Simon Hartfield crouched in the mouth of the alley, twenty meters north of Chop Tower’s auxiliary service entrance. The night air was a dead thing—soaked in bitter alkali, cheap solvent, and the necrotic sweetness of decaying synthetic protein. His HUD cut the scene into sections: three biometrics flagged yellow, two flagged orange, arrayed in a loose line around the dumpsters.

  The first was a man in a fresh-creased biodegradable jumpsuit, torso bulked by a ribcage of muscle implants, jaw squared by corporate dental. Name overlay: Jensen-23, Waste Management, Division 9. Real name buried three layers deep under the employee ID, but the badge photo told the story: once Marcus Jensen, now just another piece of the city’s white-collar cartilage.

  The other two were drones, but not the kind that whined and hovered and left your ears ringing. These were human, at least at some point—young, mid-twenties, both with the telltale blue line of workplace compliance neuromods visible at the jawline. One picked through a pile of refuse with gloved hands, the other ran a sorter bin, feeding it at precise intervals that matched the timestamp of the city’s garbage pulse. Their faces were blank, eyes focused on nothing but the task. Simon’s HUD flagged them as high-probability drones: corporate, stripped of most decision trees, running on pre-set routines unless interrupted.

  He squinted, toggled the vision to deep scan. Bioluminescent tattoos pulsed in the skin under the jumpsuits; microinjectors in the forearms regulated hormone surges to keep the workers compliant and energetic. Smart. Chop’s people always were.

  He adjusted his grip on the quickburn patches in his pocket, then let his shoulders relax. The key was to walk casual, like you belonged here. Maybe once, he had.

  Simon ambled into the alley, whistling the second movement of an old VR symphony, boots crunching on a crust of broken glass and desiccated organic matter. The first drone, sorting, didn’t even look up. Jensen-23 did. His head twitched, just barely—a subroutine kicking in. “Public access to this zone is restricted,” he said, the words perfectly neutral, “due to ongoing biowaste remediation.”

  Simon smiled, sharp and tired. “I’m not public. I’m lost. Big difference.”

  Jensen-23 blinked, recalculating. The drones kept working, hands moving with uncanny precision, feeding the sorter at the city’s pulse.

  “I lost something in the trash,” Simon said. He gestured behind himself, palms open, empty of threat. “Last night. Personal hardware. You seen anything like a neural band, maybe custom?” He let the word hang. “Medical necessity.”

  Jensen’s mouth twisted into what might’ve been pity, or just the echo of it. “All found items are collected at the end of each shift and transferred to Division 9’s main bin. Retrieval is permitted only by request and supporting documentation.”

  Simon shrugged, closing the distance by a step. “You know the paperwork’s a nightmare. Figured I’d check with the boots on the ground first. Didn’t want to waste the city’s time.”

  Jensen considered this. Simon watched the flicker behind his eyes, the little twitch at the jaw—debate between corporate dogma and old habits. The man was still in there, somewhere, playing chess with his own programming.

  The drone to the left caught a glint of metal in the muck, held it up. A baby’s rattle, the kind that piped out lullabies in random AI-generated languages. The drone didn’t even look at it, just dropped it in the bin. Simon watched the rattle vanish, felt the familiar spike of regret—how many of these drones started as people with families, with things to lose?

  Jensen squared up, one foot forward. “Your description is noted. Any further attempts to access this zone without proper clearance will be reported.” The words had the snap of a warning, but the tone was almost gentle. “Please refrain from interfering with the process.”

  Simon took another step. “Don’t suppose you ever find more than garbage, do you? Heard this is where they dump a lot of the tower’s bio—experiments.” He let the implication hover, let Jensen process it.

  Jensen’s face didn’t move, but the pupils dilated, just a hair. “Disposal protocols are strictly followed. All specimens are incinerated at end-of-shift, with documentation uploaded to the main server. There are no exceptions.”

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  He pressed. “Even for people?”

  A muscle jumped in Jensen’s cheek. He looked past Simon, toward the mouth of the alley, then back. “You should leave,” he said. “Now.”

  Simon gave a hollow laugh. “You know, last time I saw someone working this shift, they didn’t have a name. Just a barcode. I like that you kept yours, Jensen.”

  The man—drone—hesitated. “It’s policy to retain a human identifier, for customer service interactions.” The words were stiff, but the look in his eyes was not. For a moment, something real flickered there.

  Simon softened, let some of the edge out of his voice. “You ever run into anyone named Elara?” He made it sound like a joke. “About my height, bad attitude, probably trying to break into the tower?”

  Jensen looked at the ground. “No such name on record for recent intrusions.” He paused. “But there was a flagged event—last week. A person matching that description was sighted near the upper perimeter. Security response was immediate. Subject was not recovered.”

  Simon nodded, slow. “They always clean up after themselves, don’t they?”

  Jensen stared at the glistening garbage. “It’s what we do.”

  A fresh wind pushed through the alley, and with it came a waft of city trash, chemical and sweet and almost beautiful in its own way. The neon reflected in the puddles, painting Jensen and the drones in ghostlight. Simon glanced up at the top of the tower, where a handful of windows glowed in a pattern that looked almost organic. He wondered if Chop was watching through one of them right now.

  He lowered his voice, kept it between them. “There’s a back way in, isn’t there? Service tunnels. You ever get called up to the tower itself?”

  Jensen said nothing, but the right drone twitched, just once. Simon caught it.

  He turned to the drone. “Hey, you. What’s your clearance level?”

  The drone’s mouth worked, but no sound came out. Its jaw clicked, then it looked to Jensen, as if waiting for orders.

  Simon smiled again, this time without teeth. “You guys ever get bored, or is it just work, sleep, repeat?”

  Jensen didn’t answer. But something else did—a distant klaxon, muffled but clear: a tower alarm, cycling through its preamble. Jensen’s body stiffened, and his next words came out double-speed, the corporate lingo breaking apart at the seams.

  “Incident response required. Please vacate the zone. Please vacate the—” He stopped, shuddered, and his eyes rolled white for a second. When he came back, the voice was his own, raw and afraid. “You should go,” he said, barely audible. “They’re coming. Not for you—yet.”

  Simon felt the hairs on his arms stand up. “You mean Chop’s people?”

  Jensen nodded, urgent now. “They do maintenance sweeps. Wipe everything. Even us, if we’re contaminated. Go. Get clear.”

  Simon turned, but then paused. “If I get inside, anything I should know?”

  Jensen hesitated, then spat out a single phrase. “Vents. They use them to move samples. Everything else is locked down, but the vents aren’t on the main grid. You’ll have maybe sixty seconds between cycles.”

  Simon memorized it. “Thanks, Jensen.”

  Jensen’s eyes fluttered, the drone persona closing over him like wet concrete. “Leave,” he said, back to monotone.

  Simon melted out of the alley, boots soft on the glass. At the end, he risked one glance over his shoulder. Jensen-23 was already back at the bins, but the line of his shoulders was all wrong: hunched, defensive, waiting for something to fall out of the sky.

  Above, the tower lights snapped off in sequence, plunging the upper floors into darkness. In the alley, the neon seered into his vision.

  Simon ducked, he stayed low until he reached the next street. The foul scent of the city was more evident here than in most places. The taste of it burned the back of his throat. His HUD scrolled a new message across his vision:

  Ventilation schedule acquired. Route mapped. Risk: extreme.

  He grinned, even as the chill ran down his spine. Sometimes, the only way through was straight into the rot.