​Chapter 6. I’m Here

Mark reached the Old City around four. The noise was ebbing away: the bars had already flung their doors open, but people still preferred to stay home, avoiding the streets.

The car crawled through the alleys between the worn buildings. The dim walls were eaten through by moisture, mold darkening in the cracks here and there. His cuff chirped briefly — they had arrived.

Babylon hid in a narrow alley between two residential blocks. By the wall sat an overflowing trash container; on the wet tiles lay soggy cigarette butts and dark stains nobody wanted to identify. The door blended with the facade, revealed only by a flickering sign. Red neon blinked through the rain, splashing crimson across the puddles — more blinding than illuminating.

The bar looked exactly as Mark had imagined: half respectable by Ring standards and half a den. Inside, a dense, sticky smell hung in the air — tobacco mixed with a cloying sweetness. The music played low; the bass thudded dully through the floor and walls. The dim lights created an intimate, almost conspiratorial atmosphere.

Behind the counter worked a thin bartender equipped with old-model bionic arms — bare steel without synthetic skin. His movements were pure muscle memory: wipe a glass, mix a drink, take cash, repeat.

Unlike the City, where payments had long been handled through cuffs and patches, here they still used pre-war paper cash. Police were given small amounts of cash — for work in the Ring. Mark ordered a whiskey, carried it to an empty table, and scanned the room.

Tables lined the walls, leaving the center open — a space where, judging by the stains on the floor, fights broke out more often than dancing.

At the entrance sat three men in leather jackets — broad-shouldered, alert, their hands resting on their knees. By the counter stood two prostitutes, dressed far too brightly for this place: cheap makeup, tired eyes. The rest of the patrons kept to the shadows, drinking in silence, barely paying attention to anyone. They all noticed Mark’s arrival, but their interest faded quickly.

The only one who caught Mark’s attention sat in the right corner. Around thirty, neatly dressed: a crisp collar, carefully combed hair. On the surface — an ordinary visitor, but Mark’s instincts didn’t usually fail him.

The man sat with perfect posture, hands folded neatly on his knees. People didn’t sit like that in bars. He surveyed the room with cold, methodical precision — like someone waiting for a specific person to walk in. Even the way he drank was strange: precise, measured sips.

Mark watched him through the reflection in the polished metal counter. Nothing changed. The man didn’t join conversations, didn’t react to laughter or shouting, existing as if in a separate layer of reality, a little detached from the room around him. Men like that usually went for the girls, but he didn’t even glance at them.

Outwardly — nothing unusual for a Ring local. No patch, no cuff. But his movements were precise to the millimeter, too exact for a normal human.

The door swung open, letting in icy air and the smell of wet asphalt. On the threshold appeared an unshaven man in greasy clothing, with the face of a lifelong alcoholic. His left arm was missing — the sleeve of his jacket hung empty.

The one in the corner raised his head a full second before the hinges creaked. He didn’t even turn toward the sound. And he didn’t even have a patch.

Borg, Mark thought. Fully rebuilt. Rumor had it the old services kept them in the shadows — the ones that survived the war but stayed outside any official structures on the surface.

Ordinary augs had a narrow strip of skull removed and replaced with a controller — a thin plate running along the temple. It gradually intertwined with their neurons, pushing them out until the organic dissolved into the synthetic. The controller maintained a link to the Contour, making a person part of it.

When the substitution reached thirty percent, the device was swapped: excess electronics removed, leaving a glowing line on the skin — the generation’s scar.

Borgs were probably patched differently: not through gradual substitution, but through a crude, accelerated procedure. In a month or two, a brain could be replaced entirely. Maybe faster. No strip on the temple, no glowing scar.

The man lowered his gaze. The movement was too smooth, without hesitation — an economy of motion unnatural for a human being. The one-armed drunk by the door didn’t interest him.

Partial augs still kept a personality. Most of the time. In Diana and the others, Mark only occasionally caught oddities: overly even intonations, shifts in behavior. Maybe he was nitpicking, seeing what wasn’t there. But Mark had never met a borg and knew almost nothing about them. Some said that after the express-replacement the person stayed themselves — only faster, sharper, more focused. Others insisted that nothing human remained at all: just a shell, an empty vessel run by a server.

He wondered: if borgs had no neurons left at all, what happened to memory? Was it stored in the cloud? And what if the server crashed one day, or someone decided to copy your life into a stranger’s head — and erase yours?

Mark was lucky — the reflection in the counter let him watch without being noticed. The borg sat motionless, his eyes fixed somewhere deep in the room, as if he’d powered down. He had to be careful. Even ordinary augs had altered perception: the patch suggested where to look, caught eyelid tremors, micro-movements, muscle tension.

And the man in the corner was far more than an aug.

Trying not to think about anything specific, Mark took a sip and checked whether the bartender was coming. On an old screen a typical City-Contour-generated program was playing: synth-actors, sterile emotions — everything so correct it looked alien here.

The borg continued his steady scan of the room. And then he slipped — his gaze lingered on the bar counter a fraction of a second longer than it should have.

He’d been spotted. No movement: not his head, not his body. Just a microsecond delay, and something flipped inside — like a target lock. Outwardly the borg remained detached, but there was a tight, focused tension inside that stillness.

Mark let his eyes drop, as if studying his glass. He rotated it by the rim, deliberately loosening his shoulders, shifting his posture, though inside everything had tightened.

The man didn’t move. But Mark could feel he’d been marked — a quiet entry somewhere in an invisible ledger.

At that moment, the door swung open again, and a young woman around twenty-five walked in with the wet wind. Her black coat dragged street water behind her, bright pink strands plastered to her cheeks. She swept her gaze across the room — fast, registering faces. She lingered on Mark a second longer.

Great. I look like a cop.

The borg raised his head smoothly, with the unerring precision of a sensor. He stood, slid the chair back with care, and moved after the girl. No attempt at conversation, no hint of flirting — just following at a measured distance.

At the counter, she exchanged a few words with the bartender and headed toward the back rooms. The borg adjusted his step and kept going with the same precise rhythm.

Mark finished his whiskey, set the glass down, and pretended to check his cuff for messages. He waited. Gave them a minute, maybe two, before getting up and heading toward the place where the girl and her shadow had disappeared.

The corridor was narrow and dim, heavy with the smell of sweat and tobacco smoke. Faded numbers lined the doors along the walls. Behind one door, music thudded; from another seeped a man’s bass and a woman’s laughter. The sounds merged into a viscous hum of tired, hopeless lust.

At the end of the corridor, a door slammed — someone had slipped out through the back exit. A lock clicked. The last door remained slightly ajar.

Moving carefully, Mark nudged it with his fingertips and looked inside.

The room was cramped and miserable. A narrow bed with a greasy blanket, a battered nightstand, a sagging armchair by the wall — everything old, stained, scavenged — the kind of furniture people in the Ring dragged out of abandoned apartments. On the nightstand: black candles and a deck of tarot cards, several scattered across the filthy floor.

And on the bed — a body. The same girl. The pink in her hair was still barely visible, though most of her head was gone. She’d chosen pink to look more alive, but death had outshone any color.

Position: on her back, arms spread to the sides. Visible injuries: extensive cranial trauma, presumably a large-caliber gunshot wound — he noted automatically, surprised that the bureaucratic phrasing from his past still lived in his mind. Protocols weren’t needed anymore: wristbands and drones recorded and analyzed everything themselves.

The splatter on the wall indicated a point-blank shot. No signs of struggle: the furniture hadn’t moved, and there wasn’t a scratch on her hands. The girl hadn’t expected an attack and hadn’t resisted.

The body had been shot with surgical precision: rounds placed in the heart, liver, lungs. Each one calculated for maximum damage, no waste. The head had taken the worst: what remained was a mash of shattered skull and pink tufts.

Augs almost never miss. Borgs — even less so.

Mark shut his eyes, trying to steady himself, pulling the heavy, nauseating air into his lungs. In all his years on the force, he’d seen plenty of bodies, but what lay before him wasn’t a murder. It was an execution.

What now? He wouldn’t catch the borg, and protocol said this was a job for the strike units. The man hadn’t been interested in Mark — only in the girl.

Carefully avoiding the sticky patches underfoot, he stepped into the room. Something still crunched beneath his boot. By the nightstand, among the scattered cards, lay a slim book. No title, matte-black cover.

Mark picked it up and flipped through it. The pages were covered in thin, feminine handwriting: Latin mixed with some unrecognizable characters. Between the lines — drawings: figures, geometric circles, diagrams of the human body with marked points. The pages bore traces of edits — the writer had rewritten and corrected her text many times.

Mark skimmed quickly, not reading, until a familiar symbol caught his eye. A circle — a half-cross — a serpent. No caption, no explanation. He hurriedly slipped the book into his pocket.

Now, according to protocol — no actions. Turn around and walk away. But this bar was the only lead left after last night. What if this murder was exactly why he’d been drawn here?

And Mark said aloud:

“Call the Center. Homicide at Babylon Bar.”

“Received,” the comm replied.

A few seconds passed.

“Confirmed.”

A blatant violation of protocol. Direct contact with the Center was forbidden for rank-and-file officers. Such calls were logged automatically, and punishment was... inevitable. He might even get fired. But the words were already spoken, and there was no way back.

He leaned over the body and searched it. Nothing. No cuff, no documents. Mark was about to straighten up — when he caught movement in the corner of his eye. He froze.

Fingers. They seemed to twitch. Holding his breath, Mark stared — the hand lay still. Maybe he imagined it?

He shifted his gaze. Her head, which a second ago had been a shredded mass of blood and bone, was intact. Resting neatly on the pillow, framed by clean pink strands, looking straight at him. And then, right before his eyes, her face began to rot.

The skin turned gray, mottled with livid patches, swelling until it stretched to the breaking point. Then it split. A jagged tear crawled across her cheek, oozing black, oily pus. White maggots spilled from her eyes like rice.

Her jaw slowly, with a dry click, opened — jerking in unnatural spasms, like a broken doll’s. And that decaying mask smiled at him.

“Mark,” the decomposing lips whispered, and his blood froze at the sheer impossibility of it. The words came from everywhere at once, born directly inside his skull.

“I’m here.”

Her cheek peeled away, exposing blackened bone, and one eye slid from the socket in a cloudy, iridescent jelly.

Unable to move or even breathe, Mark remained leaning over her. A primal, soundless terror drowned out everything else. All that was left was a heavy, icy knot in his gut and a distant, detached kind of curiosity.

“Mark Kane?”

The question yanked him out of the trance so abruptly he almost cried out. Ordinary, mundane words — completely foreign to the thick nightmare he’d been drowning in a moment ago. He turned. A plain, unremarkable man stood in the doorway. A Center employee.

“Checked everything here? I’m Barry.”

Mark nodded, not immediately processing the meaning of the words. His brain was still trying to fuse the two realities together. He forced himself to look at the bed again.

The body lay exactly as it had in the first second after he entered. Decapitated, torn open, frozen in death. No rot. No maggots. No whispering, decomposing lips. The head — a bloody ruin. Nothing had changed.

Something was clearly wrong with him.

The cuff on his arm chirped, obligingly projecting information onto the holo: Barry Logan, detective, Center, access level one.

Mark took a step back and exhaled. What an idiot. This Barry, appearing out of nowhere; that borg in the bar who tagged him in a split second. Of course, they knew who Mark was. The damn cuff broadcast everything about him to anyone with the right clearance. He was basically a walking dossier on himself.