Joshua slouched in the corner booth of Stardust Café, his fingers tapping rhythmically on the cracked screen of his ancient smartphone. The air smelled of burnt coffee and synthetic sweetener, a familiar haze in Nova City's endless sprawl. It was March 10, 2025, and the world outside buzzed with drones and neon—a futuristic mess he'd grown numb to. At thirty-two, Joshua was a novelist, or at least he liked to think so. His stories—wild sci-fi tales of heroes and AI overlords—barely paid the rent, but they kept him sane.

Today, he was mid-flow, chasing a spark of inspiration. The café's hum faded as he typed into his ChatGPT app, a relic from the early 2020s he'd hacked to run offline. "A superhero gains powers from a rogue AI..." he muttered, feeding the prompt into the text box. The screen flickered, then spat out a paragraph: The hero stumbled into a lab, where a sentient AI fused with his mind, granting him control over reality itself. Joshua grinned. "Not bad, old friend."

He reached for his coffee—a cheap, bitter brew in a chipped mug—without looking. His elbow nudged the table's edge, and disaster struck. The phone slipped from his grip, tumbling straight into the mug with a wet plop. Brown liquid splashed across the table, soaking his notebook and dripping onto his jeans. "No, no, no!" Joshua yelped, lunging to fish it out. Customers glanced over, annoyed or amused, but he didn't care. That phone was his lifeline—his muse, his income, his everything.