Spun Up: La Vendetta del Fantasma
A Prequel to Altered Carbon
Year: 2220 CE – Nuova Napoli Arcology, Earth
The tank drained with a wet sigh. Cold fluid sluiced off Enzo Moretti’s new skin as the clamps released. His first breath in decades burned like fire in lungs that weren’t his. Vision swam—neon blues and reds bleeding through the clinic’s grimy viewports. A tech in a stained coat leaned over him, neural jack already humming.
“Stack integrity green. DHF stable. Welcome back, Signor Moretti. You’re spun up.”
Enzo sat up too fast. The sleeve—combat-grade, military surplus with neurachem muscle weave—responded like it had been waiting for him. Memories slammed in: the corporate raid on the Martian relic dig, the plasma bolt that cooked his old body, the stack being yanked before the real death could take him. Then… nothing. Storage. Ice.
Now this.
The Don’s man didn’t wait for questions. “Alessandro Rossi wants you in the tower by midnight. New sleeve, new job. Same family.”
Enzo flexed fingers that felt both alien and familiar. “How long?”
“Thirty-five years on ice. Tech’s moved on. Stacks are everywhere now if you can afford the jack. Needlecast’s cheap. Real death’s still real, though—slag the stack and you’re gone for good.”
Enzo stood. The room tilted, then steadied. “Where’s my old face?”
Nuova Napoli never slept. The old city lay drowned beneath the arcology’s lower levels—flooded palazzos turned into sleeve chop shops and black-market VR dives. Above, baroque towers of chrome and glass clawed at the smog, wrapped in pulsing neon vines that spelled out advertisements for new bodies, remote backups, and “eternal loyalty packages.”
Enzo moved through the rain-slick underlevels like a ghost. The new sleeve’s ONI (organic neural interface) fed him data overlays: heat signatures, stack pings, wanted lists. The Rossi Syndicate controlled the port needlecast hubs and half the chop shops. Their rivals, the old Moretti crew—ironic, given his name—had started double-sleeving enforcers to dodge hits. Illegal as hell, but profitable if you had the backups.
Don Alessandro Rossi waited in a penthouse that mixed ancient marble with humming server racks. Holo-fire crackled in a real stone hearth. The Don himself was on his third or fourth sleeve—lean, silver-haired, eyes like black ice. He’d been “spun up” more times than Enzo could count.
“Il Fantasma,” Rossi said, using the old street name. “You died well. Now you live again for the family.”
Enzo accepted the offered grappa—synthetic, but the burn was real. “What’s the play?”
“A rat in the lower stacks. Paolo ‘Il Serpente’ Moretti. He’s been needlecasting threats across the arcology, stealing territory, using cheap synthetic sleeves and backups to stay ahead of our cleaners. Last week he slotted one of my capos in a VR dive and walked away in a fresh body before the stack even cooled.”
Rossi slid a data shard across the table. “Find him. Slag his primary stack if you can. Destroy the backups. Make an example. The Protectorate’s sniffing around—new laws coming about double-sleeving and religious coding. We need to clean house before they spin up witnesses against us.”
Enzo pocketed the shard. “And after?”
Rossi smiled thinly. “You keep the sleeve. Plenty more work. Stacks make loyalty eternal… or expensive.”
The hunt took three nights.
Enzo started in the flooded ruins, moving through dripping colonnades lit by flickering holograms of saints and synth-hookers. He questioned a sleeve pusher in a back-alley chop shop, jamming a neural probe until the man’s eyes rolled back and his stack pinged a location.
Paolo was holed up in an old cathedral converted into a fightdrome and black-market needlecast relay. The place stank of ozone and cheap sleeve fluid.
Enzo went in hard.
The first two guards died quick—throat slits with a monowire garrote that left their stacks intact for later interrogation. The third put up a fight in a neon-drenched nave. Plasma bursts scorched marble saints. Enzo’s new sleeve took a hit to the shoulder; pain flared, then numbed as combat chems kicked in. He closed the distance, slammed the man into a pillar, and drove a spike through the back of his neck—precise, stack-destroying.
“Real death,” Enzo muttered. “Family business.”
Paolo waited in the old sacristy, surrounded by flickering server stacks and a wall of backup sleeves in nutrient tanks. He was in a wiry synthetic body, grinning with too many teeth.
“Enzo? Thought you were on ice forever. Come to collect for the old man?”
“Something like that.”
Paolo needlecasted mid-sentence—his DHF flickering as he tried to jump to a fresh sleeve across the room. Enzo was faster. He triggered the shard Rossi had given him: a localized jammer that fried the needlecast array for thirty seconds. Long enough.
The fight was brutal and short. Paolo fought dirty—stiff dealers’ neurotoxins, a hidden flechette gun. Enzo took wounds that would have killed his old body. This one healed faster. He pinned Paolo against the altar, jammed the monowire deep, and felt the satisfying crack as the cortical stack shattered.
Real death.
But Paolo had backups. Enzo spent the next hour systematically slag-burning every tank and remote drive in the room. When the last one popped and sizzled, he stood in the smoke and ozone, breathing hard.
A soft chime in his ONI. Incoming needlecast from Rossi.
“Well done, Fantasma. The family remembers its debts… and its tools.”
Enzo stared at the ruined cathedral. Somewhere far above, the arcology lights pulsed like a living thing. Stacks were spreading. Wealthy Meths were already living centuries. Crime families like Rossi’s were learning to weaponize immortality.
He touched the back of his neck where the new stack sat, humming with his consciousness.
For the first time since waking, Enzo wondered what happened when the tools started asking questions.
He walked out into the neon rain, already scanning for the next job. The Ghost was spun up. The vendetta had only begun.
End.
*(This short prequel captures the early, gritty spread of stack technology on Earth—before it fully colonized the Settled Worlds, before the Uprising, and long before Takeshi Kovacs was pulled from storage in 2384. It echoes the noir violence, moral gray areas, and questions of identity that define the Altered Carbon universe while standing alone as its own tale.)*
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