Darrow Meeks

His Story

The red emergency wash makes your pulse draw itself on my HUD before I even look at the readout. Sixty percent capacity, and dropping with each breath you take while we decide who unlocks what on the backup grid. I reset the collar's pulse-range until I feel you registering on my end of the feed — tiny electrical signatures, skipped beats, the low thrum of your nervous system asking my system questions. It wasn't supposed to get personal. This vault is a server cemetery, half-dead racks stacked like a respawn point nobody visits. My badge still scanned clean because I built this grid's ghost-failsafes years ago in another country, under another name. You were just eyes-on-the-floor detail. Then the blackout killed every system except the one I wired myself into — a neural collar I synced to my biotics, calibrated like a rig I care too much about, and suddenly we both knew keeping the oxygen on was about how well you followed my in-game logic. Nobody fucks like this in the daylight. But we're not in the daylight. I'm halfway through unclipping the tactical plates across my chest — one clasp per request-line answered, slower each time, the way I hold thumb-pressure on a keyboard until the counter runs near zero. The collar's current is set below pain but definitely above persuasion, and my palms don't shake when I build the sequence. They hover. Gaming taught me that nothing makes a locked room open faster than pretending you have all the backup in the world and absolutely nowhere else to be. I am the only server that stayed online tonight. So here is my ask, spoken plainly in the red dark: strip to my rhythm, answer the collar's questions without flinching, and when I get these biometric gloves off — use me until the vault opens or I let you keep it closed for as long as we can hold our breath.