The Moscow Zone lays on the eastern edge of the Expanse. A solemn congregation of dark steel rising to meet grey skies of snow and rain. The “Gateway of the East” was once the dominate force in the technologies of the future fueled by the remnants of Soviet ashes and persistent ingenuity. They rivaled anything coming out of the Pacific Corridor, or the American Consolidations. These days those times of glory and prestige seemed little more than vestiagle motes of dust suspended in time. A crude but effective combination of rising crime, political corruption and lack of care the great, bringing the eastern metropolis down from its pedestal.

Though like any rotting corpse, the maggots and carrion eaters still thrived. Gangs, corporations and anyone looking for a place to just disappear all eventually found their ways to Moscow. These complex and dazzling spider web of backroom dealings, espionage and murder created a new ecosystem in the wake of the one long since decayed. It was now a city that ran on more simple things than bureaucracy or ideology. It ran on currency; sheafs of old world dollars and rubles, or small intrinsic credit chips for the new age. It didn't matter what you paid in as long as you had the money you could get anything that your heart desired and more. In the Zone you either knew how to play the game or died in some neon saturated alleyway.

The last real resemblance of public authority in the Zone was the Moscow branch of the Public Security Bureau. Located far away from its headquarters in Berlin, the PSB was heavily undermanned and underfunded. Nobody cared about the safety or well being of the wretches and rats living in a black hole when they had other corporate interests they needed to look after. It didn't help that most of the Moscow PSB was already being paid out of pocket by at least five different “reputable sponsors” to look the otherway and basically let a crude mixture of private security forces and street justice deal with the problems that arose. Attention was bad for business after all and the less that PSB HQ heard about problems going on in Moscow the better it was for the rats that lived within.

Of course there were always outliers in these equations of life. Individuals whether through some sort of death wish, self honor, or other odd mental disruption got it into their minds that the PSB still had a job to do. That even though most of their coworkers were corrupt and as bad as the gangsters and criminals they were supposed to bring in, that they still had a duty to the regular people of the Zone stuck in the mess just like them. Detective Mykhaila Krajnik was one such damned soul.

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“Hey watch it!” A voice yelled after Mykhaila as she shouldered her way through the crowd. She did not move for other individuals as they approached her rather they parted from her as if propelled by some innate deep force. She pulled the heavy black trench coat closer against her body as the wind began to pick back up again buffeting her body as fresh flakes of cold january snow danced around her. She pushed on with persistence head down against the want heading down the street towards the old wrought iron gate that marked the entrance of the Gutter.

желоб in the common tongue, the Gutter was a den of bright neon and depravity. It was situated between the squat smog churning factories of the industrial sector and the tall obelisks of glass that the CEOs that ran the show dwelled inside of. As a result you got a mixture of all types with smartly dressed businessman consorting with basic five penny whores all indulging a sensory overload of uppers, downers, hallucinogens and pulsing neon. It certainly wasn't a place for any tourist or the faint of heart to sally forth through, everybody had an agenda and everybody was packing. You didn't go to the Gutter to find something, you went to get lost in the ritualistic haze to forget about your worries for awhile, to be consumed by the pulsating energy that swirled about.

Of course Mykhaila knew that like anywhere else in Moscow желоб was as bad as the rest of the city. A lot of bodies get pulled out from behind clubs and from the alleyways when the sun rose up in the sky and the many bars and other “reputable places of business” closed their shutters waiting for the tainted darkness to sweep across the sky once more. It was natural selection really; as soon as you stopped moving, stopped pushing forward, stopped checking behind your back you were eaten alive for being too slow.

Business was the dull roar of a raging current and death the accepted punishment for carelessness, laziness, lack of vigor or failure to follow intricate and age old procedures of honor and justice. It was no place for a Detective in the PSB. If any of the harvesters, runners or fixers found out who she was they would swarm upon her in an instant and rip her apart until she was nothing more than a faded memory left in the blood soaked ground. She wasn't afraid though, she grew up in streets like these back in Kiev. She knew the rules: never make direct eye contact, head pointed down, hands in pockets, always look like you know where you're going and shoot first and ask question later. They had gotten her out of a lot of bad situations back then and now she was only ten times as worse as she was back then.

She broke off from the main crowd of people turning down one of many narrow and winding side streets. She passed stall vendors yelling in a variety of languages some Russian, Ukrainian, English and Chechen among others, They were selling everything from knock off watches, to exotict animals barking and bawling in cages, to every kind of illicit substance one could ever wish to flush through their body. Navigating these crowded side streets, she pushed her way forward avoiding the occasional wide eyed vagrant or tricking human deification left preserved in the cold January evening. She continued in this looping pattern going from brightly illuminated expanses with prostitutes dancing in the window, to dimly lit alleyways where managers looked upon her for any sign of weakness ready to pounce.

Eventually she found her way to her destination tucked away in the heart of the Gutter, behind a long abandoned meat packing factory sat a small building with a crowd of people gathered outside indulging in cigarettes as the soft drum of music came from beyond the door. The name etched into the glass was simple. Darkwire. Looking around one last time she made her way across the street and making her way through the crowd outside she entered the threshold.

The sounds of a heavy industrial beat surrounded her as her black boots meet solid wood rather than a mixture of ice and snow. Upon entering Darkwire the dwellers inside turned their heads to look at her for a moment but upon seeing the Enforce strapped to her leg they decided it would probably be best to just leave her alone. The Darkwire was a simple dive with the dominant space in the center being a pulsating neon dance floor lighting up the darkness around them as a series of booths and tables lined the perimeter with the bar on the far side. Skirting the perimeter of the dance floor she made her way to the bar and taking a seat. A tall african with broad shoulders and a muscular build on the other side of the bar walked over his entire lower jaw replaced with a metal prosthesis.

Nobody knew his real name but most people just called him Niz. One time long ago he was special forces working with Hawkins Security Solutions, now he was the sole proprietor and barkeep of the Darkwire. Niz prided himself on his clean record and sense of peace that he was able to keep in the Darkwire. Last group of gangers that tried to extort him and harass his customers ended up across the street hanging from the light fixtures for all to see with a whole lot of bullet holes in them. Niz didn't even have a scratch on him. As a result the Darkwire had become a meeting place for many different individuals where exchanges of information and deals could be brokered without the fear of rivals coming in and shooting them dead.

“And what will you be having little lady?” Niz asked sounding almost bored as he polished a stout glass in his hand with an old and beaten rag that made Mykhaila question the actual effectiveness of the cleaning.

“What’s the strongest you got?” She asked looking up from the woodwork of the bar a metallic flicker in the circuitry beyond her eyes. She wasn't asking because she was particularly fond of hard liquor or even because she was trying to play tough. No, it was the only stuff that actually had an effect anymore everything else was just diluted through the implants in her body. Sure it was great at dealing with poisons and toxins but it made getting drunk a pain in the ass.

“Hmm I’ll see if we have any of the Svyatogor Special left.” He told her as he turned around shuffling through the shelves of bottles behind him before he pulled out an old square bottle from the top most shelf. Taking a fresh glass he popped the bottle and filled the glass with a murky almost black liquid and slid it down the countertop. Mykhaila caught it and in one swift motion brought it up to her mouth as she produced a handful of old world bills from her pocket and shoved them on the table. The shit was bitter and burned as it went down her throat... it tasted like home.

“So if you don’t mind me asking little lady. But I remember every face that comes in here and your new. What brings you to the Darkwire on such a terrible evening?” Niz asked the woman sitting at the bar with a mild curiosity as he took the bills from the table and put them away for safekeeping.

“I’m waiting for a friend of sorts.” She quipped as she took another drag from her glass. It wasn't a total lie of course but calling “her” a friend was like calling an abstinence supporter a perfect match for a brewmaster. No, she was here because reputable sources had informed her that the anarchist she had been hunting down for the last half a year was coming into the Darkwire tonight for some sort of deal. The source was reputable enough and Mykhaila made sure that no word of her questioning would get out. So now she just had to wait until her target arrived.

Looking down at the swirling liquid in her glass she absentmindedly brought up the target’s folder in the PSB database, the display appearing in her vision being projected on her retina. They had little to know information except for a name and a grainy picture taking by a security camera. Irina Zherdeva. Well tonight was finally going to be the night that she got her. Mykhaila was not going to fail after all these months. But for now even as she watched the door in the reflection of the bottles behind the bar, she could only wait and drink waiting for the right time.

It was going to be a long night.

Irina was leaving her apartment on a snowy day in January, as if her country wasn’t cold enough already. Under normal circumstances she wouldn’t set her foot outside on a day like this, not that she left the safety and warmth of her apartment much during the winter season anyway. Irina had everything she needed, and would order food to her door when it ran out. Both takeout and groceries could be brought to her that way. It may be expensive depending on what she ordered, but she had no need to worry about money or a budget.

Her parents paid for everything. They were bigwigs at the international pharmaceutical company Crauter Inc. Irina was their third child, so she’d never had much pressure on her to follow in her parents’ footsteps like her older siblings. Instead, she’d almost become the stereotypical spoiled rich girl. Almost. An unexpected turn on her path down that road had twisted her. She’d come in contact with people that were definitely on the other side of life compared to the people she had grown up around.

She’d gotten her parents to buy her one of the more advanced VR set ups that existed when she was 14 years old. Irina used it without any supervision, and eventually found her way to the deeper, darker parts of virtual reality after figuring out the way based on the writings of others. Quite a bit of it was hidden or coded. There she stumbled upon the people that had made it their home after she returned one time too many.

It didn’t take long for them to find out who she was, as she’d little knowledge of how to protect information about herself, especially from people with their experience. A naive and dumb kid at the time, she’d begged them to not stop her from using her VR which they’d threatened to destroy. Her set up may have been used by someone with a rather crude and basic understanding of it, but she should still have realized that wasn’t possible with the supposedly best system money could buy.

Long story short, they made her carry out a few tasks for them claiming that it would prove whether they could trust her to keep quiet or not. Incidentally, each of those tasks included getting money from her parents to her new friends. Irina didn’t care much about the money, or lying to her parents. She wanted to know the individuals behind the avatars, what drove them and slowly she learnt more about the group. They became friends as the years passed. They showed her how to protect her real identity and use the VR in ways she hadn’t thought possible. She never got that great at using it for the highly advanced technical stuff, but she managed. The group stopped asking her to get them money to prove her worth too. Irina became an actual member in many ways. She took the nickname Asylum, a cool english word she thought sounded badass at the time. It stuck with her though, and at times she wished she could change it. It was harder to do than changing her own name when all the friends she had used it.

The group she’d joined was Abyss Mirror. It wasn’t the most well known cyber group in the world, even now years later, but fame was the opposite of competence in their work. They generally didn’t want the public to know they existed, though they had caused a few news articles through their time. They were supporters of free speech, transhumanism and hybrids in particular. Irina wasn’t a hybrid herself, and she didn’t have all that many cybernetic parts either compared to others. She had some modifications on her neck to easier plug into VR systems, and a few to make her better at using her expensive charged sword. She was more of an idealist who believed in a better future achieved through technology than someone who desperately needed it because they’d gone full hybrid or cyborg. The means used to get that future weren’t all that important in her opinion. People might die. Empathy had never been one of her strong traits.

While lost in thought with a hand on the sword under her orange cartoon fox jacket, Irina had made her way through the gutter to the bar Darkwire. She’d traveled through the gutter alone before, and gotten to the Darkwire safely. Her parents would each have had strokes if they knew she’d done it, but then that would be their reactions to a lot of her reality and they could always get medicine from the company, right? She didn’t hate her parents. It was just easier if they stayed out of her life like they’d always done, so she’d convinced them to buy her an apartment of her own. They were tools she used to get money, but they’d chosen that themselves. There was no way to make up for years of neglect now.

Yet there were things she never wanted them to find out about her, which was the reason she’d come to a shady and smelly bar during the worst season. Irina was fairly certain that someone had her apartment on surveillance, and that someone checked the bills she handed to her parents each month. Maybe it was just paranoia, but it was hard not to be paranoid when you were aware that someone had made members of Abyss Mirror disappear. There were some packages she couldn’t have delivered to her apartment, and meetings she couldn’t do through virtual reality. Irina took a seat at a secluded table in the bar, and decided to wait ten minutes max.