The towers hummed at night, but it wasn’t gentle—not the lull of traffic or the murmur of lives lived above and below. It was the broken buzz of faulty antennae, unpatched servers, and the constant reverb of a system too stretched to sleep.
Minjae lived in the static.
Fifteen floors up in Block R9, he’d built a nest out of fibre cable, a hacked maintenance tablet, and a loopback port hidden behind a fuse panel that didn’t technically exist. That was where the real work happened.
“What’s your name?” the buyer asked.
“Echo.”
“What's your real name?”
Minjae didn’t answer. He lifted the burner tag from the solder plate, handed it over, and watched the buyer’s face flicker in the blue glow. The name changed. Age, too. Background scrubbed and replaced.
“I’ll be able to pass clearance with this?” the buyer said.
“If the scanner’s blind and the clerk’s bored? Yeah. Don’t get fancy.”
The buyer left with shaky hands. Minjae pocketed the credits and slid the old chip into a collection of rejects. He’d scrape the good code later, rewrite the rest.
The walls creaked around him, the tower’s skin breathing in heat it couldn’t distribute properly. Somewhere above, someone argued. Someone below slammed a metal hatch. The building was alive in the worst way: loud, unpredictable, easy to forget if you weren’t paying attention.
Minjae always paid attention.
He’d learned early that silence was a luxury. Glitches were a language. And every system, no matter how polished, had cracks you could crawl through if you knew where to apply pressure.
His mum used to call him a ghostkey. She said he could unlock anything but still act like he wasn’t there.
Back then, he’d thought it was a compliment.
These days, he wasn’t so sure.
The burner tablet pinged.
INCOMING REQUEST
PATCH: ID-TAG CORRUPTION
SEVERITY: HIGH
RESPONSE NEEDED: URGENT
He swiped it open. Half the code was spaghetti. The rest was an insult to proper formatting. He muttered under his breath and began untangling.
“I swear, if one more idiot tries to spoof an ID using a meme generator, I will personally encrypt their spleen.”
The lights shuddered. Power load redistribution. Minjae didn’t flinch. He was already on backup—a rig he’d cobbled from three different consoles and a broken visualiser.
Below his collar, his phosphor tattoo synced with his heartbeat.
A sharp knock sounded on the vent panel to his right. He spun, sliding the small blade from the table into his sleeve.
But it was just a kid, barely thirteen. Nervous. Holding a badly scratched datapad like it was contraband.
Minjae sighed. “You bricked it, didn’t you.”
The kid nodded.
“Got caught installing illegal song files?”
Another nod.
Minjae held out his hand. “You’re lucky I’m bored.”
From the next room, his mum coughed. Not the casual kind, but the dry, raw kind that dragged its way up from the lungs and made you wonder how long she’d been hiding it.
His younger sister was probably asleep, curled in the little nest of cables he’d built for her — a softer echo of his own setup, woven from spare wires she treated like treasure, plastic-coated strands she said looked “like dancing light.” Minjae had rewired her lamp last week to match the pattern of the rain.
He’d moved them in two months ago, after his mum got sick and couldn’t keep up with rent or meds. His tower flat wasn’t much, but it kept the heat in and the debt collectors out. They never asked what he did. They just trusted he’d bring in enough creds to cover power and medication.
He didn’t talk about them in the feeds or let their names into his systems, but every fake ID he sold, every firewall he wormed through — it was with their faces ghosting just behind the code.
He didn’t charge the kid.
Not this time.
They called it a “fast-track opportunity.”
What they meant was: NuYu had flagged him as viable and decided to take ownership.
He hadn’t applied. Some backend crawler must’ve scraped his debug strings off a forgotten forum and dropped his name into a database marked independent contractor onboarding. One morning, a courier drone blinked at his door and spat out a glossy chipcard—white, metallic trim, NuYu's logo shimmering faintly like it knew it owned the room.
Directive 17.3B: Temporary Systems Integration Specialist.
Elegant phrasing for indentured tech labour.
Still, money was money.
Minjae arrived wearing his best hoodie and a grimace. NuYu took both.
The building gleamed, but it wasn’t clean. Too many wires, too few ethics. Everything smelled faintly burnt. The lobby piped ambient music that never resolved into a full tune, just endless, soulless loops engineered to suggest productivity.
The others in the intake line were quieter than he expected. Freelancers, ex-interns, a few students with nervous eyes and neural fields still raw from installation. One man blinked like a buffering feed. Another smiled too wide and too slow. Glitchy. Someone had already installed behavioural dampeners.
They told him he’d be placed in Backend Diagnostics, Tier C. He told them they were wasting his potential. They smiled, the kind of smile that came preloaded on a corporate face.
“Your metrics indicate strong pattern recognition,” one said. “You’ll assist in system optimisations.”
Translation: he’d be elbow-deep in decaying code.
They scanned him. The relay imprint came first—a low-frequency sync embedded behind his ear, the cool sting of neural gel tracing his skull. The cipher node followed two weeks later, fused beneath the skin just below his collarbone. It thrummed faintly now, BPM-synced, a constant reminder that even his heartbeat was tuned to someone else’s frequency.
Minjae started work in silence and observation. He learned more by not speaking. His sector handled data sweeps: routine maintenance, endless diagnostics, broken lines of failed memory exports. Mostly dull.
But every so often, something surfaced.
Old employee IDs that shouldn’t exist. Files that blinked out halfway through review. Audio logs tagged “sim tests” that sounded far too human.
He flagged one of them out of pure curiosity. The next morning, his clearance dropped by three tiers.
For a few days he behaved, at least outwardly. But curiosity is its own defect. He began staying late under the pretence of recalibrating data cores, slipping his own scripts into background processes to see what the system hid when it thought no one was looking. He caught fragments: half-deleted personnel notes, voice patterns that didn’t match any registered staff, entire memories stripped down to code and stored in off-grid vaults.
Two days later, his datapad rebooted mid-use. All logs wiped, cleaned as if he’d never touched them.
Except—they missed one file.
His file.
Looped Vocal Test: Subject Minjae Choi.
It was meant to be a baseline capture—his voice reciting calibration phrases during intake. But this version was altered. The vowels stretched, smoothed, replicated. It stuttered where the system tried to correct a laugh, then looped the sound back on itself until it became something synthetic and wrong.
Listening to it, Minjae understood what NuYu really did with the people it couldn’t use.
They weren’t killed. They were overwritten. Repurposed into data, fed back into the system as models and prototypes, stripped of identity but not of voice.
He sat in the breakroom that night, fingers still stained with wire-solder and dust, watching the others. People with blink rates optimised for compliance. He wondered how many had been like him once—angry, too sharp, unwilling to stay quiet. He wondered what NuYu had taken from them to make them like this.
Minjae wasn’t ready to let that happen to him.
So he started backing himself up.
The server room was always too cold. NuYu said it preserved machine efficiency. Minjae said it was so no one could feel anything.
He waited until the midnight shift swap, just long enough for the patrol AI to stutter like it always did when the building tried to update itself and run security scripts at the same time. Budget cuts. Bad code. Minjae had warned them about it in a report three months ago.
They’d flagged it low-priority.
He walked in like he belonged there because he did. That was the beauty of it—NuYu had trained him to breach itself.
He bypassed the node locks with his own ID, pausing only once, hand hovering over the authentication pad, wondering if this made him a traitor or just ahead of schedule.
The door opened with a hiss that felt like breath held too long.
Inside, the mainframe pulsed like a buried heart. Blue-white light across rows of servers, each one buzzing with the memory of someone else’s silence. Files tagged. People redacted. Voices replaced. Code stacked on code stacked on absence.
Minjae pulled the drive he’d pre-loaded—his own scripts. They weren’t elegant, but they were effective. A virus dressed like an audit, something the system wouldn’t notice until it was already bleeding.
He slotted it into the main terminal and it immediately asked for confirmation.
Minjae didn’t hesitate. He hit EXECUTE.
But the system fought back. As soon as the data spike began to burn through the core registry, the override kicked in, locking down access, superheating the ports.
Then the drive exploded in a flare of white sparks.
Minjae threw himself back, but not fast enough. His right hand caught the worst of it—scorched along the knuckles and palm, skin splitting open with the smell of melted poly-fibre and flesh. He bit down a scream and stumbled, half-blind, but still smiling.
Because the lights were dying, one by one.
The servers were going offline.
It was working.
He grabbed the edge of the console with his left hand, dragging himself upright. Blood smeared across the glass. No alarms—he’d silenced those too. Just the tremor of systems shutting down, data collapsing in on itself like a star that refused to shine for anyone but the truth.
He staggered to the exit, hand cradled close, teeth grit through pain and adrenaline.
Behind him, Node B6 went dark. Permanently.
They’d say it was sabotage.
He preferred the term: extraction.
The lights flickered overhead, emergency systems trying to boot and failing. Smoke crawled along the ceiling in thin grey ribbons. Somewhere deeper in the complex, containment doors slammed shut one by one, hunting ghosts that weren’t there.
Minjae ran anyway.
Down corridors that smelled of ozone and burning code. Past the holo-posters still flickering NuYu’s slogans in half-light. He didn’t know how far the blackout would spread, only that he had to keep moving before the override protocols rebooted.
By the time he reached the service tunnels, his vision blurred at the edges. The air grew colder, thicker, full of dust and the thrum of buried power lines.
He descended without thinking—one rung, one breath at a time—until the noise of the city above became nothing but echo.
Minjae didn’t remember how he got down into The Ghost Lines, only that he hurt. Everything hurt.
He'd wrapped his hand tightly in a stolen thermal cloth, but blood soaked through. The pain had started sharp, but now he just felt numb. That was probably bad.
London above was still chasing phantoms, while deep below, Minjae became one.
The Ghost Lines lived somewhere between myth and malfunction, a place the system denied existed. You didn’t get invited. You got desperate.
Eventually he found a ladder. He remembered blood on the rungs—his blood. He remembered cold steel against his ribs, and then a tunnel that didn’t end so much as forget to close.
He woke once in a nest of broken monitors. Once in a hydro duct. Sometimes, when the pain quieted enough to think, he wondered if his mum and sister had seen the outage reports. If they’d guessed it was him. If they were safe.
He hoped the blackout had looked like nothing more than a glitch from where they were. Just another bad power surge, another night of silence in the tower. He hoped NuYu hadn’t come for them the way it came for everything else.
Before he went dark, he’d coded a series of auto-transfers—slow, untraceable trickles of credits from dead accounts into their rent fund. A ghost system feeding another ghost. They’d never know where it came from, and that was the point.
As for him, he had no name. No ID. No registry.
NuYu had scrubbed all of it.
They tried to reduce him to a redacted footnote, a simple line of code commented out, but they’d missed something.
He’d already seeded fragments of himself across the net—backups hidden in abandoned media servers, lyrics embedded in glitchwave files, fragments of identity nested in old digital graffiti. Anyone trying to rewrite him would find themselves looped back to truth.
In the quiet days—if you could call them that—he started to compose again. You couldn’t call it music, not yet. It was just phrases. Raw, spliced thoughts. Code that almost rhymed.
“Every silence they left me,
I filled with feedback.”
He stitched a new ID out of memory: 00C9-M. It was his grandfather’s once—hal-bae was a journalist who’d brought a system to its knees with nothing but conviction and a typewriter. They’d erased him for it, too. Blacklisted. Silenced. Officially forgotten.
Minjae figured some things ran in the blood.
He wrote his ID in phosphor across a data vault wall. Just once. Just to see it.
00C9-M.
The paint flickered, BPM-synced to the rumble of something alive deeper in the tunnels.
After that, people started talking. No one claimed to know him, but everyone swore they’d seen the tag—blinking on relay screens, scrawled in code across broken servers, burning brief and bright before vanishing again.
And slowly, verse by verse, the rumour began.
Encrypted tracks started leaking onto public channels: untraceable, voice-tagged, laced with fury and ghost-code. Snatches of truth inside distortion. They couldn’t find him, but they could hear him.
The Hollow noticed.
They didn’t ask who he was, just if he could please keep going.
At first, it wasn’t meant to be a track.
He’d cracked the terminal out of habit, patching wires with chewing gum foil, screen stuttering like it knew the end was coming. No surveillance. No net uplink. Just a forgotten slice of nowhere, perfect for vanishing.
He was only running diagnostics. Clearing space. Looping old files. That’s all.
But then the beatpad came alive with a low, wobbly tempo. Nothing finished.
And he thought: fine. One more file. One last purge.
So he started talking.
Not rapping or decoding. Just… spilling, line after line like a pressure valve giving out. Glitches tangled in breath, syllables stuttering raw.
“You ever look in a mirror and wonder if your name’s still yours? You ever glitch so hard you think maybe they left something in you?”
He didn’t structure or loop it, just let the words fall inelegant and human, rage threaded through regret, pride edged with silver-sharp pain. The chorus was scratched in rough with half-dead synth keys. The audio clipped on the high end. One of the verses broke halfway through because his hand still shook when he pushed too hard.
He kept it all. No edits. No encryption.
He didn’t expect anyone to find it.
And if they did?
Well.
It was just a note. That’s what he told himself.
But something in the near-constant tremor of his fingers said otherwise.
It was too quiet, even for him.
Minjae had rerouted the security grid hours ago. No cams. No scans. No passive motion pings. The only thing live down here was the soft flicker of emergency strips, bleeding pale light through a wall panel.
That—and the notebook.
It wasn’t even his. Just a leftover grid-paper ledger from some old Hollow stockpile, the kind rebels used to log equipment or ration shifts. Someone had scrawled “USELESS” on the front in marker. That made him keep it.
He’d burned through the first few pages fast. Angry lines. Scrambled half-rhymes. Code fragments mixed with lyrics. Stuff too raw to spit out loud.
He flipped through now. His hands were steady, but the skin pulled tight where the fire had taken him—shiny in places, ridged in others, mapped with the kind of memory he tried not to read. He told himself they didn’t hurt anymore. Most days, he believed it.
Some pages held verses. Some held names he swore he’d never forget. Most were crossed out, as if that would stop the memories bleeding through.
He stared at one line:
“They said I wasn’t essential. So I rewrote the system.”
Minjae shut the book and crossed the room, climbing onto the support rail, his fingers slipping into the exposed vent just above the main coolant pipe. A perfect dead zone. Too small for drones. Too hidden for scans.
He shoved the notebook deep into the ductwork and taped it with blackout foil, then sealed the vent with a loose grate.
Out of sight.
If they ever found him—if they ever caught him—it wouldn’t matter.
The words would still be here.
Waiting.
He saw them before they saw him.
Two figures walking in the opposite direction, maybe fifteen paces away. One tall, broad-shouldered, with a soldier’s gait—ex-military, judging by the augments. His face was unreadable, carved into focus, eyes mapping to every drip from the overhead pipes like he half-expected bullets to fall instead. The other was leaner, all limbs and mismatched stride, hoodie glowing faint from some kind of embedded fibre. Talking with his hands. Laughing at his own joke.
Minjae kept to the shadows, but his eyes tracked every move.
They didn’t stop or speak to him, but the one in the hoodie glanced sideways as they passed and offered him a huge, disarming smile. It was so out of the blue that Minjae could only stare back.
A few hours later, on his way back through the same tunnel, the lean guy was there again. Same hoodie. Same grin. As if he’d been waiting.
Minjae slowed, the weight of the knife in his pocket suddenly more noticeable.
The guy tilted his head like he was tuned to a frequency no one else could hear. “You’re the one who’s been splicing solo feeds,” he said. Not an accusation. Not even a question.
Minjae raised an eyebrow. “And you’re the one who keeps overloading the channel limit.”
The guy grinned wider. “Only when it sounds better that way.”
They stood there for a beat too long.
“I’m Kairo,” he said finally.
Minjae ran through the pros and cons of giving up his name to this small, animated gremlin, but Kairo’s face was so damn earnest.
“Minjae,” he said.
Kairo seemed delighted by that. “Cool. Cool.”
Minjae found his openness uncomfortable, so he shrugged, turned, and kept walking.
Kairo didn’t follow him, but his voice echoed after him down the tunnel. “I liked that last payload. The one that looped at 140 BPM. You layered something real in there.”
Minjae didn’t respond, but his mouth twitched, just slightly.
Not a smile.
Not yet.
Minjae didn’t go into the room. He could have if he wanted to—no one guarded the door, and it wasn’t like he didn’t know the access ports by now. But he was still wary, so instead, he set up shop in the tunnel just beyond.
Old cable spools for a seat. Wires arching overhead. A dusty terminal with a cracked screen he’d patched together just enough to parse code on. That was his perch—close enough to hear when someone played a loop out loud. Close enough to feel the faint vibration of beat sync through the concrete.
He told himself it was just a better location, one with more network access and less signal interference.
He didn’t tell himself that he was waiting.
Kairo passed once, holding three energy cells in his hands and a snack bar in his teeth. He nodded like they’d always known each other.
The silver-haired guy—Soahn, that’s what Minjae had heard Kairo call him—didn’t say anything. He just rerouted one of the external leads to power the terminal near Minjae’s corner.
The one Minjae was pretty sure wasn’t human—Rayne—drifted through like a ghost, unreadable face, a slow glance in Minjae's direction, then away again.
The big guy, Onyx, never spoke, but there was always a glance, like he was checking Minjae’s position, making sure of something.
Minjae listened to them build a track. He heard them argue over compression settings and vocal mix and lyrical tone.
He didn’t offer feedback.
But he did fix a bug in their code overnight, leaving a short patch note in the logs signed with nothing but 00C9-M.
Minjae stepped over the threshold.
He didn’t announce himself—he never had, and he didn’t plan to start now—but he didn’t turn away either. He stood just inside the door, shoulder against the frame, eyes adjusting to the dim, flickering glow of rig lights and beatpads.
He took it all in.
Soahn sat near the far wall, working on some kind of neural relay. The delicate kind. He moved with quiet precision, all long fingers and unspoken calculations. He didn’t look up, but Minjae could feel the awareness—a radar tuned to presence before sound.
Rayne was still. Freakishly still. Cross-legged by a speaker stack, head tilted as if listening to something no one else could hear. There was something fractured about him, like he was here but also somewhere else. Synthetic, yes, but not hollow. Minjae watched the rhythm of his breathing. It didn’t match the track playing; it matched something else. An internal tempo, although it didn't look like Rayne was running a program. It looked more like he was remembering one.
Onyx leaned against a console, arms crossed, expression unreadable. The kind of presence that didn’t flinch unless it had to. Minjae knew this type—the watcher. The one who’d already clocked his arrival, filed it, and was now running probability audits. Fine. Let him.
And then there was Kairo.
Kairo, currently in the middle of rewiring a beatpad with nothing but his teeth and a multitool held together by duct tape. Wires spilled from his jacket like part of his nervous system. Neon caught in his eyes—the kind of chaos that hovered between brilliance and self-destruction.
Kairo noticed him instantly.
“You lost?” he asked, flipping a loose wire behind his ear. “Or are you finally here to tell us how we’re doing it all wrong?”
Minjae raised a brow. “Depends. You planning to sync that vocal track with the tempo, or just keep torturing it?”
Kairo lit up. “See? I knew you were a fan.”
He tossed a datapad across the room—reckless, casual. Minjae caught it easily with his good hand.
It was a track skeleton. Beat markers. Placeholder rhymes that weren’t half bad. The kind of layout someone made while half-asleep on synthesised sugar and spite.
“If you’re gonna loiter in our tunnels,” Kairo said, “might as well do something useful.”
Minjae eyed the datapad. “This is a mess.”
“So fix it,” Kairo grinned. “Unless you’re scared.”
That grin was irritating. And persuasive.
Minjae crossed the room and dropped into the nearest rickety swivel chair like he owned it. He didn’t look at any of them again—just pulled up the audio layers and started working. Fast. Efficient. A few rewrites. One total deletion. The beat steadied. Lyrics began to form in his head.
“Don’t breathe on me while I’m thinking,” he muttered.
“No promises,” Kairo said.
Off in the corner, Soahn smiled. Just barely. Like this was inevitable.
Rayne shifted, slight but deliberate—watching, listening.
Onyx didn’t move.
And Minjae… stayed.
Later, once the others had drifted out—off to recharge, recalibrate, or vanish into whatever corners this glitch-gathered band of misfits called home—Minjae stayed behind.
Just him and the beatpad, and the faint glow of the console still echoing with the track he’d half-built.
He let his head droop, a little tired from all the social energy, content to listen to the hum of the equipment around him. Then—barefoot steps, soft as feedback hiss, padding closer.
Minjae didn’t look up. “If you’re here to ask for a bridge section, you’ll have to bribe me.”
“I’m not.”
Soahn sat—not quite beside him, but close. The kind of distance that said I’ll wait until you’re ready, but I’m not going anywhere.
They sat like that for a while, the silence steady, gentle. Not empty.
Then Soahn spoke. “You write like someone who was supposed to be erased.”
Minjae went still, the words catching somewhere deep.
“You leave space for grief,” Soahn continued softly. “And then you fill it with fire.”
Minjae pressed a hand to the console. The burn scars along his right fingers caught the glow—still healing, but visible. Always visible.
Soahn didn’t ask about them. He just said, “They almost got you, didn’t they?”
Minjae closed his eyes. “…Almost.”
Soahn nodded once. “Then we’re the same.”
Minjae looked at him properly for the first time. There was something unreadable in Soahn’s gaze—not pity, not curiosity. Something quieter. Mutual recognition, like a mirror angled to catch both their ghosts.
“You don’t pry,” Minjae said.
“You don’t hide,” Soahn replied.
Another pause—soft, shared.
Then Soahn stood, and in that calm, deliberate way of his, said, “That track you started? Keep building it. I think it remembers you.”
He walked away.
Minjae watched him go.
And for the first time since the fire, he realised that maybe he didn’t have to burn everything down to leave a mark.