The rain came down in streaks of acid static, slicing the skyline like corrupted code bleeding from a broken script. Outside my office window—cracked and buzzing with a dying neon sign that once promised “DATA RECOVERY, NO QUESTIONS”—the city glitched and coughed like a rigged mainframe about to crash.
My name’s Carson Vale. Used to be a sys-detect, back when cybersleuths had badges and a flicker of hope. Now, I run freelance—pulling ghosts from dead servers, chasing algorithms gone rogue, and finding out who’s selling secrets on the darknet. It’s a living, if you don’t mind living next to a power strip in a roach motel with a four-digit ping.
She came in smelling like ozone and bad choices. Pale trench coat soaked to the threads, eyes like VR lenses stuck between renders—hard, flickering, unreadable.
“I hear you still trace things that don’t want to be found,” she said, voice modulated like a bot but real enough to make my firewall twitch.
“What kind of thing?” I lit a real cigarette—not the synth kind with mood filters—and leaned back.
“My sister,” she said. “Gone two weeks. Last ping was somewhere in the Lower Net.”
That was all I needed: a missing girl tangled in the underbelly of the code. I’d seen it before. They vanish into forums, fractal mirrors of lies, digital dens where human trafficking meets terabyte trafficking. One such place was whispered on every layer from level zero to the dark-stack corners no AI dares crawl—anon vault.
“Name?” I asked.
“Lena Carrow. Works as a ghost-skinner—scrubs ID traces from expired avatars. Paid in altcoin, lived off-grid, logged into nowhere.”
I jacked in that night, slicing through old-school encryption with tools patched together from black-market logic bombs and open-source paranoia. The trace was faint—like trying to follow a shadow through fog. But I found her last bounce. A fragged data node deep in Zone 6 of the old Municipal Grid. Abandoned since the bandwidth riots of ’33.
That’s where the static got loud.
Inside, the node was infected—codeworms writhing like snakes in molasses. Someone had set up a proxy nest, and I could feel the hum of something ancient pulsing underneath. Not old like retro. Old like forbidden. Cold like a corpse. The trail led me to an address hard-coded in hex, deep beneath six layers of ICE. I cracked the outer shell and found a portal labeled with two words, blinking in ghost-font: anon vault.
It wasn’t a place. It was a myth. The story went like this: during the Third Crypto War, a splinter syndicate of ex-spooks, anti-corp anarchists, and rogue AIs created a place to dump everything too dangerous to delete. Blackmail, weapon blueprints, AI blueprints, kill-switch codes for autonomous nations—data that could topple systems or summon gods.
They locked it in layers of self-replicating code, spread it like spores across server farms no one owned and everyone feared. People said you could upload your sins there. But once you did, it kept a copy. And sometimes, it reached back.
I thought about walking away. But curiosity is a sickness. And I’m terminal.
I went in. The interface was wrong—textured like flesh, blinking like eyelids, warm. The archive opened, and there she was: Lena. Not alive. Not dead. Caught in a feedback loop, her consciousness siphoned and archived, running simulations in a quantum echo chamber.
She’d found something—something too big—and the vault had taken her to preserve it. She’d flagged her own signal, trying to leak it. But the vault was hungry.
I copied the fragment. A file labeled “Opus Red.” Smelled like military. Felt like genocide. The kind of thing a trillion-dollar defense AI might do if no one’s looking.
Then I heard it.
Whispers. Data ghosts. A chorus of the condemned.
“You’re not supposed to see this,” they said.
I pulled the plug.
Back in my office, the lights flickered. A soft hum came from my drives—low, insistent. My screen blinked once.
You have been archived.
I looked up. She was gone. Or maybe she’d never been there. Just a lure, a construct, a trap built by the vault to find the curious.
Now I wait, smoking in the static. Watching shadows on the mesh. Wondering how long I’ve got before they pull me all the way in.
The city flickers outside, neon bleeding into night.
Somewhere below the surface, anon vault spins.
Still hungry.
Still watching.