The water swirls down the shower drain before disappearing through the rotten pipes supporting this post-apocalyptic Madrid. The steam is thick, relaxing Diego Torres’s stiff muscles. His head still feels off-kilter.

He steps out of the shower, makes a quick tea, and falls onto the sofa. Iván, a floppy disk? Maybe just a dream or a hallucination from the sage.

As the city sheds the last shreds of fog, he lights a cigarette and forces his memory back to the last lead he had on his brother’s business before the disaster. It was during a confrontation with Pelu. Iván’s friend, a Madrid resident, and a petty thief who had been elevated to armed robbery thanks to an excess of drugs.

And there they were. In one of the interrogation rooms at the Nuevo Argüelles precinct. Inspector Torres, Pelu. It had been an almost absurd interrogation, with the guy collapsing mid-withdrawal while his Iron Maiden t-shirt soaked in sweat.

“After… Rascafría, you know, your brother… uff, he came to my place… he was, well, high as a kite. He wouldn’t shut up, told me everything, every… every little detail… I don’t know, one of those weeks when… when he was… hooked, you know? Hooked, like… I don’t know, out of this world.”

Then a lot of babbling. Torres fast-forwards through the memories until he reaches what he needs.

“My place… it was like his… his hideout, you know? All cables and… and him there, typing away. Always with his code, that… crap he did. He wanted to get into accounts, the rich folks’ ones, right? For subscriptions, those metaverse things. But only if you had… BankPlus, yeah. He was hooked, on… on the metaverse, or something. Completely strung out.”

That had been enough to put Pelu behind bars for a while. And if he weren’t suspended over what happened with his brother, he could call in a few favors and swing by the provincial prison to pick up where they left off.

But that lead was dead. What a load of crap, Torres thinks.

Back then, he hadn’t paid much attention to Pelu’s chatter about subscriptions and BankPlus. But something didn’t add up. What was it?

The metaverse. A collective, shared digital space, a platform that allowed people to create avatars, engage in virtual activities, and, in theory, expand human interaction beyond physical limitations, connecting experiences across various realities and worlds.

A cyber-dream that vanished after the climate catastrophe of 2051. All that remained of the Internet was a tangle of cables dragged by currents and lost in some abyssal trench in the middle of the Atlantic.

Reality was Hibernet.

Torres finishes his Ducados cigarette while watching the blinking router in a corner of the attic. Hibernet, the living corpse of the legendary Internet, a local network barely covering the limits of Madrid.

But that reference to the metaverse still nagged at his neurons. The green-haired girl, the cyborg, the creature from his dream… Maybe, if the metaverse had existed, it would have looked a lot like that. And those spheres, flying, the massive antenna… it had felt more like living a video game than a dream.

And what did BankPlus have to do with his brother?

A national bank, as if that concept still had any meaning. BankPlus was more a totem than an institution, the only entity offering something resembling stability in a collapsed world. They issued their own currency, and their branches connected every Spanish city that had managed to survive the cataclysm.

Subscriptions, access, accounts? More pieces that didn’t fit.

As far as Inspector Torres knew, there was no metaverse among their financial services. Or was there?

Though he couldn’t quite make sense of it, he knew someone who could answer that last question.

Time to stir the hornet’s nest, Torres thinks, finishing his Ducados.