Chapter 3 THE BLACKOUT

It happened without warning.

A solar flare hit at exactly 22:04 Earth Standard. The outer magnetosphere of New Kyoto. The city's artificial intelligence battled to manage the abrupt wave of radiation flooding over it. The impact was first.

Lights died and flickeringly lost their meaning. Gravity hampered a hiccup for a moments. Systems in the Skyplate field froze. Afterward, in a big blackout, everything vanished.

Riko Ayane screamed when her body started to respond.

Her skin tingled with a great surge of vitality. Her muscles spapped, twitched. Her bones could sense breaking and shifting, adapting into something totally different.

Her jaws stretched, shattering her teeth and turning her into something more animal than human beings. Her hearing, her sight, her whole senses opened with explosions beyond understanding. She could not control herself. Her mind was not in control; her body was.

Riko lay in a crumpled pile on the chilly lab floor several minutes after the power returned, her body still twitching as her mind tried to reassert itself. The tiles were stained with blood; in the cracked glass, her image revealed the face of a stranger.

Feral eyes. Dark veins. Too sharp teeth.

She gasped, saying "no," and moved towards the shattered mirror.

The AI did not register her change. Security footage malfunctioned. Medical alerts were muted. The system kept quiet even if it knew what had happened.

Riko used to be just a laboratory test subject. She posed a threat to the city, which knew it.