The Sump breathed steam and static. From her small, shielded alcove in the workshop, Silja Valis drew a soft, lint-free cloth across the cool chrome face of her Phase Calibrator. The motion was practiced, economical, clearing away a day’s worth of grime with methodical precision. It was a tool of pure logic, a handheld device that translated the chaos of a Bleed Zone into the clean, verifiable language of a wireframe map. Its diagnostic light remained a steady, reassuring green. The tool was optimal. The logic held.
Around her, the workshop was a cacophony of failing systems. The hiss of hydraulics from the Husk-Frame bay, the rhythmic clang of a distant auto-press, the incessant crackle of overloaded power conduits—it was the sound of a world perpetually on the verge of collapse. The air, thick with the smell of ozone, hot metal, and damp concrete, was a testament to the Sump’s slow, inevitable decay. Here, everything was broken. Everything except her instruments.
From a nearby stall, a slick, familiar voice cut through the noise. It belonged to Jago, a scavenger and information broker whose survival depended on knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. He was leaning against a stack of corroded power cells, speaking to a younger dweller, barely old enough to pilot a cargo hauler.
— AURA thinks it can just delete the messy parts, — Jago said, a smirk playing on his lips. His voice was oil on rust, smooth and corrosive. The younger dweller, his face smudged with grease, looked uncertain.
— But AURA keeps the Grid stable. It keeps us safe.
— Safe is a matter of perspective, kid, — Jago countered, gesturing vaguely at the dripping pipes overhead. — The Pinnacle is safe. This is just the runoff. They flushed the toilet and we’re what’s left. They think they can just edit reality, cut out the parts they don’t like.
He leaned in closer, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper that still carried through the din.
— But you can't delete a soul. You can only break it into ghosts.
Silja let out a quiet, almost inaudible scoff. Ghosts. The Sump was drowning in superstition. Rust-ghosts in the machines, static-wraiths in the comms, tear-stains on the walls of old habitats. It was the folk wisdom of the desperate, a way to give names to the system’s decay without understanding the underlying mechanics. She preferred data. She preferred truth.
Her fingers found the small, worn gear she kept on her workbench. It was a simple piece of metal, a token from a past failure, its teeth smoothed down on one side from years of turning against her thumb. The gear was cool and solid in her palm, a tactile reminder of a world that made sense, a world of interlocking parts and fixable problems. A system, however complex, could be understood. It could be repaired. It could not be haunted.
She pocketed the keepsake gear, the familiar weight a small anchor against the tide of the Sump’s chaotic beliefs. Her work was not done. She turned from the pristine Phase Calibrator to the ugly, scavenged machine tucked into the darkest corner of her alcove: her private monitor. It was a custom-built system, its casing a patchwork of mismatched panels, its purpose singular. It did not scan for Grid traffic or AURA broadcasts. It listened to the silence. It listened to the ambient psychic noise of the world, the background radiation of a fractured reality.
For months, it had shown her nothing. Just a flat, quiet line of meaningless static, the visual equivalent of a dead channel. It was the baseline of their existence, the sound of nothing. It was the control in her experiment.
Today was different.
A sharp, incandescent blue spike had appeared on the static-filled screen. It was not the jagged, angry burst of a power surge or the fuzzy decay of a sensor ghost. This was structured. It was clean. The spike resolved into a delicate, repeating waveform, a pattern of light that looked less like data and more like lyrical script. It was a voice singing in a language of pure energy.
The signal’s amplitude was more than four standard deviations above the baseline noise. It was a whisper that screamed in the silence.
Silja leaned closer, her maintenance forgotten, her entire focus narrowing to the impossible signal on the screen. Her breath caught. Her heart rate, usually a steady sixty-five beats per minute, kicked up, a frantic, unfamiliar rhythm against her ribs. This was not superstition. This was not a ghost story told by a grifter in a failing workshop.
This was data.
It was an anomaly of the highest order, a structured signal where none should exist. It was a ghost in the static, and it was real. Her mind, trained to diagnose and solve, kicked into a higher gear. The cynicism that insulated her from the Sump’s madness evaporated, replaced by the cold, thrilling focus of a hunter who has just found a track. This was not a problem to be dismissed. It was a mystery to be solved.
The distant clang of a hydraulic press fell silent. A single drop of condensation traced a path down a rusted pipe.
This was not a ghost, it was a signal, and its mystery demanded a solution.
