I Trust My Code
I Trust My Code
*By Illphated | illphated.com
⸻
The neon rain fell in silent pulses, tracing rivers of pink and violet down the armored plates of Colt Mercer’s coat. His red beard dripped with static mist, eyes narrowed beneath the brim of his black hat. Beside him, his coyote—half-wild, half-coded—scanned the horizon with glowing, amber eyes.
They stood at the edge of the Old Sector, where the last wooden saloons leaned against holographic skyscrapers. A place where outlaws jacked into backdoor servers while sheriffs patched together the law from scraps of forgotten data.
Colt didn’t care about any of it.
He only trusted his code.
See, in this part of the world, it wasn’t about trustin’ people anymore. Folks got rewired, reprogrammed, repurposed. Loyalty? That was just an app you could uninstall. Friends? They came with firmware updates.
But not the code.
Colt wrote his own.
Line by line, sleepless nights spent in smoke-filled motel rooms coding his neural firewall. A black-market OS, stitched together from outlaw logic and frontier ethics. It kept him sharp. It kept him clean. It kept him free.
He didn’t answer to corporations. Didn’t bow to governments. The regulators tried to buy him out once. The syndicates tried to upload malware into his system twice. And the New West Army? Hell, they offered him citizenship if he’d just plug into their cloud.
Colt Mercer said no every time.
Because he trusted his code.
Tonight, a contract squad waited in the alleys of Neon Gulch, chrome-plated cowboys with firmware updates they didn’t understand. Mercs hired by people who thought Colt was just another relic from the Old Code, waiting to be deleted.
But Colt wasn’t a relic. He was a prototype.
He glanced down at the coyote, whose fur shimmered like electric brushfire. The animal’s eyes met his for just a second—silent understanding passing between two creatures who belonged to no one.
Then Colt adjusted his coat, tapped the pistol grip at his side, and whispered beneath his breath:
“I trust my code.”
And when the first shot rang out, he didn’t hesitate. His reflexes weren’t downloaded—they were earned. His loyalty wasn’t programmed—it was chosen. And his survival wasn’t a glitch.
It was by design.
⸻
illphated.com | Neon Frontiers, Cyber Cowboys, and Digital Freedom