A Neon Disease

Neo-Tokyo is a wound. It breathes smoke and vomits neon. It’s filthy. It’s alive. The streets are soaked in broken dreams. Syringes, sex, safe hopelessness. Skyscrapers scream in color, pink and blue and acid green. And deep inside this cyberpunk hellhole, built onto the ruins of a wiped out city, lives Tetsuo. He was a boy, like so many others. Then a special kind of magic awakened inside him. Power. Screaming, impossible power. Not even he could hold it. And then the men in the shadows came. The ones in coats. With needles. With wires. With orders. Contain him, they said. Because they were afraid, of Akira. Always Akira. That name. That myth. That black hole of a boy.

Kaneda loved Tetsuo like a brother. Rode like a god on that red beast of a bike. Fast enough to forget. Tough enough to survive. They were kids. Rebels. Orphans. Dust. Racing through trash-light and chemical rain, chasing adrenaline, chasing heat. No dreams, just the hum of the engine and the static on the radio. They didn’t ask for meaning. They just wanted to burn. Then the city turned. Started watching them. Started whispering their names into the wires. Until the streets swallowed Tetsuo whole. Split him open, filled him with electricity, madness, grief. Not love, not anymore. Just power. Too much. Way too much. Kaneda couldn’t reach him.

Akira bled into the eyes of a nation. It was ugly. Beautiful. Real. Black ink on white paper like veins bursting under skin. Katsuhiro Otomo didn’t tell the future. It was the future. Then, the screen couldn’t hold it. The movie exploded. Cells melted. Worlds shifted. We all got infected. No one was safe. Not the artists. Not the kids. Not the ones who thought they’d seen it all. Neo-Tokyo became a virus. A neon disease that glittered in the dark and tasted like sugar, sluts, and static. I saw it once, and it lived in me. Curled up behind my teeth. Waited in my spine. Everything changed after that. They said it was fiction. But it was prophecy. And we’re still catching up.