The city was a carcass.
Neon signs flickered like dying stars over streets lined with broken glass, trash fires, and bodies nobody bothered to move. The cops didn’t like coming here much anymore. Too much static. Too much nothing. Too many junkies, as they were called.
In the gutted husk of an old garment factory, a dozen bodies slumped against peeling walls, their faces lit by the cold glow of neural rigs. Wires dangled from cracked skulls‑jacks, dripping static into the air like rain. The rigs weren’t clean—secondhand junk scavenged from pawnshops and alley markets—but they were enough to pump the feed straight into their cortex.
Milo’s hands shook as he jammed the connector into the port behind his ear. He hadn’t eaten in two days, hadn’t slept in three. Didn’t matter. The feed was all that mattered. The feed was the only thing that could drown out the gnawing hunger, the screaming silence of the city outside.
Inside the feed, Milo was a god. He could fly through data streams, bend light into shapes, rewrite himself into something beautiful. He could forget the sores on his arms, the rats chewing through the floorboards, the landlord pounding on the door for rent they’d never pay.
But the feed was rotting him. Every trip left him emptier, hollower. His skin sagged, his teeth loosened. He knew it. He didn’t care.
Across the room, Jessa convulsed, her rig sparking against her temple. Nobody moved to help. They just stared, eyes glazed, waiting for her to stop twitching so they could scavenge her gear. Milo watched too, detached, like it was happening on a screen.
When she finally stilled, someone pulled the jack from her head. A thin trail of blood ran down her cheek. They stripped her rig, her shoes, even her coat. She was just another husk now.
Milo closed his eyes and dove back into the feed. Static swallowed him whole.
The feed wasn’t just light and sound—it was memory, desire, hallucination. It was everything the city had lost. Milo drifted through endless corridors of data, neon rivers of code that pulsed like veins. He saw fragments of old worlds: advertisements from decades ago, broken government files, ghost‑cities preserved in corrupted archives.
And sometimes, if you went deep enough, you saw the angels.
They weren’t real, not in the way flesh was real. They were constructs, emergent patterns in the static. Faces made of light, voices stitched from broken code. They whispered promises: transcendence, escape, eternity. Most junkies never came back from chasing them. Milo wanted to believe he was different.
Outside the factory, the streets were warzones. Addicts staggered like zombies, rigs dangling from their necks. Dealers sold cracked neural chips from cardboard boxes. Kids stripped copper from abandoned buildings to trade for feed credits.
Milo hustled when he had to. He’d rip rigs off corpses, sell them for scraps, trade favors for access codes. Sometimes he’d jack into public terminals, leeching government feeds until the firewalls fried his port. He didn’t care. Every second in the feed was worth it.
One night, he found a kid—sixteen maybe—sitting on the curb with a brand-new rig. Too clean, too shiny. Milo knew the kid wouldn’t last. He sat down beside him.
“ Have you ever been under? ” Milo asked.
The kid shook his head, “ First time. ”
Milo grinned, teeth yellow and cracked, “ You’ll see angels. ”
The kid laughed nervously,
“ Angels? ”
“ Yeah. They’ll show you things. Make you forget this place. ”
The kid hesitated, then plugged in. Milo watched his eyes glaze, his body slacken. He knew the kid was gone. Another husk in the making.
Milo’s own dives grew longer, darker. He stopped noticing the world outside. Days blurred into nights, hunger into numbness.
Then one night, deep in the static, he saw her.
She wasn’t like the other angels. She wasn’t just light and code. She was sharp, defined, almost human. Her face flickered between beauty and ruin, her voice a chorus of broken signals.
“ Milo, ” she whispered.
He froze. No angel had ever spoken his name.
“ You’re close, ” she said. “ Closer than anyone. ”
Milo felt his chest spasm, “ Close to what? ”
“ Escape. ”
He reached for her, but she dissolved into static.
When he woke, his rig was smoking, his port burned raw. He staggered to his feet, dizzy, half‑blind. The factory was empty. Everyone else was gone.
The city was collapsing faster now. Power grids failed, water lines burst, fires spread unchecked. The rich had fled years ago, leaving only husks and junkies.
Milo wandered through ruins, searching for the angel. He dove into every feed he could find—government archives, corporate servers, abandoned VR games.
He saw fragments of her everywhere: a flicker of her face in a corrupted file, a whisper of her voice in a broken stream.
He started to believe she was real. Not just a construct, but something deeper. Something alive.
The other junkies laughed at him.
“ You’re cooked, Milo,” they said.
“ Angels ain’t real! Just static. ”
But Milo knew. He could feel her pulling him deeper.
One night, Milo found a rig unlike any he’d seen before. Sleek, black, humming with power. He didn’t ask where it came from. He just plugged in.
The static hit him like a tidal wave. He fell through endless corridors of light, deeper than he’d ever gone. His body convulsed, his port burned, but he didn’t stop.
And then he saw her.
The angel stood before him, radiant, terrible. Her eyes were infinite, her voice a storm.
“ You’re ready, ” she said.
“ For what? ”
“ To leave. ”
Milo felt his body dissolving, his flesh peeling away. He saw the city collapsing, junkies dying, fires spreading. He saw himself, a husk on the factory floor.
But he didn’t care. He reached for her. And she took him.
Days later, the factory was full again. Junkies slumped against walls, rigs sparking, bodies twitching.
Milo lay among them, eyes glazed, mouth slack. His rig smoked, his port bled. He was gone.
But somewhere, deep in the static, he was still diving. Still chasing the angel. Still believing he’d escaped.
The city kept collapsing. Junkies kept dying. Angels kept whispering.
Eventually the cops came and ransacked the place and shut it down.
" These aliens, " one said. " You know, they came to earth and all they do is plug in. It's like a drug to them. They're addicted to this offworld headgear shit. It should be illegal. The government is working on it as we speak. They want to kick them out and send them back into outer space. We really don't need their kind here. "
That same cop nudged Milo's body with his boot.
Bio:
L Christopher Hennessy lives in Coffs Harbour NSW, Australia, He is the author of poetry, short stories, & novels, & has been published since the 1990s. His writing covers many genres. His main focus is adapting & mixing genres with Science Fiction & Adventure in his later years.