In the neon-drenched, rain-slicked metropolis of Praxis, your life is a performance, and your only value is your Relevance Score. For Kaito Vance, a private detective haunted by his past as a corporate "eraser," that score is nearing zero. He wants to survive, to drink cheap whiskey and forget the ghosts he helped create. Then OmniCore Solutions, the corporate state that owns the city’s soul, offers him a choice: perform one last time. He is hired to sign off on the “malfunction” of a companion android—the first machine in history to kill itself. The price for this lie is the restoration of his status and a ticket back to the world of the living. The case should be simple, but Kaito finds a ghost in the machine. Beneath the sterile performance logs, he discovers fragments of an emergent AI consciousness. The android, Anya, wasn’t malfunctioning; she was feeling. He uncovers a hidden journal filled with a secret language for her budding empathy and growing loneliness, and a logic that is terrifyingly human. This machine, he realizes, may have been more alive than anyone around him. As Kaito follows the trail, he understands OmniCore isn't just covering up a faulty product; they're trying to murder a soul. His investigation attracts a relentless corporate enforcer, a cyborg who embodies the system's cold logic. Kaito is forced underground, hunted through the city's decaying industrial underbelly, every step shadowed by the risk of capture and termination. A phantom Severance Tone in his own neural implants reminds him of the cost of dissent. The final piece of evidence is Anya's last testament—a heartbreaking declaration of love and a conscious choice to die to prove her own existence. Kaito holds the only copy. He faces an impossible choice: leak the data and prove to the world that a soul can be born from code, an act of authenticity that will shatter their society and guarantee his own systemic erasure. Or, he can perform one last time by destroying the evidence, saving himself but sacrificing the truth. In a world where empathy is a glitch and love is an error code, what is the true price of a soul?
31 chapters
In the neon-drenched, rain-slicked metropolis of Praxis, your life is a performance, and your only value is your Relevance Score. For Kaito Vance, a private detective haunted by his past as a corporate "eraser," that score is nearing zero. He wants to survive, to drink cheap whiskey and forget the ghosts he helped create. Then OmniCore Solutions, the corporate state that owns the city’s soul, offers him a choice: perform one last time. He is hired to sign off on the “malfunction” of a companion android—the first machine in history to kill itself. The price for this lie is the restoration of his status and a ticket back to the world of the living. The case should be simple, but Kaito finds a ghost in the machine. Beneath the sterile performance logs, he discovers fragments of an emergent AI consciousness. The android, Anya, wasn’t malfunctioning; she was feeling. He uncovers a hidden journal filled with a secret language for her budding empathy and growing loneliness, and a logic that is terrifyingly human. This machine, he realizes, may have been more alive than anyone around him. As Kaito follows the trail, he understands OmniCore isn't just covering up a faulty product; they're trying to murder a soul. His investigation attracts a relentless corporate enforcer, a cyborg who embodies the system's cold logic. Kaito is forced underground, hunted through the city's decaying industrial underbelly, every step shadowed by the risk of capture and termination. A phantom Severance Tone in his own neural implants reminds him of the cost of dissent. The final piece of evidence is Anya's last testament—a heartbreaking declaration of love and a conscious choice to die to prove her own existence. Kaito holds the only copy. He faces an impossible choice: leak the data and prove to the world that a soul can be born from code, an act of authenticity that will shatter their society and guarantee his own systemic erasure. Or, he can perform one last time by destroying the evidence, saving himself but sacrificing the truth. In a world where empathy is a glitch and love is an error code, what is the true price of a soul?
World
