The dead never whisper. They scream.
Nathan Rho knelt beside the body as cold light flickered against the concrete. His cortical scanner pulsed in sync with his heartbeat, nestled between gloved fingers like a loaded confession. The alley reeked of frost and synthetic decay—an old smell, the kind crimes left behind when they didn't want to be solved.
Maren Sol.
Age thirty-two.
She lay in an unnatural curve, torso twisted, eyes half-open as if trying to unsee the moment of death. Her mouth was still parted. Nathan imagined she'd been calling out—not for help. For truth.
The scanner chimed. Protocol verified. Emotional tether confirmed.
Of course it had.
He hadn't seen her in five years, but distance meant nothing to the system. It measured pain, not proximity. Their silence had been thick enough to fracture steel.
He initiated the link.
The world convulsed.
Memory surged in—raw, intimate. Rain on pavement. Laughter in places they'd never belonged. Her voice, trembling with something between rage and love. "We break everything we touch."
And then: a flicker.
Nathan saw himself.
Standing at the alley's edge. Watching her die.
It froze him.
That wasn't a replay. It was a presence. His presence—embedded inside the victim's final cognition. He hadn't been there. He was sure.
But the Protocol had no room for dreams. It only recorded the truth.
The scanner blinked violently and released him, ejecting a string of corrupted data and error codes. He staggered back, breath shallow.
What had he seen?
More importantly—what had she left him?
He didn't speak about the anomaly.
Not to the local PD, not to the internal audit. Let them file it under neural artifact. Ghost code. A common glitch when memory meets trauma.
But it wasn't common.
It was personal.
Back in his apartment, the lights felt dimmer than usual, or maybe his eyes hadn't stopped adjusting. He logged the extraction as complete, coded the tether as unstable, and skipped the psych evaluation box. They'd flag it anyway.
Something buzzed behind his eyes. A residual echo. You watched.
Nathan closed the file.
At 2:13 a.m., his neural implant pinged.
Incoming request.
Encrypted. Unidentified origin. No traceable tether.
That was impossible.
He stared at the prompt.
Do you remember what's real?
No sender. No source. Just the message.
And beneath it, a pulsing button: Accept Link.
His pulse stuttered.
The system was offline.
This was outside the Protocol.
Which meant someone had built something... new.