Ghost Signal

Personal Mission His ultimate goal is to dismantle Helion’s NeuroGrid, a vast AI-driven system linking the population’s brainwaves for “security.” To do it, he must: Gather pieces of a lost root-access key scattered among black market data vaults. Expose Helion’s crimes without allowing the evidence to be erased by their counter-intelligence AI. Keep his own mind from breaking under the strain of his malfunctioning implants. Every move against the corp forces him deeper into the neon-lit underbelly of the city—where friends are temporary, enemies are permanent, and morality is just another hackable system. Neon rain stitched the night as Kael Virex better known as Ghost Signal ghosted along service rails to the holo-cinema hiding Helion’s NeuroGrid relay. The city’s thoughts hummed through concrete; cut this artery and the district would dream for a few hours. His optic parsed the dark—data phantoms skittered like code-born moths. One wore his partner’s face and mouthed don’t. He spiked the door and Echo Hacked the guard’s visor with a memory of empty corridors; the man stared through him like smoke. Inside, drones hung from the ceiling like chrome bats. Kael breathed once and triggered Phantom Overclock. The world broke into frames; he stepped between them, clipping wires, throat tasting copper as implants nipped his neurons. At the relay he seeded a virus: fragments of the root key braided with witness footage, a slow truth built to survive Helion’s counter-intel AI by learning to lie, then confess. Alarms woke. He flipped a Signal Blur, cameras coughing static, and ran through a heat-haze of bullet trails. On the roof a gunship clawed upward, searchlight the color of judgement. Over the edge, down a slick ladder, into the market where vendors hawked outlaw fruit and pirated rain. Behind him the relay kept breathing, but now it dreamed of freedom. The phantoms quieted. For a heartbeat, the city did too.