“Is that actually going to work?”
“Depends,” Minjae said as he scanned the line of code scrawled across the cracked tablet while the solder plate warmed beneath his fingers. He dragged two commands into place and let the processor chew through them. “Do you plan to use it intelligently?”
The guy in the doorway fidgeted, causing rain to drip from his coat onto the floor. Minjae knew his type. Clueless and reckless but willing to pay, and really, that was all that mattered. “I just need it to pass clearance.”
“Mm.” Lifting the burner tag from the solder plate with a pair of tweezers, Minjae let the chip cool briefly before sliding it into the reader port. Blue light flared across the cramped workspace while the rewrite executed, the name replaced, birth records stitched together, residency rebuilt from three municipal databases that disagreed on the details but ultimately confirmed the person existed.
“What’s your name, mate?” the guy asked suddenly.
Minjae leaned back against a coil of fibre cable. “Minjae.”
The man stared at him. “Is that your real name?”
Instead of answering, Minjae watched the tag as the clearance layers finished compiling.
“So… where are you from?”
Jesus, what was with this guy? Minjae raised an eyebrow. “Here.”
The man blinked. “I meant—”
“I know what you meant.” Minjae had heard the question enough times to recognise the choreography. First curiosity, then confusion, then the subtle recalculation when the answer refused to cooperate with the expectation. He let the silence stretch.
Then he flicked the finished chip toward him.
The guy fidgeted again. “And I’ll be able to pass with this?”
“If the scanner’s blind and the clerk’s bored,” Minjae said, “you’ll walk straight through. Just don’t get ambitious. Systems hate ambition.”
The guy nodded quickly, already transferring the credits across the short-range link.
The towers never slept, and Block R9, where Minjae lived, remained active all through the night. Glancing out the window, he watched a distant antenna stutter against the sky, while far below him, relay boxes chattered to themselves in forgotten protocols, and a server rack vented heat it couldn’t shed. The vibration travelled through the concrete until every flat in the building felt the same metallic buzz beneath the floor. It was a noise Minjae had grown up inside; by now, he heard structure in it.
Fifteen floors up, his workspace was hidden between two maintenance shafts in a strip of utility space most tenants believed contained nothing more than fuse boxes and forgotten pipes. The illusion held because Minjae carefully maintained it. He always made sure the panels remained crooked and dust settled where it should.
Behind the false wall, fibre cable spilled across the floor. Three salvaged consoles were stacked together, wired into each other through a port hidden behind a fuse board that the building’s map had forgotten twenty years ago.
This was where the real work happened.
Accepting the payment, Minjae flicked the old chip into a small plastic tray already crowded with false identities. Nothing in the system truly died; it just waited to be rewritten, and that was where he came in.
Above him, voices rose in the thin-walled fury of a domestic argument, and two floors down, a hatch slammed hard enough to rattle the ventilation duct beside his shoulder. Block R9 lived the way old machines lived: loudly, unpredictably, and with a tendency to fail without warning.
He’d learned early that silence belonged to wealthier neighbourhoods. But down here, noise often carried information. A glitch in the power grid always meant someone was siphoning current; a lag in the public network meant a security sweep was pushing through the district. Even glitches developed patterns once you stopped treating them like anomalies. His mother used to laugh about it when he was younger, leaning in the kitchen doorway with a mug warming her hands while he dismantled whatever appliance he’d dragged home that week.
“You’re a ghostkey, Min,” she’d told him once, watching him coax a dead terminal back to life with nothing more than two lengths of wire and a screwdriver. “You slip into locks that don’t know you exist.”
At the time, Minjae took it as praise. Now, he wasn’t so sure.
The burner tablet chirped before he could wander too far down that thought.
INCOMING REQUEST:
Patch: ID-tag Corruption
Severity: High
Response Needed: Urgent
Opening the file with a quick flick of his thumb, Minjae immediately grimaced. The code sprawled across the screen like spilled noodles, functions nested inside each other without logic, variable names pulled from some low-effort meme generator that someone clearly thought was clever.
“If one more idiot tries to spoof an ID using joke code,” he muttered while rearranging the code line by line, “I’m going to encrypt their spleen.”
The lights overhead blinked as the tower shifted through another power cycle, the consoles around him dipping before his backup rig caught the load and steadied everything again. Minjae barely noticed. He’d built the system to survive worse.
The phosphor tattoo along his neck cast pale blue-green reflections across the wall as he worked. Minjae watched them while the processors recovered.
Then a sharp knock rattled the vent panel to his right.
Minjae automatically reached toward the small blade lying beside the solder plate, tucking the weapon up his sleeve before the second knock sounded.
Opening the panel, he found a familiar boy standing there, barely more than fifteen, his shoulders hunched and hands clutching a mostly melted tablet the way someone might hold a broken bone.
Minjae narrowed his eyes at the kid. “You bricked it, didn’t you?”
The boy nodded miserably.
“Let me guess,” Minjae continued, extending a hand. “You got caught installing illegal song files again?”
Another, smaller nod.
Taking the tablet, Minjae turned it over and examined the warped casing while he powered it on through the external port.
“You’re lucky I’m bored,” he said.
From the next room, a cough cut through the tower noise, dragging its way up through laboured lungs before dissolving into a long, ragged sigh. Minjae paused, his eyes drifting to the cracked plaster wall where light from the other room cast a trembling shadow. After a second, his mother moved slowly past the doorway, one hand braced against the frame. She never asked what he did with the equipment stacked in the maintenance alcove, never asked where the credits came from when the power bill got paid and the pharmacy downstairs suddenly decided to refill the prescriptions without complaint.
Trust worked both ways.
Two rooms over, his sister was still asleep, probably tangled in salvaged wire she collected like jewellery. When they were younger, she’d insisted his set-up looked like “dancing lights,” so Minjae had built her a smaller nest of cables of her own. The difference was that hers was for the light show only, whereas his was built for long nights being an illegal legend. Just a week ago, Minjae had rewired her little bedside lamp so that the glow rose and fell with the rhythm of her breathing.
He always kept their names out of every system he touched.
When the tablet finally booted clean, Minjae handed it back. “Try not to melt it again,” he said.
The boy thanked him three times before disappearing down the corridor.
Minjae turned back to his consoles and let the repair request continue compiling. He never added the service to the boy’s bill.
~*~
They called it a fast-track opportunity, but what they really meant, once you peeled away the corporate brochure language, was that NuYu had found him. Minjae never applied. It wasn’t the sort of thing he would apply for. But somewhere in the endless scrawl of the public network, a backend scraper must have tripped over one of his old debugging threads. Probably some sarcastic teardown of a municipal firewall posted to a forgotten forum at three in the morning.
Two weeks later, a courier drone hovered outside the door of Block R9. It waited there patiently with its small rotor stirring the corridor dust while its optics tracked the apartment number. Minjae watched it through the security feed for a moment, then went to the door. The machine blinked once and extended a glossy chipcard from its chassis.
The card was white with metallic trim, NuYu’s logo glinting in one corner. Minjae stared down at it.
Directive 17C: Independent Talent Programme Fast-track Opportunity.
The phrasing tried very hard to sound generous. Minjae turned the card over in his fingers and read the fine print twice before letting out a low laugh that startled the drone enough to make its rotors wobble.
“Fast-track,” he murmured. “Right. Elegant language for indentured tech labour.”
Even so, he arrived at NuYu headquarters two days later wearing his best hoodie and the sort of expression that warned anyone paying attention that he already hated the place. The hoodie disappeared at security within five minutes, sealed away in a transparent bag and replaced with a sterile grey jacket that smelled of industrial detergent.
The lobby was full of some awful ambient music engineered to feel efficient without ever becoming memorable, the melody drifting through endless half-phrases that suggested rhythm but never committed to one. Minjae paused beneath a column of polished composite and watched the other recruits gather. Many of them were younger than he expected. Quieter, too. A guy near the reception desk who couldn’t be much more than twenty blinked slowly like a video stream struggling to buffer. Across from him, a woman smiled with polite enthusiasm that lingered just a little too long before fading again, her neural relay port still red-rimmed.
So, NuYu had already started adjusting them.
Minjae leaned back against the column and folded his arms.
“Good morning,” said the recruiter when his name finally appeared on her tablet. She smiled at him, but it was measured and a little too symmetrical to belong to anyone who slept well at night. “You’ll be placed in Backend Diagnostics, Tier C.”
Minjae raised an eyebrow. “You’re wasting my potential, you know.”
The recruiter only smiled harder. “Your metrics indicate strong pattern recognition,” she replied. “You’ll assist in system optimisations.”
Wonderful. So he was going to be elbow-deep in decaying code. He thought of his mum and sister, nodded once and looked away from that horrendous fake smile.
Augmentation began almost immediately.
First came the relay implant, a neat surgical insertion just behind his ear. The technician who installed it wore a smile similar to the recruiter’s, a touch too wide, a lot too empty. Minjae held still as the neural interface was embedded, cool gel tracing a slow path across his scalp. The sensation wasn’t pain, exactly, more like the sudden awareness of a door opening at the back of his mind.
Two weeks later they added a cipher port beneath his collarbone. Now it vibrated softly under his skin, synchronising itself with his heartbeat but still impossible to ignore. Every minute gently reminded him that his body had been connected to a network he never really wanted to join.
Minjae approached Backend Diagnostics the way he approached any unfamiliar system: quietly, and with his eyes open. It turned out to be just as tedious as he predicted. The department processed endless streams of log files and corrupted data dumps, cleaning the debris left behind by systems too large and too poorly maintained to function cleanly. Most of his day involved sorting through diagnostic reports and stitching together broken memory exports that corporate departments insisted didn’t exist.
Boring work.
Until it wasn’t.
Every so often, something surfaced that didn’t fit the pattern.
An employee ID tied to a person who officially left the company five years earlier. A cluster of archived files that vanished halfway through review, the directories fading into empty space the moment he tried to open them. Logs that didn’t quite line up, timestamps slipping out of sequence and entries appearing before the events they were meant to record.
Minjae flagged one of them out of pure curiosity, and by the next morning, his clearance had dropped three tiers.
After that, he kept his head down and worked, for what little good it did. About a week later, his datapad rebooted in the middle of a routine diagnostics sweep, the screen flashing white before returning to the standard interface. He knew what it meant, though, and when he checked, he found his entire log history had been erased so cleanly it might as well have never existed.
Minjae sat still for a moment, cold trickling down his spine. He could simply go back to doing what he was meant to do, brain-numbing work that’d pay all the bills that were constantly mounting up at home. Or, he could dig, because whoever had just scrubbed the system had done a thorough job, and thoroughness often bred arrogance. And they’d assumed nobody at Tier C Diagnostics would notice the microscopic gaps where deleted sectors used to be.
They also assumed he couldn’t rebuild the missing data.
Which, honestly, was insulting.
The wipe itself had been neat; he’d give them that. But the assumption behind it bugged him — that no one below their clearance threshold would even think to look twice. That the absence wouldn’t register.
Minjae took that personally.
Unable to help himself, he dug deeper. One particular file buried in the cache caught his attention almost immediately.
His file.
The label read ‘Employee Vocal Test.’ Straightforward enough. On entering the company, they’d all had to record various scripted lines for vocal access purposes, but the fact that his test had been buried snagged him. Sliding on his headphones, he loaded the audio and watched the waveform stutter across his screen.
It was his voice, but it also wasn’t. This version of it cracked halfway through the phrase and read out words he absolutely hadn’t said.
Minjae played it again.
This kind of thing was supposed to be mentioned in the contract, tucked away in consent clauses, signed off by all involved. He’d read every miserable page of the thing, and he was pretty sure he would remember agreeing to let NuYu put words in his mouth. Checking the file properties, he looked for an originating department or an authorisation record. But there was only his employee ID and a timestamp that placed the recording three days after he completed his vocal assessment.
Minjae took off his headphones and stared at the screen.
What the hell did they need his voice for?
That night, Minjae sat alone in the breakroom long after most of the others had headed back to their apartments. Solder dust still marked his fingers where he’d repaired a faulty console earlier in the day, and his cipher port vibrated beneath his uniform jacket. Across the room, two recruits sat talking. Minjae recognised one of them from his first morning at NuYu, a young man who barely spoke during orientation. He was talking now, although the pauses between his sentences seemed oddly deliberate.
Minjae found himself listening to the man’s voice.
How many of them had arrived with questions? How many had argued when they were told to do things they didn’t understand?
He thought about the recording sitting in the hidden cache, about his own voice, saying words he’d never spoken.
So he started backing himself up.
~*~
The server room was six floors below the rest of the diagnostics wing, sealed behind composite doors and environmental regulators that kept the air nine degrees colder than the rest of the building. NuYu insisted that the low temperature protected machine efficiency, but Minjae had his own theory.
Cold rooms tended to discourage people from lingering long enough to ask questions.
Standing in the corridor outside the security gate, he stared at the time on his wristwatch as it ticked towards midnight, while the building cycled through its nightly routines around him. Overhead, the tower initiated its scheduled updates, thousands of maintenance scripts rippling through the building at once, and right on cue, the patrol AI began to stutter the way it always did when the system tried to juggle too many tasks at once.
Minjae smirked; he’d warned them about that flaw three months ago.
Pushing off the wall, he walked casually to the door, aware of the cameras tracking him. The badge clipped to his collar transmitted a perfectly legitimate set of permissions, granted by NuYu itself, and he passed through the gate without breaking stride. That was the elegant part of the whole thing. NuYu trained him to understand its systems, handed him the keys and assumed loyalty would follow. Clearly, they didn’t understand his type at all.
He reached the authentication pad outside Node N6 and rested his hand against the glass. The relay implant behind his ear whispered streams of system chatter directly into his ear — status checks and idle diagnostics, the soft digital breathing of a network that believed itself secure.
Then he gave his usual vocal authorisation.
ACCESS DENIED.
Well, that was rude.
Minjae glanced towards the nearest camera. After weeks of trying to figure out what NuYu was doing with his voice, the recording finally gave him an answer. An authorisation phrase he’d never said, spoken in a voice the system recognised as its own.
“You’re going to regret harvesting my vocals,” he murmured.
Then, louder, he repeated the phrase from the recording.
For one uncomfortable second, the authentication pad remained red. Then the indicator turned green, and the lock disengaged with a soft mechanical sigh.
Before the door opened, a second notification appeared on the pad: his credentials were temporarily elevated to administrative clearance.
Well, that was generous of them.
Minjae snorted softly as the door opened and a blast of cold air brushed his face.
The server hall stretched beyond the threshold in long illuminated rows, blue-white light washing over stacked hardware while cooling fans worked steadily beneath the floor. All very clean. Very efficient. Very NuYu. And somewhere among those machines were the records the company decided he wasn’t entitled to see.
Minjae stepped inside and let the door close behind him. His heart was going far too fast for a man who’d spent weeks insisting this was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. The mainframe sat at the centre of the room, connected to the hardware housing NuYu’s employee records. Including his own, because apparently even stealing his identity required excellent data management. Minjae approached the terminal and pulled a slim drive from inside his jacket. He’d spent weeks preparing the scripts, disguising them as routine audits boring enough that the network shouldn’t bother questioning them.
The destructive part could wait.
First, he wanted his files.
The terminal accepted his borrowed administrative clearance without complaint. Nice to know all that expensive security could still be defeated by the right credentials and a sufficiently convincing lie. His first search brought up the expected material: employment records, medical assessments, augmentation history, all neatly catalogued under his employee number. NuYu apparently knew everything about him. Or at least everything they decided was true.
The rest took more digging, even with elevated permissions, but eventually he found those too. Vocal recordings he’d never made. Behavioural assessments for meetings he’d never attended. Authorisation logs bearing his credentials for transactions he knew nothing about.
Minjae stared at the results for a few seconds.
Well. That wasn’t concerning at all.
He copied everything, including the original files and their modification histories. Whatever NuYu were doing in his name, he wanted a record of it that they couldn’t quietly rewrite.
Then he widened the search.
The discrepancies he encountered in Backend Diagnostics were still there, but they’d been moved beyond his former clearance, tucked under layers of admin permissions. He found archived employee records with conflicting termination dates, missing authorisation documents and entire sections of diagnostic history marked for deletion.
Minjae selected everything he could reach and added it to the transfer.
As the progress indicator crept upwards, impatience buzzed under his skin, and he tapped a finger restlessly against the terminal until the drive confirmed the files were copied. Great.
There was only one last thing to take care of.
Minjae returned to his employee profile and submitted the deletion request. The terminal accepted it with almost insulting ease, apparently far less concerned about deleting him than it had ever been about letting him access his own records. He waited while the request propagated beyond Node N6, then checked the result twice. His active profile was gone. Credentials revoked. According to NuYu, Minjae no longer worked here.
Good. At least they agreed on one thing.
Right, then. Now for the unpleasant part.
A sensible person might’ve stopped there and called it a night. He had his files, evidence of NuYu’s interference and enough information to cause the company a considerable amount of trouble.
Unfortunately, NuYu still had copies.
And Minjae never claimed to be sensible.
With the recovered files safely stored, he transferred his second programme to the terminal, disconnected the drive and slipped it back inside his jacket.
Then he opened the second programme.
On the surface, it looked like another routine audit. Underneath were weeks of preparation and one fairly spiteful idea: make NuYu’s own defensive protocols do the damage for him. Once the programme reached the central registry, the system would detect the breach and do exactly what it had been designed to do: isolate the affected hardware. Unfortunately for NuYu, Minjae had arranged things so that containment would trigger a cascade of failures through the connected servers.
Expensive, probably.
Shame.
Minjae executed the programme. For a few seconds, nothing happened.
Then the terminal began to report failures across the network. Defensive protocols activated, closing access points and attempting to isolate the fault while the system tried to trace the breach. Leaning closer to the screen, Minjae watched the progress bars climb. “Come on, sweetheart,” he muttered.
The terminal shuddered as the override slammed into place. Emergency locks cascaded through the network exactly as he’d designed them to, cutting off the affected servers. Then the temperature of the local hardware started climbing.
Which… wasn’t supposed to happen.
A thermal warning flashed across the screen, and he frowned.
“Oh, that’s—”
Before he could finish, a violent electrical discharge erupted from the console, blue-white sparks spraying across the terminal in a burst of heat and shattered circuitry.
“Fuck!”
Minjae stumbled backwards, but the arc caught both hands before he could pull away. Heat tore across his knuckles and palms. The smell of melting polymer and scorched skin hit him almost immediately, and then the pain followed, racing through his wrists and up both arms hard enough to tear a scream from him. He staggered sideways, half-blinded by the burst of light, one shoulder striking the nearest rack.
One by one, the server columns began to dim, status lights flashing red before disappearing. Minjae laughed, a ragged, breathless bark, watching as entire racks went silent and cooling fans dropped away. His hands burned fiercely, his fingers refusing to fully unclench, but the progress counter was still climbing.
Fifty-eight per cent.
Sixty-one.
Sixty-four.
Fine. He could fall apart when it reached a hundred.
No alarms sounded because he’d taken care of those already, burying the suppression commands in the earlier maintenance cycle, along with the routine updates that had briefly disrupted the patrol AI. Nobody had bothered questioning those warnings either.
For once, NuYu’s complete lack of interest in listening to him was proving useful.
Bracing his forearms against the edge of an adjacent workstation, Minjae dragged himself upright and looked across the room. More status lights were going dark now, whole columns dropping out one after another.
As the last column went dark, the cooling fans wound down into silence.
Permanent shutdown.
Minjae cradled his burning hands against his chest and made himself move, because standing around admiring his work seemed like an excellent way to get arrested. His legs felt unreliable beneath him, but they worked, which was all he needed from them right now.
Corporate security would call it sabotage, no doubt, but Minjae preferred a different word.
Extraction.
~*~
Minjae didn’t remember the journey down. Somewhere between the burning server room and the tower's lower levels, the journey broke apart into disconnected pieces. Stairs. A service corridor. The sickening effort of keeping his hands away from anything they might touch. At some point he found a maintenance locker and stole a few strips of thermal cloth; wrapping them around his hands was an exercise in discovering how many different ways fingers could hurt. The whole time, he tried not to look too closely at his hands.
The drive was still inside his jacket — he checked twice, because apparently his memory couldn't currently be trusted with anything more complicated than keep moving.
NuYu's security teams would be chasing the breach by now, combing surveillance feeds for whichever idiot had just destroyed a server room and conveniently deleted his own employee record. For a reckless moment, he considered going back home, just to explain, really, though he knew any explanation he gave his mum would only lead to more questions and, eventually, tears. He didn’t want to think about how his sister would react.
But no, home was too risky. Once they realised he was gone, Block R9 would be the first place NuYu would look, and at least if he stayed away, his family could legitimately claim no knowledge of his whereabouts. As he made his way below the city, Minjae tried not to think about his mother dabbing ointment on scraped knees and skinned knuckles when he was a kid, scolding him for going too hard, too fast, never learning when to stop. He wondered what she’d say if she could see his hands now, and immediately wished he hadn’t.
The Ghost Lines didn’t exist on any official map. More rumour than geography, they were an overlapping maze of abandoned transit corridors, relay ducts, flood tunnels and forgotten service lines that wove through the city’s underbelly like the skeleton of an old machine. People spoke about them in the way sailors spoke about safe harbours: vaguely, cautiously, always with the understanding that needing them meant things had already gone wrong. It wasn’t the first time Minjae had ventured down here, but it was the first time he realised he’d probably be staying for more than a few hours.
He remembered reaching the bottom of a ladder bolted to the side of a maintenance shaft, his feet slipping on damp stone. His hands started to come out automatically to steady himself, and he caught the movement just in time, twisting sideways so that his shoulder hit the wall instead.
The Waterworks was what he needed, but he only had a vague idea where it was, and getting there took longer than he wanted. Twice he had to stop and lean against the tunnel wall while the pain threatened to overwhelm him, and by the time he reached the old filtration chambers, he was struggling to concentrate on anything beyond putting one foot in front of the other.
Minjae followed the sound of running water past enormous settlement pools and into one of the smaller distribution chambers, where the Ghost Lines had installed public collection taps along the walls. A few were already occupied, but the one at the far end was empty. Turning on the tap with his elbow, he awkwardly unwrapped his hands and held them under the cool, clean water.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” Minjae muttered under his breath while he hunched over the basin.
When he finally managed to straighten, his legs were trembling. What he really needed was proper dressings, preferably before he passed out in a public water station and became someone else’s problem.
But as it turned out, he’d already become someone else’s problem. An older woman collecting water two taps down had apparently been watching him for a while; she approached without introducing herself, took one look at his hands and informed him that he was an idiot.
“Yeah,” Minjae managed. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
After that, she directed him towards a medical station a short distance away, beyond the filtration chambers, where a volunteer thankfully took far less interest in his identity than in the state of his injuries. Minjae answered the questions he could, lied about the ones he couldn’t, and endured the treatment with his teeth clenched so hard his jaw ached.
By the time he left, his hands were properly dressed and he’d been given a few additional supplies, though the medic advised him to return for further treatment soon. Minjae promised he’d consider it, which was technically true. Whether he’d risk returning when NuYu inevitably came looking for him down here was another matter.
After that, Minjae disappeared into the quieter passages with what little he’d salvaged from topside. He needed somewhere dry, somewhere with network access and, ideally, somewhere he could sleep without another person asking him a bloody question. The Ghost Lines seemed reluctant to allow him all three at once.
For a while, he took whatever shelter he could find. One night it was the hollow shell of an abandoned monitoring station; another left him wedged inside a hydro duct while warm condensation dripped steadily from the pipes overhead. His dressings got soaked, naturally. Changing them with damaged hands introduced Minjae to several inventive new combinations of swear words, but he managed, using the supplies from the medical station and looking anywhere except at the skin underneath. By the time he found an abandoned maintenance room with power, network access and a door that locked from the inside, his standards had dropped considerably. It was filthy, but it was dry, and nobody else appeared to want it. Good enough for him.
He returned to the medical station twice while his hands healed. The volunteer looked less alarmed each time, which Minjae decided probably counted as progress. Eventually the dressings shrank, the pain became manageable, and operating a terminal stopped feeling like a punishment specifically designed for him.
That mattered, because Minjae had things to check.
Long before the server room burned, he had begun scattering pieces of himself across the public network. Backup archives nested inside forgotten media servers. Snatches of personal code buried in glitchwave audio files. Identity scraps hidden beneath layers of digital graffiti across abandoned forums and outdated message boards.
They were all still there.
The drive from Node N6 was another matter. He needed to make additional copies of the recovered files and find a safe place to keep them. For now, he encrypted the contents and hid the drive among his equipment. They could try to overwrite him, but those bastards wouldn’t erase him completely, and he knew that’d piss them off more than anything.
During quiet stretches between scavenging for power sources and repairing whatever equipment he could find, Minjae began writing again. Just in his head at first, since gripping a pen for any length of time was still more trouble than his hands could tolerate. It started with short phrases pulled from stray thoughts.
“They erased my employee ID,” he murmured one night into an old relay microphone. “Could’ve at least let me choose the replacement.”
The idea stuck with him and brought back a story his mum once told him about his grandfather. Decades ago, back when resistance travelled through paper letters and typewritten manifestos instead of encrypted signals, his granddad had gone under the moniker 00C9-M. As the story went, the old man had once helped bring a system to its knees armed with nothing more than stubborn conviction and a battered typewriter that constantly jammed.
Well, Minjae could think of worse family traditions.
He found a discarded can of phosphor spray paint in one of the lower tunnels and shook it, then wrote the number across the wall, the glowing characters reflecting against the old server casings.
00C9-M.
Minjae stepped back and eyed it, dropping the can with a clatter. Then he shrugged and headed back to his base.
He started leaking audio fragments onto public channels, short bursts of lyrics uploaded anonymously through a disposable relay address and removed before anyone could trace them back to him. Most of it was junk — angry, late-night nonsense, but occasionally he was tempted to write some of it down.
The Hollow noticed first. They never asked him where he was, but one night they sent a message back through the network requesting one thing:
Please keep going.
~*~
There were plenty of audio scraps by now, but Minjae never intended to turn any of them into an actual track. Most nights, he tinkered with an old terminal salvaged for his new base, initially out of boredom, although getting the bloody thing working soon became a matter of personal pride. His fingers moved a little slower than they used to, the fresh wraps pulling tight across his knuckles whenever he flexed them. Inside the terminal casing, a strip of chewing gum foil bridged two cracked contacts and restored the connection.
For someone trying to disappear, it was perfect.
The system booted reluctantly, its processor whining as it loaded a skeletal interface that looked like it had survived three different operating systems and at least one small electrical fire.
He told himself he was only running diagnostics, clearing space, looping through the old files to see what might still be worth salvaging. That was the plan, anyway.
The first beat came entirely by accident.
Among the terminal's old files, a corrupted audio loop triggered. A low thump rolled through the tiny room, followed by another, the intervals uneven as the programme struggled to process whatever remained of the original recording.
“Holy shit, it still works,” he murmured, adjusting the gain and playing the loop again.
The sensible thing would be to shut it off there. Instead, Minjae sat back against the relay casing and let the beat loop through the dusty air. It was... kind of catchy. Worse, lyrics were already forming in his head.
Before he could talk himself out of it, Minjae activated the recording channel and leaned towards the battered console’s microphone.
“When I look in the mirror,
I wonder if my name still belongs to me,
Or if it’s yours now, too.”
The beat stumbled halfway through the last line, throwing off his timing. Minjae stopped recording and laughed under his breath.
“Yeah,” he muttered, listening to the playback through his headphones. Then he started a second recording, speaking over the same beat this time. “You ever glitch so hard you start to think maybe they left something behind in there on purpose?”
He kept going.
Half the lines were rubbish, and several made him laugh when he listened back, but every time he considered calling it a night, another came to him. At one point he forgot about his hands entirely and reached for the controls.
Immediate mistake.
“Fucking hell.”
After that, he adjusted the recording with considerably more care and carried on.
When he finally stopped recording, the sudden absence of the beat made the little room seem unusually quiet. Minjae leaned against the relay casing and listened to the playback. Hearing it all together was weirdly disorienting, like he'd somehow managed to overhear his own thoughts. But hey, at least they were his words in his real voice this time.
This time, there was no encryption, no ghost-code and no plan to release it onto the public channels. Minjae saved the file to the terminal's local archive and left it there.
The file name blinked on the screen.
It was nothing. Just a note. A scrap of sound left behind in a dead system nobody would ever bother to search.
He shut down the terminal.
A few minutes later, he switched it back on and listened to the recording again.
~*~
Minjae sat on an overturned crate and flipped open the notebook resting on his knee. The thing wasn’t even his. It had been abandoned in the Hollow months earlier — a cheap grid-paper ledger used to track equipment inventories or ration shifts. The word USELESS had been scrawled across the front cover.
Minjae decided that made it worth keeping.
The first few pages were already crowded, his handwriting deteriorating as semi-finished rhymes collided with scraps of code and sentences he still hadn't decided what to do with. Some ended up in his recordings. Most didn't. He kept returning to them anyway, crossing out individual words and occasionally entire lines before writing them back in again.
He turned another page carefully, the burn scars across his knuckles pulling tight as his fingers flexed. The skin was healing unevenly, leaving pale ridges interrupted by darker patches where the damage was worst.
Minjae paused on one line halfway down a page, the words written hard enough to dent the paper beneath.
They said I wasn’t essential / So I rewrote the system.
Minjae stared at it for a long moment before snapping the notebook closed. Across from him, a small maintenance grate sat low in the wall, so he went to it, wedged his pen into the gap at the edge and pried it open, then slipped the notebook inside. Keeping everything in one place seemed like an excellent way to lose everything in one place. The copied files from Node N6 were hidden across separate locations under the city; the original drive was tucked somewhere else, well away from his equipment.
The notebook could stay here. It was hardly incriminating compared to the stolen evidence, but Minjae wasn’t particularly keen on having anyone read it, either.
As Minjae shoved the grate back into place, footsteps sounded further down the corridor.
Two figures appeared at the far end of the corridor, their silhouettes cutting slowly through the thin glow of the emergency lights as they approached from the opposite direction. Minjae stepped back beside a coolant pipe, letting the shadows do what they were good for.
Fifteen paces away now.
The taller of the two had to be ex-military, or close to it. He moved with the sort of awareness Minjae usually associated with people who expected trouble and knew what to do when they found it. Tall, broad-shouldered and controlled, he looked like the kind of guy you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley if he was pissed off.
The shorter one was harder to get a grasp on. Lean and long-limbed, he walked with the uneven stride of someone whose brain processed momentum slightly faster than his feet did. His hoodie sat huge on him, seams woven with iridescent fibres that caught the emergency lights and threw them back out in a rainbow of colours. A constant stream of chatter came out of his mouth while they walked, hands moving through the air in wide gestures as he laughed at something he’d apparently just said himself.
The taller one didn't smile, but there was an ease between them that made it obvious they'd done this before.
He watched them pass without moving, and as they did, the tall one glanced in his direction briefly before turning away. Minjae frowned. Apparently he'd just been threat-assessed and found wanting.
The shorter one, however, stared openly at him. Mid-sentence, the guy broke into a huge, unguarded grin that arrived so suddenly it felt like someone had flipped on an extra light in the corridor.
Minjae blinked at him.
Their conversation faded into the distant echoes of the Ghost Lines, and Minjae waited until they were gone before pushing away from the wall.
Probably nothing to worry about.
A few hours later, Minjae was returning from checking a series of relay nodes further north when he spotted the hoodie guy again. This time he was leaning against the wall beside a public relay junction, apparently absorbed in whatever he was hearing through his headphones.
Minjae slowed as he approached and the hoodie guy straightened.
“You’re the one who’s been splicing those solo feeds, yeah?” he said, tone curious more than accusatory.
Minjae stopped, because that was considerably more information than he expected a stranger to have. He raised an eyebrow. “And you’re the one who keeps blowing past the channel limits,” he replied.
The guy grinned immediately. “Only because it sounds better that way.”
Minjae huffed.
They stood there a second longer than strangers usually did, and then finally the hoodie guy said, “I’m Kairo.”
Minjae considered the wisdom of giving his name to a stranger who apparently regarded channel limits as friendly suggestions.
Kairo’s face remained disarmingly earnest.
“Minjae,” he said at last.
Kairo lit up as though the answer had solved some personal mystery. “Cool,” he said, nodding rapidly. “Cool.”
The open friendliness was becoming vaguely uncomfortable. Minjae couldn't remember the last time someone looked that pleased just to learn his name. Giving Kairo a short nod, he turned back towards his base.
Kairo didn’t try to follow him, but his voice bounced lightly down the corridor as Minjae walked away. “I liked the last payload,” he called. “The one looping around 140 BPM. You hid something real inside the mix.”
Minjae kept moving. Whatever answer he might have given refused to turn into words.
But by the time he reached the next junction, the corner of his mouth had started to twitch.
Not quite a smile. Not yet.
~*~
He could go into the room if he wanted to. It wasn’t like anyone guarded the door, and he already knew how to access the shared network. The systems underground were sloppy in the way shared networks became after too many people patched them too many different ways. But he stayed cautious and set himself up in the tunnel just beyond the entrance. A dusty terminal dragged from a nearby storage alcove became his workstation after a quick patch job. Nothing elegant, but it ran his code and kept a console window open without the display cutting out.
It was a good spot.
Music drifted easily through the open doorway, and the low vibration of synced beats travelled through the floor beneath his feet. He told himself the location simply had better network access and less signal noise.
He didn’t tell himself he’d started waiting.
One afternoon, Kairo passed through the corridor, three energy cells tucked awkwardly under one arm while a snack bar bobbed between his teeth every time he took a step. He slowed as he passed and nodded at Minjae like they’d been exchanging hallway greetings for years.
Minjae lifted a hand in vague acknowledgement before turning back to the terminal.
The silver-haired guy, Soahn, came through a little later with a bundle of external leads draped over his shoulder. He paused beside Minjae’s improvised workstation, studied the irritating flicker in the display, then crouched to reroute one of the power lines. The cable clicked into place with a soft, metallic snap, and the screen steadied immediately. Soahn didn’t comment on it; he simply gave a small nod and continued on into the room.
Rayne was another matter. Minjae recognised elements of the technology from restricted NuYu material, although he couldn’t work out exactly what he was looking at here. Rayne passed for human so convincingly that Minjae occasionally caught himself forgetting his suspicions, right up until the guy appeared silently in the corridor at midnight and nearly scared the life out of him.
And then there was the stoic mystery that was Onyx. What a guy. He never spoke when they passed in the tunnels, but Minjae caught the same brief assessment every time: one quick, unreadable glance before Onyx carried on. It wasn’t hostile. If anything, Minjae was beginning to suspect he’d been moved into the non-threat category.
From his seat outside the door, he listened while they worked. Loops replayed, disappeared and returned in new configurations while the four of them argued about compression ratios, vocal placement and whether the chorus needed more space to breathe.
Minjae kept his mouth shut.
Kairo, apparently, had a rather generous interpretation of network security. His latest project sat in a shared development directory with unrestricted read and write access. Minjae spent the better part of an hour trying to ignore the error messages appearing in its diagnostic feed. After the lights dimmed into their night cycle, Minjae lasted another ten minutes before leaning over the terminal and correcting a flaw buried deep inside the project's code structure.
He added a short note to the log file under the correction:
Patch applied. Loop stability improved.
- 00C9-M.
~*~
Minjae didn’t announce himself because announcements implied permission, and he’d never been particularly interested in asking for that. Instead, he leaned against the doorframe and surveyed the room. Beatpads glowed across the far tables, their neon strips illuminating a collection of ageing rigs kept alive on borrowed power. It was a wonder half the equipment worked at all.
Near the far wall, Soahn sat with a neural relay unit open across his lap, tools arranged beside him in neat rows. He worked slowly through the internal wiring, pausing occasionally as if he were listening to something only he could hear.
Rayne was cross-legged beside a speaker stack, so motionless that Minjae was reminded of a paused recording waiting to be started again.
Onyx was leaning against a console near the central rig, arms folded across his chest. Whatever training he had showed in the small details: the balanced stance, the focused awareness that turned towards Minjae the second he crossed the doorway. Their eyes met briefly, and Onyx gave the smallest possible nod.
Acknowledgement.
Assessment complete.
Continue.
Minjae kind of liked the guy despite himself.
And then there was Kairo, who stood in the middle of the room hunched over a beatpad he’d apparently decided to tweak using nothing but his teeth and a multitool that consisted mostly of duct tape wrapped around a bit of metal. Wires were tangled at his feet like he’d personally adopted the rig’s nervous system.
He glanced up. “Did you finally come to explain how we’re ruining the music?” he asked.
Minjae lifted an eyebrow. “Depends,” he said evenly. “You planning to sync that vocal with the tempo or just keep torturing it until it confesses?”
Kairo’s grin arrived like sunrise. “See, I knew you were a fan.”
Before Minjae could object, a tablet sailed across the room in a careless arc; he caught it awkwardly against his chest.
The screen blinked awake beneath his thumb, revealing the skeleton of the track, little more than rough beat markers and placeholder lyrics, with tempo shifts that looked like they had been mapped during a caffeine-fuelled argument with gravity.
It wasn’t terrible, just… chaotic.
“If you’re going to loiter,” Kairo said, gesturing broadly at the room, “you might as well contribute.”
Minjae ignored him, scanning the arrangement. “This is a mess.”
“So fix it,” Kairo replied immediately. “Unless you’re scared.”
Minjae glanced up slowly. “That grin,” he said. “You practise it in a mirror or does it just happen naturally when you’re being annoying?”
Kairo brightened. “Bit of both, honestly.”
Minjae crossed the room and dropped into the nearest swivel chair like it had been waiting for him all day. He connected the tablet to the console with a soft click and then opened the audio layers and started pulling the structure apart.
“Don’t breathe on me while I’m thinking,” he muttered.
“No promises,” Kairo said cheerfully, leaning over his shoulder anyway.
After a few seconds of scanning the audio, Minjae muted an entire channel.
“Hey!” Kairo protested.
“It was terrible.”
“No, it was experimental,” Kairo said, as if that justified it somehow.
“Experimental, and totally off-beat,” Minjae said with a sigh.
Squinting down at the screen, Kairo said, “… Okay. I guess that’s fair.”
Minjae rewrote the rhythm grid in quick strokes, smoothing the tempo drift and layering the beat so it landed harder on the downstroke. When the track replayed, the difference rolled through the room immediately, the bass hitting with more weight.
Rayne stirred beside the speakers, and Soahn glanced up from his work for the first time, watching with calm interest as Minjae’s hands moved across the interface.
A lyric line formed half-spoken under his breath while he adjusted the gain on the chorus. “Don’t crowd the vocal there,” he said without looking up. “Give it air or it sounds like you’re strangling it.”
Kairo leaned against the console beside him. “You say the nicest things.”
“Someone has to.”
Under Minjae’s edits, the broken-down parts finally resembled an actual song. Time got away from him after that. By the time he looked up from the tablet, his shoulders ached from hunching over it and the others were absorbed in their own work around him.
The room emptied slowly after that. Kairo disappeared first, chasing some new idea down the tunnels with a handful of tools and a grin that promised several explosions of creativity before morning. Rayne drifted out not long after him, possibly for supervision purposes. Onyx lingered a while, pausing just long enough to give Minjae a proper nod before heading out.
Minjae shrugged and leaned back in the chair, the glow from the console washing across his hands. He flexed his fingers gently where they’d started to go stiff. Then he closed his eyes and just breathed.
He heard a rustle nearby and realised Soahn was still there. Minjae didn’t open his eyes. “If you’re about to ask for a bridge section,” he murmured, “you’ll need some decent bribery.”
“I’m not.”
A chair scraped softly nearby as Soahn sat down, leaving a deliberate little gap between them.
They listened to the loop together for a while. It wasn’t uncomfortable.
“You always work like that?”
Minjae opened one eye. “Like what?”
“Like you’re trying to win an argument with the equipment.”
“Usually works.”
Soahn glanced at the console. “I’ve heard a few of your recordings.”
Minjae opened his other eye and stared down at the screen. “Oh?”
“You leave the vocals unusually exposed,” Soahn said. “Hard to miss what you’re saying when there’s nothing covering it up.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Minjae asked.
“Most people wouldn’t recognise the terminology you use.”
“But you do?”
Soahn nodded. “I used to work for them.”
For a moment, Minjae forgot about the music, and his attention dropped to the burn scars across his hands. “Yeah,” he said eventually. “Me too.”
Soahn followed his gaze. “They almost got you.”
Folding his hands into his sleeves, Minjae shrugged. “Yeah. Almost.”
“Then we have something in common.”
Minjae stared at him properly for the first time, unable to detect any pity in Soahn’s expression. No curiosity, either. “You don’t pry like most people,” he said. “None of you do.”
“People tend to tell you what they want you to know.” Another moment passed, and then Soahn stood and glanced at the console. “Those recordings you've been putting out? Keep building them.”
“Bit bossy,” Minjae said with a hint of a smirk.
Soahn smiled. “I'd like to hear where you take them.”
With that, he turned and left without another word. Minjae watched the empty doorway for a long moment, then turned back to the console and listened to the rhythm he’d helped shape.
Maybe he didn’t need to burn everything down to leave a mark.