Chapter 4: Dust and Data
640 Words
Three red lines. Forehead, left chest, throat.
No warning chimes. Omega kill-machines don't do polite.
The whine of spinning barrels.
Adrian moved. Not by choice. Code made the call.
Vision stripped away. Replaced by a ghostly blue wireframe world. Time stretched. He saw the drones' ballistic arcs. Traced the high-voltage conduits buried in the pipe walls.
*"Let me drive."* Lena's voice. Dead flat.
From the stump of his left arm, dead neural bundles lashed out like blind snakes smelling blood. Slammed deep into the exposed high-voltage conduit on the wall.
Pain.
Not flesh pain. The sickening freefall of a soul shoved into the passenger seat. Adrian was a prisoner locked inside his own skull, watching something else pilot his meat.
High-voltage current surged backward through the bundles into his port. His right arm snapped up at an impossible angle. The EMP pistol barked three times. Precise.
Not aiming at the drones. Aiming at the load-bearing struts above them.
Tons of rusted piping crashed down. Crushed the drones into scrap. A geyser of sewage and machine oil washed over him.
Neural bundles ripped free. Vision snapped back. Adrian took the wheel.
He dropped to his knees in the sludge. Dry-heaved violently. Thick black blood dripped from his nostrils, blooming in the dirty water.
*"Your synapses are frying. Next time I take over, you'll stroke out."* Lena's voice. Back to that skin-crawling tenderness.
"Get out... of my head." Adrian wiped the blood with his sleeve, slumping against the concrete pipe. Gasping.
He pulled out Ray's datapad. Screen spider-webbed, but the memory core was intact.
No physical port. He gritted his teeth, yanked a backup neural shunt from his nape, and jammed it straight into the pad's root slot.
Eyes shut. Jacked in.
The data stream. Ice cold. Biting.
Ray's hidden partition was sloppy. Adrian tore through the firewall in three seconds.
A log file. Timestamp: Three years ago. The night Lena died.
File expanded. Not text. Raw sensory feed.
*Blinding surgical lights. The stink of antiseptic. Lena strapped to an operating table. Chest cracked open.*
*A man in a lab coat. Holding a black metal box bristling with archaic cooling fins. Old-school AI core. No network module. Pure air-gapped.*
*"Her consciousness won't fully upload,"* the man's voice echoed through the feed. *"But this core can hold her 'intuition'. Shove it in."*
The feed warped. The core slammed into Lena's spine.
Adrian's heart seized.
Then, the data stream flash-froze.
Frost crept along the edges of the log file. Black crystals racing up his neural shunt.
Black ICE. Corp-grade lethal counter-intrusion.
*"Disconnect!"* Lena screamed.
Too late. Ice picks drove into his cerebral cortex. Adrian shrieked in the physical world. Eyes rolling back. Body thrashing in the sludge. Core temp dropping. Cardiac monitors screaming red across his retina.
*"Forgive me."*
*CRACK.*
Lena fried his secondary neural bundles. Hard physical disconnect.
Adrian's eyes snapped open. Gulping the foul sewer air. The back of his neck was scorched meat, trailing thin wisps of smoke. The datapad crumbled to dust in his hand.
He was alive. And he knew the truth.
Lena wasn't completely dead. Her "Ghost"—that old-school AI core—had been salvaged by Omega. Sitting in the Sector 4 Processing Plant.
Adrian staggered to his feet. Holstered the EMP pistol.
He was going to dig his girl out.
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**Chapter 5 Hook**
Three hours later. Sub-level two. Isabella's ripperdoc clinic.
"You're out of your mind, Adrian." Isabella chewed on an unlit cigarette, staring at the holo-scan. "Your secondary bundles are completely fried. But worse..."
She spun the screen toward him.
In the 3D transparency of Adrian's brain, the ghostly blue code cluster representing the "Ghost" wasn't sitting quietly in the port. It had sprouted thousands of hair-thin, glowing tendrils. Wrapped tight around his brainstem.
"It's not a parasite," Isabella's voice shook. "It's gestating."
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- Writer
