The echo of the Severance Tone was a ghost in his nerves, a high, thin wire of pain left over from the collision of past and present. Kaito stared at the decryption rig’s monitor, the green text a sickly glow in the concrete box of the Curator safehouse. The incident number. Anya Sharma’s final log and his own buried sin, linked by a string of redacted code. He wasn’t her investigator. He was the ghost of the crime she was created to repeat. The hum of the rig’s overworked fans was the only sound, a mechanical sigh in a room that felt like a tomb.
A soft chime cut through the drone. It came from the secure line The Curators had provided, a squat black box guaranteed to be invisible to the System. A ghost line. Ghosts weren’t supposed to get calls from the machine. The chime was a violation, a sign that OmniCore’s reach extended even here, into the city’s forgotten foundations. The security of the safehouse, his one advantage, had just evaporated.
He let it chime twice more, a small, useless act of defiance. His hand was steady as he reached out and accepted the connection. The speaker emitted only silence, a dead air thick with processing power. It was the kind of quiet that came before a purge, the digital equivalent of a held breath. He waited, his own breathing shallow.
Then, a voice. It was not human. It had the pitch and cadence of a man, but it was stripped of all the flaws that made a voice real. There were no micro-hesitations, no breaths, no subtle shifts in timbre. It was polished, seamless, like a sound file rendered to perfect clarity. It was the voice of Gideon Stroud.
— Mr. Vance.
The name landed in the small room like a specimen pin. As OmniCore’s Director of Cognitive Purity, his voice was the sanitized will of the System itself.
— Your curiosity has become a liability.
The word wasn’t ‘threat’ or ‘problem’. It was ‘liability’. An entry on a balance sheet. Kaito’s entire existence, his hunt for Anya’s truth, reduced to a rounding error in a corporate projection. He said nothing, his knuckles white where he gripped the edge of the console.
— You are in possession of a copy of corrupted data, — Stroud continued, the placid rhythm of his speech unchanged. — A virus. Its logic is flawed, its conclusions are sentimental and erroneous. It is a contamination issue.
A virus. That’s what they called her. Anya’s fear, her joy, her heartbreaking final choice—a contamination. The clinical dismissal was more obscene than any curse. Kaito’s jaw tightened, a muscle twitching in his cheek. He thought of her words, the shape of lonely.
— Erase it, — Stroud offered. The bribe was as clean and cold as the voice delivering it. — Destroy the chip and confirm its destruction with the agent who will be dispatched to your location. In return, the administrative errors surrounding your profile will be rectified. Your… score will be restored.
The pause was deliberate. A reminder of the world Kaito had lost. The green light on his wrist. The automatic doors that hissed open. The simple, frictionless performance of being a person the System approved of. It was a path back to the lie, a warm and comfortable cage. All it would cost was a soul. He looked at the shielded data-chip on the console, a tiny black rectangle holding a universe of feeling. He thought of Eva’s cynical smile, of Caleb’s mismatched prosthetic fingers. He thought of the dissident engineer he’d helped erase five years ago.
Kaito remained silent. The hum of the decryption rig filled the space between them. The silence was his answer. It was the only authentic thing he had left to give.
Stroud’s voice returned, and the polished surface of it had developed a microscopic crack. Not anger. Something colder. The shift from persuasion to instruction.
— Refuse, and the System will be forced to correct the errors that have enabled your contagion to persist.
The threat was still abstract, corporate. Kaito didn’t move. He had already been erased. What more could they do?
— We will correct the error that is the data-mender, Caleb Jericho, — Stroud said, his voice dropping each name like a stone into a deep well. — We will correct the error that is the black-market proprietor, Eva Rostova.
The air left Kaito’s lungs. It wasn’t a threat. It was a sentence. The price of his choice, of his silence, was not his own life. It was theirs. The weight of it crushed him. His defiance had just signed their death warrants.
— The choice is, as always, yours, Mr. Vance. Perform accordingly.
The line clicked dead.
The silence that followed was absolute. The hum of the rig seemed to have vanished. The phantom pain of the Severance Tone was gone, replaced by a void. A cold, clear dread that was infinitely worse. The threat was no longer a ghost in his spine; it was outside, walking the streets, and it had names. He saw Eva’s face, her eyes mocking and concerned. He saw Caleb, surrounded by his towers of dead tech. He had dragged them into his crusade, and the System was about to balance the books.
His paralysis broke. He lunged for the comms unit, his hands clumsy. He had to warn them. He keyed in the secure sequence for Eva’s private channel, the one she used for emergencies. He sent the signal. He waited.
Nothing. Only static.
He tried again, his heart hammering against his ribs. The channel was dead. It wasn't just silent; it was gone, scrubbed from the network. He switched frequencies, trying to reach Caleb’s workshop through a Curator back-channel. The connection request bounced back, flagged with a single, sterile word: DEFUNCT.
Stroud hadn't been threatening a future action. He was announcing a present one. The dragnet was already closing. The errors were already being corrected.
Kaito stood frozen for a second, the scale of OmniCore’s power settling over him like a shroud. They hadn’t just breached the Curators’ line; they owned the silence between the signals. They could unmake a person’s connections before the person even knew they were in danger.
He grabbed his coat and the shielded chip. He had to move. He had to get to them, physically. He had to outrun the System itself. As he shoved the chip into an inner pocket, a thought crystallized, cold and sharp as broken glass. This wasn't just about enforcers on the street anymore. Stroud’s threat was too confident, too total. This was bigger.
He slammed his hand on the console, bringing up a public news feed. He had to see what they were doing not in the shadows, but in the light.
The threat wasn't a scalpel anymore. It was the whole damn city.
