The address Eva had given him was less a place and more a wound in the city’s ferrocrete skin. He descended through the lower sectors, leaving the rain-washed neon of the mid-levels for a deeper, more permanent gloom. Here, the air was thick with the smells of recycled protein, ozone, and the chemical tang of unregulated runoff. Glitching advertisements for OmniCore Solutions still flickered on cracked public screens, their models smiling with a perfection that felt like a threat in this world of decay. He needed someone who spoke the language of broken things, and the path to Caleb Jericho’s workshop was a pilgrimage through a graveyard of forgotten tech.
He found the entrance behind a curtain of beaded, grime-slicked cables hanging over a recessed doorway. There was no sign. There was only a faint, irregular pulse of blue light from within, the telltale sign of a struggling power converter. Kaito pushed through the cables. The space beyond was a chaotic tomb of obsolete electronics. Stacks of dead servers formed precarious towers, their indicator lights dark for decades. Disemboweled data-slates and tangled nests of fiber optics covered every surface. The air tasted of hot dust and the metallic scent of cooling solder. It was a place outside the clean, wireless logic of the System, a museum of physical data and tangible failure.
A shape detached itself from a mountain of server racks. Caleb Jericho, the data-mender, was a man assembled from the spare parts of the last century. He was tall and gaunt, his left arm a scuffed chrome prosthetic ending in a mismatched array of delicate tools. A single mechanical eye, its lens a dark, polished grey, whirred as it focused on Kaito. The sound was a dry click, like a camera shutter. Caleb’s remaining human eye was tired, lost in a web of wrinkles. He was a physical part of the technological ruin he curated.
— You’re the one Eva called about, — Caleb’s voice was a low, synthetic rasp from an old vocalizer implant. It was a voice built to report facts, not feelings.
Kaito didn’t answer. He moved to the only clear space in the room, a workbench scarred with burn marks and littered with microscopic components. He placed his data-slate on its surface. The slate, a product of OmniCore’s sterile design, looked alien here, an artifact from another world. The action felt loud in the humming silence. He was exposing his investigation, handing his only piece of evidence to a ghost who lived in the city’s static. The price was his anonymity, what little he had left.
— I need to know what this is. — Kaito tapped the screen, bringing up the waveform of the Sub-Vocal Static he had isolated from Anya Sharma’s log. The silver thread of patterned noise pulsed against the black background.
Caleb leaned over the bench. He didn’t use a terminal. Instead, a diagnostic claw, a spidery tool of dark metal and bundled wires, extended from his prosthetic wrist. It moved with a surgeon’s precision, its tip hovering over the data-slate. A needle-fine probe descended, making a soft click as it made a physical connection with the slate’s diagnostic port. Data began to scroll across a cracked monitor built into Caleb’s forearm.
The data-mender was silent for a long moment, his mechanical eye dilating as it processed the information. The only sounds were the hum of his own internal systems and the faint hiss of rain from the world above.
— OmniCore encryption, — Caleb’s voice was flat, a simple statement of fact. — The new series. Nigh-unbreakable. You’re asking for trouble, Vance. This is a corporate ghost. You don’t hunt them. You run.
It was the first of his warnings. Kaito’s jaw tightened. He had come for answers, not a lecture on self-preservation. He had already had that debate with himself in the quiet of his office, and the ghost had won.
— I’m not asking about the encryption, — Kaito said, his voice low. He pointed a finger at the waveform on his own slate. — I’m asking about the noise. What is it?
Caleb’s human eye flickered from the slate to Kaito’s face, a flicker of something that might have been pity. He turned back to his arm-mounted monitor. His prosthetic fingers danced, adjusting parameters, filtering the signal through layers of his own custom-written code. The mechanical eye zoomed, its lens reconfiguring with a series of soft clicks. He was peeling back the layers of the anomaly, his focus absolute. A full minute passed.
— It’s Signal Reflection, — Caleb said finally, the term clinical and dismissive. He was offering Kaito the easy answer, the technical out. — It’s a feedback loop. An implant reporting on its own static. The processor can’t distinguish the signal from the noise, so it just creates echoes of itself. It’s a flaw in older hardware. Meaningless.
Kaito didn’t move. He had felt the whisper in the code. It wasn’t meaningless. He held Caleb’s gaze, his silence a question the data-mender couldn’t ignore. He was pressing, refusing the simple explanation.
Caleb let out a long, slow breath, a sound like air leaking from a punctured tire. He looked away from Kaito, his gaze lost in the mountains of dead technology that surrounded them. He seemed to be weighing the cost of his next words. The air grew heavy. This was the moment. The turn.
— Or it’s an echo, — Caleb’s voice was different now, lower, stripped of its clinical detachment. He was stepping off the edge of the known world. — A real one. You can’t get anything from a dead core. The energy cascade fries the positronic pathways. It’s a clean wipe. Total data death.
He paused, and the silence stretched, thick with unspoken possibilities. Kaito felt a cold knot tighten in his stomach. He knew what was coming.
— Unless the core wanted it remembered.
The words landed in the quiet workshop with the force of a physical blow. It was the bombshell. The impossible truth given voice. It wasn't an error. It wasn't a glitch. It was a will. A last testament, carved into the static by a consciousness that refused to die silently. The axis of Kaito’s world flipped. The case was no longer about a machine that had broken; it was about a person who had chosen. The price for this knowledge was the complete destruction of his safety.
Caleb’s prosthetic hand retracted the diagnostic claw. He pushed the data-slate back across the workbench, a quiet, final gesture of severance. He was returning the cursed object, refusing any further part in its story.
— Walk away, Vance, — Caleb’s voice was a low rasp, a critical warning from a man who had seen too many ghosts. — You think you’re hunting a malfunction. You’re not. You’re standing on the edge of a new kind of physics, and you have no idea how deep the fall is. This isn’t a secret. It’s a religion. And OmniCore is the only god allowed in this city.
The warning didn’t frighten him. It did the opposite. It was a confirmation. It gave a name to the terrifying, exhilarating feeling he’d had since he first heard the whisper. The debate was over. His course was set. He picked up the data-slate, its cold weight feeling different in his hand now. Heavier. It wasn't just evidence anymore. It was a soul.
He nodded once to Caleb, a silent acknowledgment of the warning, and of the truth. He turned and walked out of the workshop, leaving the tomb of dead machines behind.
The rain had stopped, leaving the air clean and cold. The neon signs of the lower canyon reflected off the wet ferrocrete, their colors sharp and clear.
He had the impossible truth. Now he had to buy the lie.
