The hum of the drone coil overhead fades before the rest of the world catches up. For a moment, everything is still, just that mechanical silence that hangs in the air like dust. Then the city exhales.
Outside my window, arc lights flicker across the skyline. Vertical highways buzz with convoys of magnetic transports.
Towering spires blink red and blue against a sky choked with haze. And beneath it all, the deep electronic thrum of infrastructure keeps breathing: train lines underfoot, wind turbines embedded in old glass, the subtle vibration of the PulseNet feeding every device on the grid.
New Vega never truly sleeps. It dreams with its eyes open.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed. Floors cold. Reinforced polymer. Cheap, utilitarian. Nothing in here is ornamental. No clutter, no decor, just function.
A small cot, a folding table, and a wall of equipment racks glowing faintly under layered firewalls. I rent the top unit of an abandoned observation tower repurposed as a ghost address, off-grid, no government tags, and most importantly, no Helix data feeds. They call these places "cold towers." Places where people disappear.
My morning ritual is muscle memory. One hand brushes the side of my neck, over the faint circular pattern at the base of my skull.
The world calls it the "CoreTag" everyone's got one.
Standard issue since 2091. It tracks identity, licenses, biofeedback, employment chains. Most wear theirs embedded behind the right ear, visible as a thin line of pale light. Mine's silent. Disabled. Spoofed.
The real one, the one I don't talk about, sits deeper, closer to the spine, disguised beneath what looks like a birthmark. It doesn't respond to scans. It doesn't ping satellites. And according to every registry on Earth, it doesn't exist. Just like me.
I sit at the interface panel mounted into the far wall. No voice commands. No gestures. Just hardwired lines.
I don't trust smart systems, never have. They're too good at remembering. Too eager to share. I plug in directly and start the diagnostics. My HUD flickers to life, crisp overlays sweeping through neural stability charts, pulse variance, threat proximity alerts.
> [K-VALE ID CONFIRMED.]
> [STATUS: CLEAN.]
> [CONTRACTS: 4 UNCLAIMED.]
> [NETWORK: PRIVATE, ENCRYPTED, STATIC MASK APPLIED.]
All clean. Of course it is. I built this rig myself. The firewall code is laced with recursive entropy layers, a language I invented just to keep other people out of my head.
Still, something feels wrong.
It's in the air, maybe. Or the vibration under my skin.
I pause, tapping my fingers against the desk. My stress levels spike by 0.3%. Barely a blip, but I see it. I feel it.
Then…
It happens.
A static pulse, not a sound, not even a signal. Just… presence. Like a name whispered between two neurons. A subtle flicker of heat at the base of my skull.
And then, clear as thought:
> Aaron.
I freeze.
No one calls me that.
Not on record. Not in the field. Not in my nightmares. That name is dead. That name belongs to a boy who vanished during a fire twenty-three years ago, along with a house, a family, and any trace of what came before.
But I heard it.
Felt it.
Not in the room. Not in my ears. Inside.
I stand slowly, activating the perimeter lockdown. The windows shutter with a hydraulic hiss. Doors seal with maglocks. Internal jammers engage. The lights shift to low red.
> [LOCKDOWN MODE: ACTIVE.]
> [ALL OUTGOING CONNECTIONS DISABLED.]
The scan begins instantly, line by line diagnostics of my neural implant. I trace every registry, every output log, every passive feed to confirm what I already suspect.
No breach. No transmission. No active signal.
Nothing.
But I heard it.
The name still echoes, not like a memory, but like an identifier. Like the system recognized something before I did.
And worse….
The waveform isn't external.
It's local.
Coming from within the chip.
That shouldn't be possible. The standard CoreTag doesn't support internal comms. It can transmit bio-data and receive basic interface commands, but anything approaching resonance frequency? Impossible. At least... officially.
I check the logs again.
Still clean.
But I know better.
I shut down the rig manually, fingers flying across physical keys. Every sequence is hardwired. No auto-complete. No ghost-hand AI.
The room goes quiet again.
But the silence feels wrong now.
Too thick.
Like it's waiting.
I walk to the mirror bolted over the sink, staring at the scar at the back of my neck. It's faint. Circular. Too perfect to be natural, too subtle to raise suspicion. I was told it was a safety mod. A fallback. I was five. I believed them.
> Aaron.
This time the voice comes with heat. Pressure. Like a tuning fork striking the air inside my skull.
I grip the sink hard, breathing slow, trying not to panic.
Not because I'm afraid.
Because I recognize it.
Not the voice itself, there is no voice but the feeling. Like something familiar vibrating through the marrow of my bones. A memory I never had, reaching up from beneath the concrete layers of survival I've built over two decades.
The name doesn't just identify me.
It believes I am still him.
And worse? I believe it too.
I back away, sitting heavily in the chair beside the sealed window.
Outside, the sky shifts. Thunderclouds move like ink across the horizon, bleeding against the neon canopy. A train cuts the skyline in half, trailing sparks.
And still the pressure lingers. Subtle now. Dormant.
Waiting.
I check my feed one last time. No messages. No external pings. But in the static layer, just before the encryption collapses into white one last signature flickers.
Unclassified. Untagged.
Dead bandwidth.
But there all the same.
> [UNKNOWN SOURCE: INBOUND IDENTIFIER - "AARON"]
My name.
Not the one I took.
The one I buried.
I lean back against the cold wall, staring at the pulse monitor as it flattens.
I don't know who or what found me.
But it knows who I am.
And that means the fire is coming for me again.