Beyond 2077

A motorcycle roared to a stop in front of the apartment block, an old building of polished concrete and balconies bristling with pirate antennas, where faded graffiti seemed more a part of the landscape than vandalism. Maya hopped off, her boots crunching sharply on the cracked asphalt.

She pulled off her helmet, letting her black hair fall in messy strands, and eyed the bike with a crooked smile.

"Not bad, your new toy, Terry," she said, giving the handlebar a playful slap. "Though the one you 'liberated' from the Jokers… that one was wild."

Terry removed his own helmet, revealing a tired half-smile.

His previous ride—his first bike—had been a cutting-edge model he'd used for months after snatching it from the gang of clowns who'd stolen it.

But some jealous snitch's anonymous tip led the NGPD straight to the school parking lot. Despite Terry's improbable—yet honest—explanation and no known ties to the Jokers in his record, the officers confiscated the bike and returned it to its rightful owner.

This one, though, was registered in his name and anything but modern. A Yaiba scavenged from a junkyard, an ancient model with entire sections of the bodywork missing, exposing a tangle of stripped wires, rusted pistons, and absent components.

For six months, Terry poured everything he'd learned from his old job fixing transport drones into it—buying, adapting, and salvaging parts.

He cleaned and polished each rusted piece with patience, coaxing the machine's roaring spirit back to life.

The bodywork, scarred with scratches and dents, was plastered with every sticker he could find in a desperate bid to preserve the original red chassis.

The flood of decals—from megacorp logos to street graffiti—gave it character, as if the bike told its own story of survival in the megacity.

"Still needs work," he said, shrugging as he ran a fond hand over the tank. "But it gets me from A to B, and that's enough."

Maya held out her helmet. "Keep it," Terry said, leaning toward her with a soft, almost intimate tone. "I'm not planning to ride with anyone else."

She raised an eyebrow, skeptical, seeing right through him. "What about your brother?"

"Oh!" Terry stretched out his hand, snapping his fingers as if to hurry her. "Right, give it back."

Maya laughed at her silly performance, a warm sound that cut through the hum of NGPD surveillance drones on their final patrol before retreating to base to avoid being scrapped when night fell.

She handed him the helmet, their fingers brushing for a fleeting moment, followed by a quick goodbye kiss. As they parted, she said, "Be careful on the 'job.' Don't let them mess up that pretty face of yours…" With a small sexy smirk, she added, "Or my favorite part down there"

Then she stepped back, raising her hand in a quick wave. "See ya, dumbass."

Before Terry could reply, the building's door screeched open. Mr. Tan stormed out, face flushed, eyes locked on Terry. He'd been watching from the window, and the bike's arrival hadn't gone unnoticed.

Terry gave him a slight nod, a gesture dripping with defiance more than courtesy. Mr. Tan's face flared redder, veins bulging in his neck as he charged forward. But Maya stepped in, planting herself in front of her father with a steady, silent glare that brooked no argument.

Especially now that she knew the name "Ramona" and was determined to find out everything about her.

Terry didn't stick around to see how it played out. He twisted the throttle, and the Yaiba's roar shattered the street's silence, carrying him away as the city lights, reflected in small puddles along the roadside, chased him like traveling companions on his way to… Arkham.

-

Mega-Prison of Arkham – Delta Containment Block – Maximum Security Cybersycho Module.

After fifteen minutes of checks—one biometric, two for weapons, and two automated—Terry was flanked by an NGPD guard and led into the depths of Arkham.

It was no longer an asylum, not even a traditional prison. The Arkham of Neo-Gotham was an armored penitentiary fortress, a monolithic megastructure sprawling across the island, built from colossal blocks of dense concrete and military-grade alloys.

Magnetic elevators, zones sealed by air compression, and a security grid designed not for mere criminals but for Cybersychos.

The corridors were vast and brutalist: all gray, no windows, no soft edges. The only color came from the NGPD's fluorescent yellow markers streaking the walls and tracing transit routes on the floor.

It wasn't aesthetic. It was deliberately hostile. As if the structure itself meant to remind you that this was a prison built not to hold humans, but to break their spirits in the process.

The guard beside Terry walked in complete silence. No guiding, no directions—none were needed. Terry knew the way. His monthly visit. Two years without missing a single one.

He reached a pressurized access chamber. Crossing the threshold, the air shifted: it reeked of ozone, caustic disinfectant, and an unmistakable sterile metallic tang that clung to the lungs.

The room awaiting him was narrow, oppressive, a rectangle of polished steel with a wall of armored glass. On the other side, another familiar NGPD guard monitored from a nest of screens and biometric sensors. His voice, distorted through the intercom, rang out with the coldness of someone addressing a prisoner:

["Stand on the floor markers. Arms out. Don't move."]

Terry placed his boots on the yellow footprints painted on the metal floor and stood still. A full-body scanner hummed around him, a horizontal blue light sweeping from head to toe. Two sharp beeps broke the silence.

["Implants?"] the guard growled, eyes fixed on the screen.

"You know already, man," Terry replied, his tone weary.

["Answer,"] the guard snapped, his voice a blade of impatience.

Sighing, he listed: "The basics: IDn, retinal projectors in both eyes, and two neck ports."

The guard nodded and without looking up from the screen. ["As you know, I'm disabling your IDn. It'll be reactivated when you leave. No signals get through here."]

Then Terry's projected interface flickered off in his vision, and the hatch opened with a hydraulic hiss.

Two guards waited on the other side, clad in gray armor up to their necks, weapons ready, helmets reflecting the institution's cold glare.

-

At the entrance to the Cybersycho wing's visitation room—empty, as even the families of such monsters didn't bother to visit—the younger guard broke the silence. "You sure about this?" His voice wavered, as if he thought it was a bad idea.

Terry met his gaze and gave a curt nod.

"You can end the visit anytime. Need anything, signal us, and we'll come in." After punching in a code, swiping his card, and scanning his fingerprints…

"Go ahead. You've got ten minutes."

The double hatch opened with a sharp click of security bolts.

Terry stepped through and slumped into the chair facing the armored glass, his hood casting sharp shadows across his face under the sterile glow of the room. His eyes locked onto the hulking figure on the other side, Prisoner #9996.

Hunched under the weight of his own body, a two-meter mass of worn muscle and degraded cyberware.

His military-grade vital implants—heart, lungs, spine—had been swapped for a basic system that kept him alive, emitting a constant, grating hum from his chest, 24/7, enough to drive anyone mad.

His non-vital cyberware—arms, legs, trapezius, and the like—had been replaced with crude industrial prosthetics in garish fluorescent yellow.

His hands were little more than clumsy, strengthless claws; his legs, a pair of rudimentary prosthetics. His trapezius, mere steel beams linking neck to shoulders, left gaps that gave an unfinished look.

Everything designed to keep him functional, as cheaply as possible.

Then Terry pressed the intercom button, meeting the six red lenses—blinking at different rhythms, like a mechanical spider sizing him up—with an unsettlingly cold stare, and asked the same question.

"Why'd you kill her… Viper?"

The left half of Prisoner #9996's face was cracked skin, hardened like scorched leather. The other half was dull metal, his distorted, sadistic voice filling the intercom with an almost amused lilt.

"Because you looked…" And, like the twenty-four times before, he gave a different answer.

Terry didn't blink, but his jaw tightened. Viper smirked, savoring the faint reaction he'd provoked.

"You know… the plan was simple. Kill the Jokers, wipe out the witnesses, and get the hell out," a short, rasping laugh like a rusted saw. "Bet your mom was smart, told you not to look. But you did, you little idiot. You got her killed."

Though Terry knew it was just provocation… Crack! There was some truth in his words…

His fist slammed into the armored glass with violent force. The impact didn't shatter it but fractured it into a spiderweb of cracks around the strike, filling with the vivid, crimson liquid of blood from his knuckles.

The intercom caught Terry's gasp as Viper leaned back, then closer, his grin widening in pure delight, as if Terry's rage were a delicacy he'd been distilling for years.

Despite the institutional coldness of the facility and its staff... Maybe because they knew his story… or maybe because he understood the young man's reaction, the guard monitoring the session from behind the surveillance cameras, faced with the destruction of Arkham's armored glass, called out to Terry with a lukewarm warning.

["Another violent outburst, and the visit's over."]

Viper let out a broken laugh, and as Terry sat back down, "Heh heh… kid, you gotta find a way to chill. I found mine—"

Cutting off what was sure to be something vile, Terry spat, "By killing defenseless mothers holding their kids?"

Viper tilted his head, the hum of his implants filling the silence for a moment.

"Oh… you think your mom was a saint, huh?"

'Finally, something new,' Terry thought, cold and rational, beneath the mask of a broken victim, fully aware of every word he spoke… every angry blow.

"What are you talking about?" he asked, feigning doubt, giving the monster across from him more rope.

Viper paused, savoring the bait. "Maybe your mom wasn't just the woman who read you bedtime stories… maybe she had a hidden life."

Terry narrowed his eyes. "You talking about the case she was working on?"

"Who knows?" Viper growled, almost carelessly. "Doesn't matter to me… I don't get paid for that."

The moment the words left his mouth, his brow furrowed slightly, a faint shadow of unease betraying the monster.

But when he saw Terry smile for the first time in two years, dropping the victim's mask to bare the teeth of a hunter, that unease grew.

Wiping the smile from his face as if it had never been there, with empty eyes and a voice so cold it clashed with the one he'd used before, Terry asked, "Who paid you… for that massacre, you son of a bitch?"

Viper stared through the glass, his sadistic grin fading as he realized he was seeing the boy's true face for the first time.

Not the broken victim he'd pretended to be, but something sharper, more twisted, and obsessive—someone who'd endured years of insults, mockery, and monthly psychological torture from his mother's killer, all to provoke that one small slip.

Stunned and uneasy, as if their roles had reversed, Viper said, "You're a sick kid… you know that, right? You're not right in the head." Then he turned to the security camera and, for the first time in twenty-four visits, barked, "Hey, guard! We're done. Get me outta here."

"No! Wait!" Terry shot to his feet and slammed the armored glass with raw desperation, the red spiderweb of cracks spreading further.

"Say it! SAY IT, YOU SON OF A BITCH! WHO PAID YOU?"

The silence drove Terry to keep pounding the glass, heedless of the pain or the state of his hands, desperate for an answer.

Guards burst into the room, moving fast—not for Viper, who sat motionless, but to restrain Terry before he shattered the glass or bled out trying.

As the guards began dragging him away, Viper flashed one final smile, ensuring that twisted grin was the last thing Terry saw. "You know… I almost feel bad, kid, that this is your last visit."

Terry froze, his breath ragged. "What?"

"I've got a new lawyer… and new friends," Viper said, the beams of his trapezius creaking as he shrugged. "They've bribed the right people. If all goes as planned, I'll be out in a couple of weeks. A 'Cybersycho reintegration project,' I think they're calling it—to make it an easier pill for the public to swallow."

"Bullshit," Terry spat, his voice flat, refusing to believe another of his taunts.

Viper stared through the glass, his red lenses blinking with indifference. "Don't believe me, I don't give a damn. But a heads-up ain't betrayal." He nodded at the blood-smeared, fractured glass. "Hope it doesn't mess you up too bad when you see me walking free."

As the guards gripped Terry, he glared at them, eyes blazing. "Is it true? You're letting this fucking monster go?"

The younger guard blinked, caught off guard. "What? I haven't heard anything about that…"

-

Fifteen minutes later—the same time it took to get in—Terry was racing across the Westward Bridge at the full speed his Yaiba could muster.

Neo-Gotham's lights flickered ahead, reflecting off the slick asphalt stretching before him, as he tried to outrun Arkham and everything inside it.

No luck. That unanswered question burned in his mind like molten iron, driving him to twist the throttle harder, hoping the roar of his bike's engine would drown out the fleeting echoes in his head for just a moment.

Even the buzz in his IDn, followed by the sharp ping of electronic notifications cutting through his thoughts, was a welcome distraction.

The interface, reactivated upon leaving the prison, projected a call icon onto his retina.

Answering with a thought, a deep voice with a thick Ukrainian accent boomed in his head. ["Terry, kudy ty propav? Where you at, brat? I've been calling you for ages."]

Terry's voice was tight, heavy. "Right on time, Vasyl."

["Everything good, kid? You sound… napruzhenyy,"] he said, his concern dripping with falseness.

"Not your problem." Terry kept his eyes locked on the horizon, where the megacity's towers sliced through the neon skyline. "Got any work tonight?"

["Tak, that's why I've been calling. Everything's set, and your rival's already here. We're waiting for you, pohnaly."]

"Just what I need. Send me the address, I'm on my way."

A couple of seconds after the call ended, a message flashed on his IDn. Terry copied the address, pasted it into his IDn's GPS, and a route projected in augmented reality across his vision.

With a twist of the throttle and the Yaiba's answering roar, he shot off, crossing the Westward Bridge toward the city's industrial district… where his fight was waiting.