The cigarette between my fingers was more than a habit—it was a moment of stillness in a city that never truly rested. At 22:48, I perched on a rooftop, watching the dystopian landscape breathe its toxic rhythm of decay and survival. Distant gunshots and wailing sirens formed a nightmarish symphony, a soundtrack to a world long abandoned by hope.

  Above me, massive freighters hung like monolithic reminders of humanity's great escape. Those gleaming vessels, perpetually suspended in the sky, were more myth than memory now, silent witnesses to a civilization's ultimate betrayal. A world split between those who ascended and those left behind to survive among the ruins.

  The stories varied. Some said it was a global ecological collapse. Others claimed a technological war so devastating that only the privileged could escape. No one alive could tell the full story—only fragments remained. No living soul had contact with the Elite, yet their massive ships remained visible from every corner of Earth, an ever-present reminder of abandonment.

  I pulled from my backpack a treasure that told a different story—a magazine from 2028, its pages a window into a future that never arrived. The cover featured a sleek BMW, all gleaming lines and impossible promise. Flying cars, clean cities, technological utopia—these were the dreams that had died long before I was born.

  Our vehicles now were Frankenstein creations, cobbled together from decades-old parts. Engines ran on Gatty, a battery brewed from organic waste that was as likely to fail as to function. We hadn't surrendered to collapse; we'd learned to build resilience from the scraps of our past. Technology wasn't dead—it had transformed, becoming something more raw, more immediate, more survival-driven. It was a perfect metaphor for our existence—makeshift, unreliable, but somehow still moving forward.

  Survival demanded adaptation. Technology was no longer about perfection, but about possibility.

  Most humans now wore their adaptations openly. Cybernetic implants had become more than a luxury—they were survival. Brain interfaces connected us to fragmented networks, muscle enhancements compensated for a world that demanded constant resilience. Rare was the person untouched by machine, and I was no exception.

  In the midst of this broken world, one corporation had emerged as a beacon of hope: MainFrame. They didn't just sell technology—they sold a promise of transcendence - A Digital Heaven. Imagine a company that could capture your consciousness, digitize your entire being - your unique Soul, and store it in vast server repositories. A second life, purchased with credits.

  My profession as a Courier sat at the heart of this system.

  When a MainFrame subscriber died, a brutal race would begin. MainFrame would ping every Courier within reach, initiating a 21-minute window to collect the Soul. No one knew exactly why this precise timeframe existed, but everyone understood the stakes. Couriers would use any means necessary to be the first to capture the departing consciousness.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Officially, MainFrame prohibited any underhanded tactics or foul play among Couriers, but the gritty reality was far removed from their idealistic edicts. The competitive scramble to secure a Soul often escalated into treacherous conflicts, with Couriers arming themselves and resorting to whatever means necessary to ensure they were the ones to capture the coveted prize.

  While most Couriers enhanced themselves for combat, I bet everything on speed and agility. My titanium-reinforced leg muscles and neural interface were precision instruments designed to navigate the urban landscape with inhuman precision. My enhancements allowed me to traverse rooftops and leap across streets, transforming the city into my personal highway.

  Upon reaching the target, a Courier would initiate the Soul transfer through a precise neural connection. A specialized receptacle, implanted at the base of the Courier's skull, would interface directly with a similar device on the deceased subscriber, creating a momentary bridge between consciousness and technology.

  The soul transfer was violent, a process that defied understanding. Something in human consciousness prevented two souls from coexisting within a single mind. A Courier would be forced to surrender a portion of their personal history with each transfer, their own memories torn away to make room for the newly captured consciousness.

  This was the unspoken contract. The subscriber's hope for digital immortality, purchased at the cost of another's personal history.

  Memories didn't simply vanish—they fractured, dissolved, rewrote themselves. A Courier might reach for a childhood memory and find only a ghost of an impression: the hint of a woman's laugh, the phantom touch of a hand. Was that a mother? A neighbor? A dream? Each soul transfer eroded personal history a little more.

  Sometimes I'd catch myself mid-conversation, suddenly uncertain of a detail I once knew intimately. A street name would slip away, a friend's face would blur. My earliest memories were now a patchwork of uncertain fragments, more fiction than fact.

  After the soul transfer, a Courier's job wasn't complete. The captured consciousness had to be delivered to the nearest MainFrame deposit center. Each successful deposit would earn a percentage of the subscriber's original subscription fee—credits that represented not just payment, but survival. The higher the tier of subscription, the more substantial the credit payout. This wasn't just a job; it was a brutal economic ecosystem where time, speed, and precision translated directly into survival, where memories were converted to Credits.

  Most Couriers lasted only a few months. I'd been doing this for two years, and the cost was mounting with each soul transferred.

  Why subject myself to this memory-consuming profession? The answer was simple: Ten million credits. A Gold Tier Subscription to MainFrame's most exclusive digital afterlife. An impossible dream in a world where the odds were always stacked against you.

  A distant gunshot echoed through the night. My watch read 23:11—no more time for a final job. I flicked my cigarette from the rooftop, watching it arc down into the street below, another small piece of debris in a city of endless decay.

  Another night. Another possibility.