Chapter 1: The dust on the mantle
My dad didn’t smell like old books or cologne; he smelled like ozone and burnt titanium. Growing up, I thought the scars on his back were from a car accident. He told me he was a “” for a firm called A.L.P.H.A.
Technically, he wasn’t lying. He analyzed risks—and then he neutralized them with a $150 million kinetic exoskeleton and a plasma-edge blade.
I found his A.L.P.H.A. Comm-Link in a floorboard safe three days after his “disappearance.” It wasn’t a phone. It was a neural-interface shard. When I pressed it against my temple, my vision didn’t just blur—it recalibrated.
SYSTEM BOOT... USER RECOGNIZED: GEN-2 DNA MATCH. CODENAME: GHOST-PROTO. MISSION STATUS: REDACTED.
The world turned into a wireframe of heat signatures and data streams. My dad wasn’t a hero because he wanted to save the world; he was a hero because the world was a glitch, and he was the debugger.
