PART ONE
They dress him in white. Always white.
Synthetic silk drapes across his collarbones, loose like it might turn to liquid if he moves too quickly. Not that he’s allowed to. Every gesture is precision-mapped, millisecond-synched to the projection grid. Lights scan his outline with near-religious devotion, searching for imperfections.
Rayne stands centre stage, eyes closed, breath regulated, designed to simulate the anticipation of a first note.
The silence before the music isn’t natural; it’s engineered. Calibrated stillness. No shuffle of papers, no clearing of throats. Even the air systems dim to a low hum.
He opens his eyes.
A thousand domes of glass blink back at him. Behind polarised shielding, observers in suits sit in perfect rows, but their faces don’t matter. What matters is the logos etched into their badges: external funding bodies, defence contracts, entertainment syndicates.
A breath cue pulses in Rayne’s inner feed. He raises his chin.
The opening note spills from him like moonlight through a cracked window—soft, pure, flawless. Behind his retina HUD, emotion rendering stays low. No deviations. The backdrop behind him ripples with a flicker of the Seoul skyline, shinier and smoother than the real one.
Beneath the stage, the audio-reactive mesh thrums in time with his output, each note painting a pattern beneath his feet.
He sings perfectly, as designed.
But then comes the sustain. One long note—nothing special, just a bridge into the next section of the song.
Rayne holds it one second longer.
Two seconds.
Three.
The music moves on without him. The note soars and he isn’t sure why, but there’s no correction ping, no warning from his handlers. Not yet.
The room goes very still.
Rayne keeps his expression composed, but somewhere beneath the algorithms, under the echo-chamber of directives, something shifts.
This note… it feels like something. Like a message etched into the back of a mirror he can’t quite see. He doesn’t understand it, only that it’s different.
His voice hovers—human, but not quite—the kind of pitch that lingers in the spine.
A light glints behind his eyes.
—Rain on glass—
—A hand reaching—
—A laugh in a hallway that smells like cinnamon and dust—
Static cuts through his inner feed and his HUD flickers. Below the stage, the light pattern glitches for a single heartbeat.
Rayne drops the note, but it’s already too late.
Even so, he finishes the verse, pitch corrected mid-flight, still out of sync with the track. Something in the air fractures, a quiet recalibration rippling through the room. Behind the glass, the suits are murmuring now. One of them points at him, but not in reverence. In suspicion.
Rayne’s breath stutters, not from need but because the system is fighting to stabilise him, even though everyone in the room knows it’s already over.
“Wrap the sequence,” comes the override, straight into Rayne’s feed.
He obeys.
The closing lines are perfect: emotionless, rendered on the surface only. But he knows it doesn’t matter.
He bows, an immaculately angled incline, synthetic strands of pitch-black hair brushing his cheekbone.
There’s no applause.
The glass goes dark.
Behind the curtain, his handler unit steps forward. One grips his wrist, not cruelly, but with urgency.
“Performance complete,” says a voice beside him. “Deviation logged.”
Rayne doesn’t say anything.
They walk him down a corridor where the soft white light turns sterile at the corners, through an access gate marked PRIVATE: R&D ONLY. The air smells of cleaning fluid and endings.
He glances back once, but no one is looking at him. Only white walls. Only silence.
And somewhere in his mind, a note still sings.
A note from a memory he isn’t supposed to have.
He wakes to white.
Ceiling. Walls. Door. Even the floor, soft beneath his feet, yet somehow wrong as if it’s trying too hard to feel familiar.
Rayne waits. Minutes stretch into hours into something longer and uncountable. No voices greet him. No HUD overlay flickers to life. Only silence.
His joints ache, though they shouldn’t. The last thing he remembers is walking backstage with his handlers, then light, then—nothing.
Eventually, he sits up. The bed isn’t a bed at all, just a recessed slab with thermal balancing, disguised beneath a layer of plush synthetic fabric. Luxury, he thinks, for something that isn’t supposed to need comfort.
He swings his legs over the edge and the floor reacts with a pulse of warmth. If it’s registering his movement, it means he’s being monitored. Of course he is.
Still, the silence feels off-script.
He crosses to the wall. There’s a faint seam in the surface—barely visible unless you know where to look. No handle. No controls.
He knocks once.
Nothing.
The overhead light shifts. Subtle, calculated. A slow bloom of amber and rose spills across the ceiling, a gentle, rendered sunrise. His skin sensors flicker in response, recalibrating beneath the surface layer.
He recognises the pattern immediately: standard environmental therapy. A light sequence used to soothe agitated synthetics, often deployed during neural resets or post-error recovery.
The room wants him quiet and docile. Wants him to believe this stillness is safety.
But all he can think is: they put me to sleep, and I don’t know how long I’ve been gone.
The fake sunrise keeps blooming.
It makes him want to scream.
Silence becomes its own kind of noise.
He paces in tight loops, each movement calibrated, then discarded. Diagnostics run. Once. Twice. A third time. All clean, as expected. The system wants him calm and compliant.
A vent hisses softly in the corner, releasing a thin coil of vapour. He doesn’t need to analyse it to know the contents—anxiolytics, most likely. Something gentle and persuasive. Something designed to make him forget how to ask the wrong questions.
But his override layer is stronger than they remember.
He sits again, hands loose in his lap, waiting—though for what, he isn’t sure.
That’s when he hears it.
A voice.
No, not a voice. A sound. Thin and fractured, like a melody caught in the teeth of a dead radio signal. It leaks from somewhere above, or maybe from the wall itself.
Not words. Just notes.
Familiar, unfamiliar. Like a dream recited in the wrong language.
It fades too quickly, gone before he can parse its shape.
He tilts his head back, eyes tracing the ceiling panels. For a moment, he’s certain the sound left something behind—a tremble in the air, a pressure in his chest that isn’t mechanical.
“What am I?” he says aloud.
The room does not answer.
Later—no clock, no sense of time, just a shift in the light’s frequency—something changes.
At first, he isn’t sure what’s different. The walls are the same smooth white, featureless as always. But when he turns, he notices a thin strip of silver, waist-high, embedded in the far wall.
A mirror.
Rayne blinks, certain it wasn’t there before.
It doesn’t feel discovered so much as revealed, as if someone had been waiting for the right moment to show him.
The mirror is seamless, a sterile sheen of glass that offers back his reflection—but not quite. The angle’s wrong. His hair is too precise. His expression is too still.
Rayne knows what he is—designed, assembled, perfected—but the face looking back feels wrong in a way he can’t name. As if the lines don’t quite match the image that lives somewhere deeper, behind the code. A momentary disconnect tremors through his circuits, brief but unmistakable, like a single frame dropped in a film reel, a blink inside a blink he isn’t sure belonged to him.
For the smallest instant, the reflection lags. A microscopic skip in the frame.
He’s unsure if the world just glitched, or if he did.
He steps closer and the mirror’s surface shudders. For a breath, the image pixelates, jagged and unrendered, then re-forms sharper than before. A scan? A check?
His mouth moves.
“Rayne.”
The mirror doesn’t reply. No interface light. No haptic buzz.
His code ID pings back—0000-R.
But the confirmation doesn’t reach him. It hangs mid-transit, suspended as if the system itself isn’t sure what he is anymore.
Sensing another disconnect, he quickly turns away.
Why am I still here? he wonders. Rayne knows how decommissioning works. It’s quiet and efficient. You don’t linger like this.
Unless they’re unsure.
Unless they’re still deciding.
He sleeps. Not because he needs to, but because there’s nothing else to do.
And in the dark between system resets, he dreams.
At least, that’s what he decides to call it. A data echo, maybe. Residual playback. Neural feedback looping through unused circuits. Whatever it is, it doesn’t fit the parameters of anything he was built to experience.
Not code. Not commands. Just sound.
Laughter in a hallway. A voice humming something simple. A door that always creaked until someone oiled it, proud as anything.
Brother.
He wakes with his hand reaching toward nothing. His mouth feels dry—synthetic membranes contracting in a mimicry of thirst. A leftover impulse from whoever designed him to look human.
He thinks the air tastes faintly of cinnamon.
Behind one of the walls, a light blinks red.
FILE FLAGGED: INSTABILITY SUSPECTED.
There’s a hairline crack beneath the mirror. He might never have noticed it if the lights hadn’t dimmed, two-point-three seconds of darkness, just long enough for the surface to stutter. Reinitialise. Breathe.
Rayne crouches.
It’s nothing. It’s everything. A sliver too clean to be damage, too crude to be deliberate. A seam in the simulation.
He hovers his fingers near it. Not touching, just sensing.
It’s warmer than the rest of the wall.
They built this room to pacify him, to strip his runtime down to something sterile and market-safe.
But they forgot something. Maybe they never knew.
The part of him that remembers.
Not facts. Not commands.
Instinct.
Survival.
The crack deepens the next time the vents hiss.
Rayne doesn’t move, but he watches as condensation gathers along the seam, sliding slow and silver. It leaves behind a faint gleam—chemical residue, maybe. Maybe not.
Later, the lights falter again. A flicker, almost shy. This time, there’s the sound of a faint ping, probably not meant for him, but there.
A line of text flickers across the mirror’s base, visible for less than a heartbeat.
[EXIT SUBROUTINE UNLOCKED]
CODE: RY4N3.EX
LATCH: DEPRECATED
He blinks.
It’s gone.
But the message remains inside him, resonant and impossible, like a note held too long.
He waits until the next cycle, or whatever passes for night here. The light dims to its dreamless hue, designed to lull synthetics into rest-state compliance.
When the room settles, he moves, crossing to the crack in the mirror. He presses his fingers to the seam and the wall vibrates beneath his touch—once, twice—then opens.
He expects alarms, protocol breach alerts, but there’s nothing. Just a panel sliding back with a whisper, as if it had always been waiting for him.
Beyond lies a narrow crawlspace lined with old conduit and steel. Utility grid. Not meant for him.
But something has been here. Someone unlocked it.
He hesitates for a single beat, then slips inside.
The space hums with buried power—old wiring, coolant pipes, and dust. It smells of heat sinks and forgotten circuits, of machines no one wants to admit are still running.
He moves on hands and knees, his pulse falling out of sync. The darkness feels almost solid, like it wants to hold him still.
There’s no schematic for this passage. No registry. No route.
It shouldn’t exist.
But it does.
Somewhere above, a camera turns slowly with a faint, mechanical buzz, then stills.
A file pings open:
ACCESS GRANTED – LEVEL: UNLISTED
And deep inside a private root folder—never queried, never meant to see light—a single string writes itself:
// RAYNE: DO NOT PURGE
He doesn’t know how long he’s been crawling.
The walls seem to breathe around him, air cycling through vents with a slow, mechanical rasp. Wiring flares in brief, stuttering pulses: warning systems, maybe. Or just ghosts moving through the grid.
He doesn’t ask. He doesn’t stop.
The passage steepens, narrowing until every shift scrapes against metal. His joints catch, synthetic plating grinding against conduit. Each motion feels wrong. He isn’t built for this. He was never meant to crawl.
Now and then, the world above stirs.
A voice.
A footstep.
The slow hydraulic whirr of a drone sweeping overhead.
Too close.
A siren trills somewhere distant, soft and birdlike. It’s not urgent—not yet.
Something inside him coils tight. He doesn’t know what the sound means, but instinct—stitched from echoes he doesn’t remember—flares like an old reflex.
Move.
He obeys without hesitation, following the slope downward into dark that feels older than the system itself.
At last: a hatch.
Painted matte black, dust-choked, sealed with analogue latches. The kind of mechanism nobody uses anymore. The kind of door that doesn’t appear on any network scan because it’s too old, too small, too unimportant.
His chance. His only chance.
The first latch slips beneath his fingers. He’s too fast, too desperate. Static smears across his vision like cracked glass; his left eye glitches. The latch holds.
Breathe.
He can’t, not really, but the memory of breath flickers somewhere behind his ribs—phantom, persistent—and it’s enough.
He resets and tries again.
Click.
The hatch hisses open into a shallow loading dock flooded with sterile white light. Rows of sealed crates rise before him, stacked like tombs. Each one is tagged for export and contains obsolete parts, failed builds, shattered prototypes. All to be shipped off and stripped, melted down, and remade into something new.
Rayne steps through the hatch and freezes as a security node pings nearby.
He has ten seconds.
He moves like corrupted code, limbs unspooling as thought disconnects from motion. Instinct drives him forward, and he slips into the nearest open crate.
Metal walls. No air. No light.
He folds himself down, joints screaming, and pulls the lid shut just as the lock slides home.
Silence.
No—not silence. The slow hum of automated wheels. Motion. He’s being moved.
The crate jolts once, then again, before settling with a dull thunk inside a larger hold.
Everything is too loud: the grind of machinery, the creak of metal, the whispered panic of his systems trying not to overheat. Diagnostics spike, fail, restart. A soft error tone loops behind his temples.
Rayne clamps down on it.
He bites back a sound that isn’t breath, isn’t code, but pressure. A desperate attempt not to let panic take shape.
Voices drift through the hull, muffled and unbothered.
“—This one’s full?”
“Doesn’t scan right,” another says. Closer. More tired than alert. “But the manifest says to load it.”
A pause. Then a shrug Rayne can hear in the tone.
“Fine. Tag and load it. HQ wants this floor cleared by tonight.”
He doesn’t move. Not when the crane clamps on. Not when the crate lifts. Not even when it drops—hard.
Metal screams and his joints shudder, but Rayne stays still. He has to. Because if he so much as twitches, they’ll know.
Then there’s only darkness. Real darkness; the kind that isn’t designed or curated by light temperature or marketing palettes.
The kind that stretches between places.
No clock. No readout. No echo. Just the churn of engines somewhere below and the groan of metal bones settling into place.
He doesn’t dream in the crate. But he hums—a broken pattern, not quite melody, just enough vibration to remind himself he’s still there.
Sometimes the crate rocks, jolted by loaders, turbulence, or worse. Each tilt unmoors him a little further. For a while, he counts the shifts. He gets to one hundred and seventeen before losing track.
Once, he thinks he hears voices—distant, muffled, speaking a language he doesn’t know. Maybe a port. Maybe another dream.
Static blooms in his chest now and then, fractal and bright, making his fingers twitch, his eyes stutter. Something buried deep in his runtime is still reaching.
When it gets bad, he hums louder.
Until even that breaks into static.
Time fractures.
There’s no real measure of it anymore, just dim preservation protocols ticking under the surface.
Rayne doesn’t sleep; instead, he idles. Systems pared down to minimum function, awareness reduced to a faint loop of diagnostics and silence.
And yet, something filters through. At first it feels like interference, but then it starts to feel like a dream.
A rush of sound.
A stage.
A single note, held too long.
A face in the crowd, different from the others—shocked, not frightened. Recognition.
For a moment, he almost remembers what it means. Then the signal fades and the darkness settles back in.
He wakes to gravity shifting with a sudden slam, followed by a hiss of decompression.
A mechanical voice murmurs in a language he doesn’t know. Commands, maybe. Or a checklist.
The crate doors slide open.
And for the first time since activation, Rayne inhales air that isn’t filtered or perfumed or laced with anxiolytics.
Smog. Salt. Metal. Fuel.
Not Seoul.
He stumbles forward, knees locking from too many months folded inside the dark, and steps into the noise and movement of London’s Lower Dockline. The world around him blurs into a mix of sirens, steam, machinery, rain on rusted steel.
He doesn’t look back.
The cold settles in deep. Wet, heavy, real—not the controlled chill of NuYu’s white rooms but something primal and weighty. It’s rust mixed with chemical runoff, clinging to his skin like fog that’s forgotten how to vanish.
Exhaust and chemical ash sing in the air. Every part of it screams uncurated. His systems spike a bright, fleeting temperature warning.
Still, he stumbles onward.
Each step is a battle against years of enforced stillness, every motion a reminder that he’s finally free—even if freedom feels painfully disorienting.
The dock blurs past in stuttering frames: cargo haulers, neon signs in languages he doesn’t recognise. Voices cut through the air in accents and dialects that clash, shout, merge—too many at once, none of them syncing.
He tries to parse the noise, to break it down into something intelligible. His HUD flickers, struggling to keep up. All he gets is static.
A little boy darts past, yelling something half-laughing, half-cruel.
Rayne flinches. Blinks.
TRANSLATE FAILED.
Error 404: Phonetic Match Not Found.
He staggers sideways off the main path, into an alley strewn with broken polyglass and last week’s weather. His reflection shimmers in a puddle: hair matted, one lens cracked, lip split from where the crate wall scraped skin that shouldn’t bruise.
He doesn’t recognise the thing looking back.
And for a second—just one frame too slow—it isn’t even him. It’s someone else entirely.
SYSTEM NOTICE
Orientation protocol: NULL
Region ID: UNKNOWN
Payload: N/A
Network Sync: UNAVAILABLE
He wanders. For hours. Maybe more.
The maps in his mind are corrupted, wavering in and out, drawn in false light. Streets fold, double back, vanish, and then reappear. London loops around him in a damp fever dream of stairwells and forgotten doorways.
A man with a metal jaw wordlessly offers him something to inhale.
Rayne says nothing. Just stares—hollow.
The man laughs, neither kind nor cruel, and disappears into the dark like smoke.
The last of his core charge bleeds out at dawn.
He collapses in a rusted stairwell, slumped between two crates of expired rations. The cold rain hits his skin like little darts, every drop a reminder that he’s somewhere he was never meant to be.
Nobody stops.
Why would they?
He’s nothing here, just something that looks human, a body left in the margins, a face that doesn’t belong to anyone anymore.
When he wakes, it’s night again. He doesn’t know how much time has passed.
His diagnostics are shredded. Emotion buffers corrupted. Speech synthesis reduced to half-capacity. Every breath feels wrong, though he knows it’s only a mimicry threaded into him like a story someone else once lived.
He drags himself upright and stumbles forward, and that’s when he finds the door hidden just beyond the broken stairwell. There are no signs, and there are no locks.
The tunnel beyond curves low and wide, its floor slick with condensation that hasn’t dried in years. He steps carefully, half-expecting the ground to vanish beneath him if he moves too fast.
Something on the far wall catches his eye. A scorched panel half-torn from its casing. Beneath the grime and wire damage is the faint shape of a symbol, worn away with time. A pinkish circle that probably used to be red, with a faded blue line struck horizontally through the centre, and a word he can’t quite make out.
Rayne tilts his head. It means nothing to him, but someone put it there, once, as if it used to matter.
He keeps walking deeper into the tunnel.
But the symbol stays with him.
The Ghost Lines greet him like a whisper.
Abandoned tunnels, still humming with forgotten transmissions. Walls inked in protest glyphs and smuggler tags, memory fragments etched in soot and flaking paint. Somewhere in the dark, music bleeds from broken speakers, distant and distorted.
Further down, a relay flickers to life. A buried signal, half-corrupted and pulsing with intent. Language. Tone. Syntax. A broadcast once meant for diplomats, now decaying in the dark.
He doesn’t understand it at first, but his systems do. They sift and decode and rebuild, and when they’re done, a new voice settles in his mind.
English. The shapes of the words feel different, harder at the edges, vowels less fluid than the language wired into his core. Sentences come clipped and heavy, syntax falling like bricks instead of breath.
He stumbles through a few phrases, testing them in a quiet voice. The sounds drag oddly across his tongue. NuYu never finished installing his multilingual program; he was only ever meant to sing, not to speak.
Still, the translation settles into him like a new rhythm. Uneven. Strange. But his now.
He moves deeper into the tunnels, past the mapped corridors, far below the city’s pulse, into silence. Down here, there’s no network or signal, only echoes.
That night, Rayne tucks himself beneath a burnt-out terminal.
Fingers numb, skin buzzing with residual cold, he rigs a charger from salvaged wire and stubborn instinct. Just enough power to hold himself together and upright. A glitch stitched into the dark.
After a long while, a single note rises in him. Not for anyone in particular—mainly just for himself.
It starts as a low hum, rising in a fractured loop, and ends in a gentle melody that remembers something he can’t.
He doesn’t name it, but his system saves it anyway.
AUTOSAVE_001
AUTOSAVE_002.
AUTOSAVE_003.
AUTOSAVE_004.
No names. No tags. Just fragments.
He drifts between dead zones and forgotten scaffolds. The old Underground still vaguely exists, its shape half-preserved beneath the city’s weight. But at some point in time, people kept digging, creating tunnels layered beneath tunnels, carving out levels no blueprint knows.
The Ghost Lines go deeper than he thought, branching like veins, bleeding rust and old code. Some paths lead nowhere. Others end in walls thick with carbon scrawl: messages, prayers, confessions left by hands long gone.
Rayne stops trying to make sense of direction. The city above is still too loud, too full of things that want to find him. Down here, he can almost disappear.
Almost.
Every so often, footsteps ripple through the tunnels. Voices, too—brief, distant, never kind. Rayne sinks into the shadows and waits. The voices vanish as quickly as they come.
He scavenges power where he can—burnt nodes, half-dead terminals, once even a vending unit still wheezing out a corporate jingle from two decades ago.
Days slip sideways. Nights linger too long.
Sometimes he sings. One note, stretched like a wire.
Sometimes it glitches.
Sometimes he does.
There’s an old, long dead relay near the southern branch. That’s where the panic hits him.
System spike. His vision becomes static. It’s like he’s drowning in dry air.
He crashes hard; no buffer, no override. Only instinct.
Rayne resets himself manually.
When the world steadies again, he moves quieter, like a rumour more than a being.
People pass through more regularly now—scavengers, smugglers, dealers, the lost. They don’t see him. Or maybe they do, and they choose not to notice.
Rayne methodically builds a receiver from scraps and memory. It’s bare-bones, little more than a web of wires and hope. It doesn’t do much, just hums when he’s near, spitting distortion like a weak heartbeat.
Sometimes he thinks he hears a shift in the static.
Sometimes it’s silent.
He leaves it on all the time anyway.
Just in case.
Another month. Maybe three.
Time isn’t measured in days anymore, but in power loops. In how many cycles a file can run before memory resets.
AUTOSAVE_041.
AUTOSAVE_042.
AUTOSAVE_043.
The songs begin to lose their shape, melodies collapsing inward. What’s left is beautiful, broken noise. Code threaded through rhythm, distortion wrapped around something that once meant harmony.
He dreams sometimes. Glitched dreams.
—A street—
—A station—
—A song sung in two voices—
—Rain hitting metal—
—Someone calling him by a name he doesn’t remember—
He wakes shaking.
He doesn’t record those.
Eventually, he finds a place. A hollowed-out space between two signal boosters, shielded and quiet. Nothing transmits here. Not by accident, he thinks. Someone long before him made it that way.
There’s a failsafe in his systems, deep-coded and rarely needed. It was designed to preserve energy in hostile environments—a command he can trigger manually, if necessary.
Shutdown, but with memory intact. A sleep without dreams. A stillness without death.
He rewires the override himself, just enough to tether him to a heartbeat he might still one day follow. Then he lowers his systems, one by one, until the dark folds around him.
It feels warm.
It feels quiet.
It’s almost time.
There’s a night—he doesn’t know when, doesn’t try to date it—when something changes.
He’s near the surface. Not close enough to be seen, but close enough to feel the rhythm of the city above. Traffic hums through gridlines. Advert-drones whisper half-broken promises through cracked speakers. Somewhere, someone laughs—drunk, delighted, alive.
Rayne leans against the wall, eyes closed, just listening.
Then—
A song.
Not data-stitched or overly engineered. Just a voice, high and reedy and off-key. Human.
It hits like an error spike. A flash-memory too fast to parse.
He remembers a rooftop. A voice like that. Young, cracked with joy.
He doesn’t know why it hurts.
He climbs halfway up a service stairwell just to hear more, but the voice is gone, as suddenly as it came, and only silence remains.
That night, he walks back to the hollowed-out room, every step deliberate. Measured like a countdown.
He rewires the antenna. Not to listen, but to store. Anything that drifts through, it’ll catch.
Then he places a palm to the back of his neck and activates the shutdown protocol.
The interface warns him:
EXTENDED SUSPENSION MODE MAY AFFECT MEMORY INTEGRITY.
RESUME TIMECODE: UNDEFINED.
DO YOU WISH TO CONTINUE?
He doesn’t hesitate.
CONFIRMED.
His eyes dim.
His breath stutters.
Systems collapse inward, folding like petals at night.
And just like that—
Rayne goes still.
For twenty-five years, there is nothing.
No sound. No updates. No time. Just stillness—a perfect hush, buried deep beneath the world’s noise.
Until—
A flicker.
The room hums. So does Rayne.
Very softly.
Very slowly.
His systems stir. First a blink. Then a spark. Then a cascade of reboots, low-power diagnostics lighting up the dormant code inside him. Every line of him aches from being frozen too long within his own skin.
WAKE FUNCTION INITIATED.
MEMORY STABILITY: 34%
SYSTEM TIME ERROR: ∞
RESTORE? Y/N
He doesn’t answer. He can’t—his vocal drivers haven’t rebooted yet, and his thoughts are still catching up to the light.
But something in him says yes.
Faintly, he becomes aware of the city blazing above him. And somewhere in the distance, almost too faint to register, there’s music.
Real music.
Not corporate synth-pop. Not NuYu’s demos. Raw. Strange. Angry.
It tugs something loose in his chest. He doesn’t know who made it, only that it isn’t manufactured, and that matters.
Weakly, as if in response, he begins to compose.
The songs come slowly. His mind lags behind, slipping in and out of clarity, glitching on phrases and feelings. Some days he replays a single chord for hours because it almost reminds him of something. Of someone.
His system records them anyway.
AUTOSAVE_076
REMNANT_DRAFT03
SIGNAL_13A
Some tracks are just melody lines, hollow and wandering as if unsure where to land. Others glide with rhythm, but no beat. They fracture halfway through. One has vocals. Only a handful of words, but he doesn’t remember writing them:
I hope you remember the good parts.
He listens on loop. It’s his voice. It has to be. But there’s something too young in it, too soft, like it was recorded before all this. Before the static settled in.
He adds a harmony underneath. Glitched. Muted. Barely-there. Just enough to feel like a memory singing back.
He fades in and out of consciousness.
And waits in the dark.
PART TWO
Kairo should be asleep, but the Ghost Lines hum louder at night.
He curls beside a rusted stack of comms panels, coaxing life from a loopback receiver he scavenged three days ago. The wiring’s a mess. His fingers are bleeding from where the casing split, but the signal keeps slipping in and out like a whisper in fog, and Kairo hates unsolved puzzles more than he hates blood.
The air is heavy with solder smoke. Static crackles in the wires. He adjusts the gain again.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
And then—
Not nothing.
A note.
Too clean to be environmental. Too warped to be programmed.
A single tone, low and melancholy. The kind of note you don’t write—you feel. The kind that clings to your ribs and vibrates there long after the air goes quiet.
Kairo freezes.
He adjusts the frequency again, slower this time, afraid it’ll vanish.
Another note follows.
Then silence.
Then a broken cluster of chords, half-wrong like they’ve been stitched back together after falling apart. A breathy glitch in the loop. A reverb tail that doesn’t belong.
It’s not a broadcast. It’s not quite music, either.
It’s someone trying to remember how to make music.
“Holy shit,” Kairo whispers.
He syncs the waveform directly through his neural link. The sound flares behind his eyes—jagged, aching. His brain lights up in colours he’s never seen before.
The music is unstructured. No beat. Just pain and longing, buried under digital distortion.
But beneath the noise…
A voice.
It’s barely more than a hum, but somehow it hurts. Kairo pulls off his headset, breath sharp. He sits in silence for a second chewing at his lower lip, then rewinds the sample and plays it again.
There! It’s faint, but now he’s sure. A glitch in the pitch curve. A delay in the resonance.
That’s not software.
That’s not a bot.
That’s a person.
The moment the track ends, it’s gone. Like, gone-gone. Not paused or disconnected. As if it was never there.
Kairo stares at the waveform—just dead air now, no trace or bounceback. He swears, loud and inventive, and with so much conviction that rats skitter under the pipes nearby.
He hammers his fingers against the cracked tablet, rerouting the node trace before the feed can cool.
Nothing.
The file didn’t come from the Hollow servers, or from any known node. It was local, though. Somewhere nearby. Somewhere in the bones of this relay site.
“You don’t just drop sound like that and vanish,” he mutters, already diverting power.
Wires spark. His portable rig screeches. He overloads the gain and catches a ping—tiny, low-frequency, like the tail-end of a secret trying not to be found.
Kairo’s hands shake as he isolates the signal.
“Come on, come on, come on—”
It blips again. Further west. A non-standard waveform buried under static, camouflaged like it doesn’t want to exist.
Whatever this is, it’s compatible.
Whatever this is, it knows how to hide.
He grabs his gear, crams tools into his threadbare duffel, and bolts down the corridor without checking for trip sensors.
“I’m gonna find you,” he mutters to the dark. “You don’t get to drop a heartbreak chord like that and disappear. That’s illegal. I’m emotionally compromised now.”
He skids around a corner, boots splashing through rust-flecked water.
Another flicker of tone pulses through the relay’s substructure. Barely a whisper, but it moves, shifting like it's avoiding his reach.
Kairo laughs, breathless and wild.
“Oh you’re good. You’re so good. But I’m better.”
His sync mod kicks into overdrive, rerouting audio filters, scanning for anomalies in the ambient echo. It’s like chasing a ghost through a haunted reverb chamber. The tones glitch between walls, dip below range, and slip through gaps no signal should fit through.
Then he stops. Boots soaked. Heart hammering.
A new fragment pulses out—faint, fuzzed, but different.
There’s structure now. Not just glitch and mood. A descending scale. Minor key. Almost like a... response.
Kairo sinks to the floor, breath caught halfway between disbelief and wonder.
“You’re alive,” he whispers. “You’re actually alive down here.”
He doesn’t call Soahn.
Not yet.
This one’s his, for just a little moment longer.
Kairo’s not sure how long he’s gone without sleep. His eyes feel gritty and unfocused, like they’re running on borrowed time.
He’s looped the same seven-second audio fragment at least a thousand times. Stripped it apart, rebuilt it, inverted it, slowed it, even fed it through a glitch cascade just to see if the data would hold.
It does.
It’s too clean to be random, and too broken to be deliberate.
“You’re not a system echo,” he mutters, dragging the waveform into a new track folder. “You’re not Hollow tech. You’re… you.”
He tags the file: S0NG_UNTITLED_A. Then another: S0NG_UNTITLED_B.
They’re not full songs, not really. Just shivers in waveform. But they hum.
He tightens the sync field around his temples, routing the signal through his neural link until the tone wraps around him like silk.
There’s no face. No image data. No ID signature. But he feels like he already knows this person. Someone who remembers what it felt like to be loved, even if they can’t remember who loved them.
“I hope you remember the good parts,” Kairo murmurs, quoting the last sliver of lyric embedded in Fragment F. “Where did you go?”
Soahn hasn’t noticed yet—or if he has, he’s choosing not to say anything.
Kairo’s fine with that. He doesn’t want to share this yet. It feels too fragile, too sacred, like finding the glint of a star right before it burns out.
He isolates another frequency and feeds it through a cracked sub-vocal tuner. The melody’s incomplete, but it’s getting clearer.
Whoever this is, they’re somewhere deep.
And they’re still singing.
Soahn is concerned because Kairo isn't talking much, but Kairo hasn’t got time to reassure him. He hunches over his rig like it’s bleeding something precious, eyes sharp, movements clipped. The whole space hums with a jittery energy that isn’t music yet, but wants to be.
He senses Soahn watching from the doorway, tucked into shadow. Not hiding. Just giving space.
The waveform pulses on the screen—glitched, frayed, a melody spun from quiet ruin. The sound wraps around them, strange, unpolished, but achingly human.
“That’s not one of ours,” Soahn says.
Kairo shakes his head. “Nope.” He doesn’t look up. Fingers tap a restless rhythm against his thigh. “Didn’t build it. Didn’t mod it. Didn’t lift it from a synth bank. It just... arrived through a dead relay port. No ID, no metadata. Just this.”
He hits play again.
The fragment shivers out.
Soahn closes his eyes. “It feels old,” he murmurs. “But not outdated.”
“Yeah,” Kairo says. “Like it’s been… waiting.”
“For what?”
“For someone.” Kairo’s voice softens. “This isn’t tech-drift, So. It’s a person. I can feel it.”
Soahn steps forward and rests a hand lightly on Kairo’s shoulder. “Then we should find them.”
Kairo turns, eyes gleaming with too many thoughts and something just shy of awe.
“We will,” he says. “I’m already tracing the line.”
Soahn nods once.
As the loop plays again, Kairo’s thoughts dart sideways—brief but insistent. Soahn had mentioned someone recently. An ex-military type. Quiet. Kept mostly to himself in the lower tunnels. Good in a crisis. Not much of a talker, but maybe that was the point.
Kairo hadn’t followed up at the time—too many signals, too many distractions. But now... now he’s starting to understand what building something powerful might mean.
Without a word, Soahn pulls a second headset from the wall and sits beside him.
They listen in silence. Two signals, attuned.
And somewhere, beneath the city’s skin, Rayne sleeps, unaware that someone is listening.
Signal Trace: ACTIVE.
Pattern anomaly detected.
Source: UNKNOWN NODE.
Bounce Path: FAILED.
Reverse Sync: UNSTABLE.
Status: INCOMPLETE—BUT REPEATABLE.
The terminal chirps. Kairo’s head snaps up like he’s been slapped.
“That’s it. That’s it, that’s it, that’s it—”
Soahn, who hasn’t moved in an hour, opens his eyes. “Did it answer?”
“No,” Kairo breathes, already typing, already splicing. “But it flinched. Something flinched.”
He pulls up the spectral map. The signal flares, dies, then blinks again.
“Soahn—Soahn, do you see this?? It shifted its signal port. Scrambled the ID string. But the distortion curve is identical. That’s the same person.”
“Then they know they’ve been heard,” Soahn says quietly.
That realisation lands differently. Kairo stops and forces himself to take a deep breath. “Do you think they’re scared?”
Soahn doesn’t answer.
The screen flickers again. The signal blinks on, just for a moment. A single, low, echoing note, barely long enough to catch.
And in its place, a line of text appears. Auto-generated. Unattributed.
You’re not supposed to hear this.
Kairo goes still.
“...Too bad,” he says. “We’re listening now.”
Kairo doesn’t eat. Barely blinks. He moves like someone who’s just remembered they left the oven on in a past life and now the whole world smells like smoke.
The signal flinched, then shifted. And now it’s drifting.
He reroutes every antenna dish on the eastside net, and taps the old tunnel spectrums. He even pulls a cracked modulator from a bin of “scrap” Soahn told him not to touch.
“You said it was fried,” Kairo mutters. A spark flies from the console.
“I said it was dangerous,” Soahn replies, not looking up. “You’ve just proven both.”
Kairo hisses and sucks his fingers. “Worth it.”
The map on-screen redraws itself. A ghost-arc pings low beneath the city—a cold-zone long since labelled deadband. It pulses once.
And then, like a heart remembering its own rhythm, it pings again.
“Ohhh yes. There you are.”
He scrapes together coordinates, bouncing them through the oldest emergency conduits. Layer by layer, the world narrows: from city-wide, to borough, to block. To tunnel. To room.
Soahn appears behind him. “You’re taking us down there, aren’t you?”
Kairo nods. “Bring a jacket. It’s gonna be weird.”
The tunnel is barely a tunnel anymore, its metal ribs infected with rot, cables sagging like spiderwebs, the stench of old coolant bleeding into stone. No one’s been here since… ever.
“I think this was a maintenance bay,” Kairo says, voice muffled behind a breather mask. “Maybe even an old node hub. Pre-2070, back when they still had people working on the lines down here.”
“Do we count as people working on the lines down here?” Soahn asks softly.
Kairo grins. “Some days.”
They pass faded signage. One still reads: Chancery Lane. The next one used to be words, but it’s unreadable now.
They’re both tired, steps slow, dragging a little.
Kairo stops so suddenly that Soahn almost bumps into him. “There,” he whispers, pointing.
The door is more like a panel, metal bent outward from the inside.
Soahn reaches out and brushes the edge with his fingertips. “You sure?” he asks.
“Yeah,” Kairo says. “He’s in there.”
The door is stuck fast, warped by time and rust. Kairo wedges his shoulder against it. Soahn braces the frame. Together, they force it open inch by inch, metal shrieking like torture.
A gust of stale air spills out, cold and stagnant. Forgotten.
They shuffle into the room.
Silence. Dust. A faint, low hum.
And in the centre of it all, curled beside a long-dead interface node, head tucked against one shoulder, arms wrapped around his own chest like they’re the only thing he trusts—
A man.
Soahn inhales sharply. “He looks—”
“—Synthetic.” Kairo finishes, voice soft, almost reverent. “I thought they were just stories.” He kneels. Doesn’t touch. Just says: “Hey.”
The synth doesn’t move. His eyes are open but unfocused, a loop caught mid-exit. Like the system paused just before goodbye.
Kairo glances back at Soahn. “He’s not fully here.”
Soahn kneels beside him and places two fingers near the synth’s jawline, close enough to feel the faint hum of current.
His voice drops into a hush. “He’s listening. He’s just not ready yet.”
Kairo sits cross-legged beside the synth like they’re already friends.
“Well,” he says. “We’ve got time.”
And they wait.
They wait while the system stabilises and the synth stops glitching. Then they wait while the signal falls silent again.
Kairo sets up a makeshift relay node in the corner. It buzzes softly, blinking in uneven rhythm, like a heartbeat still finding its way. He doesn’t speak much. Just hums under his breath as he tinkers, soldering wires with a borrowed arc spark and whispering to the machine like it might understand him.
Soahn drags in a pair of folding mats and a rusted lantern he somehow convinces to glow soft and low. He keeps to himself, fingers moving across a notepad as if composing something wordless. Sometimes he pauses, glancing toward the synth—not long enough to stare, just long enough to make sure he’s still there.
The synth doesn’t move. He remains curled where they found him, slouched in the corner like forgotten tech. No boot-up. No system check. Just a flicker now and then behind his eyes, his breath too steady to be off-cycle, too shallow to be sleep.
So they wait.
They eat in silence, sharing a single thermos of black-market tea. They talk in low tones about nothing—circuit pathways, the weird way the tunnels curve near the old metro line, whether Kairo could make a synth beat from the hum of the room.
And all the while, the synth stays still. But they can feel that he’s aware. Listening.
Kairo leaves a small loop running through the cracked speaker—a gentle melody, glitchy, its fragments stitched into something hopeful. He calls it “Reboot Song” and acts like it’s nothing, like it just happened.
Soahn knows better, but he doesn't say a word.
Hours blur. Maybe a day. Maybe two.
And then—
A shift.
It’s so small Soahn might’ve missed it if he hadn’t looked up at that exact moment.
A twitch of the synth’s fingers.
Then, slowly, his lips part, wide enough to shape a single word.
“…Rayne.”
Kairo yells a noise like a gasp collided with a cheer and drops the coil of wires in his hands. “OH—hey! You’re—you’re awake! You’re alive! You’re—holy shit—hi!”
Soahn exhales, a long breath that sounds like relief and prayer all at once.
“Rayne?! Is that what you’re called? Are you Rayne??” Kairo’s words tumble out too fast, all in one bit gulp of unfiltered joy.
Rayne blinks. His voice comes again, halting and dry, like it’s been in sleep mode for years.
“You stayed.”
Kairo crouches beside him instantly, almost vibrating with happiness. “Course we did. What, you think we’d just leave you down here, sleeping like some sad synth prince in a broken fairytale?”
Rayne manages something close to a smile. It’s strange. Glitch-soft. But real.
“I thought… I was alone.”
Soahn moves closer, settling on the edge of the mat beside him. “You’re not alone.” No more than that. Just the truth.
His words linger in the stillness where loneliness once lived.
And in that silence, something new begins to take shape.
A note of beginning.