The hunger was a cold, clean signal beneath the psychic static, a biological imperative that cut through the ghost’s noise. Kaelen’s supply of nutrient paste was a gray smear inside a limp tube, the indicator strip showing a fatalistic 15%. Less than a day. He pulled the hood of his jacket lower, the rough synth-cloth scratching his brow, and moved toward the market. His goal was simple: trade for supplies, untraceable and fast. Don’t be seen. Don’t make noise.
The Ceres Down-Spiral was a chasm of neon and shadow, a multi-level knot of repurposed industrial tunnels and cantilevered walkways. The air was a thick cocktail of ozone from cracked server banks, the smell of scorched noodles from a dozen stalls, and the damp, metallic tang of recycled water dripping from corroded conduits overhead. The psychic pressure of a million lonely minds screamed in the static.
He kept to the edge of the main walkway, his shoulder brushing against rust-streaked support pillars. The Ghost-Eater Shunt at the base of his skull, his personal token of failure, pulsed with a low, itching heat. It amplified the ambient chaos of the Resonance Field, turning the crowd’s desires and anxieties into a headache that tasted like burnt wiring. He needed to get this over with.
The junker’s stall was a chaotic pile of salvaged tech and grimy components, presided over by a man whose face was a roadmap of bad deals. Kaelen approached, keeping his own face angled down, a shadow among shadows. He placed three scavenged power converters on the pitted metal counter. They were his currency, stripped from a derelict maintenance drone.
— I need nutrient paste, — Kaelen said, his voice low and rough.
The junker, Grist, eyed the converters, then Kaelen. He picked one up, weighing it in his palm. His own mind was a dull, shielded lump in the Resonance Field, a common defense for those who made their living in the Spiral’s psychic crossfire.
— These are low-yield. Barely hold a charge, — Grist grunted, his voice like rocks grinding together. — For two tubes of paste? I need more.
— That’s all I have.
— Then you don’t have enough for two. Maybe one.
Kaelen’s stomach tightened. One tube was a delay, not a solution. It would buy him another day, maybe two, before he was back out here, exposed again. He saw Grist’s eyes flicker over him, assessing the desperation, the slight tremor in his hand. The junker was playing him.
— Three converters and two data chips, — Grist countered, his tactic shifting from devaluation to escalation.
— I don’t have chips.
Kaelen knew the dance was over. He had no more leverage. He was about to turn away, to accept the single tube and the slow starvation it represented, when Grist’s gaze shifted to a pile of junk near his elbow.
— Alright, — the junker said, his tone softening into predatory magnanimity. — You look like you’re having a bad cycle. Throw in that and we have a deal for two tubes.
He pointed a grimy finger at a small, crystalline object. It was a data spool, but an odd one, its lattice structure cracked and cloudy. It looked inert, a piece of dead tech scavenged from a recycler. To Kaelen, it was just another worthless piece of junk. To Grist, it was a way to sweeten a deal for himself, clearing useless clutter while extracting maximum value.
The choice was simple. His anonymity and the last of his valuable hardware for the certainty of food. A price paid in safety for the currency of survival.
— Deal, — Kaelen said.
He pushed the converters forward and took the two gray tubes of nutrient paste and the useless, cracked spool. The transaction was complete. He slid the items into the deep pockets of his jacket and turned, melting back into the river of bodies, the ghost in his head screaming along with the noise of the crowd.
The twelve-minute walk back to his hab-unit was a gauntlet. Every unfamiliar face could be a corporate auditor. Every flicker of a neon sign felt like a targeting reticle. He kept his head down, his senses on a knife’s edge, until the heavy thud of his mag-locked door sealed the world out. He was safe, for now. He dropped the nutrient paste on his small workbench, the tubes landing with a soft, reassuring weight. His fortress was resupplied.
He pulled the cracked spool from his pocket and turned it over in his hand. It was cool to the touch, its crystalline surface webbed with fine fractures. Dead tech. He should toss it in the recycler chute. It was just another piece of junk, a reminder of a bad trade. But he hesitated. He looked from the spool to the diagnostic port on his workstation, the fiber-optic cable coiled beside it like a sleeping snake.
An impulse, born of boredom and the quiet desperation of his confinement, took hold. What was the harm? It was a dead thing. He sat down, the worn chair groaning, and reached for the cable. His fingers found the familiar, ugly interface of the Ghost-Eater Shunt on his neck. He plugged the cable in, then connected the other end to the Mnemonic Spool. A flicker of power, a faint hum. The shunt was trying to read it.
For a moment, nothing happened. The spool remained dark. The static in his head continued its relentless assault. He was about to disconnect it, to dismiss the impulse as foolish, when everything changed.
The static did not fade. It shattered. The agonizing, chaotic noise that had been the soundtrack to his life since the severance vanished in an instant, replaced by a silence so profound it was a physical blow. He gasped, his hand flying to his neck, to the shunt that had been the source of his torment. It was cool. Quiet.
And then, the memory came. Not his own.
It was not a flicker or a fragment. It was perfect. Whole. He felt the chill of a gloved hand on a cold metal rail. He smelled rain on hot asphalt, a scent so clean and specific it made the recycled air of his hab-unit feel like poison. He saw the blurred lights of a city he had never visited, its towers spearing a sky bruised with twilight. The sensory echo was complete, a perfect moment of a life that was not his, broadcast directly into his mind.
A voice whispered in the sudden, perfect silence of his own head. It was calm, clear, and laced with a terrible, fading urgency.
— My name is Aris Volkov.
The ghost had a name. The noise had a soul. Kaelen stared at the cracked spool, his heart hammering. The world had cracked open. He was no longer haunted by psychic trauma, but by a person.
As the name echoed in his consciousness, the Mnemonic Spool in his hand pulsed with a brilliant, silent flash of light. A high-energy ping, nine-tenths of the theoretical maximum, erupted from it, a psychic shockwave that blasted out from his small hab-unit, across the Down-Spiral, and into the cold, listening dark of the system. It was a flare, fired from a lost world, announcing a single, impossible fact.
Something that was meant to be erased had just spoken its name.
The new silence in his head was vast and terrifying. The ghost of Aris Volkov was a quiet, coherent presence now, waiting.
That whisper was a flare in the dark, and the hunters would be coming.
