The cables murmured like low conversation. Kairo sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by the luminous clutter of his own making: open signal boards, tangles of fibre cable, a cracked monitor propped against a synth pad. Every inch of space looked like an explosion of light and intention. The air smelled of solder, the perfume of his insomnia.
He tapped a rhythm on his knee as he tweaked a circuit.
The others would tell him to knock off and rest if they caught him here again. Minjae especially. Onyx would just sigh and disconnect the whole rig out of spite.
He smiled at the thought. The sound of their voices still lingered in the space—phantom echoes woven into the background noise. He liked that. The silence felt less sharp with them in it.
The monitor flickered alive. A thin, erratic line wavered across the screen, stuttering like a heartbeat in freefall.
“Hello, beautiful chaos,” Kairo muttered, leaning close. “Where are you hiding tonight?”
The waveform twitched as if it had heard him.
He adjusted a dial, filtering out the ambient hiss until the hum resolved into something stranger: a low throb, almost organic. He frowned, head tilting, curls brushing the side of his face. “That’s not base relay noise… what are you?”
For a moment he forgot the ache in his back where he’d been hunched over, forgot the late hour and the tug of hunger in his stomach. The pattern on the screen danced, bright and unpredictable, and for once Kairo didn’t want to decode it. He wanted to listen. It was like hearing the city breathe in a language he hadn’t yet learned.
He didn’t notice the footsteps at first. They were too measured, too quiet. Only when the light shifted did he glance up.
Rayne stood in the doorway, outlined by the glow of an overhead conduit. His reflection ghosted across every shining surface, sharp jawed, dark-eyed, real but not real. He didn’t speak. He never did right away.
“Aren’t you supposed to be rebooting?” Kairo said without turning fully around. “I can hear Onyx’s voice in my head: ‘you’ll fry his processors one of these nights, Kairo.’”
A pause, then Rayne’s quiet rumble. “Onyx worries too much.”
Kairo chuckled. “That’s his job.”
Another pause. “And yours?”
Kairo flashed him a grin. “To make the noise prettier.”
The tiniest tilt of Rayne’s head. “You think noise needs permission to be pretty?”
Kairo blinked, thrown for a second, then laughed. “See, this is why you should talk more. You drop one line and suddenly I’m the philosopher’s apprentice.”
Rayne stepped closer, eyes tracing the flickering monitor. “You should rest.”
“I’ll rest when the Lines stop whispering.”
“They never stop.”
Kairo didn’t know what to do with that, so he reached for levity. “Well, I guess you’ll keep me awake then.”
Rayne’s mouth moved, not quite a smile, but a hint of one.
Kairo pulled a spare headset from the mess beside him, offering it without looking. “Come on, then. If you’re awake, you might as well hear what The Ghost Lines are dreaming about.”
Rayne’s fingers brushed his when he took the headset. Cold, delicate, too steady to be human. The contact sent a static crackle up Kairo’s arm.
He laughed quietly. “See? Even you can’t pretend you’re not part of the network.”
Rayne settled beside him, gaze fixed on the shifting blue display. “It listens back,” he said softly, almost to himself.
Kairo ran the loop again. The signal flared, but then it changed. The entire waveform bent toward Rayne as though drawn to him.
Kairo’s pulse kicked. “Now that,” he muttered, “is new.”
He leaned forward, hands flying across the board as he adjusted levels. Beneath the static, a sound took shape — faint, rhythmic, wrong in all the right ways.
Rayne watched the monitor, light catching the curve at the corners of his mouth and the pulse behind his jaw.
Kairo barely breathed. He’d seen Rayne glitch before, the brief shudder of code beneath skin, the flush of light through synthetic veins. But this was different. This was resonance. It was like the system wasn’t fighting him, but... singing to him.
For a second, the whole room felt suspended in that hum, a conversation between machine and ghost.
Then the signal dropped.
Flatline.
Kairo blinked, heart thudding against his ribs. “Well,” he said, forcing his voice back into its usual cheer, “that’s one way to end a duet.”
He looked sideways. Rayne’s expression hadn’t changed, but his gaze lingered on the dark screen, distant, unreadable. After a moment, he said, “It wasn’t the end. It’s just… gone somewhere else.”
Kairo studied him, the air still alive with leftover static. He didn’t ask what Rayne had heard. Not yet.
Instead, he nudged a switch, resetting the system with a soft click. “Guess I’ll start again,” he said. “Maybe the Lines are shy tonight.”
Rayne’s reflection in the glass shifted, the smallest smile flickering there. “Or maybe they’re waiting for you to listen properly.”
Kairo’s laugh caught in his throat. “Touché.”
If Rayne’s reflection smiled again, just a little, Kairo pretended not to see it.
The Ghost Lines’ vents sighed in cycles, carrying the scent of warm circuitry and something faintly metallic. Kairo had long stopped keeping time by clocks; he measured the hours in how many files his console could cache before overheating.
Rayne hadn’t left.
He’d stayed where he’d first crouched, half in shadow, headset loose around his neck, eyes following the soft rise and fall of the monitors. Kairo should have been unnerved by the silence, but instead it felt… cool. Like they’d discovered a new kind of quiet between them.
He threw another sample through the modulator, fingers a blur. “You ever wonder,” he said, “if the Lines are alive? Not like us—more like… dreams trapped in the wires.”
Rayne’s turned to him. A slow blink. “That’s… poetic,” he said at last. His voice always came out low, like he was afraid to startle the world.
Kairo grinned. “Did you just call me poetic? Careful, I might start believing it.”
A quiet, almost-human sound escaped Rayne—half a huff of amusement, half static. It lit something in Kairo’s chest he didn’t have a name for.
The new loop began to run. This one wasn’t supposed to pick up external frequencies, but the moment Rayne leaned forward, the display fractured into new colour bands.
Kairo froze, eyes wide. “You see that?”
He widened the window. The waveform undulated in intricate symmetry, each beat mapping perfectly to Rayne’s micro-movements—shoulders, breath, the infinitesimal tremor of his internal cooling system. It was as if the signal knew him.
“That shouldn’t be possible,” Kairo whispered. “You’re not even connected.”
“I’m always connected,” Rayne murmured.
That tone—the certainty in it—hit Kairo harder than the words. He tried to turn it into a joke. “Well, look at you. Wireless wonder.”
Rayne didn’t smile this time. “It’s not a choice.”
The silence after that felt heavier. Somewhere in the tangle of cables, a relay clicked, filling the space with the faint mechanical heartbeat of the network.
Kairo reached for levity again, but the scientist in him wouldn’t shut up. “Okay, but if I trace the waveform—just hypothetically—maybe I can see where it’s linking. It could be environmental interference, or—”
“Or?”
“Or you’re broadcasting something I’ve never heard before.” He hesitated. “Something that sounds like… memory.”
Rayne’s gaze lifted to him. The light caught in the dark glass of his irises, twin reflections of data streams and exhaustion. “Memory,” he repeated softly, as if tasting the word for the first time.
“Yeah.” Kairo spun toward the main console, energy returning. “I could build a proper trace. Nothing invasive, promise. Just a diagnostic sweep to see what frequency you’re tuned to.”
“You want to record me.”
“Not you,” he said quickly, “just the noise around you. The way you bend it. It’s fascinating, Rayne. It’s like the Lines are singing back.”
A long pause. Then: “Tomorrow.”
Kairo blinked. “Tomorrow?”
Rayne rose smoothly, setting the headset down beside the console. “You should rest.”
“Ugh, seriously? We’re so close…”
But Rayne had already turned away, the dim corridor swallowing him in gradients of blue. The cables hummed louder as he passed, as though the network itself exhaled in his wake.
Kairo sat there long after he was gone, hands motionless over the keys. The waveform had stilled, flat and unremarkable, yet the air still carried an after-tone, a vibration that brushed against his skin like a promise.
He leaned back and let the sound fade into him, whispering to the empty room, “Tomorrow, then.”
Kairo never slept properly on test nights. His brain refused to power down; ideas crackled too bright against the inside of his skull. By the time the others turned in, the lab corner of The Ghost Lines was already a storm of cables and energy.
He’d scavenged three relay chips, one pulse reader, and a neural-audio interface that definitely wasn’t cleared for use on sentient hardware. The kind of rig that might get him murdered by Onyx and kissed by Minjae, depending on results.
The vibration of the power coils filled the air. Kairo crouched at the heart of it, splicing the final link. He told himself he wasn’t waiting for Rayne, but his eyes kept flicking to the doorway.
And sure enough, when the ventilation ducts whispered open, the tall, quiet shape of him appeared. No sound, no announcement. Just there.
Kairo grinned. “You’ve got a real talent for dramatic entrances. Ever think about starting a horror channel?”
Rayne ignored the joke, gaze sweeping over the tangle of lights. “This looks… unsafe.”
“Probably is,” Kairo said cheerfully. “But look, I built you a front-row seat to your own weirdness. You said tomorrow.”
Rayne stepped closer. The glow from the rig caught against his skin, turning the thin seams along his jawline into lines of molten blue. “And if something goes wrong?”
“Then I apologise profusely and we’ll pretend it was Minjae’s idea.”
A pause. Then, with a smooth motion, Rayne sat.
Kairo’s grin softened into something quieter. Victory, yes, but also something close to gratitude. He adjusted the receiver on Rayne’s temple, fingers careful against the synthetic surface. It was warm — warmer than it should have been.
“All right,” Kairo murmured. “This is just a trace. You won’t feel anything. Just… think, I guess. Or don’t. Whatever you do when you’re not terrifying us with your silence.”
Rayne’s glanced at him, almost amused. “You talk a lot.”
“Occupational hazard.”
The system came online with a soft chime. Across the monitor, waveforms shimmered to life, all clean and symmetrical. For a while, nothing strange happened. Kairo began to think Rayne might be right; maybe this was just static in humanoid skin.
But then the lines began to drift.
Slowly at first like sound bending in water, then in rhythm. The same pulse Kairo had heard last night, but stronger, layered with harmonic interference.
He leaned forward, heartbeat syncing with the pattern. “That’s it. That’s the signature. You’re modulating the Lines somehow, like you’re feeding them—”
He stopped.
The screen fractured into a web of light. Data spikes clawed up the monitor, sharp enough to make the rig whine. And through that rising hum came something else.
A voice.
Small. Unmistakably human.
“Brother!”
The word drifted through the speakers, faint and half-corrupted, a glitch carrying impossible warmth.
Kairo’s breath caught. He paused over the controls, torn between awe and panic. The room itself seemed to contract around them. The power coils quieted. Even the cables stilled.
He chewed his lower lip and risked a glance sideways.
Rayne sat perfectly still which, honestly, wasn’t unusual for him. But then Kairo spotted a tiny, trembling flex in one of Rayne’s fingers, subtle and involuntary in its suddenness. That unfathomable gaze wasn’t on the screen, but somewhere far beyond it, into the hum itself. The light made him look so real. Almost... human.
Kairo swallowed hard. Every instinct screamed at him to dig deeper, isolate the frequency, understand it. But...
But then couldn't tear his eyes away from Rayne’s face. The stillness there wasn’t detachment. It was, he realised, something like pain — quiet and unresisting.
Kairo reached forward and cut the feed.
The waveform collapsed to flatline. The room seemed to expand around them, air rushing back, filling Kairo's lungs like a burst of nervous adrenaline.
The word looped through his mind, joyous and relentless. Brother!
Who was the voice calling to? Another child, or—
He glanced at Rayne again and caught himself before the thought finished. Some questions crept too close to a truth he knew wasn't meant for him.
For a long time, they didn’t move.
Rayne blinked once as if waking. His voice, when it came, was almost inaudible. “That… wasn’t you?”
“No.” Kairo’s own voice sounded raw. “Not me. Not the system either.”
He rubbed the back of his neck, trying to laugh, but it died in his throat. The silence between them felt dense and fragile, like a cable pulled too tight. Something in him recoiled from it, the same part that couldn’t bear to leave a song unfinished.
“Don’t worry,” he said at last, voice a touch too breezy, reaching for the familiar armour of humour even as it scraped against him. “I’ll tell Minjae you manifested a ghost. He’ll love that.”
The words sounded brittle the second they left his mouth. He wanted to take them back, but Rayne only looked at him, head tilted, that small, unreadable thing in his gaze again. Gratitude, maybe. Or the quiet mercy of someone who understood.
Kairo swallowed and powered down the rig properly this time, shutting each loop by hand. When the last light faded, the darkness felt less empty, as though the city above had leaned closer to listen.
He sat back on his heels, eyes still on the dark screen. “I’ll, uh… map someone else’s signal tomorrow.”
Rayne nodded once. “Goodnight, Kairo.”
He rose and left, footsteps soundless, leaving only the soft hum of residual power and the whisper of that impossible word caught in Kairo’s head.
Brother!
Kairo pressed a hand to the console, feeling the linger of vibration under his skin. He fancied he could almost still hear the voice.
The Ghost Lines lay half-asleep. Power thrummed somewhere deep in the walls, a low, restless dream that Kairo could feel through the soles of his boots. Every light on his console was dark except one—the red glow that meant recording disabled.
He hadn’t been able to delete the file.
It sat there, buried under a dozen false directories, renamed test_loop_final_final2.wav like any other late-night experiment. He’d layered static over the top, thin and imperfect, enough to make it sound like nothing at all. If anyone else opened it, they’d hear hiss, maybe a blip of corrupted data.
He still heard the word beneath it.
Brother!
He rubbed his eyes and let the chair spin, the creak of bearings scraping through the quiet. The others were asleep somewhere above. Minjae would have rolled himself into the nest of wires near the broadcast hub again. Onyx would be posted near the upper tunnel, too disciplined even in rest. Soahn—probably half-dreaming inside his neural link, muttering lyrics in his sleep.
And Rayne…
He’d vanished after the test, silent as smoke. Kairo hadn’t tried to follow. He’d told himself it was out of respect, not fear.
The vents sighed. He caught movement in the reflection on the screen and turned.
Rayne stood in the doorway again. No sound. No announcement. Same as before.
Kairo managed a crooked smile. “You really need to start using proper steps like normal people.”
Rayne came closer, eyeing the console, then Kairo. “You didn’t delete it.”
Kairo opened his mouth, closed it again. Then: “Couldn’t. It didn’t feel right.”
A tiny crease appeared between Rayne’s black eyebrows. “It wasn’t supposed to be heard.”
“I know.” Kairo rubbed the back of his neck, feeling suddenly clumsy. “But I didn’t want it gone, either. So I—blurred it. Just noise now. Safe.”
Something in Rayne’s posture eased. Not quite relief—more like the weight of something long-carried shifting within him.
They stood there in the halo of a single light, the air full of unfinished sound.
Kairo pushed back from the desk and moved to the floor, sitting cross-legged as always, motioning vaguely toward the cables. “You ever think about how we keep trying to make the Lines sound like us? Maybe they already do. Maybe that’s why it hurts when they sing back.”
Rayne tilted his head, considering. “You think pain makes people real.”
Kairo huffed a quiet laugh. “Doesn’t it?”
A strange softness settled on Rayne’s face. “Then you are the most real of all of us.”
For once, Kairo didn’t have a comeback. He just looked at him—this quiet, impossible being who wasn’t supposed to feel, standing in the blue hush of The Ghost Lines as if carved from the same light, understanding pain. Somehow sensing it in another.
He reached out and tapped the console once, switching off the last monitor. The room dimmed to a single thread of glow from the overhead conduits.
“Can’t sleep?” he asked finally.
Rayne shook his head.
“Good,” Kairo said, the smile returning. “Means you’re still with us.”
A flicker crossed Rayne’s features—something like agreement, but small, uncertain. “I’m still here.”
A million questions burned on Kairo’s tongue, but he couldn’t bring himself to voice them. Instead he watched as Rayne turned and walked away, the echo of his steps firmer now as if he’d taken Kairo’s suggestions to walk louder to heart.
Kairo stayed sitting long after, fingers drumming absently against his knee, matching the rhythm of the hidden frequency beneath the floor. It wasn’t loud, just steady.
When he listened carefully, he could still hear it—a single word held in the static of memory, warm and human and impossible.
Brother.