GHOST PROTOCOL SYSTEM

The war ended in 2062. The people who survived it made sure they would never be powerless again — and made sure everyone else would never be anything else. 125 years later, the world is divided into a simple hierarchy. At the top, fewer than two hundred Sovereigns govern from a two-kilometer tower of glass and steel, their implants fused directly into their nervous systems. Below them, the Augmented carry out orders with technology threaded through their bodies. And at the bottom, the Hollow — humans with no implants, no rights, and no future that hasn't already been decided for them — live under the permanent watch of ARGUS, an AI surveillance system that tracks every face, flags every deviation, and forgets nothing. Zev Drault is nineteen years old, Hollow by birth, and employed to repair the cameras that watch him. He has no ambitions beyond staying fed and keeping his social score high enough to avoid the kind of attention that makes people disappear. He is not special. He knows this. He has spent his entire life knowing this. Then he touches a device he shouldn't have, and something ancient and patient installs itself behind his eyes. The system calls itself Ghost Protocol. It sees the digital infrastructure of the world the way Zev sees the street in front of him — clearly, completely, and with the full understanding of how to take it apart. It levels up. It assigns quests. It unlocks skills with names like Signal Mask and Neural Tap and, somewhere behind a wall of question marks, something called Rewrite Protocol. It does not explain itself. It does not ask for permission. It simply waits for him to figure out what it is — and what it expects him to do with it. "I don't know what you are," Zev tells it, standing alone in the dark with cameras rotating overhead. "But you're clearly not going anywhere." He is right about that. And wrong about almost everything else. Because somewhere above The Pit, an analyst has already flagged his name. The flag is climbing. And the man it will eventually reach has spent twenty years making sure that anomalies like Zev Drault do not get the chance to become something larger. The system chose him for a reason. Zev just hasn't lived long enough yet to find out what it is.