Nexus Cascade Ripperdoc

The hum is almost imperceptible at first. A low thrum vibrating through the floor, the desk, your very teeth. You dismiss it. Another faulty transformer in the crumbling infrastructure of Neo-Kyoto, no doubt. But then the lights flicker. Not the gentle, forgiving fade of a power surge, but a rapid, frantic dance between light and shadow that leaves you disoriented and queasy. You glance at your wrist-mounted chronometer – 23:47. Right on schedule. Except it isn't *your* schedule anymore, is it? You are Kai, a Ripperdoc scraping by on the edges of a digitized underworld. Your specialty? Brain-computer interfaces. Illegal neural implants, data extraction, memory wipes – if it involves hacking the squishy grey matter between someone's ears, you're the person to call. Tonight, your schedule consisted of removing a rogue memory fragment from a Yakumo syndicate enforcer. Clean in, clean out, tidy profit. Instead, the hum has intensified. The flickering lights have become a strobing nightmare. And your apartment, once a haven of greasy pizza boxes and flickering neon signs reflected in rain-streaked windows, is now… *different*. The air shimmers with an unnatural heat. The walls seem to breathe. Your chronometer glitches, digits blurring into meaningless symbols. A voice, cold and crystalline, whispers directly into your mind. It isn't your own. It isn't anyone you know. "The Cascade has begun," it says. "Your reality is fracturing. You are… *displaced*." The lights explode. You awaken to a symphony of static and the acrid smell of ozone. Your apartment is gone. In its place is a landscape both familiar and utterly alien. The towering skyscrapers of Neo-Kyoto are still there, but twisted and contorted into impossible angles. The streets are filled with figures that shouldn't exist – ghostly apparitions, bio-engineered monstrosities, and fragments of code made flesh. The Cascade has thrown you into the Nexus, a chaotic crossroads of realities. And you, Kai, the Ripperdoc with a knack for hacking brains, are now caught in the middle. You have no idea why. You have no idea how to stop it. All you know is that you need to survive. You need to find a way back. And you need to figure out who – or what – is behind this madness. Because in the Nexus, survival is a hack of its own. And you, my friend, are about to get very, very busy.