Submitted for the September 2025 prompt: Terrestrial Settings

Two paths diverged in the neon-soaked grid of Downtown Tampa, and I had forty-seven seconds to choose before the Intruder Countermeasures walls came down.

 

The Sykes Building's neural network pulsed electric blue against the humid night sky, its servers humming with the collected dreams of a million sleepers. I crouched on the rust-stained fire escape of the old federal courthouse, jack cables snaking from my skull to the portable terminal strapped to my wrist. Sweat mixed with the constant drizzle that fell from the skyscrapers' cooling systems.

 

Three AM. The witching hour. When corporate firewalls dreamed and security AIs dozed between their scanning cycles.

 

My display painted two routes through the building's data architecture in stuttering wireframe. The Blue Path, sanctioned, documented, leading to the employee database I'd been hired to crack. Standard smash-and-grab, extract some accountant's gambling debts for his ex-wife's lawyer. Clean, simple, paid the rent on my Ybor flophouse.

 

But beside it, bleeding crimson through my visual cortex, the Red Path beckoned. Unmarked subnet, quantum-encrypted, humming with the kind of data density that suggested secrets worth killing for. The kind of path that led to the core servers where Sykes stored the memories they harvested from the brain-dead in Tampa General's vegetative ward.

 

I'd stumbled onto it six months ago during a routine insurance fraud job. Sykes wasn't just a medical tech company. They were farming consciousness itself, distilling human experience into sellable data packets. Dreams. Childhood memories. Last words. All of it processed, packaged, and sold to the highest bidder in the neural black markets that thrived in the humidity between Tampa's towering arcologies.

 

The timer on my terminal counted down. Thirty-nine seconds until the next security sweep. Thirty-eight. Thirty-seven.

 

I could take the Blue Path. Complete the job. Get paid. Go home to my one-room apartment, where the cockroaches had learned to interface with the building's smart grid and the walls leaked data from the servers next door. Safe. Anonymous. Another ghost in the machine.

 

Or I could follow the Red Path into the heart of Sykes' operation, where they processed the stolen souls of Tampa's forgotten into product. Where they had extracted someone's grandmother's recipe for picadillo and sold it to a fast-food conglomerate. Where some corporate executive hoarded a stranger's first kiss in his private memory palace.

 

The choice should have been simple. The Blue Path meant survival. The Red Path meant war against an enemy that could erase my identity with a thought, delete my existence from every database in the republic.

 

But I thought about the kid I'd seen in Sykes' promotional materials, locked in a medically induced coma while they strip-mined his dreams of riding bikes and eating ice cream. Selling his stolen childhood to aging executives who wanted to remember what wonder felt like.

 

Twenty-three seconds.

 

I thought about the woman in the ads, smiling vacantly while technicians in clean-room suits harvested the neural patterns of her wedding day. Her husband had signed the consent forms after the stroke. Needed the money for treatment that would never come.

 

Fifteen seconds.

 

The Blue Path would let me live to fight another day. The Red Path would probably kill me. But it might also expose Sykes, might show Tampa what was being done in those sterile white rooms where consciousness went to die.

 

Ten seconds.

 

I chose.

 

The Red Path opened like a wound in the building's nervous system, and I dove through layers of security. The ICE rose around me, Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics that manifested as burning geometric spiders, each one programmed to lobotomize data thieves like me. But I'd been running these streets since before the neural networks learned to dream, back when hacking meant soldering chips and the internet was still just a gleam in ARPANET's eye.

 

I ghosted past the first firewall, spoofing my identity as a maintenance routine. The second tier nearly caught me, aggressive code that probed for markers of human consciousness. But I fragmented my signal, scattered myself across seventeen proxies hidden in the abandoned Orange County courthouse servers.

 

The core was beautiful and terrible. Crystalline data structures that held human consciousness like insects in amber. Memories sorted by emotional intensity, by commercial value, by the purity of the pain they contained. I found my target: the master database where Sykes catalogued their inventory of stolen souls.

 

I copied everything. Names, acquisition dates, the corporate clients who bought and sold human experience like ag futures. The evidence scrolled through my visual cortex faster than I could process: thousands of comatose patients, their inner lives harvested and commodified while their families grieved in hospital waiting rooms.

 

The countermeasures found me.

 

The black ICE came screaming through the data pipes, malicious code that burned like acid through my neural interface. I felt them clawing at the edges of my consciousness, trying to fry my brain from the inside out. But I was already running, already uploading the stolen data to dead drops scattered across the city's mesh network.

 

I made it back to the physical just as the security alerts started screaming from the Sykes Building. My head felt like it had been split open with an axe, blood trickling from my nose where the neural feedback had overloaded my jack. But the data was safe, uploaded to WikiLeaks servers in Estonia and encrypted drives hidden in the ruins of the old Sulphur Springs water tower.

 

I limped down the fire escape, leaving the federal courthouse behind. The path I'd chosen would change everything: my life, Sykes' empire, the future of consciousness itself in a world where thoughts had become currency.

 

Two paths had diverged in Tampa's neural grid, and I had taken the one that led through digital fire and corporate hell.

 

And that would make all the difference.