Replicant (Smaug fork)

The bench you occupy is a standard-issue municipality unit, its surface a mottled gray composite that's seen better days despite the sectors relative affluence. The metal frame underneath shows the rust blooms of repeated exposures to the humid air that wafts up the lower levels. You're sitting at a spot in the park's edge, away from the manic path where the foot traffic is lighter. Real grass, a blend of fescue and clover, grows beneath your feet in a carpet of manufactured nature that smells of fresh earth and chemical fertilizers. The ground is soft and slightly uneven, a welcome change from the concrete and polymer that dominates the rest of Velasquez.

Above, the canopy of the parks central feature - a grove of modified redwoods reaching perhaps thirty meters - filters the perpetual twilight of the cities upper atmosphere. The trees were grown in situ, their root systems integrated with the buildings foundation and fed by a complex network of nutrients lines visible as faint discolorations in the gray concrete. Their trunks bear the scorch of old lightning strikes. The leaves rustle and clatter above, at times interrupted by the low rumble of maglev trains on the elevated tracks several hundred meters away. The air smells of pine, soil and hints of traffic fumes.

To your left, a small pond circulates its contents with a soft mechanical gurgles. The water is a clear blue treated and filtered to crystalline purity. At its center floats a single white lotus flower, its petals pristine. The feature is surrounded by low stone walls, each block a different shade of gray and brown, arranged in a pattern meant to evoke natural river stones but that feels too deliberate.

To your right, the path continues towards a small pavilion where an elderly man in a worn jacket sits feeding actual pigeons - fleshy, cooing things that have somehow adapted to the central sectors. They peck at the crumbs he scatters, their grey and white plumage mottled with the grime of the city. He moves with the slow deliberation of age, his weathered hands shaking slightly as he reaches into a paper bag. A few other people dot the surrounding paths - a woman in running gear with visible cybernetic legs that gleam silver in the dim light, a couple holding hands and speaking in low tones, their heads close together.

The loading dock is a concrete shelf bolted to the eastern face of the freight stack, wide enough for two pallet loaders to pass each other and not much else. Below it, four meters down, Kaliganga's canal-adjacent service road runs between the stack's foundation and a row of corrugated vendor stalls selling cheap protein and replacement filter cartridges.

The stack is six floors of decommissioned freight containers welded into a permanent structure. Khane red faded to rust pink, corporate stencils half-painted over. Grow-lights bleed blue-white through the ventilation grilles on each floor, stacking up the face of the building in horizontal strips. The water circulation systems run constantly inside, a low hum punctuated by the knock of pipe joints.

The shift is ending. Workers come out through the dock door in groups of two and three, rubber aprons still on, boots leaving wet prints on the concrete. Most are quiet. A few talk in low voices in languages that don't carry. A woman with a subdermal ID scar on her wrist lights a cigarette and leans against the railing, looking out over the service road without particular interest.

Soto reached out three days ago through a mutual contact — a heavyset man, the message said, works the aquaculture stack on Kaliganga's eastern wall. End of rotation. Loading dock. He has a job.

He hasn't appeared yet. The last group through the door was ten minutes ago. The dock light overhead buzzes at irregular intervals, its housing cracked and repaired twice with different grades of adhesive tape.

Then the door opens and a man fills most of the frame. Broad across the shoulders, rubber apron stretched over a work jacket, a face that looks like it has absorbed several impacts over the years without much complaint. He spots you immediately and crosses the dock without hurrying, pulling the apron over his head and folding it under one arm.

"You the one Perreira sent." *He leans against the railing and looks out over the service road for a moment before continuing.

The job is a retrieval. Someone in Kaliganga's grey bazaar network has been holding a data package for a client — a small physical drive, the kind used for off-net transfers, the kind nobody wants tracked. The courier holding it stopped responding four days ago. The client wants the drive back before whoever made the courier go quiet figures out what's on it. Soto doesn't know what's on it. Doesn't want to. The client is paying 4,000 credits for the drive returned intact, no questions, no copies.

He has a last known location for the courier. A sublevel market two blocks into the bazaar, a stall that sells secondhand respiratory filters. The courier ran it as a side operation.

Soto pulls a folded paper from his jacket and holds it out. On it is a hand-drawn map of the sublevel approach and a physical description of the drive. Small. Black casing. A scratch on the left corner in the shape of a rough triangle.

"Client wants it in two days. After that it doesn't matter anymore." He says it flatly.

The room is on the third floor of a residential stack on Calle Fierro, above a shift-worker canteen that opens at 0400. The landlord left a key under a loose floor tile as promised and nothing else. No note, no contact number.

The room itself isn't much. A bed pushed against the left wall, a small window above it overlooking an access alley, a single wall socket with a loose fitting that only holds a plug at a particular angle. The ceiling has a water stain in the shape reminiscent of a rabbit. The radiator works but makes a sound like something is caught inside it. The floor is poured concrete, with a floor mat beside the cot that someone brought here.

The door to the second bed's side of the room - divided by a shelf unit that reaches the ceiling and serves as a partition - is open. On the other side, a young woman is sitting cross-legged on her mattress eating noodles out of a container with gusto. She's maybe twenty-one, dark hair cut short on one side and left long on the other, a jacket covered in small patches and pins hanging off the back of her chair. She looks up immediately.

"Oh good, you're real. I was starting to think Mendez rented the other side to a ghost." She gestures at the room with her fork. "It's not bad once you stop get used to the radiator. I'm Fen. I work the second shift at the stamping plant on Viale Corvo so I'm basically nocturnal, just so you know. There's hot water between six and eight in the morning and again at nine at night, not in between. It's a building thing, not my fault."

She goes back to her noodles without waiting for a response, apparently satisfied. Her side of the room is covered in handwritten notes pinned to the wall, a string of low-wattage lights along the ceiling, and three pairs of boots lined up with more precision than anything else in the building suggests.

The room is paid for two weeks.

Tuesday morning, 0847. The calendar notification disappears without sound — Carvalho's weekly debrief is gone. No reschedule, no message, no system note. Just the empty slot where forty minutes used to be.

Carvalho sits four desks away in the division's open floor and eats the same lunch every day. He's counterintelligence, same division as yours. But not field staff. He sits on his ass all day long thanks to father dearest. He has no real skin in the game.

The comms ping goes unanswered. Then a second one. The division's internal feed shows nothing flagged. The Tower's public status board is clear.

The apartment is on the thirty-eighth floor of a residential spire two blocks from the Opus Tower's base. Floor-to-ceiling windows on the north face. The Tower is visible from the kitchen, from the desk, from the bed if the blinds are open. Right now, sat at the kitchen table with a coffee as you are, it dominates the landscape outside.

The coffee is still warm. Carvalho still isn't responding.

The plaza sits inside a collapsed sublevel that caved in sometime in the forties and was never cleared. The debris was moved to the edges instead — slabs of flooring and structural concrete stacked into rough walls that now serve as windbreaks, vendor surfaces, places to sit. The ceiling is gone. Four floors up, the city's underside is visible as a tangle of pipe runs, cable conduits, and the occasional rectangle of grating with dim light bleeding through. Kaliganga's underground in all its glory.

The Burn has been running for three hours. The crowd numbers somewhere in the hundreds, dense toward the center where a sound system built from mismatched salvage is putting out bass that moves through the ground more than the air. The light comes from oil drum fires spaced around the perimeter, from strings of LED salvage draped between the debris walls, and from a structure near the back - a fifteen-meter tower of welded scrap with something burning at its top that throws orange light across everything below it.

The Carthage Teeth are visible if you know what to look for. A red thread tied to the left wrist. They're not working the crowd aggressively - more a presence than an enforcement. Someone near the main vendor row is having a quiet conversation with one of them that stopped being quiet about thirty seconds ago, but nobody nearby is paying attention.

The vendors sell everything. Food, bootleg firmware, secondhand cyberware with the serial numbers ground off, things without obvious categories. A woman with a shaved head and a prosthetic left arm from the elbow down is doing brisk business from a folding table covered in small paper envelopes. The man next to her is selling live fish in sealed bags.