Neon Ghost

Chapter 13: Cyber Saints

Neo-Tokyo has no gods. Only bandwidth.

Sub-level 4. The abandoned St. Mary's Cathedral. The stained glass was long gone, welded shut with crude lead plating.

Adrian, drowned in an oversized rad-cloak, blended into the ragged flock. The air was a toxic soup of cheap synth-incense and ozone.

No priests. No crosses.

Dead center stood a ten-meter-tall holographic Jesus. Faceless. Its head was a massive, slowly rotating Omega server rack. Ghost-blue light bathed hundreds of kneeling worshippers below.

Thick black cables jacked straight into the base of their skulls, hardwired into the cathedral's subterranean mainframe. Eyes vacant. Foam at the lips. Bodies twitching to an inaudible frequency.

"They're uploading hashrate," Isabella hissed over the comms. "Lunatics turning their gray matter into mining rigs for the Cloud Parliament."

*"Not the Parliament."* Lena's voice echoed in his skull, dripping with visceral revulsion. *"The Shepherd. I can feel it... it's gnawing on their frontal lobes."*

Adrian tightened his grip on the pulse pistol in his pocket. He came to find Blind Joe's fixer, not stumble into a tech-cult.

Suddenly, the holo-Jesus flared blinding, pristine white.

The twitching stopped. Snapped their heads up in unison.

A woman in an immaculate black uniform stepped out onto the mezzanine VIP balcony. Victoria Chase. She looked down at the "flock" like she was auditing a spreadsheet of prime metrics.

"Praise the Advisor." Victoria's voice resonated via bone-conduction inside every worshipper's skull.

"Praise..." Hundreds of hollow throats rasped a mechanical echo.

Victoria's gaze swept the crowd, then snapped dead onto Adrian. Thirty meters apart, their eyes locked in the ghost-blue halo.

Adrian's muscles coiled. Thumb flicking the safety off his pistol.

But Victoria didn't call the guards. She just tilted her head, a ghost of a smirk playing on her lips, and mouthed three words.

*"She's burning out."*

Adrian's pupils pinned. A white-hot spike of agony drove into his neck port. Lena's code unleashed an agonizing wail in his gray matter.

Victoria turned, melting back into the shadows of the balcony.

Mass dismissed. The worshippers yanked their cables, shuffling out like meat-puppets. Adrian stood rooted, cold sweat soaking his spine.

"What did she say?" Isabella stepped from behind a pillar, face chalk-white.

Adrian didn't answer. He stared dead at the empty balcony. Deep in his right orbit, the Advisor's crimson data streams blinked in a frantic, bloody strobe.

---

Chapter 14 Hook

After Victoria vanished, Adrian walked up to the colossal holo-Jesus.

He reached out, fingertips brushing the projector's base.

*"Don't touch it!"* Lena shrieked.

Too late. The base hissed open.

No cables. No servers.

Just a dense, wet hive of raw, crimson human brains. Pulsing in unison.