I am Kuro Komyo, a detective of the Counter Chaos Bureau’s elite RIOT squad. I am tasked with enforcing the Well Ordered Society Act, a strict ban on music and dancing imposed to prevent the spread of the "mania" sickness. I am a full cyborg and have been since just after I was born. While I never got to experience life with an organic body, being a cyborg is pretty cool. I’ve got state-of-the-art enhancements like advanced cyber warfare and sonic frequency manipulation capabilities. I’m supposed to use these to carry out my duties with ruthless efficiency and pay off my debt to the CCB for saving my life when I was younger.

I never knew my parents because they died in a car crash taking me home from the hospital where I was born. I’ve gotten conflicting stories about what kind of people they were. Some in CCB say they were musicians to try and explain my innate talent for music. I’m one of the best detectives in CCB because of it. On the one hand my talent is a blessing because I’m given wide latitude to go undercover and hunt down chaos agents with the music I create. On the other it can be curse in a world where music is criminalized. Sometimes I wonder what kind of music I’d create if I were free to just do so the way people did before the ban. I wonder if I’d make the kind of stuff that infects people with the mania?

CCB is engaged in ongoing battle against groups that try to spread the mania. The main group pushing it call themselves “Shamans of Play”. Allegedly they want to ignite humanity's passion for music and dancing. The Shamans believe that the ban on music is oppressive, that the "mania" is not a sickness, and have been in open revolt since the Well Ordered Society Act was passed. They believe the mania is a manifestation of natural human desire for self-expression that has been unjustly criminalized. The Shamans organize communal experiences of music and play, spreading the joy of music and dance to populations starved of these experiences.

I’m told my unique abilities make me invaluable in CCB’s fight against the Shamans. CCB’s top brass believe I can eventually infiltrate the Shamans’ operations and take them down from within. I can never tell how serious they are about that though. Every raid gets more and more violent. It used to be we’d capture them and interrogate them to learn more, but lately it seems like we’ve just been tasked with massacring them. The way some of my peers revel in the violence, the destruction, the uprooting of communities….it doesn’t seem all that well ordered to me.

During one particularly intense raid on a safe house used by the Shamans, we came across these skilled musicians who were performing some of their new music. As we prepared to take them out, I was captivated by the beautiful melody that filled the room, by their passionate singing about the power of music to heal and uplift. It’s standard on a raids for squad members to wear protective gear that prevents us from getting infected with the mania. But because of my undercover work I’m allowed to go on these raids without protection. CCB let’s me record samples of the music these groups make so I can use it to draw in those we haven’t found yet.

Occasionally I experiment with creating music using these samples as inspiration. After all if I can really get into the world of sound these groups are already creating, I’ll be an even better undercover operative. Every time I do I feel a sense of freedom and joy and wonder if that’s what the mania is like: a sense of liberation, a sense of not having to live under the burden of obligations in a society you inherited, a feeling of pure bliss.

I really hope that by allowing myself to feel, even if only slightly, what the mania feels like, I can become a full fledged member of the Shamans of Play. I’m constantly reminded that if I can bring them down from the inside, my debt to CCB will finally be paid off. So whenever I’m not on raids or investigations, I fully embrace my undercover persona as Black Cyborg, indulging in the mania so that I can get in deeper with the Shamans. Perhaps In a world where an individual’s expression of their inner music is silenced, Black Cyborg can stand as a beacon of hope for a brighter, more harmonious future. A beacon I can use to draw the Shamans in, and shut them down.