David’s apartment was the type of place you forgot right after leaving it. It had a mattress in one corner, a cracked window, two dead plants on the sill, and not much else. His desk was just a sheet of plastic over a crate, wired up with three mismatched monitors and a half-functioning terminal that overheated whenever he pushed it too hard.

Right now, it was steaming.

David sat cross-legged on the floor, hunched over the glowing screens. He worked fast, fingers clattering away at his decades old keyboard. A mug of coffee sat untouched nearby, already ice cold.

It was six in the morning and the sky outside was a dull blue.

The job this time around was as simple as they got. Break into a local database for prisons and extract records going back to the past year. Some buyer in Manila wanted it, who knew for what. Blackmail probably, or maybe something political. He was pretty sure one of his data pulls last year had been for drug trafficking. It didn’t matter.

David found that in life, asking unwanted questions was both pointless and messy. So, he didn’t ask them.

There was a ding from the monitor as he broke the firewall, and David got to typing again. He scanned through the file. Thousands of columns of data were scrolling through his viewport. Most of it was typical. Some vandalism, unauthorized prosthetics, and crap about loitering. There were a few public disorder charges, plus a nasty sentence on “information crimes”, whatever the hell that was. But all in all, nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing he hadn’t seen before.

David leaned back as his algorithm compiled the data. He took a sip of his coffee, then spat it right back out ruefully.

Then, line 4378 caught his eye. Wasn’t anything big, it was just... the name was Spanish. Not unusual in itself, but the file said the arrest happened in Buenos Aires.

Interesting… David squinted at his glowing monitor. This database was only supposed to cover East Asia.

A fluke maybe? A transferred inmate or something?

He checked the arrest details. No transfer in sight. No sign the person had ever been processed in Seoul. The arrest, trial, and sentencing all happened in Argentina. But somehow, the file was sitting here, in a Korean database.

That wasn’t supposed to happen. Right?

He scrolled back through the previous hundred entries starting to feel suspicious. More showed up: Lagos, Toronto, Hanoi. Entirely different legal systems. Entirely different record formats. But all bundled in the same place.

David paused the script and ran a broad search. He wanted to see just how many files came from outside the Korean peninsula.

The result came back a minute later.

More than 90,000.

His eyes widened. This wasn’t a glitch. This was global. Which was bad. Probably.

Every few seconds, more names were appearing, from every damn place on the planet that wasn’t Korea. Two from Kenya. About seven in a row from Germany. Fifteen– no seventeen– from Indonesia. One from Canada.

It was like someone was piping all the world’s prison logs into this one system.

David stared at the screen. What now? The job was technically finished. He had everything the client wanted. He could zip up the files, send the package, and have a nice big breakfast.

David sighed and started digging.

Most of the foreign entries looked pretty normal, actually. There were a few oddities– missing data fields, odd codes, and sometimes even multiple entries for the same person. Arrest dates too, all over the place. David wasn’t sure that was anything real. The global government wasn’t exactly known for precise recordkeeping.

He ran a sample check, trying to find bugs or fake data. Nope, none of that. So these were real records then. Weird.

David rubbed his eyes, sitting back. He stared up at the ceiling for a second, then wondered if he could maybe plot them. He pulled up a scraper and had it do just that.

David looked at the map his scraper had just created.

So the plot thickens.

The entries weren’t random. They were split evenly across each of the major world regions. No repeats. Almost as if there was someone out there trying to collect one of everything.

It made absolutely no sense.

David scratched his head. Why build a system like this? Why spend all this time loose sorting data to sneak it into an obscure Korean database?

He ran another check, trying to find something, anything, that would link the data together. There wasn’t any obvious connection. No shared software, no joint tags, no label saying this was part of a larger network. Just the system hoovering up the world’s sentencing data and tucking it away.

He clicked a few times, not really sure what he was looking for.

Eventually he found something.

One of the entries had a source tag that just read: SYS_CORE_NODE_0X.

Which… hold on. So that wasn’t a location, obviously. That was a system-level command, must be, for internal use.

He stared at the tag for a long moment.

Which meant this wasn’t a public-facing system. This was internal. Core-level. Whatever was syncing these records wasn’t supposed to be visible or accessible, even to the people running the database. And definitely not a 20 year old hacker that got paid off the black market.

David sat very still.

The smart thing would be to close the window. Delete his logs. Send off the data and pretend he’d seen absolutely nothing.

So of course, he didn’t do that.

David highlighted a section of the data and saved a copy. Nothing fancy, just a small batch of the weirdest entries. He wrapped it in an old encryption key he hadn’t used in years and buried it deep in one of his cold storage drives.

David checked back at the main screen.

New names were still appearing.

Bangkok. Prague. Santiago. Lagos again.

One every few seconds. Like a metronome.

He checked the time: 6:51 AM.

Still early. Still quiet outside.

David reached for his coffee again. It was as cold as when he’d spat it back out, but he drank it anyway.

The job was done. The data was clean. He just had to hit send.

David opened a secure line, fingers tapping out a short code from memory. The signal bounced around for a few seconds before it rang. One tone. Then two. Then static.

Finally, a garbled voice came through. “Yeah?”

“This is Red April.”

A pause.

“Red April,” the voice repeated, mocking, almost. “You still using that name?”

David shrugged a little. “It stuck.”

He’d picked it years ago. Every good hacker had a code name, and when he'd gotten into the business, he'd needed to find one. He'd picked some redhead girl from grade school named April he'd had a crush on. He hadn't given it much thought, but Lantern seemed to find problem with it. Who knew why.

“Listen, Lantern, I was running a job and I found something weird.”

The garbled voice on the other end was sardonic. “Define weird.”

“I was doing some usual shit, prison transfer data for some buyer in Manila–”

“Yeah, let me guess, he took the data and ran, huh? Never trust a guy from Manila, man, they’re as shifty as they get–”

“No– listen. I was scraping the prison logs from an East Asian node, but I’m getting stuff from everywhere. Lagos, Toronto, the works. All of it funneling into this tiny Korean data center.”

“Huh. Sounds like a server leak.”

“No, man. They’re not leaking out, they’re being pulled in. I’m seeing systems level code here. Deep-rooted as hell. As shifty as it gets.”

There was a pause. “All right. Mind sending me a sample.”

“Copy that.” David copied the packet he’d extracted and sent it over. “Take a look-see.”

There was an even longer pause.

“Yeah, okay. This might be a little unusual.”

“I know, right?”

“See, just looking at this, I can’t tell what the root cause is. The records are legit, just in the wrong place.”

“Wrong side of the world, you mean.”

“Yeah… that. Listen, the only way to parse from here would be to go to the processing hub. The one routing the data.”

“I know, man. That’s the reason I called.”

Lantern sounded cocky. “Naturally.”

Lantern was the person you went to when you wanted to get across a technical barrier. He could break any firewall or encryption, block any physical surveillance, and he could do it all drunk as a daisy. Didn’t stop him from being a prick about it though.

Of course, there was a catch.

“There’ll be manual stuff,” came Lantern’s voice. “Nothing huge… but no matter how clean the disruption is, someones going to need to be there in person to flip a few switches, click a few buttons. They’ll have legacy crap like biometrics and physical relays.”

David grumbled in annoyance.

“Or… and here’s what I’d do… pretend you didn’t see it. Send the data package, get your shifty Manila money, and scatter.”

David glanced toward the corner of the room where his gear bag sat, half-zipped and dusty. He hadn’t touched it in a while. Last time he used it was for a job in Suwon. Nothing fancy; just a network tap and a portable scanner. This would be more complicated.

“You got the coordinates of this packaging place?” he asked.

“Sending ‘em.”

His screen lit up with a file; just a simple map overlay. The facility wasn’t far. Twenty minutes by bike, fifteen if he booked it.

David stood up and stretched. "Looks like I’m getting some fresh air."

“Not so fast, Red April."

David sighed. "Twenty thousand credits. Deposited into your account the second this is done."

"Now we're talking."

David walked over to the corner and pulled open his bag. He dropped in a set of override chips, a portable signal cutter, two power cells, a wrist port, and his brain linker. Just the basics. If he needed anything more… well, he’d better not need anything more. He zipped the bag shut and slung it over his shoulder.

“This better be worth my time,” he said. “Otherwise I'm twenty thousand credits in the hole over a goddamn data leak.”

He snapped the earpiece into place as he locked the door behind him. The elevator was broken as per usual, so he took the stairs down four flights.

The second he pushed open the building’s front door, the smell hit him: thick and chemical, a motley combination of oil and melted plastic. Some factory a few blocks over ran its exhaust lines straight into the open air. They’d gotten a court order from the government to shut it down, so of course they’d ignored it and kept pumping.

He cut through the back alley behind his building, weaving through crates, trash bins, and two street cats fighting over something that might have been food at one point. A man sleeping under a torn awning twitched awake as David passed, then went right back to sleep.

“This place has got a few background protocols,” Lantern’s voice buzzed in his ear. “It’s quiet for now, but they’ve got proximity sweeps set to fifteen meters. Don’t stand too long near the west wall.”

“Got it.”

David reached the main road, where a row of vendors had already set up shop. One tried to shove a skewer of something greasy into his hand. Another tried to sell him counterfeit credits. David waved them all off and tucked his hands into his pockets.

His bike was chained at his usual rack, one of the few that thieves usually missed in their rounds. He unhooked it, praying it had enough charge. Half full. Great. Just enough juice to get him where he needed.

The streets were mostly empty in the early morning, but drones were still zipping overhead– some delivery, some patrol, and some patrol pretending to be delivery. Cameras, of course, were on every street corner, doing their routine swivels.

David just kept peddling.

“All right, I ran a trace on those nodes you sent me. They’re not pegged to anything. Floating infrastructure.”

“Meaning?”

“Means the system can route through any active line in the global mesh. It’s like a roaming admin tag. Old government tech. Nobody uses it anymore. At least, not officially.”

“So what?” David muttered. “Someone brought a dead system back to life?”

“Or it never died,” Lantern said.

Cool. That wasn’t ominous.

David passed under a scanner arch that pinged at his arrival. His ID wasn’t visible, but the system swept him anyway. A second later, it let him pass.

A pair of plainclothes officers stood leaning against a wall, pockets bulging with gear. One watched David roll by without blinking.

The data packaging place was coming up now. It was this ugly hunk of building covered up by newer developments. Just another storage unit that the city upgrades had left behind. Remembering the thing about the west wall, David veered right and circled to the back.

“Lantern. What’s happening?”

“Cool your jets, man. They’ve got a couple perimeter tripwires. Standby.”

David stood around under an old billboard, trying not to look like he was about to break into a government facility. The billboard screen was broken–some ancient gov-prop campaign that had gotten too faded to read. The whole thing was flickering like a wounded animal.

“Done,” said Lantern, sounding satisfied. “Take the northeast vent, it’ll have some crawlspace access. There’ll be some piping, avoid it and cut the power junction on the left.”

“Copy.” David found the pipe and the crawlspace and the junction. He popped open the control box and found a bundle of wires staring back. He yanked a couple as told, and the lights on the nearest sensor went dark.

“Done.” David started clambering through the crawlspace. The tunnel smelled like rusted metal and factory fumes. A few minutes of clambering got him to the grate, which he popped open and pushed his way out of.

He found himself in a maintenance hall.

“All clear,” said Lantern. “No record of breakin.”

David hitched his bag higher on his shoulder. “You’re officially a felon, Lantern, how does it feel?”

Lantern snorted. “As if we both weren’t already.”

The maintenance hallways was narrow, dusty, and smelled faintly of mildew. David followed Lantern’s directions, left, right, down a stairwell that hadn’t seen a mop in decades, then left again. A camera blinked in the corner, then clicked off as if on command.

“Cutting it close, are we?” David muttered.

“Please,” Lantern said. “This system’s a relic. I turned that camera off when you were in the stairwell; it just took seven minutes to transmit the signal.”

Doors unlocked like magic the second David got to them. Some beeped gently, others slid open smooth as butter. There were no guards, no cleaning staff, just eerie and quiet. It was like the whole building was on autopilot.

“It’s a skeleton crew,” came Lantern’s voice. “They run the command through city central, and they have one dipshit in a booth keeping an eye on twenty buildings at once. I’m blocking the feed a little further upstream.”

“So nothing on me, then?”

“Nope. Even if the guy’s got a side monitor, he’s probably using it to watch soap operas.”

David kept walking. He made it down another flight of stairs, this one without any lights at all. He fumbled his way through in the light of the emergency glow, and found a heavy metal door, dented like a war veteran, which meant he was at the control room. He palmed the access pad. “Lantern?”

“Relax; feeding the spoof now. Keyed the ID to some systems engineer called Kim Woo-yin. The bastard’s been dead six months and he’s still on the payroll. Global government at its finest.”

David snorted. “And where are those six months of salary going, now that you’ve got his ID?”

“What? It’s not like the dead guy needs it.”

A second later, the light blinked green, and the door opened with a hiss.

The room it revealed had a low ceiling, lit by rows and rows of yellow LEDs. There was a central console in the middle and wall-mounted displays all around, all humming beautifully. It looked like the one place in this blasted building that still worked.

David plopped his bag on the floor and pulled out the brain link. It looked like a flash drive had had a baby with a hearing aid, and one end of it plugged right into the hearing jack behind his ear. David snapped it into place and shivered a little as a pulse ran through his temple.

“All good, buddy?”

“Yeah, I’m in.”

“Cool. Just loaded the mask. Welcome back to the world of the living, Kim Woo-yin. You’ve got full access now.”

David tapped the console, let the interface stabilize, then got to poking around.

As per expectation, the prison data was all there. There were queues and queues of data, hundreds of entries an hour, and they made no effort to even pretend to be East Asian. This data center was some kind of funnel, and it packaged all the data before booting it off somewhere for who knew what.

“Can you trace where it’s being sent?”

Lantern was clicking away at his end. “Some batching facility… labeled MIRA-X. Past that, they’ve got it pumped through a buffer. Redacted for even admin-level, so no hope.”

David felt a little anxious. “All right. That’s not worrying in the slightest.”

Lantern gave a whoop. “Hey, it’s not just prison data they’ve got in this place, buddy. Check out the other servers.”

David scrolled sideways, and feeds from all the other servers popped into place. There was just about everything. Oceanic reports. Some stuff on the pacific rift, ‘Deep-Sea Probe Delta Alpha’, crap on thermal shifts…

“What in the hell?”

Lantern kept doing. “And look. Climate data. Four hundred years of it. Historical, simulated, projected. What the hell operation are these guys running?”

“Why is any of this lumped in with crime records?”

“Ask someone who knows, Red April. They’re not even the same data formats. Different timestamps, access protocols, someone’s force merging them.”

David rubbed his forehead. The room felt hot now. He wasn’t sure if it was the server racks heating up, or if it was just him.

“No way in hell this is a misroute, Lantern.”

Lantern didn’t answer right away. “Look, I don’t know what this is. All I know for sure is I don’t wanna be neck-deep in this shit.”

David stared at the screen. “So those prison logs– they’re just the surface of this then.”

“Looks like it. And now we’re looking at the ocean floor.”

The two of them sat in silence for a few seconds. Then, Lantern cleared his throat.

“All right, look man. I’ll make this simple. You wanna walk, let’s walk. Sell the prison scrape, and I’ll forgive half your tab. Ten thousand wiped clean. Just send me a few dead files for cover or some shit, and no one’s the wiser.”

David kept staring at the screen.

“Your client never asked for more than the local logs, right?” Lantern continued. “You give ‘em whatever they paid for. You make your money. I make mine. This thing? Whatever this is, it’s not our fight.”

David stewed on that for a minute, but didn’t answer.

“Red?”

He looked over the lines of code, everything from tagged entries of seismic patterns to stuff about riot suppression. There was no way to make head or tail of it.

“Let’s poke a little deeper man. Just give me a couple minutes with this.”

“Famous last words, Red. Famous last words.”

“You want your money or not? Check the facility history for me”

“Fine. This place was opened… let’s see… 2248. It’s an EAC-P12 designation, which makes sense given the state of this place, mostly low level data, with compression and routing facilities.”

“So all standard then.”

“Yeah, except it was shut down in 2289.”

“What, sixty years ago?”

“Yep. Shut down, decommissioned, and flagged as non-operational in 2289.”

“Looks pretty operational to me, Lantern. When’d they bring it back up?”

“No record of reactivation,” Lantern said. “No maintenance logs, no staff assignments. It just… started back up last year. As if… somebody turned on the lights and decided not to tell anyone.”

David pulled up the startup log. It was clean. Too clean. No ID, no command trail, just a timestamp: 12:01 AM, April 3rd, 2350.

“So someone turned this into a ghost node,” he muttered. “They’re piping data through a dead facility so no one notices.” David highlighted a chunk of the outgoing data stream and started tracing it. “Map this for me, Lantern. Where’s it going next?”

Lantern was quiet for a beat. “Uh… Five nodes across Asia, then encrypted at a central port. After that… goddamn.”

“What?”

“Continental GovSec. The big dogs.”

David leaned back. “So all this random data… straight to the top?”

“Yep. And that’s where I stop helping,” Lantern said. “We’ve already pushed it. No one hacks the GovSec core. No one even peeks. You hit that wall and alarms go off that I can’t stop.”

David stared at the screen. The data stream shimmered in front of him, a moving river of stolen knowledge. He felt his fingers tighten on the console.

“I’m going in,” he said.

“Don’t be stupid.”

“I’m just looking.”

“You’re not just looking, Red. That’s a black box system. It’s not built for outside access.”

“Which is why you’re not doing it,” David said. “This is my part.”

Lantern groaned. “I’m telling you, they’ll notice.”

“They haven’t yet.”

“Yeah, because I’m feeding them a dead guy’s ID and blocking thirty security pings a minute. But that’s here. Once you go into GovSec, you’re past all that. I can’t cover you there.”

“Relax, will you? Just sit back and take your twenty thousand credits.” David cracked his knuckles and whipped up a cloning profile. With any luck, it’d pass as admin if you didn’t look too close. GovSec’s encryption line was dense, but it wasn’t completely foreign to him. He’d coded around this architecture before, and he could do so again.

“Red…”

“I’m mostly done already. It’d be a shame to stop now.”

“It’d also be a shame to die a painful death in a GovSec black site. I’m telling you man… you’re gambling with your life.”

“Oh yeah? Feels like Tuesday to me.”

David tapped his last few commands and stared expectantly up at the computer. The interface stared right back at him, frozen in place, and for a second, he wondered if he’d done something wrong. Then, with the softest of chimes, a new window opened.

“I’m in.”

The data flood that hit him was like a tsunami. Thousand page documents, files that were timestamped to decades ago, archived links that used models he’d never even seen… David skimmed through it all. No time to gawk; he needed to figure out why the government needed this crap in the first place.

A folder caught his eye: STRATCORE-SYN. Inside were subfolders with strange titles. Pattern Compression, Behavior Drift, Memory Seed Trials.

“Strange…”

Lantern grumbled something about how they were all going to die.

David clicked on Memory Seed Trials. The folder contained logs, thousands of them. Most were tagged with random alphanumerics, but some had labels: “SINGAPORE_32,” “Q-MODEL_LOSS,” “SUBJECT_BREAK.”

The files were too big– way too big for standard ID data, which could only mean. “So hold on then… this isn’t surveillance. It’s simulation. They’re not watching… they’re modeling.”

“Great, good, awesome.” said Lantern. “Can you get out of there now?”

“One more layer, Lantern.” He clicked a few more times, found a few more nodes…

Bingo.

A final folder opened, blank at first, then loading a stream of some kind.

At first, it was hard to tell what it was. A map of some kind? Then David understood. A brain. It wasn’t literal, but some kind of neural chart– living and updating in real time.

Then everything went wrong.

Lantern’s voice cut in, frantic. “Red! I’m out. I’m locked out. I’m completely locked out.”

“What?”

“You heard me! They cut me off. They’re overriding my access. They know we’re in the system.”

David’s fingers froze over the console.

And then, just for a moment, Lantern’s voice changed.

The garble stopped.

David heard it. Lantern’s real voice. Just for a second.

A quiet, panicked, very human voice.

David’s blood went cold.

That wasn’t possible. The earpiece distortion was embedded in hardware and software. For someone to break through that meant one thing: they’d hadn’t just infiltrated the control room, they’d infiltrated their own private tech.

Every screen in the room flashed red.

A loud tone began to sound. Emergency systems kicked in.

“Run!” Lantern shouted.

David turned to grab his bag.

Then, the world exploded.