Fly to me Higher
Control
The city sprawls beneath a sky choked with smog, neon signs flickering like dying stars. Corporations tower over districts, their logos casting long shadows across streets teeming with augmented mercenaries, data smugglers, and street vendors hawking black-market cyberware. Rumors whisper of a rogue AI fragmenting itself into the grid, its code mutating in the underbelly of servers. Gangs clad in reactive armor battle over algorithmically predicted turf while a nameless courier—you—clutches a prototype nano-weapon grafted to their spine. Choices ripple: sell it to the warlord funding gene-spliced soldiers, deliver it to the anarchist collective breeding sentient viruses, or let the AI burrow into your neural interface, rewriting your past with every synapse it claims. The rain never stops. Trust dissolves faster than biometric encryption.
c
The horizon fractures under a sky choked with smoke and static. You bank hard, engines screaming as tracer rounds carve neon scars through the gathering storm. They said the stratosphere was a tomb—frozen air, failed engines, the weight of a dying world pressing down. They weren’t wrong. But the beacon still pulses somewhere in that starless black, flickering coordinates older than the war, older than the lies etched into your flight console. Your gloved hand hovers over the thrusters. One burst could melt the hull. Or punch through the cloudwall to whatever’s left up there. The comm crackles—a voice you haven’t heard in seven rotations, ragged but alive: “All wings, converge. Climb or crash. No third options here.” You count the blips on your radar—too few, always too few—and let the old mantra taste like iron in your mouth: *Higher. Faster. Unforgiven.* The stick jerks left as the g-forces hit, and for a heartbeat, you’re weightless. Not falling. *Ascending.* The dark parts like a curtain. Above the storm, the stars aren’t stars at all.
