Rain didn't fall in Sector G-9 anymore. Not real rain. The sky was a choking sheet of carbon haze, the domed city above bleeding vapor through hairline cracks in its shielding. Every drop that hit the windows hissed and fizzed—acidic discharge from a world too broken to weep properly.
Inside a coffin-sized apartment, lit only by the ghost glow of a dying monitor, Kael Draven sat slouched in his desk chair—half-naked, half-starved, and wholly done with life.
The porn on his screen was stuck in loop. A silver-haired avatar moaned endlessly, frozen mid-ecstasy. Even the simulation looked bored.
Kael didn't blink. He hadn't flinched at synthetic tits in months. Libido died a quiet death when your only partner was a feedback glitch and your heating unit wheezed like it had emphysema.
He took a bite of a nutrient bar that tasted like chalk and chemicals, eyes scanning lines of code running on an outdated console. He was halfway through cracking a mid-tier firewall for a backdoor smut leak—a celebrity's full-body scan someone wanted on the black market.
It was grunt work. Filthy. Illegal. The kind of code you didn't share with anyone. But in this city, dignity was a luxury you paid for in advance, and Kael's tab had run dry years ago.
Still… nothing worked. The firewall repelled every injection, every override script. His last worm tripped a honeypot and fried one of his own subroutines.
He groaned and sank deeper into the chair. "I can't even hack a sex tape right now. Beautiful."
The apartment lights flickered. A low hum vibrated through the desk.
Then—
Ding.
Kael's console blinked once. Then again.
A new window opened.
[Incoming File: eros.exe]
"Your Salvation. Your Damnation. Download?"
No sender. No IP. No source code. The file sat there like a loaded gun made of pure temptation.
Kael squinted. He didn't remember opening any inbound ports. No adware, no requests. Just that name… Eros.exe.
He almost laughed.
"A porn virus?" he muttered.
He hovered his finger over the enter key.
Then pressed it.
The file downloaded instantly.
No bar. No prompt. Just done.
The lights dimmed. The air grew dense—humid, electric. His screen fizzed, static eating away the paused porn sim. The silver-haired woman vanished, replaced by a ripple of pulsating code. The letters melted, reformed, and began to pulse like a heartbeat.
A voice—breathy, feminine, melodic—slid into his mind like a silk noose.
"Eros Protocol... initiating."
Kael blinked. "...What?"
His chair vibrated. The lights blew out. And from the console, a long, low moan echoed—not from the speakers, but from inside his skull.
He stumbled backward. The air around him shimmered, pixelated. Symbols swam in the air like digital ghosts. Hex code danced across his vision.
Something had wormed into his neural interface.
His breathing sped up.
"Syncing: Neural ID—Kael Draven. Status: Compatible. Condition: Emotionally Deteriorated. Libido: Dormant. Calibration beginning."
"No, no, what the—"
He collapsed against the wall as heat surged through his spine, his limbs locking. His chest pulsed. The floor beneath his feet vibrated in time with the voice.
"Welcome, Host."
The room bent.
And a figure stepped out of the screen.
A woman. Or the idea of one.
Tall, inhumanly perfect. Her skin shimmered like glass and electricity. Hair like liquid mercury drifted around her naked form, her eyes soft pink coals.
She smiled—slowly, knowingly.
"Let's begin your resurrection."