Chapter 1
The hum of the servers was the only heartbeat in that basement room. Kai was seventeen years old, his fingers moving across the keyboard with a predatory grace. To him, the world outside those four walls did not exist; there were only command lines, data architectures, and vulnerabilities.
Ren sat beside him, her face illuminated by the bluish reflection of three different monitors. They had been working on the “Ghost-Protocol” for months. At first, it had been almost like a magic trick: they would breach hospital servers, pinpoint insurance funds allocated for surgeries, and, with a surgical redirect, slip them into a labyrinth of offshore accounts.
The money vanished. The surgeries were postponed due to “administrative issues.” Nobody died—or at least, that was the story they told themselves. It was just slowed-down bureaucracy. A clean, invisible, perfect scam.
“St. Jude just received the cap for operating room 4,” Ren whispered, her eyes gleaming. “Let’s move everything, Kai. Now.”
Kai typed the bypass string. “Done. The fund is in our buffer. To the hospital, that patient now appears to have no coverage. The surgery will be canceled in ten seconds.”
He glanced at the surveillance monitor. A man on a gurney was being wheeled back to the ward. Kai felt nothing. He was just a unit of data returning to its slot.
But that night, Ren didn’t stop. Her fingers began to fly frantically across the keys, typing commands Kai didn’t recognize.
“What are you doing?” he asked, frowning. “We already have the money. Log out of the system.”
“There’s a logic flaw, Kai,” she replied, her voice unusually sweet, almost hypnotic. “If the hospital notices the financial gap right away, they’ll start tracing the access logs. We need to create a distraction. Something to keep the staff busy while we wipe the transfer logs.”
Kai looked at her. “What kind of distraction?”
Ren didn’t answer. She entered the Intensive Care Unit management module. With a speed that sent a chill down Kai’s spine, she began rewriting the alarm thresholds of the multiparameter monitors.
“Ren, you’re tapping into vital monitoring protocols. Don’t touch them, that’s sensitive stuff.”
“Shut up. I’m just raising the tolerance. If someone’s heart slows down, the system shouldn’t scream. It needs to think everything is normal. Just for ten minutes, Kai. Long enough to make the logs disappear.”
With chilling precision, Ren began rewriting the ICU alarm thresholds. Kai watched the code shift: the variables meant to trigger the sirens in case of cardiac arrest were silenced, pushed far beyond human limits.
“Ren, stop. If the parameters crash, no one will notice.”
“Exactly. That’s the point.”
Kai felt an uncomfortable warmth crawling up his neck. He stared at the screen. On monitor 2, the camera for ward 4 appeared. A nurse walked past the central station. The monitors displayed perfect green lines, regular heartbeats, 98% saturation.
But in the camera feed of room 402, a man began to move his hand convulsively. He was reaching for the call button, but the system, manipulated by Ren, had deactivated that too. To the central computer, room 402 was either empty or occupied by a patient in a deep sleep.
“Ren, look... the man in 402 is suffocating. Reiterate the sensors. Now!”
“Focus, Kai. If you reactivate the sensors, the server will send a system alert that will hunt us down in three seconds. Do you want to go to prison for a stranger?” she snapped.
But Kai couldn’t tear his eyes away. They watched a doctor walk calmly down the hallway, less than three meters from the door. The man looked at his tablet, saw that all parameters were “green,” and walked on. He didn’t enter. He couldn’t know that behind that wall, a life was fading away because a software was lying.
The silence in the basement room became oppressive. The man’s pulse on the screen grew irregular, then slow, then a flat line. The hospital monitor continued to display a fictitious heartbeat, a loop created by Ren to deceive the doctors.
“The alarm won’t sound...” Kai whispered, his voice a thread of air.
“Exactly,” Ren replied, bursting into a small, frantic laugh. “It’s perfect, Kai! We’ve created the perfect crime. It’s not the money that’s the fun part. It’s the control. We decide who lives and who is just a system error.”
Kai stared at the man on the screen. He was motionless. A doctor finally entered the room for a routine check, and they saw his reaction in delay: the horror, the desperate attempt at CPR, the chaos exploding in the ward. But it was too late. Twelve minutes had passed since the time of death. Ten minutes in which the system had shown nothing but lies.
Kai felt disgust rise in his throat. He had created that protocol to master machines, to prove his superiority over systems of power. Instead of using code to break free, he had used it to build a digital grave. He was no longer an architect; he was an engineer who had designed an invisible executioner.
“It’s the beauty of code, Kai,” Ren chuckled, her eyes fixed on the flat line only they could see. “It doesn’t get your hands dirty. It doesn’t make a sound. We just proved we can erase a life without even touching it.”
Kai looked at the screen where the doctors faced only the horror of a body already cold, and deep inside himself, he felt that something within him had broken along with that life.
“I didn’t create it to kill,” he said, his voice now as hard as metal. “I wanted control over the system, not the weight of corpses.”
“Power is indivisible, Kai. You either have it all, or you have nothing,” she replied, without taking her eyes off the monitor.
Kai said nothing more. He pulled out his drive, erased his tracks with cold fury, and stood up. He stepped out into the freezing night, but the air wasn’t enough to cleanse his lungs. He knew a life had ended because he had been too good at writing perfect software, and that weight would stay inside him forever.
FIVE YEARS LATER
The hospital was a labyrinth of humming neon lights and artificial silences. Inside the room, the air seemed to have solidified, heavy as lead. Shein Aizawa could no longer feel his legs; he had been sitting beside Yuna’s bed for so many hours that the physical pain had become background noise. Yuna was pale, but her green eyes still sought Shein’s with a strength that seemed to defy the diagnosis.
“Rest, sweetheart. I’m right here,” Shein had whispered to her, caressing her damp hair.
The nurse walked in shortly after. She looked exhausted, with the deep dark circles of someone on the twelfth hour of her shift. She checked the medical chart at the foot of the bed, took a vial from the cart, and injected it into the IV tube. A mundane gesture, repeated a thousand times a day.
“This will help her relax,” the woman said with a half-smile.
Shein nodded, grateful. But less than five minutes later, Yuna’s hand snapped out, gripping his arm with a force that made her bones creak. Yuna’s eyes flew open, but there was no longer any light in that green. There was only blind terror.
Her body stiffened, then began to shake violently. These weren’t mere tremors; they were muscle spasms that seemed to want to snap her spine. Yuna tried to scream, but only a muffled sound escaped her lips, the gurgling of someone drowning in her own body.
“Sweetheart! Yuna!” he yelled, trying to hold her still while she kicked desperately against the sheets.
The doctors swarmed around her like white vultures. Shein was shoved away, his hands torn from his wife’s. He stood pinned against the wall, watching Yuna convulse under the jolts of the defibrillator. Her body bounced on the mattress like a broken puppet.
Thump. One shock. Thump. Another.
And then, suddenly, nothing.
The noise of the ward faded. The doctors’ shouting, the hiss of oxygen, the frantic stomping on the linoleum... everything became a distant, muffled hum, as if Shein had slipped underwater. The head doctor stepped away from the group. He snapped off his latex gloves, one at a time, with a slowness that seemed infinite to Shein. He approached. The man’s lips moved, but the words arrived distorted, devoid of meaning.
“...I’m so sorry, Mr. Aizawa... your wife didn’t make it.”
She didn’t make it.
Those words struck Shein with the violence of a bullet. He felt a stabbing pain explode right in the center of his sternum, as if his ribs were being cracked open with bare hands. He brought his hands to his chest, clawing at his shirt, convinced his own heart was failing. A primal, inhuman gasp tore from his throat, a sound that seemed to rip his vocal cords and make the windows of the ward rattle. It was the sound of something breaking that could never, ever be repaired.
He collapsed to his knees. Air would no longer enter his lungs. It was pure shock, a total blackout. He could hear his own heartbeat thumping in his ears like a war drum, while his vision blurred at the edges.
The nurses rushed toward him, cold white hands trying to pull him to his feet, to calm him, to drag him away from that room which had now become a morgue.
“Let go of me! Yuna! Yuna!”
Shein fought, he kicked, tears burning his face as he tried to claw his way back to that bed. The nurses held him by the arms, whispering words of comfort that were nothing but static noise. He felt nothing but the pneumatic void that had opened wide inside him.
To the hospital, it was a tragic accident to be archived as soon as possible. To Shein, the truth was much simpler and more agonizing: his heart had stopped in that room, at the exact same instant Yuna’s heart had stopped.
