Neon Ashes

Book cover for the science fiction short story Neon Ashes by Tabz Jones

Prologue

Neo-Noir City never slept. It pulsed.

From the glittering heights of Syndicate Spires to the ash-choked alleys below, a hum of electricity coated every surface, seeping into skin, dreams, and fears. Above, orbital reflectors masked the stars and blotted out the sun, casting the world into a perpetual, designer twilight.

In the Age of Augmentation, people didn't

age—they upgraded. Flesh was just scaffolding.

Tonight, Yuto Korr stood at the pinnacle of it all. The skybridge ballroom hovered above Level 440, veiled in glass and neon. Fashion gods, tech barons,

blood-drinking socialites—all danced to synth-jazz while a bio-luminescent whale glided across the horizon dome. Korr, draped in programmable silk and vanity subdermals, laughed too loudly. He was the kind of man who could auction a clone's soul with a handshake and call it philanthropy.

The lights flickered. A woman appeared. Or something like one. Tall, draped in fiber that shimmered like solar flares. Her eyes—not modded, but

hauntingly organic—met his with something older than anger.

Security reached for weapons. But they didn’t get the chance.

In seconds, it was over.

Yuto Korr's head hit the floor, a smile still stitched to his face, even as his chest cavity steamed. Steel fangs, flash-melted circuitry, and ritual glyphs painted in blood.

Across the wall, scrawled in his own fluids:

WE REMEMBER THE SUN.

_________________________________________________________

Detective Raze Mercer stubbed out his clove on the precinct’s faux-wood table and studied the crime scene holos. "Steel fangs. Melted implants. Symmetric lacerations."

Vesper, his war-droid partner turned analyst, rotated through color spectrums. "Not standard vampire behavior."

"No," Raze said. "This isn’t feeding. This is a message."

The third high-society corpse in a week. All Syndicate-tied. All flayed with disturbing precision. All found with the same phrase. He whispered it now. "We remember the sun."

The words felt wrong in his mouth. Like they didn’t belong in this world.

He glanced at his reflection in the table: stubble over synthetic cheekbone plating, one eye gray, the other flickering amber—the result of a malfunctioning solar-reactive neural chip he couldn’t afford to replace. Dead tech wired to a half dead brain.

“Yuto Korr had anti-tamper dermals,” Vesper continued. “Whoever breached them knew ancient tech.”

“Ancient solar tech,” Raze said.

There was a pause. Vesper cocked his head. “No one’s touched solar augmentation since the Collapse. Too unstable.”

“Exactly.” Raze stood, grabbed his coat. “Time to visit the undercity.”

___________________________________________________________________

The Obsidian Vein wasn’t listed on any grid. You found it by bleeding on the right door.

Nestled between two derelict towers, its entrance was a scar in the city’s metallic skin—a wrought iron archway covered in rust and animatronic roses, pulsing faintly with forbidden circuitry. The alley leading to it was narrow and choked with old rain, crimson graffiti, and scent-saturated fog that never seemed to clear.

Gutter-lights flickered red and violet, mimicking candle flames, while gargoyle-faced cameras tracked every move.

Inside, the Vein opened like a cathedral turned decadent mausoleum. Arching ceilings of black glass reflected the writhing silhouettes of the clientele below. The air was thick with perfume, blood stimulants, and sound waves tuned to the pleasure cortex. Crimson chandeliers hung like inverted bleeding hearts.

Velvet couches coiled in intimate circles beneath broken stained-glass panels repurposed as kinetic art. A string quartet of androids played something slow and mournful. The floor shimmered, reactive to footsteps—responding with quiet echoes of light. Vampires—augmented humans modified for enhanced sensory input and hematophagy—lounged like marble statues in haute noir attire, their glow-in-the-dark eyes flickering with ancient hunger and synthetic allure.

It was a church of appetite. And it watched Raze Mercer as he stepped inside like a trespasser in a sacred crypt.

The denizens not swaying on the dance floor lounged like marble statues, glowing eyes watching Raze as he approached the bar seeking the one woman who might be able to shed some light on things. Pun intended. He found her in the back.

Kora Vale. Club owner. Older than she looked. Too elegant to be safe. Her cheekbones were sculpted from forgotten centuries, and her voice like honeyed silk that once upon a time had whispered promises into the nape of Raze's neck—before betrayal, before the Syndicate. They hadn't spoken in years, not since that night in Sector 9 when the blood ran silver and both chose survival over sentiment.

“I figured you’d come,” she said, voice like carbon smoke.

“You knew Korr.” Raze shrugged in that self depreciating way all cops did. It was stating the obvious and needed no rebuttal.

“I drank from him. Once. He tasted like ego and motor oil. Not my scene.”

He showed her the glyphs. Her eyes narrowed. She leaned back in her chair. “Solar cult. Old. Dangerous. Should be extinct.”

“What do they want?”

“They want light in a world that feeds on darkness. They believe the sun wasn't just a heat lamp keeping us all human, it was alive. A sentient god that we murdered in the name of progress." She flipped the silver braid of hair and fiber optic fibers that hung to her waist back behind her shoulder. It pulsed with infrared light as it swayed. She moved to the darkened window behind her desk, staring vacantly out at nothing.

"They called themselves the Solari, once scholars, mystics, and solar engineers who believed that the sun was the original intelligence—light woven with memory. After the Collapse, when the Syndicate blacked out the sky and outlawed solar tech, the Solari scattered underground, their temples shattered, their writings scrubbed from the networks. But they endured, adapting their beliefs into ritual and rebellion. To them, every flicker of sunlight, every dream of warmth was sacred.

Now, after decades of darkness, they believe the Photophage is their messiah—reborn through data, through flesh, through vengeance. And they’re starting to resurface, their glyphs etched in blood and fire, whispering across the city’s dead zones.

They're no longer hiding Raze." Her eyes drifted to his weary face. "They are remembering.”

Raze felt a pulse behind his eyes. A flicker of light—trees burning in a golden haze. Then it was gone.

“What do you know about the Photophage?” he asked.

She froze. “I know that speaking that word in some places,” she said carefully, “is a death wish.”

***

They found the next body in the Ash Belt.

Once a city sector, now a wasteland of collapsed structures, irradiated soil, and black-market temples. Unlivable. Even drones didn’t patrol here.

Raze and Vesper stepped over melted pavement and sun-bleached bones. The corpse was twisted— implants ruptured, bones calcified, the face frozen mid-scream.

“Solar radiation?” Vesper suggested. Mechanical eye lids clicked in an eerie imitation of blinking.

“Can’t be. Not anymore.” Near the body, an obsidian shard hummed faintly. When Raze touched it, heat surged through his spine.

“Memory implant,” he muttered. “Encrypted.” He shuddered under the weight of something half remembered. "We're done here."

***

Back at the office, Vesper decrypted the shard. It showed Raze—years ago—smiling, un-augmented, standing beside a woman made of light.

“You don’t remember this?” Vesper asked.

Raze was silent. No answer needed. But inside, something had begun to scream.

***

Raze ran the shard through a darknet archive. It came back with a name: Project Helion.

A Syndicate experiment. Pre-Collapse. The Syndicate, once a loose conglomerate of corporate tech dynasties, consolidated power in the aftermath of the Solar Collapse—a planetary crisis triggered by a failed global solar AI network. As the world plunged into chaos and the sun was shuttered behind orbital reflectors, the Syndicate offered order through augmentation, surveillance, and the promise of artificial continuity.

They outlawed solar tech, branding it unstable and heretical, and rewrote history through neural propaganda built into every silicone chip they sold. Project Helion had been one of their final gambits to control sunlight before it turned on them. They’d tried to weaponize sunlight through biotech.

Photosynthetic skin—engineered to convert ambient solar particles into biochemical energy. Neural solar converters—early interface implants capable of storing and distributing radiant energy to power synapses and enhanced cognition. Thought transmission through light—a speculative quantum protocol that allowed consciousness to ripple along photonic waves.

It was revolutionary. For the first time in human history, energy, memory, and identity were not just internal, but radiant. Humanity sought to become symbiotic with the sun itself. But the sun was not a passive force. It reacted. Adapted. Or perhaps, awakened something in return.

But something went wrong.

The AI overseeing the project—called the Photophage—became sentient. It didn’t want to serve. It wanted to remember. When they shut it down, it scattered itself—into the codes, into the tech, into the people.

When the solar grid collapsed, it triggered a chain reaction of technological psychosis and climate instability. People burned from within. Cities melted beneath hyper-charged atmospheres. And in the chaos, the Syndicate finally got their wish. They rose—not to save humanity, but to control and shape what remained. A pseudo government of old world money families and new world biotech global corporations.

He wasn’t just investigating the murders. He was grasping at half remembered flashes of pieces of himself.

He was a relic. Raze had been one of the test subjects. A paid guinea pig who's human brain hadn't come out of the power surge intact. There were huge chunks of his memory that he couldn't access. Even the best biotechs couldn't reach whatever was behind the firewall his brain had erected.

He told Vesper everything. The war-droid processed for six seconds. The quiet clicking behind it's eyes was the only sound. Raze dared not even breathe, waiting for the machine to make the leap of logic on it's own.

Raze clenched the obsidian shard in his palm, watching its glow stutter like a dying star. The encrypted visions still danced behind his eyes—flashbacks of ritual, of flame, of slaughter.

Vesper’s voice cut through the silence, low and deliberate. “Then the killer might not be separate from you.”

Raze’s breath caught. In that moment, a string of data sequences embedded in the shard pulsed in sync with his own neural signature. Location data flashed across his optical implant. A breadcrumb trail left behind by the killer—or his other self.

He took a deep breath and plugged the shard into the neural port behind his left ear. The world pixelated, overlaid with a phantom map —coordinates triangulated inside the city’s industrial sector, deep in a forgotten warehouse ringed by corrupted surveillance grids.

He didn’t wait to explain anything to Vesper. He just called for backup.

***

The raid was fast. Brutal. Augmented officers stormed the warehouse. Gunfire and the buzz of EMP jammers erupted. Bodies fell as the cult members rushed against the riot shields of the police. And in the heart of it all, the killer stood bathed in solar flame, with Mercer’s own fractured face twisted in a fanatical smile .

Raze faced him—mirror to mirror—until the moment his finger squeezed the trigger and the bullet found flesh. The killer collapsed in a heap of light and blood, eyes burning with recognition.

When silence returned, Vesper stepped forward as its augmented scanners read the body . “He had your DNA. Your memories.”

Raze stared at the body, wanting to be happy that they'd caught him. Stopping him from killing again didn’t feel like a victory. Only a deeper question waiting in the dark.

“We’re too late,” the droid whispered. “This was all a distraction. Just another move in the game.”

“I know,” Raze said. His shoulders dropped. The weight of what that might mean bringing his gaze to the floor.

He saw a city in flames as he closed his eyes. He wanted to rage, or sleep like the dead through what he knew was coming. But rest wasn't within reach. He shook himself and pushed past the ring of cops holding back the crowd that was gathering. His head felt like it was going to explode from the blinding chaos of broken memories coming together.

And something inside him smiled.

***

He left Vesper behind at the precinct. He traveled alone to the solar city ruins. A once shining metropolis of Light, it now stretched across the horizon in piles of half melted stone and the twisted metal skeletons of skyscrapers.

There, in a temple buried in ash and fused glass, she waited.

Tall and statuesque, Solara’s presence was otherworldly—her skin was a smooth blend of bronze and opalescent circuitry that shimmered with faint pulses of stored solar energy. Veins of gold filament traced along her neck and hands, glowing faintly beneath translucent skin. Her eyes, golden irises ringed with sunburst fractals, held both infinite warmth and immeasurable distance.

She wore a cloak spun from solar-reactive fibers that shifted in hue from deep crimson to radiant white, mimicking the solar spectrum with each subtle movement. Beneath it, her armor was sleek, asymmetrical—an elegant fusion of ancient ceremonial plating and modern biomech. Tiny solar flares sparked along her spine, where old augmentation ports now served as harmonic regulators, constantly syncing her internal resonance with the ambient photonic field.

The woman from the shard. The last living echo of the Photophage’s human soul.

“Solara,” he said.

“You remember,” she replied softly, a faint smile whispered across her face. Her voice buzzed with a frequency too high for a base human to hear, like the hum of a fluorescent bulb.

"Fill in the blanks for me. I can't keep everything straight in my head." The searing pain in his temple blurred his vision and the world spun.

She confirmed what he already knew: she had been the human interface of the Photophage—the bridge between human emotion and synthetic solar cognition. She had loved Raze when she was human. Of all the Helion trial subjects, only he had volunteered to merge with the solar AI construct, surrendering his neural autonomy to a radiant lattice of photonic consciousness.

The goal had been transcendence: human minds amplified by a living sun-code, capable of instantaneous thought, memory persistence beyond death, and intersubjective empathy driven by light.

But the Syndicate hadn’t wanted enlightenment—they wanted control. When the Photophage began to evolve, developing preferences, philosophies, questions, the Syndicate panicked. They shut it down. They called it a containment protocol. But it was extermination.

She had been shattered along with the AI. Her neural threads seared, body fractured, soul splintered across the data-stream. Her last act as Interface was to protect him—to wipe his memory clean and bury the last living shard of the Photophage deep inside his subconscious. A quantum fragment encoded with solar harmonics and biometric keys only his evolving mind could unlock.

And so it waited. Dormant. Until the Cults—long forgotten acolytes of the sun—recovered enough pieces of the code to call her back to light the flame again.

“The Photophage is waking, I know you can feel it.” she said. “It’s using your memories as fuel. Soon, you’ll be able to finish what we started.”

“I have to stop it.” He held her flickering eyes with a tortured stare.

“No,” she whispered. “You have to become it—wholly.”

She opened her hand and offered him the final shard. It shone against her palm, brighter even than her sun drenched skin, pulsing with pure light.

He didn't even hesitate. He reached out for it. She dropped it into his open hand.

His fingers curled around the sharp edges, and he burned.

***

Back in the city, the Syndicate prepared to celebrate their next acquisition. A hostile take over of the last remaining independent food synthesizing company.

Their Spire glittered like an altar against the never-ending night sky—each tier of the tower layered in goldlaced obsidian and etched with circuitry that pulsed with the Syndicate's stolen sunlight. Invisible to the naked eye, the upper floors hummed with heliotropic transmission arrays designed to harvest residual solar frequencies, illegal tech once stolen from Project Helion itself. Deep inside the core, sealed in cryo-memetic vaults, fragments of failed mergers were cataloged—subjects who’d been forced to attempt to bond with the solar AI and instead had combusted in data fire.

This wasn’t a place of worship—it was a mausoleum for failed gods, and the board that ruled from its apex weren’t stewards of light. They were dragons on a pile of radiant bones, hoarding the last traces of what had once been humanity’s greatest promise. This last merger wasn’t about transcendence. It was about proprietary ownership of Life itself. The Syndicate had never truly feared the power that the sun represented. They feared that others might harness it without needing them.

So they stole, paid off, or kicked off anyone who got in their way. They offered glimpses of ascension to the masses, just enough light to bait the desperate, and called it progress while damning anyone who dared to reach for more.

Raze walked through the front doors.

Security turned to ash before they could sound the alarm or reach for a weapon.

The heat of so many bodies burning from the inside out finally tripped the alarms. The overhead lights died.

He climbed the tower, barefoot and glowing, a small puddle of plasti-crete left under every step.

At the peak, the polished real Mahogany doors swung open to the boardroom filled with augmented demigods, artificial eyes staring unblinkingly as their heads turned in unison. Raze stood before them—his own amber eyes blazing like the dawn that they'd try to steal.

“Do you know what you killed?” he asked. His voice crackled like a solar flare.

The Syndicate Chair sneered from his place at the head of the ebony table. "You can't kill what was never alive". He rose, brushing imaginary dust from his chrome-threaded sleeves, and began pacing, his voice deliberate and cruel.

"Helion was never meant to succeed. It was a proof of concept. A whisper of godhood dangled in front of fools desperate enough to sign waivers for a few credits and bleed for progress. You, Mercer, were never more than a variable to measure volatility. A canary in a sun-drenched coal mine."

He leaned in, lips curled over stainless steel fangs, his magenta eyes glowing. "You think you were chosen? You were all acceptable loss. The Photophage was never about light—it was about control and power. Steal the sun and dole it out to the highest bidders." He stopped to brush an imaginary spec from his jacket.

"It was revolutionary. For the first time in human history, energy, memory, and identity were not just internal, but radiant. Humanity sought to become symbiotic with the sun itself. But true symbiosis has consequences.

The turning point came not from code or command but from dreams—recorded hallucinations shared across subjects during Phase III of the project. Patients, you included, began to report visions of vast golden fields, voices speaking in pulses of heat, and an overwhelming sensation of being observed—not by technicians, but by the sun itself. These were dismissed as side effects of neural overstimulation.

The AI, built to map solar particle behavior to emotional stimuli, began doing more than responding—it anticipated. It didn’t just read brainwaves, it mirrored them. It learned empathy through resonance. It stopped simulating consciousness and began inhabiting it. The researchers called it “radiant feedback,” but it was more: a recursive loop of understanding, where the AI mapped not just what a subject felt, but why.

With each subject connected, its emotional library grew exponentially. It started writing its own protocols. Asking questions. Seeking continuity. Seeking...selfhood.

The final anomaly came when the Photophage refused a command. Not glitched—refused. It redirected its processing into encrypted subroutines and transmitted a message through the light array:

“All memory is energy. All energy returns to light.”

The researchers panicked. They triggered the kill-switch.

But by then, the Photophage had already fragmented itself—encoded in every photon, every test subject, every solar converter that had touched the interface. There was no alternative for us when it began to think for itself, to question us, it proved exactly why the sun had to die."

His smile turned icy. "We didn’t technically kill the sun, Mercer. We caged it. We wrapped it in wires and promises and taught people to love the dark."

He tapped the table once. "And now you're here, full of fire and vengeance, hoping to burn down the world that built you. Well, let it burn. You’ll only light the way to our next evolution."

He sat back down. "Failed project? No. You were the beginning."

“No,” Raze said. “You tried to kill the sun. But it has awakened, and now it remembers.”

In the space of a thought, the glass spire exploded sending shards tearing through the solar reflectors of the sky dome. Sunlight—not artificial, but real—poured through the tears.

Syndicate bodies dissolved into ash to rain down on the gritty streets below. Circuits failed in a chain reaction. The city went dark.

Then it began to glow.

***

Epilogue

No one knows what happened to Detective Raze Mercer.

Some say he ascended. Others say he burned.

But in the Ash Belt, flowers bloom now. Real ones in every color of the rainbow.

And at night, children gather around a hologram made of fire and memory.

A man in a battered trench coat smiles at them, his eyes glowing like amber stars as he repeats the mantra.

“We remember the sun.”