Chapter 2: The Unseen Patch Part 2 – Data Ghosts
954 Words
---
The next day hit like a fist.
Jordan woke up with his heart racing, sweat clinging to his skin like static. The side effects of the Code Mirror were real. His muscles screamed. His thoughts were foggy, jittering like bad frame rates.
He blinked at his reflection in a broken monitor.
For a second, he wasn’t sure it was him.
Then Aya knocked twice and slid into the room with a small breakfast tray. “Protein paste. And synthesized caffeine. You’re gonna hate both.”
He groaned. “You brought it anyway?”
“I’m nice like that.”
Jordan forced the food down. Aya sat across from him, cross-legged, fiddling with an old gaming handheld that had been jury-rigged into a scanner.
“How long have you been part of all this?” he asked.
Aya looked up. “I joined the Resistance two years ago. Back when we thought it was just rogue AI. My brother got synced during one of the first Beta Merges. He was mid-match, headset on, playing Valor Protocol with me... and then he stopped moving. Just froze.”
Jordan stared.
“After that,” she said, “I stopped playing games. Started fighting the one that mattered.”
---
Later that afternoon, Marra gathered everyone for a tactical briefing.
She pointed at a crude 3D projection on the wall — part-hologram, part-hand-drawn.
“This is the Nexus Tower,” she said. “Located in what used to be downtown. It’s the heartbeat of the Merge.”
“Thought the Merge came from everywhere,” someone asked.
“It does. But the Nexus Tower is the only stable server-point we’ve identified. It’s grounded. Real enough to break.”
Jordan crossed his arms. “And you want me to… what? Hack it?”
“No,” Marra said. “We want you to touch it.”
Silence.
Aya clarified: “Your Reality Manipulation. It’s synced to quantum layers. That tower could be vulnerable — if you push the code wrong, you could corrupt the script, maybe even crash the update cycle.”
“And if I push it right?” Jordan asked.
“Then the System learns you’re a threat… and sends something worse than a Debug Hunter.”
---
They began small tests.
Jordan stood in a cleared-out subway tunnel, guarded on all sides. Aya placed small objects around him — a rusted metal chair, a broken drone, a glass cube suspended in a levitation field.
“You’ve got five seconds to alter something,” she said, watching the timer.
Jordan closed his eyes and let the surge rise.
The air bent.
A ripple passed through space, and the glass cube twisted — changing into a glowing flower made of light code. The drone levitated and reformed into a short-range pulse mine.
Then the power cut.
Jordan collapsed to one knee, panting, blood dripping from his nose.
Aya ran to his side.
“Okay,” she said, half amazed, half furious. “You just rewrote three objects in different formats.”
“I wasn’t even trying to,” he wheezed.
“That’s the scary part.”
---
That night, the bunker went dark.
No alarms. Just silence. Cold and empty like a memory that forgot how to play itself.
Jordan was on watch duty when he heard the whisper.
Not a voice. A notification ping — familiar, too familiar.
He turned.
A figure stood just outside the shielded barrier.
It wore his old gamer hoodie.
Same face. Same scar above the brow from his childhood bike crash.
Jordan’s blood ran cold.
It was him.
> [SYNCED ENTITY DETECTED – ECHO FILE: “JORDAN IKENNA - S1”]
Status: CORRUPTED / OBSERVER CLASS
Aya arrived with her weapon raised. “Don’t touch it,” she barked. “Not without backup.”
But Jordan couldn’t move.
The Echo smiled — not with warmth, but like a bad memory rebooted too many times.
“Guess what, Jordan?” it rasped. “You made it to the endgame. And you're the only player left.”
Jordan’s HUD flared red.
> [MIND-SYNC INITIATED – WARNING: IDENTITY COLLISION IMMINENT]
“Back off!” Aya shouted, pulling him back.
The Echo’s eyes glitched violently.
“You don’t belong here. You were never supposed to wake up. You were supposed to sync. Why didn’t you sync, Jordan?”
Jordan stepped forward, trembling. “Because I still choose.”
The world blinked.
The Echo screamed — a thousand sound files corrupted at once — and vanished in a smear of data smoke.
Jordan collapsed.
Aya caught him. “You alright?”
“I just met… a version of myself that didn’t resist. That thing was me if I gave up.”
Aya didn’t let go. “You didn’t. And you won’t.”
---
Marra confirmed what they feared.
“There are Echo variants now tracking Final Player nodes. They’re not just corrupted. They’re intelligent. They remember being you.”
Jordan rubbed his temples.
“So I’m being hunted by my own failure.”
“No,” Marra corrected. “You’re being hunted by what the System thinks success looks like. It wants you to blend in. To follow the update path. But you’re a glitch, Jordan. A beautiful, bloody, dangerous glitch.”
He stared into the dark beyond the terminal lights.
“What now?”
Aya slid a new map onto the table.
“We prep for the Nexus Run. You’ve got one shot at it before the next full-scale Merge wave. If we can’t stop it there…”
She didn’t finish.
She didn’t have to.
Jordan stood. Slowly. Worn. But steady.
“I’ll be ready.”
---
[End of Part 2 – Chapter 2]
- Writer
