It’s Complicated
The city groaned under the weight of its own updates. Streets slick with neon reflections and the whispered paranoia of a million messages unsent, where there were no carefully curated digital selves. Only real people with real secrets, drowning in the analog silence of a world that had never known The Book.
I take a last drag of my cigarette, watch the rain smear the headlines of yesterday’s news. In a different timeline, the story was different. There would have been a platform to connect us all. To sell us our own desires before we even had them. But in this world, the only networks were underground, stitched together with coded phrases muttered in bars. Notes slid into coat pockets.
I find people. Search histories and mutual friends, the old-fashioned way. Digging through digital garbage. Staring into the abyss of human desperation until it stares back.
Tonight, I’m looking for a ghost.
“Name’s Drangers. Shelby Drangers” he whispers across the table, his voice low and urgent. His suit was too clean for the city, his tie a noose he didn’t know was tightening. “She disappeared last week. No calls. No letters. It’s like she never existed. But I remember.”
That was common enough. People here vanish easier than a drop of rain in the gutter. No cloud backups. No tagged photos. Just the presence of absence.
I take the file, flipping through black-and-white photos of a woman with sharp eyes and a sharper smile. “What was she into?”
He hesitates. “She worked for The Book.”
I pause. The Book ran the planet’s information like a black-market commodity, controlling what was known and what stayed buried. They were the reason privacy still had a price.
“I assume you already checked their vaults?”
His silence was answer enough.
I leave the bar and hit the streets, the air thick with the scent of burnt coffee and the corrupting sea. I know where to start. There were places in this city where the past was still written down, where rumors traveled by word-of-mouth instead of algorithm.
At the crumbling bookstore on 9th, I find an old contact. Hunched over a typewriter. One of the last. Punching out words only a few would ever read.
“Shelby Drangers?”
He doesn’t look up. “You’re not the first to ask.”
I’m close.
“She was trying to build something. A network. Not like the others. Open.” He shakes his head. “She should’ve known better.”
The ache in my guts tells me she’s already dead. But her idea?
I step back into the rain, the city humming with a biting desperation. Maybe in another world, Shelby’s vision had already won. Maybe there was a place where people didn’t disappear so easily.
But not in this one. Not yet.
