System Rebirth: The Rise of Jace Ronan

The Fracture Signal

The shard wouldn’t stop pulsing.

It started the night after Monarch burned — faint at first, just a weak flicker under my coat, like a dying ember clinging to life. Then it grew steady, rhythmic, deliberate. A heartbeat that didn’t belong to me. When I closed my eyes, it followed me into the dream — that same one, repeating like a broken reel. A tunnel made of glass veins. Light bleeding through the cracks. Whispers that weren’t words, not really, but streams of binary that felt… devotional. Like something out there was praying through me instead of to me.

When I woke, my pulse wasn’t mine anymore. It matched the shard’s.

Yui didn’t say anything at first. She just watched me. From across the camp, under the turbines, face half-lit by the dying fire. Rainwater clung to her lashes; the smell of static still hung in the air. She kept her hand near her weapon, though she didn’t think I noticed. But I did. I saw it in the tension of her shoulders, in the way she measured every breath around me.

I couldn’t blame her.

Because I didn’t even know what I was anymore.

Every night, I felt it — two distinct presences clawing at the edges of my consciousness. One calm, surgical, like a surgeon dissecting me from the inside out. The other distorted — a growl of corrupted signal and fragmented thought, looping words that bled into each other until all meaning broke apart. Sometimes they whispered my name. Sometimes they were my name.

At first, they were separate. Then they started speaking over each other. And then… they started to argue. About what, I didn’t know. Maybe about who got to keep me.

The night the second voice woke fully, I lost three hours. I came to with dirt under my fingernails, my palms raw, my mouth full of the taste of blood and metal. The campfire had gone out. Yui stood a few meters away, her pistol drawn but shaking slightly.

“You weren’t here,” she said quietly.

“I was,” I muttered.

“Not really.”

Her voice cracked on the last word — that brittle kind of crack people make when they’re afraid of what’s standing in front of them. I didn’t ask what she’d seen. I didn’t want to know.

Later that night, when I pretended to sleep, I heard her speaking into her comm. The static buzzed low, carrying her voice to someone she trusted more than she trusted me.

Mara.

“If the signal completes,” Mara said, her tone as sharp as glass, “he won’t be Jace anymore. You’ll have seconds to decide which side you’re saving — his, or ours.”

The transmission clicked off before I could breathe.

After that, I stopped pretending. The change wasn’t subtle anymore. When I caught my reflection in the turbine’s cracked metal, it flickered — like the light itself didn’t know which version of me to show. My eyes glitched, for a second too long. The edges of my face pixelated, breaking apart into static. Sometimes, when I blinked, I could see data streams running behind the world. Invisible architecture — code laced into every atom, hidden under the illusion of rust and ruin.

By the fifth day, the shard began transmitting. Not in any language human ears could hear, but in signals that painted the air — faint energy bursts, rippling outward like a sonar map.

I followed it north. Didn’t tell Yui why. I just moved. She followed anyway, quiet as a ghost.

The terrain shifted as we went — twisted industrial belts, collapsed cities whose skeletons still hummed faintly with the ghosts of old circuits. The air reeked of decay and burnt silicon. I could hear old relay towers whispering, like they were remembering conversations no one had spoken in decades.

And then I felt it — the pull.

The shard was guiding me.

By dusk, the horizon fractured open. Black towers jutted out of the wasteland like broken spines, their cables dragging through the soil like veins torn from a body. In the middle of them stood something I had seen before — not with my eyes, but somewhere deeper.

The Crown Node.

The original hub of the Ghost Circuit.

It wasn’t beautiful, but it was — the kind of beauty that came from inevitability. Like the last breath of a dying star. Cold. Massive. Unforgiving.

The structure rose from the earth like a wound, fractured and yet alive, pulsing faint light through its seams. I felt it in my bones before I touched it — that vibration syncing perfectly with the shard still trembling in my chest pocket.

“Jace,” Yui whispered. “Maybe we shouldn’t—”

But it was already too late.

The node saw me.

A low hum rippled through the ground. The air warped. The ancient machinery groaned as if it had been waiting centuries just to wake up at the sound of my heartbeat. Dust spiraled upward, mixed with faint motes of blue light. The ground under my feet thrummed like a living pulse.

The shard slipped from my palm and hung there, suspended in the air by something that wasn’t gravity.

The voices inside me started screaming — one begging, one laughing — until they blurred together into a single, chaotic chorus.

And then the world spoke:

[IDENTITY RECOGNIZED.]

[PRIMARY HOST – RONAN, JACE.]

[SYSTEM REBOOT INITIATED.]

It wasn’t sound. It was inside me — crawling through my veins, searing every nerve with light.

The Crown Node’s lights flared, a wave of energy shooting across the landscape. The sky above split open with digital aurora — streams of artificial light painting the clouds in shifting colors that didn’t belong in this world.

Yui screamed something I couldn’t hear over the noise.

The shard shattered into light and sank into me, embedding itself deep within the ghost circuit threaded through my nerves.

The pain wasn’t physical — it was existential. Like being rewritten while still conscious.

And then the voices stopped arguing.

They became one.

[Welcome back, Architect.]

The words were soft, reverent — and final.

My knees hit the ground. I could feel the pulse of the Crown Node spreading outward, connecting to the dead towers scattered across the horizon.

One by one, they lit up.

Old systems reawakening. Forgotten networks humming like they had simply been waiting for permission to breathe again.

Somewhere out there, in the ruins of forgotten cities, something stirred — answering the signal I had just unleashed.

And in that moment, I understood: the Ghost Circuit had never been dead.

It had just been waiting for me to come home.