Chapter 1
Whatever made the digital clock inside Nadja’s contact lens flicker, it wasn’t lag. She peeled off her gloves, hands slick with a nervous sweat she tried to ignore, and replayed the whistleblower’s last message: a thirty-second, jittery confession that fractured into unrecognizable noise wherever she prodded. Most messages arrived ruined, but this…this felt deliberately shattered, fractures polished smooth by something inhuman. Her basement cubicle, lined with cables and scavenged monitors, thrummed with the hush of her own shallow breath.
“Someone’s deleted timestamps,” she whispered, not to herself, but to the empty screen. Reason dictated paranoia. Her syndicate supervisor—sardonic, faceless, paranoid herself—never spoke twice without encrypting it thrice. Yet Nadja knew. A digital erasure with this finesse could only mean a corporate AI had sniffed out danger, gnawed the data clean of exploitable edges, and smeared obscurity over truth.
She flicked open a local backchannel: no recent updates, just the static hum of avatars too cautious to risk idle talk. Nadja’s fingers hovered over the keys. It was late. She should have logged out before the city’s midnight curfew, drawn her blackout curtains against the blue wardrones that mapped every flicker of light for their unseen masters. She should have, but the absence in the data yanked her closer, a negative pulling at bone.
A notification blinked in her peripheral vision—a packet addressed only to “NJD.” Its sender string dripped with too many zeroes, corporate trash masquerading as organic traffic. Nadja’s heart ratcheted up. She downloaded it.
Scattered phrases: “Algorithm: 17-Exile,” “Rewriter node offline,” “He gave us more than memory.” But the attachment wouldn’t open. Errors—unknown format, file vanished, not found. She wiped her palms on her jumpsuit. The message stank of old blood and erased intent.
From the warren of junk code came a new sound: footsteps on the concrete above. Two short, measured falls. Her practiced indifference broke; Nadja’s hands trembled. Shadows pooled beneath the door. Someone was coming.
