1:39am, Thursday the 9th October, 2132.

“What a damn mess,” said a tall, Japanese man as he climbed out of his 2097 Raijin; a sleek, silver car that did not match the scruffiness of its owner. “There’s junk everywhere.”

A second person climbed out from the opposite side, a dark-skinned woman with shoulder-length teal hair and bright green eyes. “Try not to step in anything,” she said, pulling her blue leather jacket around herself to hide from the cold.

“Well at least the rain’s stopped,” the man said, looking over the dozens of abandoned stalls in the market in front of them. “Still… Can’t believe I’ve been dragged all the way down here on tonight of all nights.”

“Happy birthday,” the woman mocked. “I wish the Captain would stop splashing me with the crap he aims at you.”

“You know how it goes – partners share the shit. Don’t like it, can always get a new one.”

“Please. Without me you wouldn’t catch a thief if he broadcast a video of himself jerking off with stolen goods.”

“That’s a vivid and slightly disturbing imagination you have there, Greaves.”

As they spoke between themselves a uniformed police officer approached them, wearing black body armour and a Katana 12 assault rifle hanging by straps across his front. “Detective Kato?” The officer asked; the holographic acronym for the Kanto Megapolis Police Department lit on his chest in bright white.

“Yes,” the tall man replied, reaching into his pocket and taking out his ID card to show. His partner did the same. “I’m Detective Sergeant Kato Akihiko, this is Detective Laura Greaves.”

The officer leaned in, examining Kato’s card more closely. “Is that written as a Japanese name, or English?”

“Japanese,” Kato replied. “Kato’s my last name.”

The officer nodded. “Well, ID checks out. Follow me, please, and I hope you brought your sick bags.”

Kato and Greaves looked at each other for a moment, then followed the officer as he walked around the corner and through an electronic door being held open by a bright yellow steel frame. Once inside, they climbed three flights of stairs that were lit by searchlights on metal stands. When they reached the third floor, a forensics team in disposable white coveralls and various other armed officers were gathering evidence and patrolling.

“What happened here, officer?” Kato asked, one hand in the pocket of his dark leather trench coat, the other scratching the side of his messy dark hair.

“Just out here,” the officer said, pointing to where a second door was held open by a second yellow frame, which led to an outside bridge.

Kato and Greaves followed the officer again; Kato nearly bumping into one of the forensics analysts who walked out of an open apartment; and moved silently along the hall until they reached the bridge.

“Holy shit,” said Greaves at the sight, and Kato shook his head in disappointment. The bridge was under the cover of a temporary, white plastic tent to protect it from the rain that had since stopped, but even that rain couldn’t wash away all the blood.

The two bodies lay there in crumpled, broken positions – entirely motionless, guns still in stiffened fingers, eyes open in shock. They had deep cuts and tears across their entire bodies, and their throats had been ripped out by what looked to be some wild beast.

“Fuck,” grumbled Kato, stepping towards them to examine. “What the hell happened here?”

“Private security from Naka-Sura Multinational were on patrol, heard gunshots being fired. Rushed up here to find a man standing over these two unlucky citizens, covered in blood. Demanded he surrender, he wouldn’t, so they shot him over the side of the bridge,” the officer explained.

“Naka-Sura? What were they doing down here?” Asked Greaves, crouching down by one of the bodies and gently lifting one of the hands that held a gun.

“They own this entire district,” the officer said. “Abandoned now, been slated for ‘deconstruction’ for eight years. Now people use it to dump whatever junk they can find, including other megacorps. Naka-Sura send guns down here to try and stop it - and stop scavengers like these two stealing their property.”

“Scavengers? That what these two were doing down here?” Kato asked, walking over to the edge of the bridge and looking over it. “I don’t see a third body. Did forensics take it already?”

“Yeah, we think so. And no,” said the officer. “That’s the thing. There was no third body. We got a description from the NS guys, but they wouldn’t stick around for you two and we couldn’t exactly make them.”

“What’s the description?” Asked Kato.

“Young, mid-twenties maybe. Caucasian, pale skin, longish dark brown hair, though it was soaked from rain so it could be lighter. Thin – not real skinny, but basically no fat on him at all. Apparently, he wore a blue shirt and pants, no shoes, like the kind they use in hospitals. And obviously, he was covered in blood.”

“No weapon? No knife? Those wounds can’t be made by nicely trimmed fingernails.”

“None that they saw, none that they can find. Only weapons were those guns, and they were fired.”

“Fired? At what, from where?”

Suddenly Greaves looked up to Kato. “This guy’s marked,” she said, flashing an ultraviolet torch over the upper arm of the body in the sleeveless jacket. In the purple light an invisible ink showed – a leopard’s head, and an R in its open mouth. “He’s a Runner.”

“Hmm,” Kato mumbled, taking out his own torch and leaning down by the second body. He tore away at the trench coat sleeve to reveal the same segment of the upper arm, then flashed his own torch on ultraviolet. The same symbol. “This guy’s a Runner too.”

“Runners? Aren’t they just some low-life gang from Tokyo Bay?” Asked the officer. “What the hell are they doing all the way down here?”

“Scavenging, it seems,” Kato said, lowering the body’s arm and then moving to the face – the open, shocked eyes, and blonde hair. “I know this guy, Greaves. This is Sebastian Cooper, also known as Coops. I jacked him trying to offload bootleg slicers. Check their pockets.”

Kato and Greaves began to delve carefully into the inner pockets of the dead men’s clothes, but Kato came up empty. “Nothing.”

“This guy has a slicer,” Greaves revealed, pulling it out of the sleeveless jacket. “But it’s broken. Looks like something tore through it.”

“A bullet?” Kato asked, looking over.

“No… No, more like a knife, maybe? Or a claw hammer. I’m not sure, but these things aren’t exactly made of jelly.”

“Well that’s one question answered,” Kato said as he looked up at the officer, then stood. “These guys were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Forensics did find signs of tampering with one of the door locks down the hall, but there’s nothing interesting in the apartment. We’ve scanned the place – doesn’t look like they even went in there,” the officer explained.

“Hey sorry, officer, uhm… What’s your name?” Kato asked.

“Nolan. Nolan Koerner.”

“Officer Koerner, you said shots were fired?”

“Yes,” Koerner replied, pointing down to the other end of the bridge. “At least two handgun rounds were fired, as well as a burst of automatic from a submachine. One of the handgun rounds hit the wall there, another ricocheted off that door and hit another wall back on this side. As far as we can tell, all of the automatic rounds hit the far wall too.”

Kato looked closely at the bullet holes. “Hm. Low spread, high accuracy. If those went through a person, there’s no way he could still be alive.”

“Kato, a third handgun round was fired based on the ammo-count on these weapons,” Greaves said, examining the guns closely. “I can’t account for that bullet, though.”

“So, these two Runners were here illegally scavenging, wrong place, wrong time. They came across someone, fired at him – and presumably missed, since he then killed them with brutal efficiency using some unknown weapon,” Kato recapped. “Naka-Sura security gets down here to find the suspect still here, covered in blood and wearing hospital gowns, then shoot him when he refuses to surrender. The force of the bullets pushes him over the bridge, where his body disappears.”

“Sounds about right to me,” Koerner said.

“Could be he’s augmented, some megacorp agent. Cybernetics, biotics, what have you,” Kato surmised. “Would account for the ruthless killing, which was damn quick according to the look on their faces. Even so, no-one, whether 100% natural home grown human or cyborg monstrosity with robo-nuts, could survive that many rounds from a submachine gun at this range. So, either someone’s lying, or the body was stolen, because not all the numbers add up here.”

“Kato, I found some strange liquid,” Greaves said, scooping a strange, pale, yet slightly milky substance from the ground on a glassfibre swab.

“What is it?” Kato asked, moving closer to look at what she had.

“I don’t know, but I can’t find much more of it. Could be that it washed away in the rain, but with all the blood out here… I’m not sure. I’ll have the lab check it out,” she said, sliding the swab into a small electronic sheath that flashed twice when locked.

“Koerner, I’ll need to speak to those NS guys,” Kato told the officer, turning to face him.

“I’ll get you their IDs,” Koerner replied, then turned around and walked back into the apartment building to speak with someone else.

“I don’t know, Kato,” Greaves said, looking out over the bridge at the empty, eery, debris-filled streets below. “Something fuckin’ weird is going on here. I don’t like it.”

“And on my fuckin’ birthday, too,” Kato sighed, leaning on the brick wall and wishing he was back at home with his cat.

3:02am, Thursday the 9th October, 2132.

“Get back in here, warugaki!” A woman shouted, leaning out over the balcony and holding closed a silk robe that barely covered her naked body.

“Get off my fuckin’ back, you damn bitch,” a man shouted back at her, as he stormed out away from the tower building to the laughing of several teenagers and low-lives hanging around on the street corner.

The woman sighed, covering her face with her hand as she turned and walked back into her apartment. Aiden watched her from on top of the large, concrete barrier that separated the rest of Kanto from the run-down district in which he woke, but it wasn’t the woman he was interested in. No – it was the clothes hanging on the line just inside the balcony door, stood there in the night air to dry. They were men’s clothes, and even if they were too big Aiden would be considerably less conspicuous than he was now.

He waited a moment until the teenagers got bored and moved away from their corner, then leapt from the edge of the barrier over to a balcony close to him. Then, carefully but with a surprising new-found agility, he climbed down a successive series of railings until he lightly touched the ground. He looked left and right, made sure the coast was clear, then ran quickly across the road to his target.

Using a large garbage disposal bin, he climbed up, then reached up for the first railing. Then, using it as a ladder, he jumped up to the next ‘rung’, the balcony where the woman had been. He peeked up over the balcony floor, looking into the lit apartment. He couldn’t see anyone, so he silently climbed over the railing and looked at the clothes hung to dry.

They were old, worn, and cheap, but they’d do fine. A pair of blue jeans, black shoes, and an unbuttoned green shirt. He grabbed them one by one, then tucked them up under his arm.

Suddenly, Aiden heard a voice shout up at him, “Oi! Bakayarou! What are you doing in my apartment?!”

The thick Japanese accent was angry, and Aiden had no desire to stay and meet it. He quickly ran through the door and inside, and the silk-robed woman who lay on the sofa screamed and jumped and threw one pillow at Aiden before using the other to shield herself. Aiden dodged, sprinted across the room and, in one swift motion, opened the apartment door, went through it, then slammed it behind him. A man down the hall suddenly looked up at him with a lit cigarette, then looked down again. Aiden ran for the stairs and down them, and saw the angry man barging up the first flight.

“What the fuck? Those are my clothes. Give them back!”

The man began to run at him, but Aiden slid around him effortlessly, leapt down to the ground, then ran out of the apartment and back onto the street. He didn’t stop there, fearing the man was chasing him, and ran down the road and turned into an alley, then ran down that and turned again into another. Eventually he felt comfortable that he escaped and paused to catch his breath.

“God damnit, Aiden…” He whispered to himself, wanting nothing more than to go home. “What the hell am I doing here?”

Eventually he calmed and changed his clothes. He shoved the old, soaking, blood-stained blue ones into a drain, then tied his shoelaces and walked back out to the sidewalk. It was quiet now, and apart from one man walking out of a seedy-looking bar and stumbling home, there was no-one there.

Aiden decided to make for the bar, the bottom floor of a tower that rose too high for him to measure. What was above it? More apartments? Hotel rooms? Maybe he could find a place to rest and figure out what was happening.

He stepped under the purple neon sign written in large Japanese kanji, with a smaller, English translation beneath it. Tanaka’s Bar. He pushed the door open, then stepped out of the cold. Inside was a quaint, old-fashioned, western-inspired drinking establishment. Lone men sat at tables around it, and the wood-top bar had a row of empty stools. In the corner, several large gambling machines with reduced volume buzzed multi-coloured light, and various advertising screens covered the walls like paintings.

Aiden approached the bar and sat down, his elbows resting on it. The bartender was a woman – late twenties, Japanese, and wearing little more than a bra and fishnet. She had a skirt, but it was dark, and most people couldn’t see it behind the bar anyway.

She was facing away from him, clearing the cabinets behind the bar, but seemed to have heard him enter and sit down. “Nomimono ga hoshii ka?” She asked, then turned around to look at him. “Oh. Sorry, we don’t get many white people here. What can I get you?”

“Uh…” Aiden began, suddenly realizing he had no money. He had nothing. “Just… Water, please?”

“Water?” The girl asked him, staring at him in partial disbelief. She rolled her eyes then turned to the tap, her long pink hair swaying behind her. “Jikan’nomuda,” she muttered as she poured him a glass of water, then turned back to him and placed it on the bar.

“Uh… Yes, thanks,” Aiden told her. He wasn’t fluent in Japanese, but he could understand enough to know what she said. ‘Time waster’, she had called him. She wasn’t wrong. He was just like all the other men in that bar now, skulking around in the early morning for drinks. No-gooders, criminals, killers – just like him. At least they had money to pay for a drink.

He sipped his water. Luckily at least that was still free. “What’s your name?” Aiden eventually asked, if only to strike up a conversation. He hadn’t realized how lonely he felt, how much he just wanted someone to talk to. “I’m Aiden.”

The woman looked at him, her eyes silver and distrustful. Was he playing some trick on her? A conman, perhaps? Why did he care about her name? “Nami,” she eventually replied. “You stink of rain and sweat, Aiden. You should take a shower.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Aiden replied, imagining how nice a shower might feel as he looked past Nami. A moment later, he noticed the screen behind the bar. It was showing an advert for some prostitution business in bright blue and pink, but that wasn’t what interested him. It was the time it displayed – the date.

3:25am, Thursday the 9th October, 2132.

Aiden gulped, feeling shock and panic wash over him. “I-Is that screen right?” He asked Nami, pointing to it.

Nami looked back at it, then rolled her eyes. “Probably. If you want sex, call them and stop bothering me. I’m not fucking you just because you pay me.”

“No, not that. I mean the time. The date,” Aiden corrected her.

Nami looked back at it again. “Yeah. Why?”

“Excuse me,” Aiden said, a sudden and severe nausea coming over him as he left the bar stool and moved quickly towards the bathroom. He pushed open the door, then let it slam behind him as he stumbled over towards one of the urinals. Suddenly he vomited – forcing thin, clear liquid out of his stomach and down the flushing drains. He groaned, wiped his mouth, then moved backwards and slid to the ground against one of the cubicles.

What the hell was happening?

He looked down at the floor between his legs, tears spotting down onto his shirt. He sniffed and wiped them away with a sleeve and tried to figure out what the hell he was going to do. He had been shot, but somehow had no injuries. He had walked around in the freezing cold and rain for hours, had stolen clothes, and had even killed two men. Why couldn’t he remember anything before that? Why didn’t he know where he was? Where was his sister, Sarah? Could she even help him? Even if she could get to Kanto he was a murderer now, and she was a police officer.

“Damn, you’re a real mess, aren’t you?”

Aiden looked up, seeing Nami standing there in the door to the men’s room. “I’ve had a rough night,” he admitted, which seemed to cause the woman to smile.

“This goes against my survival instincts but look, you’re clearly broke and need help, and I’m not the massive bitch I might appear to be. Plus… Something about you tells me you’re not an asshole. My shift ends in twenty minutes. I’ll take you to my place – you can use my shower, and call whoever you need to call.”

Aiden took in a deep breath, then climbed up to his feet. “Thank you, Nami,” he said, wiping his eyes again on his sleeve. “I’ll pay you back, I promise.”

“Just don’t make me regret it. I’ve got a gun, you know.”

“Don’t worry,” Aiden promised. “I won’t.”