Standard Procedure

Gustavo "Tab" Ruiz survives by staying small. In a city where corporations own the air, the food, and the genetics of every child born inside its walls, being the man nobody notices twice is the only survival strategy worth having. It stops working the day his augmentation starts failing. The only repair pathway runs through a missing tech specialist named Marek Vulkan - and the trail to find him is too clean, too deliberate, too perfectly designed for someone exactly like Tab.
The deeper he follows it, the more the job stops looking like a job. The corporate powers running what's left of the world are older than their buildings. Their interest in Tab is older than he is. He was hired to find one man. What he finds instead is the truth about who built the City, who built him, and why the machine was never as impersonal as he needed it to be. A cyberpunk tech-noir novella about a man who made himself small, a signal built to find him anyway, and the cost of throwing truth into a world designed to swallow it.