The only sound in William's room was the soft click of the door closing behind me. Death had come quietly in the night, the final severing of neural connections after years of progressive damage. As a geriatric physician, I'd overseen dozens of such endings, but this one felt different. Perhaps because no one had come to claim him.

Pravdin wiped sweat from his brow and squinted at the sky. The sun hung directly overhead, bleaching the endless wheat fields into a sea of pale gold. His combine harvester droned on, cutting a precise swath through the grain while the dashboard screen blinked its constant metrics: yield calculations, moisture content, collection quotas.

The headache started the moment Wei stepped off the high-speed train into Beijing West Station. Not the dull throb she'd been experiencing for weeks now—this was sharper, more focused, as if someone had turned a dial. She paused, adjusting her messenger bag, and discretely tapped behind her ear twice. The tiny depression there—where her i-Comm neural interface had been implanted three years ago—felt oddly warm.

Dr. Eleanor Chen pressed her thumb against the identity scanner outside Wellness Center 37-B, waiting for the familiar burn as the device sampled her DNA and matched it against her mandatory daily verification profile. The scanner glowed green, but held her a moment longer than usual. She kept her face neutral, careful to project nothing but professional fatigue—an acceptable emotional state for a primary care physician nineteen hours into a twenty-hour shift.

The first alert came through Maya's corneal implant during breakfast. A thin red frame pulsed around her peripheral vision—the CorpSec warning system her mother had insisted on when she'd moved to the city. Maya blinked twice to dismiss it. The message would wait. The patched-together community network had cried wolf before.