2025-02-24 20:17:42Ghost in the System
I stared at my screen, fingers hovering over the keyboard, my pulse pounding in my ears. Darren had to be here—somewhere. Somewhere in the vast, sprawling veins of the government’s digital infrastructure, his name had to exist. I ran the search again, breathing shallowly and scrolling through the results. No matches were found. The words burned into my vision. My stomach twisted into a tight knot. Impossible. Nobody just vanished, especially not from a system that tracked everything—bank records, medical files, social security numbers, employment history. And yet, Darren was a ghost. A glitch. A name wiped clean from existence. My fists clenched, and before I knew it, I slammed them against the desk. "No. No way." I pulled up my secondary hacking interface, digging deeper. Bypassing firewalls. Scraping encrypted archives. Pulling fragments of forgotten data like a desperate archaeologist clawing through ruins. Nothing. I checked birth records, school transcripts, and hospital visits. Zero. Zilch. Darren Barnes did not exist. But I knew him. His lopsided grin, the way he twirled a pen between his fingers when he was deep in thought, the inside jokes only we understood. He wasn’t just data in a system. He was real. And I refused to believe someone like him could be erased so completely. A bead of sweat trickled down my spine as I shifted my search—social media, old emails, chat logs. Anything. But every attempt came up the same. Empty. Even the messages we had exchanged were gone, as if someone had reached into my past and deleted every trace of him. I swallowed hard, my heart hammering against my ribs. "Darren… where the hell are you?" The screen flickered. At first, I thought it was a glitch. Then a new message popped up: [Anomaly Detected. Correction In Progress.] My throat went dry. That wasn’t my code. That wasn’t from any system I had hacked. This was something else. A cold chill crawled over my skin as I stared at the message. My fingers twitched over the keyboard, hesitating. This was bad. Very bad. I wasn’t just searching anymore. I had triggered something. Before I could react, my screen distorted—colors bleeding into digital noise. Then, my entire system shut down. The fan whined, then died. The room plunged into eerie silence. I bolted up, shoving my chair back. My mind screamed at me to move, but my body wouldn’t cooperate. Someone knew I was looking. And they were powerful enough to erase Darren—and shut me down in seconds. My phone vibrated on the desk. I snatched it up, hands clammy, nearly dropping it. Unknown number. I hesitated. Then swiped to answer. "Who is this?" Static. Then a voice—low, distorted. "Stop digging, Tony." A sharp spike of fear shot through me. "Who are you?" A pause. Then: "Walk away. This isn’t your fight." I gripped the phone tighter. "Like hell, it isn’t. Where’s Darren?" Silence. Then the line clicked dead. A shiver slithered down my spine. My hands trembled as I set the phone down—carefully, like it might explode. I forced a breath through my teeth, trying to keep my head from spinning. Someone didn’t want me to find Darren. And whoever they were, they had the power to make people disappear. I needed help. Fast. I grabbed my backup laptop from the closet, fired it up, and started reconfiguring my network. If they had tracked me once, they could do it again. I needed to move, change locations, and wipe my digital footprint clean. But before I could even finish, another message blinked onto my screen. [RUN.] The overhead light flickered. Outside, a car engine roared. Tires screeched. Doors slammed. Shit. Adrenaline slammed through me like a lightning strike. I didn’t think—I moved. I yanked the laptop’s hard drive, shoved it into my backpack, and bolted for the fire escape. Behind me, my apartment door burst open. Heavy boots thundered inside. I didn’t wait to see who they were. I swung myself down the ladder and hit the pavement hard, pain jolting up my legs. Shouts erupted above. Flashlights cut through the darkness. I ran. Heart pounding, lungs burning, I weaved through the backstreets, slipping between dumpsters and disappearing into the shadows. My mind raced. Who were they? Government agents? Private contractors? Whoever they were, they weren’t taking chances. And that meant one thing. Darren wasn’t just missing. He was taken. And if I didn’t find him soon… I’d be next.
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CHAPTER 40
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A Code Written in BloodThe vault smelled like cold metal and something else—something rotten, like data that had spoiled. The walls pulsed with dim red lights, stretching into endless rows of glass cases. At first glance, they looked empty.They weren’t.I stepped forward, breath fogging against the glass as I peered inside. A face stared back at me. Eyes wide. Mouth slightly open, like he’d been caught mid-sentence. A man frozen in time.Not dead. Not alive.Just gone.Kane moved beside me, her fingers hovering inches from the glass. “What the hell is this?”Elias was already moving, his bag slung over his shoulder as he pulled out a tablet. “A graveyard,” he muttered, running his fingers over the control panel. “Or a prison, depending on how you look at it.”My stomach twisted. “They’re trapped?”“They’re rewritten.” His voice was grim. “The system didn’t just erase them. It repurposed them.”I forced myself to look again. The man in the glass had no scars, no wrinkles, nothing tha
CHAPTER 36
The Fractured SelfThe road ahead stretched endlessly, a ghost of a world flickering in and out like it couldn’t decide if it wanted to exist. My boots kicked up dust, but even that felt artificial, like it was programmed to react the way I expected. Kane walked beside me, silent, her sharp eyes scanning the ruins ahead. Elias trailed behind, muttering calculations under his breath.I knew where we were going. The Overseers’ domain. A place where reality wasn’t a certainty, where time looped back on itself and people became echoes.But for some reason, I couldn’t remember why we were going there.I frowned, shaking my head. Something was missing—like a word on the tip of my tongue, slipping further away the harder I tried to catch it.Kane noticed. She always did. “What’s wrong?”“I…” I opened my mouth, but hesitation stopped me cold. What was wrong? I couldn’t explain it, but I felt lighter, like pieces of me were missing.“Tony,” she pressed, voice firm but not unkind. “Talk to me.”
CHAPTER 35
A World Outside the SystemThe world around us wasn’t fully formed. Buildings stood half-finished, their structures dissolving into static at the edges. The sky above flickered between shades of gray and deep violet, glitching in and out like a bad signal. It was a place that wasn’t supposed to exist—an abandoned zone, untouched by The Overseers.Kane and I stood in the middle of the street, our breaths visible in the eerie cold air. She kept a tight grip on the device we’d stolen, her knuckles white from the pressure.“This place feels wrong,” she murmured. “Like it’s waiting to disappear.”I agreed. The world here wasn’t stable. It was like standing on the edge of a dream, just before waking up.Then, a figure emerged from the shadows. A man, dressed in a dark, tattered coat, his face partially hidden beneath the hood. He stepped forward with a calculated slowness, his hands raised in a gesture of peace.“I was wondering when you’d find your way here,” he said.Kane tensed beside me
CHAPTER 34
The Core’s CoordinatesThe screen flickered, casting a cold blue glow over Kane’s tense face. Lines of encrypted data scrolled rapidly, filling the air with the soft hum of technology at work. My fingers danced across the keyboard, heart pounding as I decrypted the last layer. Then—Coordinates. A list of possible locations. The Core.Kane exhaled sharply beside me. "This is it." Her voice was quiet, but beneath it, a current of urgency rippled through.I swallowed. "We finally have something real."But before the words could settle, a chill ran through the room. The lights dimmed, not flickering—shifting, like the walls themselves were second-guessing their existence. Kane and I locked eyes. Outside the window, the city moved in ways it shouldn’t. A building that had been across the street was now beside us. People walked in slow, deliberate steps, their faces expressionless, heads subtly tilting in unison."The Overseers," Kane murmured, reaching instinctively for the knife at her b
CHAPTER 33
The Price of RebellionThe air here was heavy, thick with the weight of things that didn’t belong.I could feel it pressing down on my skin, humming through my bones—a silent scream buried in the fabric of reality. Kane and I moved cautiously through the remnants of what had once been someone’s last stand. The place had the same eerie stillness as the hideout before, but worse. This wasn’t just abandoned.It was frozen.A street half-formed, cutting off into an expanse of nothing. A doorway leading to nowhere, hanging in the air like it had been sliced from existence mid-thought. Cars, chairs, even the dust in the air—stuck in a single moment, refusing to move.Like time had decided to give up.Kane ran a hand over a rusted terminal embedded in the wall, her fingers pressing against dead keys. "Whoever they were… they didn’t get far."I crouched near a stack of papers scattered across the cracked pavement. Words scrawled in desperate handwriting, some neat, others jagged and frantic.
CHAPTER 32
The First RemnantI woke to the taste of blood in my mouth.For a second, everything was wrong—blurry, twisted. The world flickered like a broken screen, and shadows stretched in directions they shouldn’t. My heartbeat was loud, too loud, like it was trying to hammer its way out of my chest. Then, just as quickly as it started, the distortion snapped back into place, leaving me gasping on a cold, cracked floor.Kane's voice cut through the haze. "Tony."She was crouched beside me, eyes sharp, body tense. There was dust in her dark hair, and a thin cut ran along her jaw, but she looked intact. Alive."You're okay," she said, like she was trying to convince herself. "I caught you before you hit the ground. Mostly."My head throbbed. I forced myself upright, biting back a groan. "Define 'mostly'?""You didn’t die. You’re welcome."I let out a weak, breathy laugh. "Guess I owe you one."She stood, scanning the room we’d landed in. It was some kind of hideout—low ceilings, metal walls, the
