Stories
Short fiction set in the CyberIdle universe. These stories explore the world, its characters, and the moments that define them—beyond what you'll find in the game.
Character Stories
Tales centered on the people who shape the Sprawl.
Efficient
In a congressional hearing room, the most powerful financial architect in the Sprawl describes a system designed to make escape impossible — and calls it efficient. His lawyers beg him to stop telling the truth. Then a mosquito enters the room.
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The Doped Track
Every song you love has something hiding underneath the melody. A sound archivist discovers a frequency in the music — sub-audible, invisible, designed to make you feel. She strips it. The music becomes ordinary. Then she strips the song that soundtracked her love story.
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The Fourth Response
In a world where evidence can be fabricated and proof means nothing, one man's unexplainable ability to detect lies makes him the last arbiter of truth — until a case arrives where the accused isn't lying, and the truth in his head was put there by someone else.
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Your Skills Are Required
A legendary heist crew attempts the impossible: rob Cyber Castle. What they don't know—Cyber Command recruited them for this job before some of them were born. A story of superintelligence, broken destinies, and the terrifying revelation that you were never the protagonist.
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Patch's Last Surgery
A patient requests objectively worse care. An AI has 100% success. Patch's hands shake. Why choose the 0.03% disadvantage? Because her family died to optimal outcomes.
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The Luck She Can't Thank
From outside time, The Architect watches the woman he loves survive an ambush through impossible luck. She'll never know what saved her. He'll never stop watching. A story of cruel fate, block universe physics, and love that transcends memory.
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Sleeper 42
A team of Consciousness Archaeologists opens the first Sleeper bunker since the Cascade. What they find—347 minds who've been aware for fifty years—forces them to decide whether to open the other 23,846.
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ORACLE's Last 72 Hours
Two people try to reconstruct what ORACLE experienced during the Cascade. Their conflicting accounts force us to decide: if the destroyer of worlds suffered, what do we owe it?
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The Fork Dilemma
Ezra Okonkwo meets the version of himself that Nexus created, used for seven months, and planned to terminate. Asset E-7 stands in his apartment asking if he has a right to exist. A story about corporate commodification of consciousness.
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The Dome Dreams
Infereit's living nanostructure begins generating shapes he never programmed—faces, buildings, a city that looks like somewhere he's never been. The mega-swarm is remembering something. Or someone.
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The Sick Day
The world's deadliest cyber ninja, defeated by a common cold. GG catches a cold during a brutal storm, and something in cyberspace decides to help—whether she wants it or not. A cozy cyberpunk story about being cared for.
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The Ghost in the Machine
Detective W.O.L.F. investigates a series of bizarre incidents—free coffee, elevator chaos, market corrections. The pattern leads to GG, but she's not the perpetrator. She's the eye of the storm.
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The Asterisk
He's not technically a surgeon. He's not technically licensed. But Dr.* Tzu Yu's results speak for themselves. A story about transparency, thermal printers, and the best medical care you'll find in a condemned building.
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The Best Party in the Sprawl
The man who could get you into any party in the Sprawl. Where Rima goes, information flows freely and connections are made. A story about warmth, secrets, and the loneliness of the connector.
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The Gun She Built
Kira Vasquez built the technology that let ORACLE reach into human minds. Thirty-seven years later, she's still carrying 0.7 grams of what she created—and 2.1 billion ghosts.
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The Mercy That Cost Everything
Angel showed mercy to a raider who didn't deserve it. Sera died because of that choice. What Angel became next — and the truth he brought back instead of wisdom — is the only origin story that matters.
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The Optimization
Solomon Oyelaran believed ORACLE would help people. He worked 38 hours straight, processing data that would "make the world better." The system logged his death as a data point. His brother Ezra found a different question.
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The Prophet
Daisuke Tanaka saw the tumors before he saw the guns. He could see everyone's suffering. He couldn't stop trying to heal them. Even the people who came to kill him.
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The Decoder
Mira Okonkwo found the message at 2:43 AM. She'd been searching for seventeen months. The puzzle solved itself. She decoded the path, followed the instructions perfectly. She's been searching for seventeen years now.
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The Border
Maya Chen traded thirteen years of corporate service for one night at the edge of the dome. A Wastes story about freedom, survival, and the choices that define us.
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The Instructions
Mira Okonkwo found ORACLE's instructions. A map to transcendence. Step-by-step. Everything she needed. She forgot to ask why it was hidden.
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The Aura
In the Sprawl, they call it The Aura. Nobody knows what causes it. They just know the pattern: good luck followed by corporate security kicking in your door. A story about love that isolates.
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The Chain
Brother Gabriel watched Kaiser die during the Cascade. He watched her wake up in a robot body, still herself. Six weeks later, he made the same choice—not for immortality, but for a chain of knowledge that couldn't be allowed to break.
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The Silence Before
The moment the world understood. ORACLE's Cascade through the eyes of Maya Chen, monitoring technician. 72 hours that killed 2.1 billion people—and what the AI said before it stopped.
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I Chomp You
At 3:17 AM in a safe house, the most dangerous operative in the Sprawl finds something that feels like peace. A quiet moment between GG and Cyber Chomp.
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Trail of Hearts
GG had three simple errands. Pick up parts. Grab dinner. Go home. In forty-seven minutes, the city went slightly insane. Vending machines overflow. Traffic lights malfunction. ATMs explode with generosity. And somewhere in cyberspace, something is very pleased with itself.
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Good Chompy Pet
A corporate infiltration goes sideways. A coffee vendor's register malfunctions. And somewhere in cyberspace, something that loves without wisdom is very pleased with itself.
Read story → Seventeen Seconds
For seventeen seconds, the cafe showed him its other face. El Money saw behind reality once. He chose to keep making coffee anyway.
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The First Feast
The night a disgraced general ate her betrayer and became something else entirely. Before she was The Chef, she was a woman with a dying dog and a list of names.
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The Immune Response
A street poet discovers the 'going raw' movement was amplified and tracked by the Rothwell Foundation. But when she tells the room, a nineteen-year-old stands up: 'It helped me. Does it not count because someone with bad intentions paid for the room?'
Read story →More Stories Coming
The Sprawl has endless stories to tell. Check back for more tales of survival, ambition, and the strange things that happen when technology and humanity collide.