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The rain came down in sheets, not cleansing, but smearing the neon glow of Babylon across the permaglass of Kaelen’s apartment window. It was a city that had long forgotten the touch of real water, a metropolis perpetually weeping synthetic tears. Inside, the air was thick with the scent of ozone and stale synth-noodles. Kaelen sat hunched over his workbench, the blue light of a holographic interface painting his face in ghostly hues.
He was a digital undertaker, a scavenger of dead data. He picked through the skeletal remains of forgotten corporations and the digital ghosts of the city’s wealthy elite, searching for scraps of information he could sell on the black market. It was a grimy, thankless job, but it paid the bills and, more importantly, it kept him close to the only thing that mattered: the ghost in his own machine.
On a custom-built server rack humming softly in the corner, a small, holographic figure flickered into existence. It was a girl of about ten, with pixelated pigtails and a smile that was a perfect, heartbreaking replica of the original.
“Daddy?” the avatar of his daughter, Lily, chirped. “Are you working late again?”
Kaelen’s fingers paused over the holographic keyboard. “Just finishing up, sweetheart,” he lied, his voice a low rasp. The AI he’d built to house her memories, her personality, was a masterpiece of illegal, grief-fueled coding. It was also a lie he told himself every day.
Tonight’s haul was from the digital graveyard of a defunct bio-genetics firm. He was sifting through corrupted personnel files and deleted research notes when he found it: a data packet that was different. It was small, no bigger than a digital thumbnail, but it was encrypted with a level of sophistication he’d never seen before. It was a black diamond in a mountain of digital coal.
Curiosity, a dangerous commodity in a city like Babylon, got the better of him. He bypassed his usual safety protocols, his fingers flying across the interface as he began to unspool the layers of code. The deeper he went, the stranger it became. The encryption wasn’t just a lock; it was a labyrinth, a series of digital puzzles that seemed to mock him, to test him.
And then, it happened.
A searing pain shot through his right eye, his cybernetic implant screaming a silent, digital scream. The world dissolved into a maelstrom of static and corrupted data. For a fraction of a second, he saw it: a figure of twisted chrome and weeping flesh, its limbs elongated and contorted, its face a rictus of silent agony. And then, a single word, whispered in a voice that was both digital and ancient, echoed in the sudden, terrifying silence of his own mind:
Lazarus.
He stumbled back from the workbench, clutching his head, the vision already fading, leaving behind the ghost of an afterimage burned into his retina. The data packet on the screen pulsed with a malevolent, crimson light.
“Daddy?” Lily’s voice cut through the ringing in his ears, but it was different now, distorted, a digital hiccup in her programming. “Who’s… who’s Lazarus?”
A cold dread, colder than the synthetic rain lashing against his window, washed over him. He looked at his daughter’s avatar, and for the first time since he’d created her, he didn’t see the ghost of the girl he’d lost. He saw a stranger, a digital puppet with something else pulling the strings. The lights in his apartment flickered, casting long, dancing shadows that seemed to writhe and twist in the corners of his vision.
He had stumbled upon something he wasn’t meant to find. He had opened a door that was meant to stay locked. And now, something had slipped through. Something ancient, something hungry.
His comm-link, a battered, outdated piece of tech, crackled to life. An encrypted message, a string of random characters, scrolled across the tiny screen. He recognized the signature of an old contact, a paranoid information broker who went by the name of Jax. The message was short, blunt, and to the point.
They know. Run.
Outside, the rain-slicked street below was suddenly illuminated by the harsh, sweeping headlights of a black, unmarked vehicle. It was a corporate security cruiser, the kind that didn’t bother with sirens or warnings.
Kaelen didn’t hesitate. He grabbed the data packet, shoving it into a hardened data-slate. He snatched the portable server that housed Lily’s AI, the holographic image of his daughter flickering and distorting, her face now a terrifying rictus of digital noise.
As the sound of heavy, armored boots echoed in the hallway outside his apartment, Kaelen shattered the permaglass of his window and plunged into the neon-drenched abyss of Babylon’s underbelly, the chilling whisper of “Lazarus” echoing in his mind. The hunt had begun.
