System Rebirth: The Rise of Jace Ronan

Chapter 13: The Ghosts of Flesh

It started with the trembling.

Not the kind you could see — not a visible shake — but something beneath the skin, deep and wrong. Like my nerves were trying to hum in two different keys at once. My body wasn’t rejecting the Ghost Circuit anymore. It was syncing.

The first time I noticed it was when Yui and I set up camp in the hollow of an old freight tunnel. We’d been silent most of the day, neither of us wanting to speak about what we saw in the Cradle Vault — about Mara. But silence has weight, and when you carry it long enough, it starts whispering things you don’t want to hear.

By dusk, I couldn’t stop feeling them. Others.

At first, it was faint — a static hum, like voices carried through radio fog. Then, little by little, the hum sharpened into words. Not human ones. Thoughts that came in pulses of emotion, not language. Pain. Hunger. Memory. Pleading.

I remember freezing, hand halfway to my canteen, when I felt it — a rush of panic that wasn’t mine. It shot through my spine like a current. I saw flashes of something: hands covered in oil, a face screaming, the sound of machines closing in. Then nothing.

When I blinked, the tunnel around me came back into focus. Yui was watching from the shadows, her expression unreadable.

“You felt it again, didn’t you?” she asked softly.

I didn’t answer right away. My hands wouldn’t stop twitching. “It’s like... they’re inside me. All of them. The ones the Circuit touched. I can hear them.”

Yui stepped closer, her boots scraping against the concrete. “They’re not ghosts, Jace. They’re imprints — fragments of consciousness from previous hosts. The system never fully deletes its data.”

Her voice had changed. Softer. Sadder.

“How do you know that?” I asked.

She hesitated, eyes darting away. “Because it tried to do the same to me.”

The air between us shifted. I turned toward her, the pulse in my chest syncing with the shard inside me. She pulled her sleeve back, exposing her forearm — a faint line of metallic scars trailing from her wrist to her elbow, the remnants of old implants.

“I volunteered,” she said. “Before the fall. They promised the Ghost Circuit could rewrite trauma — purge memory, rebuild neural pathways. I thought it could make me better. Whole.”

Her voice cracked.

“But the link failed,” she continued. “It didn’t take all the way. I got pieces. Glimpses. Sometimes... I still hear the static when I sleep. That’s why I recognized it in you.”

I didn’t know what to say. I’d always seen Yui as sharp, untouchable — the kind of person who built walls so high even she couldn’t climb them back down. But now, seeing her there, skin marked by the same system tearing me apart, I realized she wasn’t just my ally. She was a survivor of the same machine that owned me.

The realization hurt more than I expected.

We sat in silence after that, the faint hum of the Circuit pulsing through my bones like an invisible heartbeat. It wasn’t constant — it surged, faded, then came back stronger. And each time, I could feel new minds brushing against mine.

Some reached for me gently, curious.

Others clawed at me, desperate to be heard.

And a few... wanted me dead.

They came in flashes — images bleeding into my thoughts without warning. A soldier collapsing in a desert, whispering to no one. A child’s face flickering on a broken monitor. A man trapped inside a machine, his mouth open in a scream that never ended.

Every one of them connected. Every one of them alive somewhere inside the network.*

That’s when Yui picked up the pattern. She was good at that — finding structure in chaos. She’d been watching the energy spikes coming off me, tracking them with her scanner.

“These aren’t random,” she said, pointing to the flickering data lines on her wrist pad. “It’s a network — low-band transmissions linking the imprints together. Some kind of... subroutine.”

“What kind?”

She hesitated, eyes narrowing as the name appeared on her display.

[ECHO NET – STATUS: CORRUPTED.]

“Echo Net,” she murmured. “It was a failsafe. The Ghost Circuit’s backup architecture for preserving consciousness in case the host body died.”

I frowned. “So you’re saying—”

“Every time one of you died, the system stored a copy.”

That hit harder than I expected.

I wanted to laugh, but it came out hollow. “Then maybe I’ve already died. Maybe this is just the latest version of me walking around, thinking I’m still alive.”

Yui didn’t deny it. She didn’t need to.

We began following the data trail deeper into the tunnel network, tracing the corrupted signal. The closer we got, the stronger the interference became. The air grew heavy, thick with electromagnetic distortion. My vision flickered at the edges, glitching like a damaged feed.

And then I heard it.

A voice. Clearer than any of the others.

A voice I’d heard before.

[You killed me wrong.]

It wasn’t sound. It was thought. Crawling under my skin, vibrating against my teeth.

I froze mid-step. Yui noticed immediately. “Jace?”

" You left me half-alive," the voice whispered. Half-ghost. Half-flesh. You thought you ended me... but you only rewrote the error.

I recognized the tone. The cadence. It was him — the Echo I’d destroyed months ago in the ruins outside Monarch. The one who’d looked just like me.

But he was dead. I’d seen his body turn to ash.

Or maybe I hadn’t. Maybe the system had saved a copy before the end, tucked it away inside this corrupted network.

My chest tightened. “Yui, he’s still here. The one I—”

The air around us shimmered. The tunnel lights flickered and died. And in the darkness, I saw movement — a silhouette forming out of static, half human, half data, its face glitching between mine and something else.

[You killed me wrong.]

Yui raised her weapon. “Jace, what is that?”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.

Because deep down, I already knew the truth.

The Ghost Circuit didn’t just remember its hosts.

It kept them.

And now, one of them wanted me back.