The hum of the drone coil overhead fades before the rest of the world catches up. For a moment, everything is still, just that mechanical silence that hangs in the air like dust. Then the city exhales.Outside my window, arc lights flicker across the skyline. Vertical highways buzz with convoys of magnetic transports. Towering spires blink red and blue against a sky choked with haze. And beneath it all, the deep electronic thrum of infrastructure keeps breathing: train lines underfoot, wind turbines embedded in old glass, the subtle vibration of the PulseNet feeding every device on the grid. New Vega never truly sleeps. It dreams with its eyes open.I swing my legs over the side of the bed. Floors cold. Reinforced polymer. Cheap, utilitarian. Nothing in here is ornamental. No clutter, no decor, just function. A small cot, a folding table, and a wall of equipment racks glowing faintly under layered firewalls. I rent the top unit of an abandoned observation tower repurposed as a ghos

The lights didn’t flicker. They died.One second I was staring at a screen pulsing with rogue code, and the next, blackness swallowed everything, monitors, HUD overlays, even the quiet ambient glow from the security grid. Gone. As if someone had yanked the sun out of the sky.I didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. I just listened.Silence isn’t quiet. Real silence hums. It pulses. You can hear your own blood. You can feel the weight of space collapsing around your ears. My tower had never gone fully dark before, not even during a system reboot. I installed redundancies. Backup solar. Coil-fed battery reserves. None of them triggered.Which meant this wasn’t a power failure.It was a sweep.I pivoted to manual override, flipping the panel cover on the analog rig. My fingers punched commands into hardened steel keys, no touchscreens, no voice inputs. Just cold, mechanical certainty.Nothing responded.A warning formed in my gut before logic caught up. I hadn’t sent a signal.But something in me

The hatch let out a long, metallic groan as it sealed behind me. Four layers of reinforced steel. One access port. No network feed. Nothing smart. Just dead cables and air that smelled like rusted data. The lab was buried three levels beneath a Helix blacksite I helped decommission five years ago. Back then, it had been a front for a biotech firm doing unauthorized synthetic cognition trials. Helix moved in quietly, stripped the equipment, and buried the place under a false name and three floors of concrete. But I remembered. It wasn’t much. Just fragments. Floorplans. An old clearance code burned into the back of my mind. Enough to get me inside. Enough to buy a few hours of silence. I scanned the interior with a handheld bio-sweep. Nothing alive. No power signatures. Just layered dust and the distant creak of an old world forgetting itself. Good. I didn’t need ghosts. I had enough of those already. The central console still hummed faintly when I booted it with a dire

They say the best ghosts are the ones who hunt themselves. The Helix contractor interface wasn’t supposed to be accessible outside of secured terminals. But with a clean persona, scrubbed credentials, and a few lines of worm code nested in synthetic bio-pings, even the safest walls opened if you knocked just right. My name was Kade Rowan now. Signal analyst. Former military. Specialized in anomalous neural drift cases. Every word of it was a lie. Except for the part where I was dangerous. The relay node I used was patched through four proxy chains and rerouted through a classified contractor terminal I lifted years ago. It wasn’t much, but it still carried Helix’s recruitment signature, enough to get me past the firewall and into the private job pool. The low-tier contracts were as expected. Surveillance sweeps. Civilian dissident tracing. Low-risk recoveries for stolen biotech. I bypassed all of them. I was looking for something else. In the back channels of the board

From the outside, the Helix Tier-2 logistics node looked like any other medtech relay center. Clean. Forgettable. No logos, no guards. Just a long, flat structure with seamless grey paneling and a biometric gate. Inside, it was a different story. I stepped through the access chamber as Kade Rowan. A contractor, neural tracker, cleared under Operation D7. A soft chime registered my chip. > “Welcome, Operator K. Rowan.” The voice was synthetic. Genderless. Helix liked it that way, no accents, no warmth. Just function. The corridor beyond was lined with embedded lights that shifted with motion. Surveillance drones hung silently in the corners like sleeping spiders. I kept my pace steady, my posture relaxed. There were no windows. Just the hum of power beneath the floor. The system guided me to a debriefing cell, plain white walls, one table, four chairs. Three other freelancers were already seated. One had a mechanical jaw. Another wore optic replacements tinted blood-red. No on