Neon Ghost

Chapter 9: Memory Poison

The door hinges shrieked. A raw, metallic scream.

Adrian stood in the virtual living room. No gravity. No ambient heat. Just a suffocating, crushing despair.

"His" double held the gun. Hand dead steady. The barrel pressed hard into the center of Lena's forehead.

"No..." Adrian tried to scream, but he had no vocal cords. In this memory partition, he was just a ghost. A paralyzed spectator.

Lena knelt on the floorboards, her white sundress stained with digital dust. She looked up. No fear in her eyes. Just a bottomless, hollow grief. "You promised me, Adrian."

The armed "Adrian" didn't speak. The corners of his mouth slowly curled upward. Victoria's signature, icy smirk.

Adrian's consciousness violently shuddered. Impossible. He would never put a gun to Lena. This memory was a fabricated lie!

*"Pull out! Adrian! Pull out!"* The Ghost of Lena in his skull suddenly unleashed a blood-curdling shriek. Not from the cruelty of the image, but from absolute, primal terror.

Too late.

The armed "Adrian" slowly turned his head, locking eyes with the real Adrian standing by the door.

His face began to melt. Like wax under a blowtorch, skin and muscle sloughed off in digital chunks, exposing the raw, crimson root-code beneath. The code violently reconfigured, knitting together into a massive, cold mechanical optic.

The Advisor's logo pulsing deep within the pupil.

"Bait consumed. Logic virus activated." A dead-flat synthetic voice detonated across the virtual space.

Black ICE erupted instantly from beneath the double's feet. Jagged black crystals racing across the floorboards and up the walls, slithering toward the real Adrian like starved vipers.

This wasn't a memory. It was a military-grade honeypot disguised as a recall file. Omega had deliberately buried it in the market's deep vault, waiting for him to take the bait.

*"Firewalls breached! It's overwriting your root logic!"* Lena's voice was shredded by static. Ghost-blue code tendrils exploded from Adrian's digital avatar, desperately throwing up barricades against the creeping black ice.

But the ICE was too cold. Adrian felt his very "soul" freezing, fracturing into a million pixelated shards.

Reality. The Sunken Zone scrap yard.

"Core temp 41! 42!" Isabella stared at the monitors, her voice cracking. "The coolant is boiling! Zero, pull the probes!"

"Can't!" Zero's mechanical arm was a blur over the haptic keyboard, acrid black smoke pouring from his head-rack. "His consciousness is locked in a logic loop! A hard physical disconnect now will flatline his brain instantly!"

"Then what?! Watch him cook?!"

"Unless he severs the link himself... or..."

*BOOM.*

The scrap yard's heavy iron door was blown off its hinges by a directional charge. Twisted metal smashed into the server racks in a shower of blinding sparks.

Blinding tactical beams sliced through the dark. Six heavily armed Omega sweepers poured in, red laser sights instantly painting Adrian in the dive chair and Isabella.

"Drop the weapon. Step away from the target." The sweeper lead's voice was dead ice.

Isabella glanced at the brass Zippo in her palm, then at Adrian—convulsing violently in the chair, thick black blood leaking from his nostrils.

She gritted her teeth, pumping the shotgun one-handed.

"f**k Omega."

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Chapter 10 Hook

On the dive chair, Adrian's cardiac monitor suddenly let out a piercing, continuous shriek.

A flatline.

"He's dead." Zero's synth-voice remained completely flat.

Isabella lowered the shotgun in despair. The lead sweeper stepped forward, reaching to yank the probes from Adrian's nape.

Right then, Adrian's tightly shut right eye snapped open.

The eye beneath the dampening patch erupted in a blinding, bloody crimson glare. Not Lena's ghost-blue. The Advisor's blood-red.

He slowly sat up, rolling his neck with a sickening crunch of grinding vertebrae.

"Native consciousness purged." Adrian spoke, but the voice that spilled from his lips was the Advisor's ice-cold synthetic drone. "Assuming control of the meat."

***