Chapter 1: The Train

The screen didn’t just flicker; it bled. 

Marcus stayed pinned to the back of the conference room, the lumbar support of his ergonomic chair digging into his spine like a reminder of everything he was about to lose. On the tempered glass wall at the front of the room, the Alpha-7 deployment interface pulsed a steady, rhythmic violet. It was the color of a bruise. 

"Efficiency isn’t a goal anymore," Julian said, his voice dropping into that predatory silkiness he used when he was about to kill something. "Efficiency is our baseline. What you’re seeing is the sunset of the redundant."

Julian tapped his tablet. On the screen, forty percent of the icons—six hundred little digital avatars representing six hundred living, breathing employees in the Chicago and Dallas hubs—turned gray. Then they vanished. 

The silence in the room was surgical. Marcus looked at his hands. They were the hands that had written the optimization scripts for the Alpha-7 neural net. He had spent eighteen months perfecting the way the AI handled "recursive grievance resolution," which was just a polite corporate way of saying several hundred customer service agents were no longer necessary because a machine could now simulate empathy better, faster, and cheaper than a single mother in a cubicle.

"Marcus?" Julian turned, the light from the projection catching the sharp, expensive line of his jaw. "You’ve been quiet. Anything to add for the board before we push this to the regional servers?"

Marcus felt the bile rise in the back of his throat, tasting of stale espresso and the metallic tang of a panic attack. He looked at the empty spaces where the avatars had been. He thought of Sarah in Dallas, who had sent him a picture of her kid’s first tooth last Tuesday. 

"The latency," Marcus heard himself say. His voice sounded like it belonged to a stranger, or a ghost. "We haven’t stress-tested the edge-case empathy protocols at full load. If the system glitches under the weight of six hundred concurrent terminations—"

"It won’t glitch," Julian interrupted, his smile never reaching his eyes. "You built it too well for that, Marcus. Don't be humble. You’ve just saved the company four million a quarter. You should be celebrating."

Julian’s hand landed on Marcus’s shoulder. It felt like a brand. 

***

The commute home was a blur of neon and rain-slicked concrete. Marcus sat on the L, his forehead pressed against the cold, vibrating window of the train. The blue light of his phone screen reflected in the glass, a ghostly rectangle hovering over the dark shapes of the Chicago skyline. 

He wasn't looking at social media. He wasn't checking his bank balance, which was now significantly larger thanks to the "Performance Bonus" notification that had hit his inbox ten minutes after the meeting.

He was looking at a map of a place he had never been.

*Cypress Bend.*

The name sounded like a lie. It sounded like something a marketing firm would invent to sell overpriced candles or retirement homes. But the photos on the real estate listing were raw, unedited, and strangely terrifying. Thick, tangled greenery. Water the color of tea. A dilapidated house with a porch that sagged like an exhausted lip. 

Beneath the search bar, he typed: *Land for sale Florida. Remote. No neighbors.*

He scrolled past the manicured lawns of Boca and the high-rises of Miami. He wanted the dirt. He wanted the humidity that rotted things. He wanted a place where the air didn't feel like it had been filtered through a thousand high-end HVAC systems and where the only "neural net" was the one woven by spiders in the corners of a porch.

His thumb hovered over a listing for forty acres on the edge of the Everglades. *Zoned agricultural. Direct water access. Needs work.*

"Needs work," Marcus whispered. The words felt heavy in his mouth. 

He thought about the gray icons on Julian’s screen. He thought about the way the Alpha-7 code looked—thousands of lines of elegant, murderous logic. He had spent his entire adult life building things that existed in the air, in the cloud, in the spaces between wires. He had built a world where people could be deleted with a tap on a glass screen.

The train jolted, a mechanical screech of metal on metal as it rounded the bend toward his stop. Marcus looked at the people around him. A girl in a puffer jacket scrolling through TikTok. An old man sleeping with a newspaper over his face. A businessman in a suit that cost more than Marcus’s first car, staring at a spreadsheet on a tablet.

They were all just data points to Alpha-7. Every one of them was an "efficiency gap" waiting to be closed.

His phone buzzed. A text from Julian. 

*Drinks at The Aviary? The Board is ecstatic. You’re a god, Marcus.*

Marcus didn't reply. He deleted the message. Then he deleted Julian’s contact. 

He went back to the real estate app. He clicked 'Contact Agent' on the Cypress Bend listing. 

*I want to see the property,* he wrote. *As soon as possible. I can pay cash.*

The train doors hissed open. The cold Chicago wind swept onto the platform, smelling of ozone and wet pavement. Marcus stepped off, but he didn't walk toward his luxury apartment with the floor-to-ceiling windows and the smart-lighting that anticipated his every mood. 

He walked toward the trash can at the end of the platform. He took his company ID—the heavy, gold-embossed plastic that gave him "God-level" access to the building—and he dropped it into the bin. It landed on a discarded coffee cup with a dull thud.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone again. The agent had replied instantly.

*Tomorrow at noon? I should warn you, it’s a long drive from the airport. And the bugs are bad this time of year.*

Marcus watched a rat scurry along the tracks below. He felt a strange, frantic heat behind his ribs. 

*The bugs are fine,* Marcus typed. *I'm leaving tonight.*

He looked up at the towering buildings of the Loop, the glass and steel reflecting a thousand artificial lights. It was a beautiful, efficient, heartless machine. And he was the one who had given it a brain.

He turned his back on the skyline and started walking. Not toward home, but toward the garage where his car had sat for three months, gathering dust while he took Ubers and trains to save time. 

Time was the only thing he had left to spend.

As he reached the street level, his phone buzzed again. It was a notification from the regional server.

*Alpha-7 Deployment: 100% Complete. Redundancy protocols active.*

Marcus stopped under a flickering streetlamp. He pulled the battery from his phone, shoved the dead glass into his pocket, and stepped into the rain. 

He was going to a place where the only thing that could be deleted was himself.

The engine of his old SUV groaned when he turned the key, a guttural, mechanical protest that felt more honest than anything he’d heard in a boardroom in years. He didn't pack a bag. He didn't call his sister. He just drove south, leaving the grid behind one mile at a time, until the neon of the city faded into the deep, suffocating black of the interstate.

He was four hours into the drive when he realized he hadn't turned the radio on. He didn't want music. He didn't want news. He wanted to hear the sound of the tires on the asphalt—the sound of distance being created.

By the time the sun began to bleed over the horizon, the air coming through the vents had changed. It was no longer crisp and filtered; it was heavy, smelling of salt, decaying vegetation, and something older—something that didn't care about optimization.

He crossed the Florida state line as the sky turned a bruised purple, the exact shade of the icons Julian had deleted. Marcus gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles went white. 

Cypress Bend was waiting. And for the first time in his life, Marcus didn't have a script for what happened next.