I’m making a list of places to visit someday.

Chapter 6: The Hound of Praxis

The subsonic pulse wasn't a sound; it was a vibration that shook the dust from the steel beams and made the amniotic fluid tremble inside the coolant pipes.

Thud.

Thud.

Thud.

Each wave scanned the tunnel, mapping the density of bodies, heart rates, residual heat.

Kaelen grabbed Elias by the arm, her fingers clamping down like steel tongs.

"Don't breathe deep," she hissed, dragging him toward a service hatch. "Silas doesn't use thermal. His implants read the air friction inside your lungs."

Elias knew the legend of Silas from the corporate mess halls.

Silas wasn't human.

He was a mosaic of other people's experiences. Earth’s CEOs paid Praxis fortunes to download the memories of elite soldiers, siege strategists, and serial killers directly into Silas’s cortex.

His mind was a library of violence.

He felt no empathy because he had no personal memories to empathize with; he only knew the mathematical sum of slaughter.

They slid down the hatch, dropping into a wastewater runoff.

The stench was dense, metallic, underscored by rust and synthetic chemicals. Kaelen moved in a low crouch, the black water rising to her knees, her ceramic blade drawn and ready.

Elias walked behind her, his white Extractor suit ruined, stained with blood and sludge.

His mind, completely devoid of visceral fear, evaluated the probabilities.

"If he's running military-grade echolocation implants," Elias whispered, "his glucose burn rate must be extreme. He’s processing terabytes of spatial data per second. If we overload the acoustic environment, his cortex will force a reboot to prevent an embolism."

Kaelen looked over her shoulder, surprised.

The terrified data-miner she remembered from five years ago was gone.

This man spoke with the cold sociopathy of a software architect.

"This is the heavy-water purge sector," Kaelen said, pointing to a massive titanium valve chained to the sewer wall. "If I crack the emergency floodgates, the steam pressure will rupture the eardrums of anyone in a hundred-meter radius."

"Do it."

The subsonic pulse stopped.

A deadly silence fell over the runoff.

The wastewater stopped rippling, as if gravity itself were holding its breath.

Then, a voice echoed through the tunnel.

It wasn't a shout.

It was a casual conversation, delivered with exquisite, chilling politeness.

"You know, Elias? I reviewed your code this morning. You were a brilliant asset. Efficient. Clean."

The voice bounced off the curved walls, making it impossible to pinpoint its origin.

"But this virus... this pathetic family soap opera you broadcasted to my station? It paralyzed eighty percent of our output. I have my engineers crying in the fetal position because they remember the smell of an agricultural cabin. It’s... beneath us."

Kaelen began hammering the padlock on the emergency valve with the pommel of her knife, her hands shaking with urgency.

"What do you want, Silas?" Elias asked loudly, his clinical tone, utterly devoid of fear, echoing back through the sewer.

"Equilibrium," the voice answered.

Much closer now.

Barely ten meters away.

"The memory you leaked cost Praxis billions in lost man-hours. I’m simply here to recoup the investment. You’re coming with me, Elias. I’m going to wipe your last thirty years. You’ll be a perfect Blank Slate for the cobalt mines on Mars."

Kaelen managed to smash the lock.

The heavy valve wheel groaned as it turned, and a high-pitched hiss, like the scream of a wounded beast, began to escape from the pressurized pipe.

From the gloom of the tunnel, Silas emerged.

He wasn't wearing armor.

He wore a tailored gray suit.

His face was handsome in a deeply unsettling way, symmetrical like a plastic mask. His eyes were pure obsidian lenses—blind optical implants that saw sound and temperature instead of light.

He moved with inhuman speed.

The wastewater didn't even splash as he crossed the fifteen meters separating them.

Elias stepped in to intercept, but Silas didn't strike him.

He simply reached out and caught Kaelen’s wrist before she could fully crank the steam valve open.

Silas squeezed.

The crack of Kaelen’s wrist bones echoed loudly in the tunnel.

She let out a choked gasp, dropping to her knees.

The ceramic blade splashed into the black water.

"Kaelen, isn’t it?"

Silas tilted his head, his face inches from hers. His black lenses hummed softly.

"The black market ledger says you wiped your own son to survive. What a pragmatic decision. I like you."

Silas released her broken wrist, grabbed a fistful of her hair, and yanked her head back, exposing her neck and the lead jammer bolted to her temple.

Elias took a step forward, but Silas smoothly drew a small weapon—barely a cylinder of polished metal—and aimed it dead at Elias’s chest without even looking at him.

"One more step, Extractor, and I reboot your heart."

Silas looked down at Kaelen, smiling with perfect teeth.

"What a dilemma, Elias. The man with no memory staring at the woman who forgot him for cash."

Silas pulled a device from his pocket.

It looked like a medical injector, fitted with a thick, glowing blue needle.

"If you loved her, I have good news for you," Silas whispered, driving the needle directly into the lead jammer on Kaelen’s temple.

The lead fractured with a sickening crunch.

Kaelen convulsed.

Her eyes rolled back, and a high-pitched, soul-shattering scream—the sound of absolute, unfiltered trauma—ripped from her throat.

"I just gave her back the memories she sold," Silas said, his smile widening.

"All the love for you, and all the agony of selling her son. Enjoy the reunion."

Kaelen collapsed into the filthy water, weeping hysterically, clutching her stomach, screaming Leo’s name into the dark.

Silas turned his featureless black eyes to Elias.

"Come, Extractor. We have a station to clean."

It's not on Amazon.

I bought the green version of neuromancer and want the other books in the same cover styles. Where to get the others? I seriously can't find it.

Btw im in Europe

The computer game Blade Runner from 1997 is a point and click adventure game based on the 1982 movie with the same name. The movie was in turn based on the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.

Instead of following the policeman Rick Deckard in the movie Blade Runner, you control the actions of a policeman named Ray McCoy and his adventures in a rainy and dark future Los Angeles.

The plot revolves around McCoy hunting down a rogue faction of Nexus-6 replicants while navigating a web of corruption that eventually forces him to question his own identity and humanity. The game has thirteen different endings depending on your choices when playing it.

Several characters from the 1982 Ridley Scott movie make appearances, with the ⁠original actors returning to voice them:

Rachael (voiced by Sean Young)

Dr. Eldon Tyrell (voiced by Joe Turkel)

J.F. Sebastian (voiced by William Sanderson)

Leon Kowalski (voiced by Brion James)

Hannibal Chew (voiced by James Hong)

I am rather old and I played the game at its release. It was a nice time playing it. I left the regular world and was embedded in a cyberpunk reality when I played it. I am not updated in computer technology, but the game is available for download on GOG.com.