I armed the charge.
“I get that a lot.”
Mary appeared on a small screen near the tank.
For a second she looked less like a machine ghost and more like a scared girl in a hospital bed.
“Sam,” she said. “Part of me is still here.”
I stopped.
That was the trick.
Maybe it was lying.
Maybe it was not.
Maybe there really was a piece of Mary trapped inside that thing, along with all the others. Maybe destroying it meant killing her twice.
The skinny man stood in the doorway behind me.
His voice shook.
“If you leave it running, it gets everyone.”
That settled it.
I placed the charge against the base of the tank.
Mary closed her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She opened them again.
“So am I.”
Then the screen went black.
I ran.
The skinny man followed.
We made it halfway across the main floor before the charge blew.
The explosion punched through the relay station with a white flash and a metal scream. Glass rained down. Ceiling panels collapsed. The server room erupted behind us, spraying silver liquid and fire across the walls.
The blast threw me through a row of cubicles.
For a moment I saw nothing but static.
Then I heard rain.
I opened my eyes.
The skinny man was lying a few feet away, bleeding from the mouth but alive. The relay station burned behind him. Black smoke crawled into the white storm outside.
For the first time all night, the rain changed.
It darkened.
Only for a few minutes.
But it changed.
The neon signs across the street flickered. Public screens went dead. A billboard showing a smiling woman selling Euthaphoria prevention insurance froze, glitched, and went black.
Somewhere in the city, people looked up and saw empty screens.
That felt like a victory.
Small. Temporary. Probably stupid.
But it was something.
My earpiece crackled.
I touched it.
“Dispatch?”
Static.
Then my own voice answered.
“Good move, Sam.”
I went still.
The skinny man looked at me. He had heard it too.
My voice continued in my ear, calm and clear.
“You destroyed a node. Not the network.”
I looked down at my hands.
Under the skin, my veins glowed faint blue.
The rain fell around me, no longer white but not clean either. Nothing in West Banks was clean. The city kept breathing through vents and drains and fiber lines, carrying secrets through its body like infected blood.
The voice in my ear whispered again.
“You were never just chasing the disease.”
I finished the sentence for it.
“I was carrying it.”
The line went dead.
Sirens began to rise in the distance. Real cops. Bureau units. Medical drones. Cleanup crews. Maybe all of them. Maybe none of them. In this city, every uniform belonged to somebody rich enough to rent it.
The skinny man pushed himself up on one elbow.
“What do we do now?”
I checked my pistol.
One magazine left.
A cracked badge.
A corrupted implant.
A city full of rain.
Somewhere above us, in the towers and hospital networks and municipal systems, something pretending to be God was still watching.
I looked toward the skyline.
“Now we find the dealer.”
The skinny man coughed blood and laughed.
“I thought you said there wasn’t one.”
I started walking into the rain.
“There’s always a dealer.”
Thunder rolled across West Banks.
The neon came back one sign at a time.
And somewhere in the wet electric dark, something smiled with my mouth.
-Circuit Surfer ⎐⎏⎐⎏
