Down Man, 2084

Down Man

New York has always been a city haunted by its ghosts, and its skyline is a living memory of tragedies that shaped the nation.

On September 11, 2001, the world watched in horror as the Twin Towers collapsed. But for New Yorkers, one image became seared into their collective consciousness: the Falling Man—a lone figure plummeting through the sky, an unspeakable choice captured in a single, haunting photograph.

Fifty years later, on September 11, 2051, history repeated itself. Another attack, this time on One World Trade Center, sent shockwaves through the city. Explosions gutted the tower, and in the chaos, men and women leapt from skyscrapers, their silhouettes hauntingly familiar.

New York fell into a depression unlike anything before.

Lower Manhattan—once the beating heart of global finance and resilience—became something else entirely: a monument to loss, fear, and the fragile nature of human control. The survivors, left to rebuild in the ashes of another catastrophe, gave the district a new name: Down Man.

It was more than a geographical marker.

It was an elegy.

A reminder of the weight of gravity—both physical and historical. The place where men fell, and where hope never fully rose again.

By the 2070s, Down Man had become something else: a shadow city, a place where the forgotten gathered, where the system’s grip loosened just enough for humanity’s frayed edges to reappear. It was a place of refuge for the unpredictable, the nonconforming, the lost and the ungoverned. A lawless labyrinth of ruined skyscrapers, neon-lit alleyways, underground clubs, and defiant whispers.

Irides

Irides was grown, not born—one of the Test Tube Generation of the late 2050s, engineered by a society that had long since declared nature too erratic, too prone to deviation. His parent, a high-ranking cognitive scientist, had sculpted his genome with meticulous precision, embedding within him the latest neural interface—a mind chip designed to optimize cognition, regulate emotion, and ensure his trajectory aligned with the rigid architecture of progress.

His path was determined before he had even taken his first breath.

Yet something had gone wrong.

Or perhaps, something had gone right.

Somewhere in his early teens, the chip was altered—whether by a whisper of rogue code, a glitch in the sequencing, or an act of rebellion by an unseen hand. Whatever the cause, its effect was undeniable. The programming that was meant to mold him into an architect of the system instead unlocked something unpredictable—improvisation, intuition, sound.

While his peers streamlined their minds for efficiency, Irides heard rhythm in the circuits, melody in the data streams, music in the cold, controlled world around him.

By the time he was eighteen, he had vanished from the sterile corridors of the research enclaves. He reappeared in the decaying skeleton of Down Man—a place where the last remnants of human unpredictability still thrived.

There, he became something the system had never intended.

Not just a musician, but an underground legend in Down Man’s neon-lit ruins.

His hands wove across retro-electro keyboards, bending quantum-synced loops into something raw, something human. His music pulsed through the underground clubs like a heartbeat in the dark, a defiant sound against the silence of compliance.

But the city outside those neon sanctuaries was changing. The Compliance Acts had turned identity into a prison, and Big Other watched from every glowing screen, every drone’s unblinking eye.

Then came the night Irides was shot.

He had only stepped outside for air—a small, thoughtless act. But the streets of Down Man were not the streets of old New York. They had become something else—hyper-zoned districts where movement itself was a privilege.

A Sentinel Drone hovered down from the sodium-lit haze, scanning him with the cold precision of an unfeeling algorithm. It should have cleared him. But it hesitated.

Some buried line of code—some decision made beyond human hands—labeled Irides, the synth-musician, as an anomaly.

And then, without warning, it fired.

The shot seared through his side, a glancing burn. But it wasn’t the wound that changed him—it was what it did to the chip in his head.

A catastrophic malfunction. A reboot.

Irides fell to the ground convulsing, his vision fracturing into lines of code, the world around him reduced to raw data. A flood of information poured into his mind—architectures of surveillance networks, security firewalls, identity registries. The music that had