The first rule of wearing GEAR was simple: Your body pays for every advantage.
TyeRome learned that truth at twelve years old, standing on the cracked edge of a Bronze Zone
alley while a courier's body crumpled mid-sprint. The kid had been wearing Cheetah
Sprinters—Gold-tier sneakers that turned legs into piston-driven death machines for precisely
forty minutes. On the forty-first, both calves snapped with the dry finality of tree branches
underfoot.
The courier had tried to stack the effects. Rookie mistake. He’d paired the shoes with Kangaroo
cargos—cheap, Bronze-tier pants meant to rebound impact. Together, they had transformed his
legs into a battleground of conflicting instincts. The muscles didn’t fail. The instincts did. The
Cheetah in him wanted speed. The Kangaroo just wanted to bounce.
The kid laughed when he leapt over the first roof.
He screamed when he hit the ground wrong and both knees reversed.
TyeRome never forgot the sound. It etched itself into his spine.
Now, twelve years later, Tye saw that same reckless hunger every time he looked in the mirror.
Same eyes. Same desperate glint.
—
He worked Customer Service at Labz Inc. now, buried six floors below the surface of Neo-Pelt’s
sales wing. The first thing they taught new hires? Never ask about side effects.
Three weeks into the job, he broke that rule.
“My Wolfskin Work Gloves are making my hands shake,” the customer wrote.
Diagnosis: The user had failed to pair the gloves with a Bronze-tier Calcium-Boost Undershirt.
Obvious user error.
The system prepared the standard response—an upsell pitch for Platinum Full-Sleeve
Stabilizers. 499 credits. Side effects omitted, of course.
Instead, Tye typed:
Sir, are you dreaming in smells yet?
The terminal lit up crimson.
WARNING: Non-Compliant Response Detected
Across the aisle, Imani was typing like a machine—no typos, no pauses. Her Gold-tier
Spider-Silk Sleeves shimmered as her fingers danced across the keys.
“They fired the last guy who started asking about side effects,” she said, not looking up. “Funny
thing is, he got arrested four weeks later.”
“For what?” Tye asked.
She didn’t stop typing. “The guy tried to detox with fire.”
—
He took the long way home after that shift, winding through the Bronze Zones, where people
stitched and wore GEAR they’d never afford normally. Towering graffiti curled over crumbling
brick and guttered concrete.This was a jungle full of wild creatures and everyone trying to reach
the top of the food chain.
Someone had spray-painted a crude pyramid beside the alleyway:
Black Market GEAR Hierarchy
BRONZE: 1–3 items — Safe-ish, if you don’t mind twitching.
GOLD: 2 items max — Unless you want teeth growing in strange places.
PLATINUM: Full-body only — Pray you remember your name.
Tye stopped to trace a line beneath “teeth growing in.” He didn’t know why.
A shadow moved beside him. A vendor stepped into the light, eyes rimmed red, breath hot with
Komodo Dragon Energy Gum—a cheap Bronze-tier stimulant that burned more than it boosted.
“You lookin’ to gear up, lil nigga?” he rasped, flashing open a velvet-lined case.
Inside were relics.
Mantis Shrimp Knuckledusters—Gold-tier, brutal. Punch through steel, rupture bone.
Tardigrade Undershirt—a Platinum demo model. Survive anything. Feel nothing.
The vendor smiled wide, revealing a single gold canine. “Try the shirt. First hit’s free.”
The fabric inside the case writhed, like it was breathing.
Tye took a step back. Then two more. His feet remembered the scream of the courier from all
those years ago.
He ran.
—
Home was silent. Still.
Except for the package waiting on his doorstep.
It didn’t have a label. Just a faint, burnt-metal scent—ozone and copper. Tye crouched slowly,
heart thudding.
He took it inside and peeled it open.
Inside was a single glove:
Eel-Fist Gauntlet (Gold-tier, left-hand only) — 600V discharge, with a warning to monitor blood
sugar levels closely.
Beneath it, folded neatly, was a child’s drawing. A rabbit, wide-eyed and stitched together with
shaky red ink.
There was also a note. Handwritten. Signed.
They told me to stop testing on myself.
But how else do you measure the cost?
— T.Z.
Tye stared at the initials. He knew them. Everyone in the biotech community did.
Dr. Tajiyo Zugun. The mad genius who’d invented GEAR and vanished before the first lawsuit
hit court.
Without thinking, Tye slipped the glove on.
The world shifted.
He felt it before he saw it—his nerves lit up like someone had flooded them with lightning. The
quiet hum of the air conditioner screamed into his skull. He could feel every current in the walls.
Taste every wire.
And then came the hunger.
It wasn’t just in his stomach—it was in his spine, his chest, his jaw.
Across his vision, a faint HUD flickered to life:
Calories Burned: 804 / 4000
He staggered into the kitchen, hands shaking, bones buzzing with the high of something not
fully human.
Somewhere beneath Neo-Pelt Labs, in a biometric vault sealed twenty years ago, a red alert
blinked to life.
Unauthorized Activation Detected
ZUGUN’S FIRST THREADS: ONLINE
TyeRome didn’t know it yet, but something long buried had just begun to wake.