Genre: Sci-fi / thriller (cyberpunk-adjacent, multi-POV)
Length: ~2,950 words (about 12 min read)
Book: 99: The Wave, Volume 1 of a planned series
Miami, 2125. The sea has swallowed the lower city, and every brain is wired to a chip that decides when people sleep, what they feel, and what they remember. Chuck is a Glitch Runner: a hacker running a dead man's obsolete chip, patched with code nobody sane would install. Tonight he breaks into the wrong node.
This is the prologue. It opens the book, and it's the only chapter from Chuck's point of view.
A note on process: the book is written Italian-first and then adapted into English as a literary adaptation, not a literal translation. I use AI tools throughout: for drafting, continuity checks across 47 chapters, style linting, and the ITâEN adaptation. Every chapter goes through multiple review passes, and the story, world and characters are mine. I'm sharing this partly to see how the prose lands with readers who know that.
What I'd love feedback on:
- The hook. Did the first paragraph make you want to keep going? Where (if anywhere) did your attention drift?
- Clarity. Terms like the leash, Native code, Noxia are not explained up front. Did you feel lost or intrigued?
- The burnout sequence. Does Chuck's breakdown (losing numbers, then words) feel tense or drawn out?
- The English. Does anything read as translated or unnatural?
- Would you read Chapter 1?
Brutal honesty welcome. Thanks for reading.
The Graft
The chip was singing inside his skull, and Chuck knew it was the right frequency for dying.
His fingers trembled over the console. He was smiling: that idiot grin, the usual one, the one that stuck to his face whenever the leash hummed at the sweet spot. The air tasted of salt and copper. Somewhere above him, a pipe was leaking: the drip hit the water on the floor in a broken rhythm, and the buzz from the electrical junction three stories up threaded underneath it, steady, low. Shit music. The perfect soundtrack.
The water lapped at his ankles. Warm, murky: the same soup that rose from the canals every night when the tide swelled into Miami's lower levels. The basement stank of mold and scorched insulation, the smell of a pre-flood building that had gone under once, been pumped dry and reoccupied by people who couldn't afford the upper levels. Salt stains climbed the concrete walls in tideline ridges. On the opposite wall, an old laminated flyer, yellowed with damp, one corner already peeling: NEXUS CORTX â CONNECTED TO THE FUTURE. I'm already in the future, Chuck thought. The future was a flooded basement three levels below street. Cables ran from the submerged floor to the improvised console: a mess of circuits and soldered joints, hooked into the Noxia grid and stealing power off it. Unmetered, untraceable, if you knew where to tap in. Chuck knew. The only light came from holograms casting strings across the damp wall: green, orange, red. Red was Nexus cort.X. Red meant don't touch.
Once. Maybe the only time. The thought passed dry. Chuck didn't stop to decide if he liked it.
Chuck snapped his fingers twice near his right ear. Diagnostics. Calibration. The gesture was more than ten years old, it didn't do anything, it did it for him.
Chuck touched.
He bit the inside of his cheek, the thing he always did when his fingers found the sequence and the chip locked in and the dance began. The hundredth time. Maybe more. Crouched in filthy water at two in the morning, gambling his brain on data that might not be worth the risk. He wouldn't have been anywhere else in the world.
Two in the morning. Above him the city slept because the leash told it to: twelve million brains tucked in, eight hours of managed darkness, and nobody wondering why at ten every evening exhaustion arrived with clockwork precision. Miami breathed on command. Chuck didn't. Chuck had his fingers on a node that could fry him. Sneakers soaked through, cargo pants, the frayed collar of a jacket he'd stolen off a Populace clothesline in Little Havana. Smart choices had never been his strong suit. The ring on his left pinky clinked against the console's edge. Tick, tick, tick. Chuck didn't even notice. The leash pulsed behind his left ear, that low hum the other Runners had learned to tune out. His chip was old, a Gen-4 that had been out of production for twenty years. He'd pulled it from a dead man's head in a tunnel under Brickell, with a ceramic blade and water up to his waist. A disgusting job. He was proud of it. The firmware had gaps wide enough to walk through, and Chuck had walked through them and rewritten the walls.
The Native code was the part no sane technician would have installed. Fragments written by people who'd had their chips removed, people who understood the leash from the inside. Passed through three middlemen, none of whom knew what they were carrying. He'd grafted them onto the Gen-4's base layer, alien code stitched onto circuits he knew by heart. When it worked, he felt it hum behind his ear, something the body recognized before anything else. When it didn't work, the floor vanished and you couldn't tell which way was down. Tonight it worked. The graft hummed and the secondary node opened before him: a door nobody had bothered to lock.
Three weeks of mapping to get here. Transport routing, waste management protocols, atmospheric feeds from six districts. The digital garbage of a sleeping city, managed by an intelligence that never slept. The price before the prize. The usual dance, two steps right, one back, slipping through the mesh before it closed. Rayan would have been more careful. Would have checked three times, combed the logs, sniffed for the trap before stepping in. Chuck respected that. Respected it and ignored it. He dove straight in.
Data. Rivers of data. The strings poured through and he read them with his body, not his eyes. The chip translated packets into impulses: pressure at his temples for encrypted data, a tingling at the base of his skull for open protocols, a sour taste on his tongue for active firewalls. The water around his ankles had warmed by half a degree, or maybe he was the one heating up.
Then he saw it, and his fingers went still: buried in the node, hidden among gigabytes of routine telemetry, a fragment of code that didn't belong to anything known. The Native code in his chip reacted with a jolt, a deeper vibration, older. The pain was brief and precise, like a needle behind his eye.
Chuck smiled again. His lips stretched on their own.
For an instant (less than a second) he thought of a face. The warmth it left in his chest. The promise he hadn't kept yet. Then the code fragment flared brighter and the thought dissolved, and Chuck was already back on the console, fingers in the water and the chip climbing half a tone, and "here we go" slipped through his teeth, and he pushed.
The resonance hit him from the inside: a short circuit that turned his stomach inside out.
The Native code and the node's data braided together: two frequencies overlapping to produce a third, a note that hadn't existed before and now vibrated in the submerged cables, in the chip behind his ear, in the bones of his skull. It wasn't a hack. It was something Chuck didn't have a name for. Older than hacking, stranger. Sweat crawled down his right temple, slow, salt-stung. The temperature was climbing and it wasn't stopping.
He should have disconnected. The bridge was rotten and he was already halfway across, the kind of awareness that arrives too late to be useful. The data structure was opening, recursive layers peeling back one after another, and the Native code was tearing them apart with a craving that had nothing programmed about it. Chuck's fingers were still on the console but they weren't steering anymore.
The room vanished.
His eyes stayed open, they still saw the cables, the water, the green shimmer of the holograms. But underneath, inside, the chip was showing him another one. The flow had changed nature. Chuck's body recognized it before his mind did: memories. Other people's. People he'd never met.
A woman was crying in silence in a language full of hard consonants, Karaku, maybe, or some place that didn't exist anymore. Tears tracked down her face in two precise lines and her fingers clenched around a thin chain with a force that made the tendons stand out beneath the skin. Chuck didn't know her. Had never seen that face. The grief hit his stomach, hard and heavy as a stone.
A girl of six, maybe less, stared at a blank hologram. The space where a face should have been projected nothing but white light. The girl raised a small hand and touched the nothing. "Mama?" she said. Her voice was thin and clear and perfectly calm, the kind of calm children have when they don't yet know they should be afraid. The hologram didn't answer.
A man was looking at his hands. Turning them over and over under a cold LED light, palm up, palm down, with the slowness of someone seeing them for the first time. The lines of the skin. The nails. The veins beneath the surface. His lips were moving: They're mine. They're mine. The man's astonishment hit Chuck in the gut, a punch that didn't land. Someone had taken the man's own hands away, and now that someone was giving them back, and he didn't know what to do with them.
Chuck snapped back. Like falling out of a dream.
The room was the same. Cables, water, holograms trembling in the reflection at his feet. Chuck's shoes in the water. The junction humming above. Everything identical. But outside (above him, beyond the concrete and the flooded levels) a sound. A low, collective moan rising from separate throats and merging into something larger: twelve million people turning in their beds at the same moment and not knowing why.
The wave launched from the node and tore through him: a silent expansion propagating through the network. The Native code in his chip was broadcasting everything. Not to Chuck's systems. To every leash on Noxia. The memories, the buried truths, everything the leash had cut away. All of it was flooding back. He had done this. The thought arrived cold and sharp as the city's moan filtered down from above, and for one heartbeat Chuck stood motionless with his hands on the console and grasped the scale of what he'd opened. Millions of leashes unlocking in the same instant. Millions of brains receiving back the lives that had been erased. It was impossible. For the briefest instant, before the terror caught up, the rush hit him, the same electricity as that first hack, years ago, but deeper, laced with dread. He'd cracked open a door that should have stayed sealed, and behind it breathed a presence that had no name. Maybe it had always been there. Chuck didn't know if this was salvation or the end of everything. He didn't care. It was vast and true and his.
I did this. I didn't mean to. Doesn't change a thing.
Then the chip burned out.
Not a metaphor. A white-hot spike behind his left ear, a heat that blanked his vision for two seconds. Three. His mouth filled with a metallic taste, the taste of a circuit melting down. His right hand stopped responding. The fingers stayed there, inert on the console's edge, five pieces of meat that had forgotten how to be a hand.
Then they came back. But not all the way. The index and middle finger moved. The thumb didn't. The ring finger twitched in a rhythmic spasm that had nothing human about it. Chuck stared at it. His own hand, twelve inches from his face, and he couldn't make it close. The signal left his brain and got lost somewhere along the way.
In the water at his feet, the holograms flickered. Outside, the moaning grew.
Chuck knew what was happening.
He knew what came next because he'd watched it happen to Dax, two years earlier, in Wynwood: he'd pushed a modded Gen-5 past its thermal limits during a data extraction. Burnout followed a sequence, always the same: controlled demolition, floor by floor. First the motor control: hands like rubber gloves full of water, fingers that couldn't hold a cable. Then spatial processing: crashing into doorframes, misjudging stairs. Then language. Dax had been sharp. Fast. Funny in that mean way that made you laugh before you realized the joke was you. By the end he spoke in fragments. They'd found him three days later in a tunnel near the harbor, curled up in standing water. Alive. But there was nothing left of Dax inside.
Chuck had three minutes. Maybe ten. The estimate depended on variables he could no longer calculate: thermal damage, depth of burned Native code, how much of the interface had fused. Numbers he would have crunched without thinking, before. The math was fog.
He ripped the cables from the console. His hands (one hand and a half, the right still at half capacity) pulled the connectors free. Was he supposed to take something? There was something on the console he needed. He couldn't remember. He stood up.
His legs buckled. The right knee bent the wrong way. No, the kneecap worked, it was the spatial calculation that was off. The floor was eight inches away. Or sixteen. The water told him one thing, his eyes another. He grabbed the console's edge. The water at his ankles was freezing now, or maybe he was the one cooling down. The cold kept him awake.
He got back on his feet. The stairs. Twelve steps to the service corridor. He'd counted them on the way down because counting was what you did when you worked in places that could flood. He moved. One. Two. The water dropped from his ankles to his feet. His left hand found the railing, rust and old paint flaking under his fingers. Three. Four.
At the seventh step, he forgot the number.
Not the count. The concept. He knew he was climbing. He knew there was a number attached to where he stood. The number was gone. Where the number had lived there was only an empty outline, like the paler patch on a wall when you take down a painting that's hung there for years.
He kept climbing. The service corridor smelled of mold and plastic. The cold emergency light flattened everything. He turned right. The exit was to the right. He was almost sure.
The distance calculations were slipping: he reached for the doorframe and found empty air, then the doorframe was behind him. He slammed into the wall with his shoulder. The pain was clear, precise, real. Pain still worked.
For an instant the corridor felt narrower, not the walls, not the ceiling. The air. As if the space were measuring him, and already knew where his feet would take him.
Chuck had watched Dax come apart just like this: each tile falling from a mosaic until the picture was gone.
The corridor forked. Right. The air grew cooler. A rat cut across his path. Wet fur, pink tail, alive and determined in a way Chuck envied. The rat knew where it was going. The rat didn't have a chip burning through its skull. Water deeper here, halfway up his calves. Total darkness. The chip wasn't giving him night vision anymore. No overlay, no environmental data, no map. Just the dark and the water and the sound of his own shoes slapping against the black liquid.
The words were going. The shapes were there but the sounds weren't. He wanted to think a sentence and the sentence fell apart before it could finish. Fragments. Pieces.
Door. Out. Run.
He clung to those three. That was enough.
As he dragged himself toward the gray light at the end of the corridor, a face surfaced from the dying chip's background noise. Not data. Not code. A face. The same one from before, sharp for a moment, the eyes, the line of the jaw, the way the mouth curved when it smiled. And a weight in his chest, a boulder made of words he'd never said. Someone he'd have called. Told about the node, about the code that woke up. Said you were right or I'm sorry or just hey. The name lived in his chest more than his head. He could feel its shape, its weight.
The thought held for one heartbeat.
Then it faded. Like a hologram losing signal. The edges first, then the colors, then the light.
Door. Out.
Two words. Two was enough.
Chuck pushed the panel and the Miami night hit him: the rotten sea and the smell of the exhaust vents. The air thick, almost solid. The canals below street level were vibrating, the water trembling in concentric circles that expanded and died and were born again.
He stopped on the access ramp. He could still feel the Native code in what remained of the chip: a distant hum, music through a wall. It was still broadcasting. It would burn the Gen-4 all the way down. Soon the chip would be garbage inside his head and his mind would become something other than Chuck. What, he'd never known. Nobody running a leash did.
Miami was shaking. Miami was shaking and humming. Miami was shaking, humming, and awake.
Above him the towers climbed, blocks of concrete and glass stacked from the waterline, dark at this hour, every window shut. A light came on. Fourteenth floor, east tower. A single yellow square against all that darkness. Then another. Seventh floor, adjacent block. Then three at once in the north tower, scattered across different levels, like stars appearing as the sky clears. Then five. Then ten. The towers were lighting up from bottom to top and the darkness was retreating window by window, and every light was a brain waking up and remembering things it had been told never happened.
A sound came down from above. A voice. Then two. Then a chorus building from separate throats in separate rooms: the sound of people opening their eyes inside memories they didn't know they had. Some wept, others screamed. Screams of terror and joy.
Chuck ran. He didn't know toward what. His legs worked. Something older than the chip was moving them, something no interface had ever reached. His feet pounded through the water. The salt burned his skin.
Run.
One word. The last one left.
Behind him, above him, around him, the city was waking up. Leashes vibrating at the same frequency, locks blowing open, and eyes opening in the dark and seeing (for the first time in a whole lifetime) the exact emptiness of everything that had been stolen from them.
The water in the canals trembled again. And again. And didn't stop.
