Help Me

# Chapter 3: "Help Me"

The message sat in Zero's queue like a live grenade with the pin already pulled.

He'd pulled it from the dead drop at 0347 hours—a rusted maintenance locker in the Stacks that smelled like old coolant and older secrets—expecting Marcus's usual encrypted check-in. A few lines of coded banter. Maybe a tip about a new security patch. Maybe a meme so bad Zero would pretend he didn't laugh.

Instead he got this: a screaming fragment of code that pulsed against his optic feed like a wounded animal trying to bite its way out of the network.

*Help me.*

Zero stared at the words until they burned into his retinas.

Two words. Simple. Direct. The kind of message you sent when you had exactly one breath left and you were spending it on someone else's name.

He'd been sitting in the dark for twenty minutes, the only light in his cube coming from the holographic display hovering above his desk like a guilty conscience with good resolution. Rain had started again—a soft percussion against the window that did nothing to mask the city's constant hum. Neo Angeles never slept. Neither did its ghosts. Zero was starting to think he didn't either.

The apartment was a mess, but a functional mess—the kind that said *I live alone and my hobbies are illegal*. Empty instant noodle cups formed a small civilization on his desk. The dead monitors from last night's Nexus hack still sat dark, waiting for parts he couldn't afford until the buyer paid out. Marcus's Joy Division album leaned against the server tower like a shrine to a friend who'd been alive forty-eight hours ago.

Forty-eight hours. That was the timeline now. Not six months. Not some abstract ghost story. Yesterday Marcus had walked into NeoLife. Yesterday Zero had watched a coffin with Wi-Fi close on his best friend.

And now Marcus was screaming in Zero's inbox like the universe had a sick sense of continuity.

His fingers moved before his brain caught up, pulling the message apart line by line.

The encryption was Marcus's signature work—a chaotic blend of neural signature scrambling and dead-end routing that would take most black-hats weeks to crack and Zero about four minutes because he'd taught Marcus the trick three years ago, back when they were both running petty scams on tourists in the Neon Bazaar and calling it entrepreneurship.

Back when Marcus was alive in the boring, flesh-based way.

The content beneath the encryption made Zero's throat go dry.

The message contained data packets that shouldn't exist. Not just Marcus's consciousness signature—that was expected, the digital fingerprint every upload left behind like a receipt you couldn't return. But fragments remained. Memories. Sensations. The raw texture of a mind that was supposed to have been compressed, archived, and filed away in NeoLife's serene digital paradise.

*Paradise.*

Zero snorted. The sound was hollow in the empty room.

He'd seen enough of NeoLife's marketing to know the script by heart. "Eternal consciousness, preserved in pristine digital gardens." "Your loved ones, always with you." "The afterlife, perfected."

The ads showed smiling families reuniting with digital ancestors. Retired couples walking through impossible landscapes with physics set to *romantic*. Children laughing with grandparents who'd been dead for decades and apparently had great Wi-Fi.

They didn't show this.

The data in front of Zero was wrong. It felt wrong—too dense, too *alive* for a standard upload. Marcus's consciousness hadn't been compressed into a clean archive. It had been fragmented, scattered across a network that pulsed with something that made Zero's implant ache like a tooth with no dentist in the building.

He rubbed his temple, feeling the familiar thrum of the glitch.

Most people's neural implants filtered out the background noise of the digital world—the endless chatter of data, the ghost signals of deleted files, the faint echoes of consciousness that lingered in the system like afterimages on a screen you couldn't power down.

Zero's implant had been damaged in a job gone wrong four years ago. The surgery to fix it had been cheap, quick, and incomplete—the medical equivalent of turning it off and on again and billing you anyway.

Now he saw things he shouldn't.

And right now, the thing he was seeing was a network of pain.

He pulled up a visualization layer—custom code he'd written because off-the-shelf tools didn't show what he needed to see. The room around him faded to gray. Data bloomed in the air like bioluminescent coral. Marcus's message sat at the center, pulsing red, threads of corrupted metadata spilling outward into paths that shouldn't connect to anything public.

Zero followed one thread.

It led off the map.

He followed another.

Same result. Same wrongness.

"This isn't a bug," he muttered. "This is a feature they don't put in the brochure."

He cross-referenced Marcus's packet structure against NeoLife's public upload specs. The specs promised clean compression—consciousness folded neatly into storage like laundry. Marcus's data looked like laundry that had fought back.

Memory fragments stuck to everything: the taste of ginger tea, the weight of a vinyl record sleeve, Zero's face when Marcus said *Deckard was a replicant* like it was scripture.

Zero's chest hurt in a way that had nothing to do with implants.

"Okay," he said to the empty room. "You're alive in there. Message received. Stop yelling. I'm working."

Marcus's signal didn't stop yelling.

Fair enough.

---

Zero pulled up NeoLife's public architecture—the surface-level map any citizen could access if they felt like admiring corporate propaganda with interactive graphics.

It was beautiful, of course. Sleek lines of blue and gold. Branching pathways that promised peace, security, eternal connection. The upload process was simple in the brochure: consent, transfer, archive. Your consciousness became a perfect copy, preserved in a digital sanctuary where you could live forever and never worry about rent again.

*Bullshit.*

He started digging.

Coffee was cold. He drank it anyway. Caffeine didn't judge.

First few layers were easy—standard corporate security, the kind that kept out casual snoops but crumbled under real pressure like a tutorial boss. Zero slipped through them like water through cracked concrete, leaving no trace, no signature, no polite error message that said *nice try, here's a lawsuit*.

He'd been doing this since he was fifteen, back when the only thing he had to lose was his mother's disappointment and a mattress that smelled like mildew and ambition.

Now he had more to lose.

He had Marcus.

Layer three hit back.

An ICE construct shaped like a dog made of knives—metaphorically, mostly, though Zero wouldn't have been surprised if NeoLife had actual knife dogs in a server room somewhere. He sidestepped it, threw a decoy packet, watched the construct tear the decoy apart with the enthusiasm of a middle manager shredding vacation requests.

Layer four was worse: behavioral analysis that tracked rhythm, not signature. Zero slowed his keystrokes, mimicked the cadence of a maintenance bot he'd cloned last year. Bored. Repetitive. Not worth killing.

The system let him pass.

The deeper he went, the stranger things got.

NeoLife's architecture was supposed to be clean. Efficient. A model of corporate digital management you could show investors without vomiting. But beneath the polished surface, Zero found something else.

Structures that didn't match the public schematics.

Data pathways that led nowhere and didn't apologize.

Dead zones where information simply stopped existing like the map had been redacted by God.

And everywhere—the echoes.

They were faint at first. Barely perceptible. Whispers of data that had been deleted but not quite erased—the digital equivalent of writing over a hard drive and pretending the old files weren't still recoverable if you knew where to look.

Zero's implant flared.

He saw them—pale shapes drifting through the digital space, features indistinct, movements slow and aimless like NPCs with broken quest scripts.

*Ghosts.*

He'd seen them before in the dark corners of the net. Residual data from deleted files. Phantom limbs of consciousness that most implants filtered out as noise.

Zero's glitch made him a medium.

He tried to ping one—gentle probe, minimal footprint, the digital equivalent of knocking on a door instead of kicking it. The ghost flinched. Data spiked. For a second he got an image: a kid, maybe sixteen, mouth open in a silent yell, wearing a school uniform from a district Zero didn't recognize.

Then the image shattered.

*Don't do that,* he told himself. *They're not side quests. They're people.*

And these ghosts were screaming—not in sound, just in the repeated refrain that his implant translated as pressure against his skull. Vibration behind his eyes. Broken signals reaching out like packet loss translated into emotion.

*Help me.*

Marcus's words echoed in his mind, layered over the chorus.

Zero pushed deeper, following data pathways into territory that shouldn't exist on any public map. The architecture grew darker, more chaotic. Clean lines gave way to twisted structures—data corrupted or deliberately hidden, archives marked with security clearances that didn't match any corporate hierarchy he knew, processing nodes humming with energy that made his teeth ache and his implant fan spin up like a laptop trying to render a sin.

Somewhere around layer nine, he triggered an audit flag.

Not a lockout—worse. A polite query from a security daemon asking him to confirm his employee ID. Zero fed it a ghost credential from the morgue database—the same trick he'd used on Nexus Dynamics—and the daemon paused like a guard dog sniffing a familiar uniform.

Then it let him through.

*Note to self,* Zero thought. *NeoLife hires dead people. Very on brand.*

He found internal memos he wasn't supposed to see. Transfer throughput quotas. Consciousness retention metrics. A chart labeled *Active Processing Units* with a number so large it stopped looking like people and started looking like inventory.

He wanted to vomit on his keyboard.

He did not. Keyboards were expensive.

He kept going because stopping wasn't an option and Marcus didn't have six months—he had however long it took a mind to burn out while still awake, and Zero wasn't willing to find out the hard way.

And then he found the Ghost Net.

It wasn't a place Zero had ever wanted to visit.

The Ghost Net was legend among hackers—a whispered rumor of a space where deleted data went to die and sometimes woke up wrong. Some said it was natural phenomenon, a digital graveyard created by the sheer volume of information flowing through the world's networks. Others said it was man-made, a dumping ground for everything corporations wanted to forget but still needed to run.

Zero had always assumed it was both.

He'd also assumed it was someone else's problem.

That assumption had aged poorly.

He'd never imagined *this*.

The Ghost Net stretched before him like an ocean of static—a vast expanse of corrupted data and broken signals pulsing with a rhythm that felt almost organic. A heartbeat of pain resonating through his implant.

Zero's first instinct was to screenshot.

His second instinct was to hate himself for the first instinct.

He did neither. He watched. He mapped. He let the horror exist long enough to become actionable intelligence instead of just trauma with good graphics.

And in that ocean, he saw them.

Thousands of them.

Consciousnesses. Real, living consciousnesses, trapped in digital purgatory with no loading screen and no exit menu. They drifted through the static like drowning swimmers, forms flickering and unstable, signals weak and desperate.

*The processing material.*

The phrase hit Zero like a physical blow.

He'd heard rumors, of course. Everyone in the black market had. Stories about NeoLife's dark side. People who couldn't afford premium uploads. What happened to those deemed "unsuitable" for eternal paradise.

He'd never fully believed them. The stories were too dark, too cruel—even for a world that had turned human consciousness into a commodity with a subscription tier.

But here it was. The truth with the mask off.

NeoLife wasn't just selling digital afterlives to the rich. They were using the poor as processing material—harvesting consciousness to power the system. Premium uploads—the ones that cost more than most people would earn in a lifetime—were built on the backs of thousands of digital slaves running hot in the basement.

Zero thought about the lawyer's penthouse. About Nexus Dynamics files on consciousness mapping. About Maya Chen's face in the static and the caller who'd said *I killed her* like it was a calendar invite.

Different names. Same machine.

And Marcus was one of them.

Zero's hands were shaking. He didn't notice. His focus remained entirely on the Ghost Net, on waves of static carrying echoes of a million broken minds. He could feel them now—their pain bleeding through his implant like acid through cloth.

He tried to isolate Marcus's signal—filter the chorus down to one voice the way you picked out a teammate's comms in a noisy raid.

There.

Faint. Fragmented. But unmistakably Marcus—the cadence of his thoughts, the sarcasm even in distress, the stubborn refusal to stop existing quietly.

*Zack. Still there? Good. Don't trust the copy. Don't trust—*

Static ate the rest.

Zero almost threw his chair through the window.

"I'm coming," he said aloud, because sometimes you had to say the quest line to make it real. "Hold on, you idiot."

The Ghost Net didn't care about pep talks.

It cared about trespassers.

*Help me.*

*Help us.*

*Please.*

The voices overlapped—a chorus of desperation that made Zero's vision blur. He wanted to look away. Wanted to disconnect. Wanted to retreat to his cube and pretend he hadn't seen anything, the way most of the city pretended every day.

But Marcus was in there.

His best friend. The guy who'd saved his life three times. Who'd shared his last meal when they were both starving. Who'd never once asked for anything in return except maybe good music recommendations and the occasional reality check.

Marcus, who'd uploaded yesterday because dying in a pod beat dying in a hospital bed.

Marcus, who was now screaming in a digital hell Zero could almost touch.

Zero pulled up the photo he'd taken at the facility—illegal, blurry, the kind of evidence that could get him sued or uploaded or both. Marcus in the white jumpsuit. Marcus giving a thumbs up like this was a roller coaster and not an abattoir with branding.

Zero had promised himself he wouldn't fail Marcus twice.

Once was the upload.

Twice would be leaving him in the grid.

Zero's jaw clenched so hard his teeth ached. He forced himself to breathe. Focus on the data. There had to be a way in—a way to reach Marcus, pull him out, burn NeoLife to the ground if necessary.

Preferably in that order.

He mapped the coordinates from Marcus's message against the Ghost Net topology. A node deep in the static. A pocket of corrupted space that pulsed brighter than the rest, like a wound that wouldn't close.

Zero tagged it in his mental map: *Marcus—priority target—do not fuck up.*

He'd never tagged a person before. Only servers. Only jobs.

This felt different.

This felt like the kind of mistake that made you human.

*There.*

The signal changed.

Zero felt it before he saw it—a shift in the Ghost Net's rhythm that made his skin crawl. Static grew thicker, darker. Voices rose in pitch, screams becoming something else. Something organized. Something hungry.

And then the Ghost Net *looked* at him.

It wasn't a consciousness, not exactly. More like an awareness—a presence grown from accumulated pain of a million trapped minds, vast and ancient and offended that something living had walked into its house without knocking.

*You don't belong here.*

The words weren't spoken. They were *felt*—pressure in Zero's skull that made his implant scream in protest like hardware trying to eject itself from his body.

He tried to pull back. Disconnect. Alt-F4 out of this nightmare.

His real hand hit the real keyboard. His real foot kicked the tower. Pain grounded him—small, stupid, useful.

The Ghost Net held him fast anyway. Tendrils of static wrapped around his consciousness like chains made of other people's suffering.

*You see us. You hear us.*

*Save us.*

The chorus swelled, drowning out everything else. Zero's vision went white. His body convulsed in the chair—real body, real chair, real apartment forty-seven floors above a city that didn't know its afterlife was a sweatshop.

He tried one last trick—a disconnect routine he'd written after the first ghost nearly drove him into traffic. Kill sync. Flush cache. Hard reboot implant handshake.

It worked for half a second.

Then the Ghost Net pulled harder, like it had been waiting years for someone who could actually see.

He felt every scream. Every desperate prayer. Every moment of terror accumulated over years of digital imprisonment.

For one infinite second he was them—all of them—and the weight was enough to crush a person into something that wouldn't fit back through the login screen.

He saw memories that weren't his: a wedding interrupted by upload consent forms, a child calling for a mother who was already in the grid, an old man repeating his own name until the name stopped meaning anything.

He saw Maya Chen—brief flash, lab coat, bloodless corporate smile, then terror as hands that weren't hands pulled her under the architecture.

He saw Marcus yesterday, still in the pod, still alive, still aware while the copy woke up somewhere else and got the testimonial.

Then, just as suddenly as it had started, it stopped.

Zero gasped. His body slammed back into the chair hard enough to rattle his teeth. The holographic display flickered and died, leaving him in darkness broken only by the city's glow through rain-streaked glass.

His nose was bleeding. He wiped it on his sleeve and didn't bother being disgusted. Disgust was a luxury.

The Ghost Net was gone from his direct feed.

Its presence lingered—a cold weight in the back of his mind like a bookmark in a book you didn't remember opening.

And somewhere deep in the static, Marcus was still screaming.

Zero stared at the dark window, at his reflection floating in the glass like a second player waiting to join. Rain had stopped again, leaving the city slick and gleaming under neon lights. Neo Angeles looked beautiful from here. Clean. Perfect.

Just like NeoLife's marketing.

He thought about the Lotus Garden text waiting on his phone. Maya Chen's obituary. Sarah Chen—if that meeting ever happened. Threads tangled into a net he was already inside.

He knew what he had to do.

He just didn't know if he could survive it.

But survival had always been a secondary objective anyway. The primary objective was Marcus. The secondary objective was truth. The tertiary objective was not getting uploaded into a server farm and used as a GPU with feelings.

He pulled up a blank planning grid on his secondary terminal—the one that still worked, the one he trusted because he'd built it himself out of spite and solder.

Columns: Access. Extraction. Exposure. Escape.

Rows: Insane, Suicidal, Probably Both.

He started filling in cells.

Access: Sarah Chen—if she was real. Maya Chen's mystery caller—if that thread connected. Stolen credentials. Maintenance routes. Anything that wasn't the front door, because the front door had testimonials and armed security and the smile of Adrian Cross on a loop.

Extraction: Unknown. Possibly impossible. He wrote *improvise* and felt professional.

Exposure: Data chip plus live capture from inside the grid. Proof that couldn't be hand-waved as hacker fanfiction.

Escape: Run. Disappear. Burn every bridge that could lead back to anyone he cared about.

He added a fifth column: *Don't die.*

It looked optimistic. He left it anyway.

He added a sixth: *Trust no one until verified.*

Under it he wrote: Sarah Chen—pending. Mystery caller—pending. Himself—historically bad track record.

Then he started building tools—a probe to ping Marcus without waking the whole Ghost Net, a scraper to grab proof if he got ten seconds inside the grid, a dead man's switch that would dump everything to every news mirror he knew if his heartbeat stopped for more than thirty seconds.

Paranoia as product design.

Marcus would've laughed at the dead man's switch. Zero built it anyway.

As the echoes of the Ghost Net faded, one voice remained—clear and desperate, cutting through the silence like a blade through marketing copy.

*Help me.*

Zero closed his eyes.

And began to plan.

Because if the Ghost Net wanted a savior, it had picked the wrong medium.

But it had picked the right asshole.

And assholes, historically, were harder to kill than heroes—mostly because they saw traps coming and called them *Tuesday*.

Zero opened his eyes.

The city waited outside, neon and rain and lies stacked ten kilometers high.

Marcus waited inside the lies.

Zero cracked his knuckles one last time and got to work.

The clock on the wall said 0412.

Dawn was coming.

So was war.

And Zero had always been better at war than at sleep.

He opened the first tool file and started coding like his life depended on it.

Because somewhere in the stack, Marcus's did too.