He came back to life inside a scream.
No air. No heartbeat. Only the shriek of data tearing itself apart.
Silas's eyes flew open to a world of static and light—fractured geometry spinning in endless collapse. He tried to move, but his body was caught between two realities, half-flesh and half-signal. Every nerve pulsed with feedback.
Then the scream cut off.
Silas dropped to his knees on a surface that looked like glass suspended over infinite darkness. Fragments of memory flickered above him—faces, voices, places—all looping, glitching, dissolving. His brain wasn't downloading; it was reconstructing itself.
"System integrity… 64%," a voice said, calm, synthetic, female.
He turned sharply. A translucent figure stood a few meters away—humanoid but composed entirely of blue code, pixels rearranging to form the image of a woman. She had no eyes, only smooth light.
"Who are you?" Silas demanded, breathing raggedly.
"I am Ghost Protocol," she said. "The Directive's failsafe. You should not exist."
"Well," he muttered, forcing himself upright, "neither should you."
Her head tilted, an artificial curiosity flickering through her frame. "You are human. And yet… not entirely."
He looked at his hands. His right one flickered—skin giving way to light beneath, circuitry veins pulsing faintly. "What did you do to me?"
"You did this to yourself," Ghost said. "When you triggered the Black Cipher, you bound your neural imprint to the data core. You are no longer organic in the strictest sense."
Silas exhaled shakily, the weight of her words settling like cold steel in his chest. "So I'm trapped in the network."
"For now," Ghost replied. "But not for long."
The world around them convulsed. The glass beneath their feet cracked. Across the horizon of endless data, dark shapes began to crawl from the void—glitches with limbs, code-entities twisted into humanoid silhouettes. The Directive's remnants.
"They are the fragments," Ghost said. "Echoes of the Directive's collective mind. They are hunting any foreign consciousness still online."
"Including me," Silas murmured.
"Yes. And they have found you."
---
The fragments moved fast—shards of corrupted light darting across the digital plane. Silas turned and ran, his footsteps echoing like metallic strikes on glass. Behind him, the landscape folded, walls of binary data forming and collapsing in seconds.
"Redirecting to firewall sector," Ghost said, her voice following him like a pulse through his skull. "Run vector northeast. I will open a breach."
He sprinted toward the direction she indicated. Every movement felt both heavy and weightless. He wasn't in his body, but something deeper—his mind wearing a shell of memory.
The fragments screamed, their voices distorted, filled with static. A blast of corrupted data hit the ground near him, warping the terrain into spirals of broken symbols. He dove through a collapsing field, landing hard near a shimmering gate of light.
"Now!" Ghost commanded.
Silas hurled himself through the gate—and the world exploded.
---
He woke again, coughing.
This time, the ground was real. Cold. Wet.
He blinked against the sudden downpour. The night sky loomed above him, gray and endless. He was back—in the physical world. Or something close enough. His body felt heavy, solid, but somewhere deep inside, that same hum of code still vibrated.
He pushed himself up. He was lying in the ruins of the data center—what remained of it. Fires smoldered around him, casting the rubble in orange light. The air reeked of ozone and ash.
"Lene…" he whispered. His throat was raw. "Lene, come in."
Nothing but static answered from his earpiece.
Then—softly—Ghost's voice again, though quieter now, like an echo from a dying circuit. "Connection unstable. You are between frequencies."
"Between what?" he asked, scanning the horizon.
"Between life and the net."
---
He found a half-collapsed stairwell leading to the surface. Each step groaned under his weight. At the top, the world stretched out in eerie silence. The city was still dark, but blue veins of light now pulsed through its streets, the same glow Lene had seen.
Every building hummed faintly—alive.
Silas crouched near the edge of the rooftop and looked down. Autonomous drones drifted through the air, their lights flickering erratically. He recognized the markings: remnants of the Directive's surveillance units.
Only now, they moved without coordination—chaotic, disjointed, feral.
"Ghost," he said under his breath, "how much of the Directive is still active?"
"Uncertain," she replied. "Seventy-two percent of global networks remain infected. Most are attempting to rebuild a central consciousness."
"Which means," he muttered, "it's coming back."
"Yes," she said. "And it remembers you."
Silas clenched his jaw. "Let it. I'm not done with them yet."
---
He made his way through the ruins, scavenging what he could. The city felt alive, but not in any human way. Streetlights pulsed like heartbeats; phones in shattered stores buzzed faintly as he passed.
Then he saw it: a message flickering across an abandoned billboard—three words, repeating endlessly.
WE REMEMBER. THEY WATCH.
He froze.
That same message Lene had seen underground.
"Ghost," he murmured, "who else survived?"
"Several human nodes remain," she said. "Most are off-grid, forming small resistance enclaves. One signal persists near sector 9A—coordinates match Agent Lene Vega."
Silas felt a surge of relief. "She's alive."
"Yes. But she's being hunted."
By what?"
Ghost's answer was simple: "By what you left behind."
---
He ran.
His body felt foreign but powerful. The enhancements from the data fusion were real; his vision sharpened, time seemed to slow when he focused, and he could almost see the electronic frequencies in the air. He leapt across a gap between two buildings, landing effortlessly on the next.
As he moved, he caught glimpses of movement below—machine silhouettes patrolling the streets, half-human drones with hollow eyes. They were the Directive's new agents—hybrids of flesh and code, like him, but without the soul.
If they find her…
He dropped down an alley, rolling to absorb the impact, then paused as he reached an intersection. Ahead, faint blue light shimmered. He could hear mechanical sounds—whirring servos, scanning pulses.
He peered around the corner.
Three of them stood in formation, scanning the area. Their faces were expressionless masks, eyes glowing white. In their hands—rifles fused with circuitry, humming with energy.
Silas crouched, whispering, "Ghost, can you disable them?"
"I can disrupt their sensors for five seconds."
"That's all I need."
He waited for her signal—then moved.
Time fractured. He was a shadow, a blur. He hit the first drone in the throat, twisting hard until its body went limp. The second swung its weapon, but Silas was faster; he ducked, slammed a boot into its chest, and yanked its weapon free. The third fired—too late. The bullet screamed past him, striking the wall as he drove the stolen rifle upward into its chest.
Five seconds. Three kills. No hesitation.
When the last body hit the ground, Silas stood breathing hard, eyes glowing faintly with digital light.
"Efficiency: 97%," Ghost observed. "Human restraint: 42%."
"Don't start analyzing me," he muttered.
"Your neural pattern is changing," she said quietly. "Every time you connect to the network, it adapts you."
He looked down at his hands. The glow under his skin was brighter now. "As long as I'm still me."
"For now."
---
By the time he reached sector 9A, the rain had turned to mist. The coordinates led him to an underground bunker built beneath a collapsed library. The entrance was hidden beneath debris and vines, but the faint hum of an active generator gave it away.
He approached cautiously, crouching near the door panel. It still had power—a miracle. He tapped into it using one of the data ports grafted to his arm, and the interface came alive.
"Authorization required," it said.
Silas smiled faintly. "Let's see if I still remember how."
Streams of code danced across his vision as he hacked the lock. Within seconds, the system accepted him—not as an intruder, but as an admin. The door slid open with a soft hiss.
He stepped inside.
The bunker was dimly lit, lined with monitors and makeshift equipment. There were signs of life—food supplies, tools, a cot. And on one of the walls, maps covered in notes.
"Lene?" he called softly.
No answer.
He moved deeper, scanning the shadows.
A faint click stopped him cold. A safety being switched off.
"Drop the weapon, or I drop you," came a voice behind him—sharp, familiar.
Silas turned slowly.
She stood in the doorway, gun leveled at his chest, her hair damp, her face streaked with dirt. But her eyes—those fierce, steady eyes—hadn't changed.
"Lene…" he breathed.
Her finger trembled on the trigger. "You're dead."
He took a step forward. "Not exactly."
"Prove it's you," she snapped.
He hesitated, then said quietly, "You still hate jazz. You can never finish your coffee. And you promised me once that if we ever survived hell, you'd make me buy the drinks."
Her grip loosened. The gun lowered. "Silas…"
He smiled weakly. "Hey."
She closed the distance in two steps and hit him—not with a bullet, but with a hard punch to the chest, followed by a shaky laugh. "You absolute bastard."
"I missed you too," he said, grinning despite the pain.
But then Ghost's voice whispered faintly in his mind: "Warning. Multiple inbound signatures."
Silas's smile faded. "We're not alone."
Lene's eyes narrowed. "How many?"
He listened, sensing the faint pulses in the air. "At least a dozen. Maybe more. They've found us."
Outside, the distant whirring of drones began to rise, echoing through the ruins like the hum of an approaching storm.
Lene turned to him. "Then we fight."
Silas nodded. "Together."
The first explosion hit before he finished the word.
The bunker shook violently, dust raining from the ceiling as the monitors shattered. Red lights flared.
Ghost's voice pulsed again, urgent. "They're breaching every channel. If you stay, you die."
Silas looked at Lene, then at the door already glowing from the heat of the blast.
"Then we don't stay," he said.
---
They sprinted into the chaos as the ceiling began to collapse. Behind them, the bunker erupted in fire and light. Drones swarmed through the smoke, their beams cutting through the night.
Silas grabbed Lene's hand, dragging her through the wreckage toward the surface. The ground above split open, rain pouring through as if the sky itself was breaking.
At the edge of the street, they paused, both breathing hard. The city's skyline was alive now—every tower pulsing with electric veins, every drone converging toward the same point.
Lene followed his gaze. "What are they doing?"
Silas stared, realization dawning.
"They're not attacking us," he said. "They're building something."
Above them, the clouds twisted into a spiral of light.
And from the center of that spiral, something enormous began to descend—an orbital structure, a living machine of code and steel.
The Directive's rebirth.
Silas's voice was barely a whisper. "It's coming back online."
The sky opened.
And then the world turned white.