He ran. The wardrone’s descent was a silent promise of violence, its red optic a period at the end of a death sentence. Kaelen plunged into the river of bodies flowing through the Down-Spiral’s main concourse, the press of the crowd a suffocating, welcome shield. He kept his head down, his hood pulled low, letting the current of the mob carry him away from the balcony, away from the smoking ruin of his hab-unit. The Ghost-Eater Shunt at the base of his neck, once a source of screaming static, was now a clean, sharp vibration, a compass needle of impossible technology pointing him deeper into the warren. He needed a ghost to read a ghost, a technician who worked in the shadows of the Resonance Field. He needed a data-weaver.
The den was three levels down, tucked behind a stall selling vat-grown protein that smelled of scorched sugar and desperation. A faded hologram of a tangled knot of light flickered over a bead curtain. Kaelen pushed through, the plastic beads clicking softly behind him. The air inside was thick with the scent of ozone from an overworked cooling unit and the cloying sweetness of the noodle bar next door. Wires snaked across the floor like black vines, converging on a central console where a woman sat hunched, her face illuminated by the shifting green and blue light of three holographic displays. She was old, her skin a roadmap of bad deals, her eyes augmented with optics that glowed a faint, tired cyan. This was Mirela, a name spoken only in whispers, a weaver of the system’s forgotten threads.
She didn’t look up as he approached. Her fingers, tipped with worn silver contacts, danced across a non-physical interface, coaxing shimmering lines of data into intricate patterns. Kaelen stopped before her workstation, the low hum of her machinery a counterpoint to the steady, clean vibration of the shunt. He placed a small stack of credit chits on the edge of her console, the only real currency he had left.
— I need you to read this, — he said, his voice low and rough. He held out the Mnemonic Spool.
Mirela’s eyes flickered from her work to the cracked crystal in his hand, then to the credits. She finished a complex data-weave, collapsing it into a single point of light with a final, decisive gesture. Her augmented optics whirred as they focused on him, their light probing and dismissive. She saw the desperation he tried to hide, the hunted look in his eyes.
— It’s a dead spool, — she rasped, her voice like grinding stones. — Cracked lattice. Probably corrupted. The credits are good, though.
— Just look, — Kaelen insisted, pushing the spool a little closer.
With a sigh of profound boredom, she took it. Her silver-tipped fingers were surprisingly gentle as she placed the spool into a recessed cradle in her console. The machine, a jury-rigged assembly of salvaged corporate tech and black-market components she called her Psych-Loom, whined as it powered up. A new hologram shimmered to life above the console, a chaotic tangle of silver threads.
— It’s encrypted, — Mirela said, a hint of professional interest in her voice. The spool wasn’t dead, just locked. — Psychic signature. High-end. Corporate or military.
She began to work, her hands a blur, weaving and unweaving lines of code around the tangled knot of the spool’s data. The Psych-Loom hummed, its pitch rising as it fought against the encryption. The silver threads in the hologram vibrated, resisting her attempts to untangle them. On the back of Kaelen’s neck, the Ghost-Eater Shunt’s clean hum flickered, a brief stutter of static that mirrored the struggle on the display. The data was fighting back.
— Standard bypasses are failing, — Mirela muttered, more to herself than to Kaelen. Her brow furrowed in concentration. The failure rate climbed on one of her screens, a stark red number ticking toward 100%. — Whatever this is, it doesn’t want to be read.
She leaned back, her cyan optics dimming for a moment. She had hit a wall. The spool was a perfect lockbox, and she didn't have the key. Kaelen’s hope, a fragile thing born in the fire of his escape, began to wither. He had traded his sanctuary for another dead end. He had paid with his last shred of safety, and the price had bought him nothing.
— Wait, — Mirela said, leaning forward again. She wasn't looking at the encrypted data anymore. She was looking at the container, the very structure of the spool’s crystal lattice. — There’s an index. Buried in the substrate.
Her fingers moved again, this time with a slow, deliberate precision. She wasn’t trying to break the lock; she was tracing its edges. A new schematic bloomed in the air, a faint web of light overlaying the chaotic knot. It was a map. The spool in her machine was just one point of light in a constellation of seven.
— This isn’t a full record, — she whispered, her voice filled with a sudden, unwelcome awe. — It’s one of seven.
The schematic revealed the ghost was a shattered mirror, one of seven pieces scattered across the system. It pulsed, a spiderweb of light connecting the point on Ceres to six other locations. To follow the map was to announce himself to the system.
— The full memory is distributed, — Mirela explained, her eyes wide as she took in the scope of the schematic. She pointed a silver-tipped finger at the display. — Each piece is anchored to a different psychic signature. You have one. You need six more.
Kaelen stared at the web of light, his personal haunting now laid bare as a system-spanning conspiracy. He could still walk away. He could take his credits back, leave the spool, and disappear. It was the smart move, the survivor’s move. But the clean hum of the shunt at his neck had changed again. It was no longer just a compass. It felt heavier, a low thrum of resonance that seemed to connect him to those six other points of light, a phantom limb aching for what was missing.
— How do I read them? — Kaelen asked. The choice was made. He would not run. He would hunt.
Mirela shook her head, pulling the spool from her rig and pushing it back across the console toward him. Her professional curiosity had been replaced by a sudden, urgent need to be rid of him. This was bigger than she wanted.
— You don’t. I can’t, — she said, her voice sharp. — This kind of fragmentation… it’s not data anymore. It’s a soul, torn into pieces. The encryption isn’t a password; it’s the psychic echo of the man himself. To read the whole thread, you need a specialist. Someone who deals in ghosts as a matter of course.
— Who?
— A Keeper archivist, — she said, spitting the words out like they were poison. — An Uplift. They’re the system’s ghouls. They find ghost data, they archive it, and they never speak of it again. They value balance over everything, a neutrality so absolute it becomes its own kind of zealotry.
She tapped a final command into her console. A string of coordinates appeared on Kaelen’s datapad. A location, here on Ceres, in the quiet, forgotten sectors of the upper levels.
— That’s a known Keeper meeting point, — Mirela said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. — They’re quiet. They listen. Go there. Tell your story. Maybe they’ll listen to you. Now take your money and your ghost and get out of my den.
Kaelen scooped up the credits and the Mnemonic Spool. He turned and pushed back through the bead curtain, leaving the smell of ozone and the green glow of the Psych-Loom behind. He stepped back into the chaos of the Down-Spiral, the noise and the psychic pressure of the crowd washing over him.
The air felt different now, charged with a new and terrible purpose. The neon signs seemed to burn a little brighter, their colors sharper.
He had to find an archivist before the hunter found him.
