Liam, shoulders hunched beneath a frayed leather coat, moved with deliberate caution through the narrow alley leading to a forgotten quarter of NeoNexus’s underbelly. Every step stirred the stagnant air, thick with the smell of rotting waste and stale desperation—the kind of odor that seeped into clothes and lingered like bad memories. It was no wonder so few ever ventured this way.
But Liam had his reasons. His client had promised generous compensation for a simple mission: retrieve data from something that should’ve been buried long ago. Or rather, someone. Word on the street was that souls trapped in Neurocradle’s machines still lingered—whispering their secrets in half-formed dreams. It was, after all, a relic of a time when corporate ambition knew no bounds. If the rumors were true, death was no longer an end, but a doorway into a digital purgatory.
He paused at the edge of a rusted chain-link fence, eyeing the structure beyond. Once, Neurocradle had been heralded as a miracle of technology, promising second chances and eternal life for those wealthy enough to afford a neural implant. Now it stood desolate, windows smashed, its interior swallowed by darkness. The rumor mill claimed it was abandoned not because the technology failed, but because it succeeded too well—creating ghosts that refused to rest.
Liam tugged his coat tighter around him, each rivulet of rain sliding down the worn leather and dripping onto the grimy asphalt. He spotted the corroded steel door he’d been told about, half-obscured by neon graffiti pulsing under flickering lights. Above it hung a battered sign that read: Neurocradle VR Terminal, its buzzing neon tubes sounding like the labored breath of some wounded animal. A hollow, repetitive wheeze that set Liam’s nerves on edge.
Taking a slow breath, he keyed in a code scrawled on the back of his hand. With a grinding shriek, the door unlocked, revealing only darkness beyond. Liam glanced over his shoulder, momentarily questioning his decision to trust a faceless client. But curiosity—and the promise of a substantial payout—drove him forward. He pushed the door open, stepping into the stale air that clung to the interior like a sickness.
Within, the once-sterile corridors of Neurocradle had devolved into a graveyard of rusted machinery. Rows of shattered VR pods stood like tombstones, coated in a fine layer of dust and illuminated by sporadic bursts of malfunctioning emergency lights. Dangling wires and frayed cables trailed from the ceiling, forming a maze of technological sinew. The hushed drone of failing power units echoed throughout, an unsettling lullaby for the ghosts rumored to dwell here.
“Dead men tell the best tales,” Liam muttered under his breath, recalling the old saying among data-thieves and netrunners. If the stories were true, those who perished with Neurocradle’s implants still roamed these halls in digital form. Liam just hoped the one spirit he needed to question would be willing—and sane—enough to speak.
He pressed deeper into the facility, each step echoing ominously. Ahead, a faint glow pulsed where a central console waited, dormant but not yet dead. Liam approached, carefully avoiding debris underfoot. He could almost feel the weight of thousands of lost consciousnesses bearing down on him, like invisible eyes watching from the shadows. Clenching his jaw, he steadied himself and prepared to do what he did best: pry open the past and scavenge its darkest secrets.
Liam paused at the threshold of the corridor, the ancient lights overhead flickering like dying fireflies. He knew he shouldn’t be here, not in this rotting husk of a research facility, and certainly not with Virtu lurking in the shadows of his mind. The megacorp had started as a humble pharmaceutical outfit—healing the sick and peddling “miracles”—but it had grown into a corporate colossus that quietly pulled the strings of NeoNexus’s political stage. Politicians were little more than marionettes dancing on invisible wires, their speeches and policies orchestrated by Virtu’s hidden hand.
Rumors whispered in the gutters spoke of new projects that could reshape the very fabric of the city—some say they were close to total control of the populace, an insidious plan hidden behind glossy ads and smiling, corporate faces. Liam couldn’t confirm all the talk, but he believed enough of it to risk his life here. He’d seen Virtu’s brand of ‘problem-solving’ firsthand. Their methods often left people dead or worse.
Now, this crumbling facility and its rumored ‘digital ghosts’ stood as his best shot at unraveling Virtu’s secrets. One ghost in particular: a whistleblower whose mind, if the stories were true, was still lingering within Neurocradle’s aging servers. Liam needed answers—the type you couldn’t bribe, blackmail, or silence. If this phantom memory had witnessed Virtu’s darkest machinations, then maybe it held the evidence to expose them.
With that in mind, Liam forced himself onward. The corridor opened into a wide chamber where a half-dozen shattered VR pods lay like coffins split open at the seams. Each unit bore the charred remains of wiring and circuits, as though someone had tried to torch the entire system but ran out of time—or nerve. The air reeked of burned plastic and stale disinfectant.
He scanned the space, noting the faint hum of an emergency power core still managing to pump electricity through frayed lines. Somewhere behind these walls, the whistleblower’s consciousness might be drifting, waiting for someone bold—or desperate—enough to plug in and listen.
A distant clang echoed from the far end of the room, making Liam’s heart jolt. He swallowed hard, fingers flexing around the small data-slate tucked in his coat pocket. Virtu had eyes everywhere, and if they realized he was sniffing around their old experiments, they wouldn’t hesitate to eradicate him like a rogue virus.
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But if this place held even a fraction of the truth about Virtu’s puppet regime, it was worth every risk. Sucking in a breath, Liam made his way toward the faint glow of a still-active console, steeling himself for whatever haunted data might be waiting. He thought again of Virtu’s unseen hand, the rotting shells of political leaders they controlled, and the city’s naive faith in the bright future those leaders promised.
“Better the truth kill me,” Liam muttered, stepping over a tangle of ripped wires, “than let them keep strangling this city in the dark.”
He marched onward, determined to unearth the secrets that Virtu had tried so hard to bury—secrets stored in the final memories of a dead man whose voice refused to stay silent.
A faint hiss greeted Liam as he crossed the threshold into the next chamber, boots echoing against the grime-slick floor. Overhead, exposed cables sparked and crackled in intermittent flashes, casting jagged shadows across the walls. The room was dominated by a massive console bank, half of its screens shattered, the remaining flickering with static. Old lab notes, scrawled in black marker, clung to the console’s edges like desperate, final pleas: “Test #89… Mind Integrity?,” “Emergency Protocol Active,” and in one corner, “Burn It All—” scrawled in shaky letters.
Liam traced a finger over the console’s surface, brushing aside a thin layer of ash. This was where the whistleblower must have uploaded his consciousness, or maybe stored the final data chip that sealed his fate. With a careful hand, Liam nudged a panel aside. Wires spilled out, some severed, others just barely connected. If anything in this place still had a pulse, it had to be here, in the nerve center.
A flutter of light sparked in one of the broken monitors, just enough to make Liam think it was responding to his presence. He keyed a command into his data-slate, hoping to coax whatever was left of the system into talking. For a moment, only silence and static filled the chamber. Then a crackling hum erupted across the console, and faint lines of code pulsed across the remaining screens.
SYSTEM…RECOVERY…INITIATED WARNING: PARTIAL CORRUPTION DETECTED
A wave of dread rolled through Liam. Partial corruption often meant crucial fragments were gone forever. Or worse, twisted beyond recognition. Still, a partial file might be enough to blow Virtu’s facade wide open—enough to prove they were more than just puppet masters, that they’d done the unthinkable in pursuit of power.
“Come on, come on…” he muttered under his breath, fingers tapping anxiously against the console. The code scrolled faster, lines of text colliding in an incoherent blur, occasionally blinking out as if lost to the void. Liam’s heart pounded. He needed that whistleblower’s memory—his living testament to Virtu’s dark dealings. But each flicker of static and distorted snippet of data suggested he might be too late.
Still, determination flared. He wasn’t leaving empty-handed. With a calm that belied his churning nerves, he connected his data-slate’s interface cable to the console’s battered port. A few sparks danced around the connection, and the whole system groaned as if in protest.
“All I need is one good file,” he whispered. “Just one—”
But before he could finish, the console spat out a half-distorted feed: a blur of a man’s face, agony carved into its features. The image shuddered, replaced by a line of dialogue repeating in a frantic loop:
There's—no—time—Virtu—
Then it cut out, replaced by the hiss of static. Liam felt his chest tighten. The whistleblower was here, or at least some digital echo of him. And it was calling out a warning, even from beyond the grave. Whatever fragment existed in this place was fighting to be heard, defying the ravages of corruption and time—and Liam intended to heed its call.
He hammered the keys, forcing the console to search deeper, to retrieve more. The overhead lights dimmed, the lab’s neglected systems pushed to their limit. In that moment, surrounded by flickering monitors and the stench of decay, he realized how close he was to the truth—and how close Virtu’s shadowy hand might be, ready to snuff him out the second he unearthed their buried sins.
Liam’s heart thudded in his chest, the taste of rust and adrenaline thick on his tongue. That fragmented message—There's—no—time—Virtu——played on repeat in his head. For all he knew, it could’ve been Dax, or some other poor soul caught in Virtu’s crosshairs. Whoever it was, they’d tried to speak across the void of death, and Liam couldn’t walk away without answering.
He glanced at the keyboard, spattered with grime and ash, then at the cracked monitors flickering with half-dead images. Clearly, brute-forcing commands through half-burnt circuitry wasn’t going to be enough. He needed a direct interface—something that would let him walk through the memories without relying on the facility’s failing hardware. He could try to bypass the main systems, sure, but time was short. The place felt like it might lose power at any second, and the data he needed could vanish with the next spark.
His fingers moved deftly, prying open an access panel on the console’s underside. A tangle of wires sprang out like cybernetic entrails, each labeled in tiny, faded text. Audio In, Audio Out, Neural Link— Bingo. Liam fished a coil of cables from his coat pocket, hooking them into the battered port. Then he rummaged around until he found his makeshift VR headset—a battered relic from another era, rigged with a black-market neural jack. With a grimace, he slid it over his head.
“Alright,” he muttered under his breath, tightening the straps until the visor pressed firmly against his brow. “Let’s hope you don’t fry my brain.”
A hiss of static flared in his ears, and the console sputtered in protest. The overhead lights flickered twice, dimming to an almost twilight glow. Liam swallowed hard, bracing himself. If the whistleblower’s consciousness was still in here somewhere—Dax or otherwise—he’d have to meet it on the inside. A direct dive was risky, but this was no time to be cautious.
He steadied his breathing, recalling old netrunner tricks he’d picked up in the undercity. Focus on your pulse. Let your eyes track the flicker of data. Fight the wave of disorientation when you plug in. He keyed in a final sequence on the console, forcing a shaky handshake between his VR visor and the near-ruined system.
The hiss grew louder. His vision blurred, replaced by the barest suggestion of shapes forming behind the visor’s flickering screen. Columns of code and neon lines scrolled across his field of vision. Somewhere in there, he might find the truth about Virtu’s operation—and the final testament of a man who’d died trying to expose it.
“Come on,” Liam murmured, feeling the sweat bead on his temple. “Show me what you’ve got.”
Then, with a final surge of static, the real world melted away, and Liam plunged into the fractured landscape of Neurocradle’s digital afterlife.
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