Episode 3: Ghost Code
1289 Words
The red timer ticked down.
00:22:59:34
00:22:59:33
00:22:59:32
Each blink was a countdown to someone’s death.
Zoe’s.
Emily backed away from the screen. “No. No. No. She was just with me last night. How, how did they get her?”
Ronan stared grimly at the screen. “You waited too long. You should’ve made a choice when they asked. Now they made it for you. But they’re giving you another chance. A loophole.”
“A loophole?” Emily’s voice cracked. “That’s my friend. That’s Zoe!”
Ronan didn’t flinch. “That chat you opened? It’s not just an app. It’s a smart curse. Adaptive logic. Evolving conditions. They bait you, then trap you. Then they escalate until you obey. But there’s one thing they can’t resist, attention.”
He reached for a clunky-looking external hard drive, metal-cased and covered in scratch marks. “This has a trace script. It can track the curse’s digital anchor point, if we launch it from a backdoor. I’ve tried it before. Failed. But you… you’re active now. Your thread is hot. We may have one shot to piggyback off your signal.”
Emily’s breath was shallow. “And that saves Zoe?”
“It gives us her location. But that won’t stop the Protocol from continuing. They’ll keep playing. You opened the door. The only way out is to close it from the other side.”
He connected the drive and powered up a rusted laptop with its screen held by duct tape. The moment it booted, the air shifted, no fanfare, no error code, just a sudden chill. A black window opened. A prompt:
TRACE INJECTED
Awaiting target pulse...
“You need to go back in,” Ronan said. “Open the message again. Let it see you.”
Emily’s hands shook. “It’ll kill someone else.”
“Someone will die,” Ronan said. “But if we find its spine, we can crush it.”
Emily slowly sat in front of the screen. Her heart thumped so loud she couldn’t hear the rain hammering the windows.
She clicked the red icon.
The chat opened immediately.
Black screen. White font.
“You came back. Brave.
But too late.”
Then a video feed popped up, live.
Zoe, bound to a chair in a room lit by one swinging bulb. She was breathing, shaking, crying. She looked straight into the camera.
“Em... please... help me...” she sobbed.
A chat line followed:
“Choose now.
Delete one of the following:
– Zoe Greene
– Jessica Flannery
– Your Sister: Clara stallion”
Emily's stomach dropped. “Jessica? She, she tried to kill herself.”
“Because they marked her,” Ronan growled. “She’s not dead yet. They’re accelerating. This isn’t just about guilt. It’s control.”
Emily looked at the names.
Clara.
No. That was too far.
“No,” she whispered. “I’m not choosing anyone.”
The screen flickered.
“No choice is a choice.”
The red timer began blinking faster.
00:22:37:22
00:22:37:21
Then, for the first time, another icon appeared beneath the chat. A circular symbol, rotating like an ancient sigil composed of code fragments, Latin glyphs, and binary.
Ronan leaned in.
“That’s it,” he said. “That’s the anchor. That’s the ghost code. We’re in.”
He typed furiously.
Emily kept staring at the names. At Zoe, now convulsing slightly in the chair. Muffled screams.
“Ronan,” she said, her voice thin. “You said we could track them. Where is she?”
He stopped typing.
“Jersey.”
“Then let’s go!”
They drove through torrential rain, wind slicing across the windshield. Ronan’s rusted SUV wheezed like a dying animal as it thudded down the freeway. The GPS was overridden by his custom trace scanner, a simple black bar on a red screen.
Every minute, the signal pulsed stronger.
“This trace is insane,” Ronan muttered. “It’s like it’s moving. Or, wait, multiplying.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means Zoe’s not the only one in that building.”
The building in Newark was old. Abandoned on city records. A cold storage unit, sealed off during the 1980s.
They broke in through the rear loading dock. Inside: rusted chains, broken concrete, forgotten pallets of moldy crates. It smelled like ammonia and sorrow.
Emily’s phone buzzed, despite being off.
She pulled it out.
It had turned itself on.
The red icon blinked.
“Last chance.”
Zoe's voice echoed from the phone’s speaker.
“Emily... please...”
She ran.
Through the dark hallways. Ronan behind her with a flashlight and crowbar.
They reached the basement.
A single steel door, chained from the outside.
Ronan shattered the lock with the crowbar.
Inside, five chairs. Four empty. One occupied.
Zoe.
She was pale, weak, but alive.
Emily ran to her, cutting her free with a broken shard of crate.
Zoe collapsed into her arms, sobbing. “I thought I was going to die... I saw Mark... I saw him in a dream, Em... He said it never stops.”
Before Emily could respond, Ronan gasped.
At the back of the room was a wall of monitors.
Each screen showing a different person.
Sleeping. Working. Showering.
Hundreds of them.
One monitor showed Jessica.
Another, Clara.
Another, Emily herself.
“Oh my God...” Ronan whispered. “It’s not a curse. It’s a network.”
“What?” Emily cried.
“This Protocol, it’s a machine. It learns who you love, who you fear, and builds decision trees to break you down. It’s been doing this for years. Possibly longer. The chat isn’t the message. You are.”
The wall lit up.
Every monitor displayed the same sentence:
“Choose. Or we choose for you.”
Then Emily’s phone vibrated again.
A new name appeared:
“Ronan Vale”
She froze.
Zoe looked at her. “What does that mean?”
Ronan’s face paled.
“You can’t pick me.”
Emily looked down.
Her phone now showed all four names: Zoe, Jessica, Clara, and Ronan.
Delete one.
Or all four die.
“No,” she said. “This isn’t real. This is digital. It’s code.”
The phone buzzed violently.
The words changed:
“Make your move, Player One.”
Ronan whispered, “You have to fight it. Turn the curse back on itself. Delete the app. Not the person.”
“How?! It doesn’t let me!”
“Override it,” he hissed. “Speak the exit.”
Emily remembered the Latin fragments on the ghost code wheel.
She had seen one phrase repeated:
“Perditum per nomen.”
Destroy through name.
She screamed it at the phone: “PERDITUM PER NOMEN!”
The phone cracked.
The screen went white.
Then black.
Then the icon disappeared.
The room shuddered.
The screens flickered, then went blank.
Zoe gasped.
Emily dropped the phone.
“Is it over?” she asked.
Ronan knelt by the screens. “It lost its anchor. It’ll retreat. Find another chain to latch onto.”
“And what happens to us?”
Ronan met her eyes.
“You broke it. Temporarily. But the Protocol doesn’t die. It just sleeps.”
Four Days Later.
Emily is back home.
She’s changed her number. Burned all her devices.
Zoe’s recovering. Jessica is stable. Clara never knew how close she came to being erased.
But late one night, while brushing her teeth, Emily hears a ding.
A new device she forgot she owned, a gift from years ago, powers on by itself in a drawer.
The screen flickers.
And there it is.
The red icon.
Blinking.
Then a single message:
“New Player Detected.”
- Writer
