(22 min read) Jessica128 earned her way into one of the most exclusive junctions in SkyCity. But now, she’s struggling. She runs several live episodes and always meets her love energy generation quotas on time. But she can’t manage to sustain enough tokens to compete. Desperate for views, she hires a a pricy Celebrity mentor, but the advice is grim: to keep the life she's worked for, someone else might have to lose theirs.

(13 min. read) Somewhere in the SkyCity Core, a newly activated Bot wakes to a new assignment: working the human retail shops in a female humanskin avatar. Almost immediately, it notices irregularities; anomalies within itself trying to transmit a warning. Realizing its own intentions too late, the Bot encounters exactly what it had hoped to avoid.