The rain was a constant hiss on the polymer-concrete, a sound that never changed. It fell through the perpetual twilight of Vertikalgrad’s undercity, washing the neon glow of a thousand signs down into the gutters in oily, rainbow slicks. Sineus moved through the alley, his boots making no sound on the wet ground. His destination was a dead end, a narrow space between two hab-blocks bleeding rust and data-static. A single holo-sign for a synth-noodle bar flickered overhead, casting the alley in strobing blues and reds, then plunging it back into darkness. The air, thick with 94% humidity, smelled of ozone, wet metal, and the faint, sweet decay of discarded nutrient packs. His mission parameters were simple: neutralize a data smuggler operating in Sector Gamma-9.
He found the target halfway down the alley, sprawled against a corroded maintenance panel. The man was already neutralized. A single, dark hole in the chest of his worn synth-leather jacket showed where a projectile had entered. The body was cooling, the last of its warmth a faint bloom on Sineus’s thermal overlay. The mission was physically complete, but the context was wrong. This was too clean for a street-level dispute, too quiet. A professional hit, but not his. He knelt, his focus absolute, ignoring the corpse as a piece of meat. The real evidence was never in the flesh.
Sineus closed his eyes for a half-second, letting the world of light and matter fall away. He engaged the faculty that made him RosNova’s most effective instrument. When he opened them, the alley was no longer empty. A silent, grey flicker of a figure shimmered over the body. A Palimpsest Phantom. It was a data-ghost, an echo of a memory violently excised from the script of reality. The phantom was humanoid, its form wavering like a corrupted video file, its hand outstretched in a gesture of offering. It was silent, locked in a broken loop of action, a wound in the world only he could see. The presence of the phantom meant the smuggler’s death was more than a simple murder; it was an erasure.
He moved closer, his gaze analytical. The phantom was unstable. A hairline crack, a fissure of pure black, ran through its translucent form from shoulder to hip. It was a glitch in the ghost, a sign of a sloppy, rushed memory-edit. A clean cut would have left nothing, not even this echo. This was the work of an amateur or someone in a hurry, someone who had the tool but not the skill. The price of their haste was this scar, this lingering proof of what they had tried to un-write. The sight of it put a familiar pressure behind his eyes, the strain of perceiving a contradiction the universe was trying to forget.
He focused on the phantom’s core loop, letting the stuttering action resolve into a coherent narrative. The outstretched hand. The slight turn of the head. The gesture was not a plea or a threat; it was a transfer. The memory-scar analysis, a process of reading the damage in the local reality-script, confirmed it. The smuggler’s true purpose, the one that had been cut away, was not just transport. It was delivery. The object of the transfer, now a void in the phantom’s hand, resolved in Sineus’s mind: a relic-key, its form ancient and intricate. The smuggler was a courier, and he had reached his destination.
Sineus turned his attention back to the physical world. He pulled the target’s data-deck from an inside pocket. The device was cold to the touch. He interfaced it with his personal terminal, running a deep scan. The result was predictable. The deck was wiped, its data integrity hovering at a scant 0.1%. All that remained were ghost fragments of low-level commercial transactions from the last cycle: a noodle purchase, a transit pass refill, a bet on the grav-races. The physical data told the story of a nobody, a victim of a random mugging. It was a perfect cover, a clean layer of manufactured normalcy painted over the raw truth of the phantom.
He had a choice. He could report the anomaly, the phantom, the relic-key. That would trigger a Level-3 investigation, bring in neuro-archaeology teams from RosNova, and expose this sector to a full-spectrum audit. It would be the truth. Or he could report what the physical evidence showed. The lie. The price of the truth was chaos. The price of the lie was order. RosNova’s order. His purpose was to preserve the integrity of the system, and the system was built on such lies. He made the choice in less time than it took for the holo-sign to flicker from red to blue.
His fingers moved across his terminal, fabricating the mission log. ‘Target engaged in Sector Gamma-9. Subject resisted. Neutralized.’ He uploaded the report to the RosNova servers. The lie, concise and functional, was logged as official truth. The gap between what was real and what was recorded widened by one more body. A confirmation chime, quiet and final, echoed in his ear. The controlled lie was preserved.
Before leaving, he completed the sanitation protocol. He accessed the local network, a messy web of public and private nodes. Two nearby alleyway cameras had recorded the last five minutes. He isolated their data streams, his personal device emitting a low hum as it injected a wipe command. Zero bytes of incident data remained. He erased his own presence from the scene, leaving only the body and the fabricated story of a mugging gone wrong. The scene was now sterile, ready for the undercity’s indifferent custodians.
He rose, the rain plastering his black coat to his frame. He gave the flickering phantom one last look, the cracked ghost still reaching for a hand that wasn’t there. Then he turned and melted back into the labyrinth of shadows and neon, another scar on the world cataloged and concealed.
The rain continued its steady, percussive rhythm, washing the alley clean of everything but its secrets. The stuttering sign cast long, dancing shadows that looked almost like ghosts.
