Chapter 10
A World in Need
Kael witnesses the world's suffering firsthand, the same suffering that drove him to the Red Cross. He grapples with his desire to help versus his deep-seated cynicism.
The flickering neon of Neo-Kyoto bled through the grimy viewport, painting Kael’s cramped apartment in hues of sickly green and jaundiced yellow. Outside, the city pulsed with a life that felt both frantic and hollow, a testament to the very things that had hollowed him out. He’d seen it all, or at least, he’d thought he had. The gnawing hunger in the slums of Mumbai, the desperate eyes of children in war-torn Aleppo, the silent despair of refugees adrift on a poisoned sea. He’d been there, a cog in the Red Cross machine, a bandage on a festering wound, a voice whispering platitudes into the void. And it had broken him.
Now, the chip in his spine, a cold, metallic star pressing against his vertebrae, felt like a mockery of those past ideals. It was a constant, physical reminder of his failure, his disillusionment, the gnawing neurosis that had become his constant companion. He traced the faint scar tissue on his neck, the entry point of the implant, a phantom itch thrumming beneath his skin. He was a clone, a manufactured echo of a man, tasked with saving the world, yet barely able to save himself from the ghosts that haunted his own manufactured mind.
He watched a news feed