12:05am, Thursday the 9th October, 2132.

The bowels of Kanto City cried in the night, a forest of engineering and disposed machinery screeching with strain and rust. As it passed crescendo a man’s scream joined in; a terrified, high-pitched wail reaching out into darkness as he struggled to clamber and climb from his pit.

When the sounds of advanced industry waned, so too did the man’s voice. Soon there was nothing more than the rain, falling through the shadows of great, black, angled towers that reached so high they disappeared in dark clouds. Far above him bridges, pipes, and metal structures formed incomplete ceilings, lit only by the lambent of coloured words and signs; neon ghosts in distant fade. Rainwater coagulated on any surface it could find, then poured down from corners or cracks - thick, freezing streams splashing onto an ancient and forgotten ground.

Aiden King was curled into a foetal position amidst garbage and discarded electronics, hugging his arms and shivering from the wet and the cold. His entire body burned from the inside, like acid was spilling into his bloodstream, and his head was being pulverised by something that he wished would kill him. His eyes were clenched shut, and he could do nothing but lie there and wish that whatever was happening to him would end.

Footsteps. The unmistakable sound of boots hitting wet ground, and the patter of rain hitting plastic or rubber coat. Aiden’s pain suddenly dulled, and he turned his head just enough to look at the source of the noise. A figure wearing a dark green coat moved across a walkway high above him, and paused under a light just long enough to light a cigarette under his hood. Then, without ever noticing Aiden was there, he disappeared through an automatic steel door.

“H-Help me,” Aiden tried to say, though through the chattering cold his voice was too weak to be heard. Eventually he reached out a pale wet hand and tried to grab something, anything from the nearby scrap that he might use. There was no thought process behind this, no plan of action – just an overwhelming desire to find something that could ease his suffering.

He found nothing of value. A broken screen, a rusting rod of metal, a discarded firearm part. Eventually he dragged his legs and managed to get up to his knees, where a pale, almost milky substance fell from his half-open mouth. He spat the rest out, watching thoughtlessly as it mixed away in the rain.

A few moments later, Aiden steadied himself to his feet. His eyes burned, and he wiped them with the sleeve of what looked to be a pale blue gown. The questions suddenly came to him: where was he? Why was he wearing clothes that weren’t his?

He began to walk. He stumbled at first, a dizziness filling his head that made the dark street sway dramatically with his movement, but after several seconds it went, and he became clear-headed for the first time since he woke. Where was he? Kanto – he knew that, though he didn’t know how. But where? In some lower, forgotten part of the city? Some abandoned area or complex? Where was everyone? Even run-down neighbourhoods had homeless people, stray animals or gangsters roaming the streets keeping look out. Apart from that one figure, all Aiden had seen were piles of trash.

There were no windows in the buildings he walked past, just broken screens. Occasionally the inescapable world of advertisement revealed itself in a flickering, stuttering video or product placement, but Aiden limped past them. Eventually he found an electronic door, but no amount of knocking, moving or pressing on the keypad could get it to open. It showed no signs of life – a piece of dead circuitry entombed in a wall of concrete and graphene. He left it and moved on.

Several minutes later he came across a small, open area. It was barely as wide as a four-lane road and not much longer, but it was filled with the skeletons of abandoned food and market stalls. The vast majority of any discernible colour had been stripped from them from signs, to paintwork, to posters; only steel and rust remained, but on the far side Aiden saw a dim yellow light in a perpetual cycle of waxing and waning. He walked closer, peering through the rain to get a better view, and realized that an automatic door was being stopped from fully closing by a cinderblock.

Aiden approached, reached his arm into the gap between the door, and forced it open wide enough for him to climb through into an interior hallway. Like the market square, the hallway was abandoned and stripped of anything that could have given it character, but it was filled with green bags of garbage and abandoned papers. A dim, flickering yellow light came from the ceiling above, and stained stairs at the side climbed up to further floors. It was quiet in there, and though cold it was still significantly warmer than it had been in the rain.

He felt compelled to go up, so he climbed the stairs out of the trash and the debris. On the first floor he encountered what looked to be apartment doors, but somehow knew that no-one was living in them. They were locked but abandoned, so Aiden went up again. On the second floor it was a similar story, except this time a dark cat was sat at the end of the hall, cleaning itself with its tongue. It stopped when it noticed Aiden and stared at him silently with blue-green eyes until it lost interest, turned and walked around a corner. For a moment he considered following it, but a sudden noise on a floor above him led him back around to another flight of steps.

It was difficult for him to make out what the noise was. Some clatter of some sort, or a thud, and looking up to try and see it he climbed the stairs two at a time, his hand reaching to hold the railing.

“Fuckin’ piece o’ junk,” said a hushed, masculine voice. “Kuso kurae!”

“Calm down,” said another, barely more than a whisper. “Just try it again.”

“Shinjimae, Cooper,” the first replied.

By this point Aiden had reached near the top of the stairs to find there was no light, and his face was just high enough to look over the floor and see two men by a door opposite him. One man, with blonde hair and a grey trench-coat, stood over a second man who was skulking down in the dark and operating some handheld electronic box. This second man wore a red, sleeveless, padded jacket, and was holding the box against the door’s electronic keypad while manipulating a pair of naked wires with his other hand.

“You know I can’t understand your ancient fuckin’ language,” the blonde man complained. “Just get it done.”

They both had coastal Kanto accents, a mixture between 21st century Japanese and American-English, formed when migrants had created a low-class, multi-cultural community around the old Tokyo Bay. That probably meant only one thing – they were spice addicts at best, gangsters at worst. Aiden stayed as quiet as he possibly could, trying to decide whether to ask them for help or not. No-one would ever find his body down there.

“Maybe if this piece of shit slicer wasn’t as old as my language, we’d be through this door by now,” hissed the crouched man. Then suddenly, “Got it!”

Electricity crackled, and the locked door slid open with a hum. The crouching man stood, slipping the ‘slicer’ back into his pocket, and peering through into the apartment with the other man at his side.

“It looks empty,” the blonde man said.

“It can’t be. There’s gotta be something in there. Let’s look.”

“I swear to god, if you dragged me all the way down to the steels for a ghost haul, I’m gonna kill you myself.”

Aiden watched as the two men stepped through the door, then crept up to the top of the stairs. He stuck to the darkest shadows, trying to conceal himself from whoever the scavengers were. He decided it was best to leave them, that nothing good would come from them finding out he was there. When he looked down to the far end of the hallway, he saw a second door that was stuck completely open and led out onto a walkway that crossed the street outside. The rain was so heavy he could see it from the stairway, and the roaring of a storm filled the air.

Step by step, he crept down the hall towards the outside. The whispering voices of the scavengers faded, and the freezing chill of the outside grew with every foot.

“I can’t believe it, fuckin’ empty.”

The voice was back, and loud, and in the hallway, and instinctively Aiden froze there in the darkness, not daring even breathe. He was as silent as death itself and just hoped they didn’t look his way, didn’t see his dark figure against the rain.

“You led me out here – again – for nothing. That’s it, man. I’m done with this shit. You can find another partner next ti- what the fuck is that?”

Aiden panicked. His flight response kicked in, and suddenly he was sprinting out into the downpour and across the walkway. Something snapped past him, then he heard two deafeningly loud gunshots ring out into the night. One bullet hit the concrete wall to his front, another hit the metal door and ricocheted off elsewhere. Then there was a third shot, and Aiden felt it tear through his right shoulder.

The impact of the bullet almost knocked him forward off his feet, but he maintained composure. Hot, pale liquid began to spray from his wound, and it spilled out down his clothes and onto his feet. Then, as though it had been a delayed reaction, his shoulder began to burn unbearably, and he felt a pain that made him scream. He heard the men shout behind him, but ignored them, and stumbled forward towards the closed door to slam his fist against it and beg it to open. It didn’t, then several more shots were fired.

A second later, Aiden was lying in the rain on his front, barely able to move his body. He twitched, and groaned, and tried desperately to fight – to live – but he could do nothing but bleed. He felt a boot press against his side and, too weak to stop it, felt it roll him over onto his back. He looked up at the two men, who still had their handguns ready, and watched as they searched him with their eyes.

“Yo, who the fuck is this?” Asked the man in the red.

“No idea. Hey, buddy, what the hell are you doing here? Shit man, he’s a freaking gonner. Look at those holes,” the blonde man said.

“Hey Coops, we need to get out of here. Someone will have heard those shots. PMCs will be down here any second now.”

“I know, I know. Can’t leave this guy though. If he survives, he might talk.”

“Then fuckin’ shoot him, man!”

The blonde man aimed his gun down at Aiden’s face. “Sorry, kid,” he said, then pulled the trigger.

Aiden felt warm, hot blood in his mouth. Everything was dark now – had he been killed? Or was he simply about to die; in those final few seconds before his brain ceased to function, and his soul free to leave.

There was no pain anymore, that was good. And he could see a light now, down the dark tunnel. It was bright and warm even in the rain, and it was growing closer, more welcoming. All he had to do was go into it… But something told him not to. He turned around, slowly, and began to realize he was standing. Strange… Hadn’t he been lying there on the ground?

In fact, he could see where he was lying now. He saw the pale liquid on the floor, and the soundless rain hit the concrete under his feet. It wasn’t cold anymore. It wasn’t hot either, but it wasn’t cold. And his body wasn’t there.

There were bodies though. One in a sleeveless red jacket, and another in a torn trenchcoat, with their guns still by their hands. Their blood was all over the bridge, being washed away by the rain, but the tears in their flesh were permanent. Dead, both of them, but by whose hand? By his? He raised his hands towards his face and looked at them; looked at how they were red, how blood had congealed beneath his fingernails. He looked at the hole in his blue shirt, and the unmarked, pale flesh beneath it.

As the realization that he had killed those two men came to him, so did the sounds of his environment. His shadow was cast tall on the far side of the bridge by a bright light coming from his rear, and as he heard the rain again, he turned back to the hallway with blood smeared over the bottom half of his face.

“Get down! On your knees, now!” The masked soldiers shouted, the neon blue eyes of their helmets, their spotlights, and their submachine guns aimed directly at him.

Aiden swallowed again, feeling the warm blood creep down his throat, and began to wonder what beast’s skin he now wore. He began edging backwards, tried to raise his hands to display his intent to surrender, but the soldiers were scared. He could see the fear in them, the way they moved, and as he opened his mouth to talk, they opened fire.

Their bullets tore through him, forced him back to the side of the bridge, then pushed him over the edge.