Rain slicked streets always looked better in neon. TARITOTO The lights turned puddles into pools of color—blues, pinks, and reds rippling every time someone passed.
The city never slept, but it didn’t dream either.
My name’s Cipher. I’m a ghost—at least in the system. No ID, no records, no official existence. The corporations call people like me “data shadows.” They don’t like us because we can slip into their networks without permission.
And I had just stolen something they would kill for.
It started with a routine hack.
Just another night, jacked into a cheap terminal in a back-alley noodle shop, breaking into CoreDyne’s cloud for a client who didn’t want to be found.
I expected encrypted financials, maybe a list of dirty shell companies.
What I found was Project Helix.
Helix wasn’t just another experiment. It was a neural overwrite—a way to replace a person’s memories with corporate-written scripts. They could turn anyone into a loyal employee, a perfect assassin, or a compliant politician.
And I had the files. All of them.
The moment I pulled out of the system, the city felt different. Every camera seemed to follow me. Every drone passed just a little too close.
By midnight, they sent the Hunters.
Hunters aren’t cops. They’re freelancers—mercenaries with cybernetic reflexes and no questions asked. You don’t fight a Hunter; you survive them.
The first one found me near the old maglev station. Big, fast, too many implants to count. I dodged into the shadows, slipping through a maze of abandoned train cars.
That’s when she appeared.
She called herself Nova. Half her skull was chrome, one eye glowing faintly red. She didn’t say why she helped me, just that she’d been watching my work for a long time.
“They’ll burn the city to get Helix back,” she said. “You need a way out.”
I didn’t trust her. But I didn’t have time to argue.
We moved through the undercity—narrow tunnels lit by flickering signs, air thick with steam from leaking pipes. The deeper we went, the quieter it got.
Nova led me to a hidden network hub run by the Drowned Kings—a gang of rogue netrunners who claimed to be untouchable.
They weren’t.
The Hunters hit us an hour later.
The hub lit up with gunfire and static as firewalls collapsed and the Drowned Kings scrambled to jack out.
Nova dragged me through a side tunnel, kicking open a rusted hatch.
We emerged in Sector 9—a part of the city where the corps rarely came. Here, the lights were dimmer, the streets quieter, the danger more personal.
Nova finally told me the truth.
She wasn’t just helping me—she was in the Helix files too. Not as a target. As a prototype.
“They erased me three years ago,” she said. “Built me into someone else. I clawed my way back, but the memories… most are gone.”
She wanted the files to rebuild herself. I wanted them to burn CoreDyne to the ground.
So we made a deal.
We spent the next two days bouncing the data through ghost nodes, fragmenting and hiding it across the network. Every move drew more attention. The Hunters stopped being subtle.
By the third night, the whole city knew someone had Helix—and everyone wanted it.
CoreDyne’s CEO made a broadcast, offering amnesty and enough credits to retire for anyone who brought me in alive.
No one did. But plenty tried.
We fought through alleys, across rooftops, even inside a corporate freight hauler. Every time, Nova was there, moving like she’d been born for this.
Maybe she had.
The final push came at the old signal tower on the city’s edge. That was where we could broadcast Helix to every open channel in the grid—make it public, untouchable.
CoreDyne knew. They sent everything they had.
It was chaos—drones swarming, Hunters closing in, the tower shaking with every impact.
Nova took the uplink controls while I covered her, my neural link burning from the speed of the data transfer.
Then a Hunter got through.
He was fast—faster than thought. One second he was across the room, the next he had Nova by the throat.
I didn’t think. I just acted. Pulled the trigger. The Hunter fell.
Nova didn’t thank me. She just finished the upload.
When the files hit the net, the city lit up. Everyone knew about Helix. CoreDyne’s stock crashed in seconds.
But they wouldn’t die. Corps never do. They’d rebuild, rebrand, and try again.
Nova vanished that night. Left without a word.
I stayed in the city, moving through the neon and the rain, still a ghost.
Because in this place, once you’re in the system, the only way out… is to burn it down.