The Ghost Lines were always coldest near the upper levels. The air thinned there, caught between ruin and sky, frost veining the glass like circuitry left to die.
Their hideout was a semi-collapsed comms tower, long gutted and skeletal, its windows shattered, its walls home to birds that nested in the metal ribs. Power still trickled through the circuits—just enough to keep a few systems alive—and from the roof, Rayne could see the skyline stretching out across the city, neon trembling in the fog, the world carrying on without them.
He didn’t need sleep, not technically, though he sometimes shut down to cool his systems when the heat built too high. But in those quiet hours between check-ins, when the others drifted into their human rhythms of rest, he wandered.
He found the sealed room by accident, or perhaps by something older than instinct. The door had swollen from years of water damage, the metal frame warped and rust-bitten. It took a careful angle, a servo-assisted turn of his wrist, and the latch gave with a hollow sigh.
Inside lay ash and fractured beams, the remains of machinery long corroded to silence. Dust shifted beneath his steps. Among the wreckage stood a single terminal.
Not NuYu. Civilian tech. Outdated, but intact.
Rayne knelt in front of it, brushing away grime from the panel with his fingertips, exposing a dark interface beneath. The screen blinked once, flickering, and then steadied.
Odd. There were no visible cables, no ports, yet the device responded to him. Screen-glow bled gently against his palms.
He froze.
This shouldn’t have been possible. He’d not sent a connection request, no external link. Still, his internal systems stirred low through his circuits, rhythmic like a heartbeat he didn’t own. Something buried deep, older than code, slid into motion.
[Log playback: confirmed.]
A soft click, and then static.
Then a voice, thin and warbled, rising from the noise — his voice.
But it was younger somehow, softer. Singing a wordless melody, imperfect but earnest, learning each note as it came.
The sound filled the room, tremulous and human.
Then, just beneath it, something else. A sound too faint to place. Laughter? Breath? He couldn’t tell.
The recording wavered, disintegrating into static before the words could settle. The screen flared briefly with colour, pale gold and washed blue. It might have been sunlight breaking through cloud, or corrupted pixels arranging themselves into a skyline. He couldn’t tell. The image trembled once, then faded to grey.
Then the file cut. The glow dimmed, leaving only echoes whispering softly into the dark.
He stayed long after the playback ended, sitting in the quiet stillness deep within the tunnels, staring at the screen panel.
[Repeat Log? Y/N]
The cursor blinked, waiting patiently.
Rayne hesitated, pulse readings steady but too quiet in his ears. Whatever he’d heard still lingered like a residue across his circuits.
The prompt waited. Blink-blink.
He reached out and tapped once—Yes.
Rayne leaned closer, the faint buzz of the terminal resonating somewhere deep in his chest cavity. A beat travelled through his circuits, subtle but insistent, as though the signal recognised him before he recognised it.
The sound came again, fractured and heavy with compression, before a single note rose through the interference, soft and uncertain. It wasn’t music exactly, but something near it: a melody still learning its shape.
The terminal glitched, lines of light breaking across the display. Beneath the note, another voice surfaced — high-pitched, bright, laughter at the edges.
“Brother, don’t stop. That part was pretty.”
The same image from earlier appeared on the screen, broken but clear enough to see that it was indeed a skyline, bathed in morning light, clear skies, the rising sun. The colour of air before the smog. Rayne reached out as if to touch it, the reflection trembling across his palm.
Behind his eyes, something flickered—not an image but a warmth. Light spilling through a window he’d never seen. A voice calling a name that wasn’t his, and still made him want to turn.
The screen cut out again.
Silence followed, so complete it almost sounded like the end of the world.
Rayne waited, not sure for what. Nothing returned but the low hiss of feedback and the quiet ticking of his internal drive.
He ran the file again.
Once.
Twice.
Again.
Each replay shifted in minuscule ways; a note warped, the sound of the laugh bending into a different frequency. It was never the exact same recording, though every diagnostic insisted it was.
By the sixth loop, Rayne’s internal systems issued a quiet alert: recursive pattern detected. Potential memory strain.
He dismissed it.
The hum crawled through his audio feed, faint but constant. He could almost mistake it for breath.
No external input. No network activity. No data stored.
And yet the echo persisted.
He knew this wasn’t NuYu code because there was no trace of their encryption, no corporate watermark burned into the metadata.
It felt… organic. Imperfect. Human.
He watched the playback one last time, the skyline trembling across the display. The fragment unravelled at the same point, light bleeding through the noise like a wound that refused to heal.
He didn’t know whether he was remembering something or being remembered by it.
Eventually, he powered down the terminal. The light faded from the screen, leaving only the outline of his reflection. For a moment it seemed to look back at him, before the image dissolved into shadow.
When he stepped into the corridor, the tower felt louder than before. Pipes groaned and wheezed in the walls, dust sifting from the ceiling in thin cascades. Every echo followed him too closely, like the static had mapped his shape.
By the time he reached the upper level, the hum of the broadcast room spilled softly into the hall—a steady, living noise.
Inside, the others were scattered in their usual quiet sprawl. Kairo half-asleep near a console, one headphone sliding from his ear. Soahn curled beside the window, gaze tilted toward the lights beyond the glass. Onyx crouched over a damaged terminal, tools glinting between his fingers. Minjae, half-hidden under a hood, muttered something unintelligible to the rhythm of his own exhaustion.
The warmth hit Rayne first. Not just the air, but the presence — that subtle layering of breath, movement, conversation. He stood for a moment, letting it settle around him before crossing the floor to sit among them.
Soahn looked up briefly, eyes calm but searching, as if he sensed a difference in the current. He didn’t ask.
Minjae cracked a half-formed joke about Kairo’s snoring.
Kairo twitched, murmuring something about frequencies, then went still again.
Rayne let the sound of them blur together. Something in his chest tightened, small but steady, a trace of the same echo that had followed him from the room below.
He didn’t understand it.
But he was grateful he wasn’t alone with it.
The room settled into an easy hush. Screens dimmed one by one, the blue glow softening to amber. The fizz of old circuitry filled the space like a lullaby.
Rayne’s gaze drifted toward the amp they used for testing tracks. Its indicator light winked, awaiting command. He thought of the file still looping gently somewhere inside his system—the voice (his voice?), the shimmer of light, the other’s boyish laugh.
For a heartbeat, he imagined letting them hear it.
But… he couldn’t. Not yet. Not until he understood it better.
The urge passed as quietly as it came. For now, the fragment belonged to its own silence.
He leaned back instead, syncing the rhythm of his internal drives to the sounds around him—Minjae’s quiet breathing, the click of Onyx’s tools, the soft song of Kairo’s half-dreaming murmur.
Gradually, the noise inside him eased to match theirs. The static softened until it felt less like interference and more like company.
Later, when the others drifted into full sleep, he opened his internal log and saved the fragment — no title, no tag, just a line of unlabelled data buried deep in his archives.
He didn’t remember the skyline.
But he remembered the light, the laughter, and something like belonging.