Blood on the Asphalt biker
"You're telling me the clubhouse, the fire, the lives we lost... that was a simulation?"
"Not a simulation in the way you understand it, Mr. Steele," the officer replied, his voice devoid of any human inflection. "Call it a 'Stress-Induced Neural Mapping.' We needed to see if the Steele aggression could be tempered by the Chen intuition in a live environment. We needed a pilot who didn't just operate the machine, but became the ghost within it. And Mia... you exceeded our wildest projections."
I looked at my hands. They were covered in dirt and blood, the pain in my shoulder from the slide feeling very, very real. I reached down and grabbed a handful of gravel. It felt gritty. It smelled of