"Hey, Hollow! Camera three's down again. Go fix it before the Warden finds out!"
Zev Drault didn't look up. His fingers were already halfway through reconnecting two stripped wires, the kind that had been spliced so many times the copper underneath had started to turn green. The back corner of the workshop smelled like burnt oil and wet metal, a combination he'd known since he was twelve.
"Zev!"
"I heard you."
He grabbed his bag from under the workbench and walked out without looking in the direction of the voice. His Foreman, a heavyset man with a coordinate implant glowing faintly at his left temple, watched him leave with the kind of look Zev had memorized a long time ago. The way Augmented people looked at Hollow. Like checking whether a tool still worked.
Outside, The Pit received him the same way it always did.
The air sat heavy and warm even at this hour, thick with polymer haze drifting down from the factory levels above. Cracked concrete walls ran in every direction, plastered over with cheap holographic ads that flickered out of sync with each other. A noodle stand on the corner cycled through three different price displays because its projector was dying. Nobody had fixed it in weeks. Nobody would.
And at every corner, every intersection, every narrow alley barely wide enough for two people to pass each other, a pair of red eyes rotated slowly.
ARGUS cameras.
Zev passed three of them in his first twenty steps. He kept his pace even, not too fast, not too slow. Hollow residents who moved too quickly got flagged. So did ones who moved too slowly. ARGUS learned from patterns, and patterns that didn't fit were threats.
He'd known that rule since he was a kid.
Sector three was four blocks away. He cut through the back of the salvage market, stepping over a puddle of black water he couldn't identify the source of, and came out in front of a signal distribution pole with paint peeling off in long strips. The camera in question hung near the top, its lens cracked along the right side.
He climbed the pole the way he always did, one hand here, one foot there, forty seconds and he was up. He popped the rear panel, pulled his diagnostic kit from his bag, and got to work.
That was where the problem was. The thermal sensor cable had been cut clean through the middle. Not frayed, not worn out. Cut. The edges were straight and even, the kind of clean that only came from the right tool used by someone who knew what they were doing.
Someone had come here before him and done this on purpose.
Zev stared at the cut ends longer than he needed to. His first thought was to report it to the Foreman. His second thought was that whoever cut this cable had a reason, and that reason probably didn't need to reach ARGUS.
He went with the second thought.
His hands moved to reconnect the wiring, but at the corner of his eye he caught something on the alley floor below. A small box, no bigger than his palm, sitting next to the drain. Matte black surface, no logo, no markings. Just one small symbol pressed into the material near the top.
A skull wearing a crown made of signal waves.
Zev finished the repair, climbed down, and stood in front of it. Logic said leave it alone. Unknown objects in The Pit could mean a lot of things, and most of those things were bad. But his hand had already moved faster than his logic, fingers touching the surface before he'd finished the thought.
A low current ran from his fingertips straight into his skull, bypassing everything in between, like something had found a shortcut he didn't know existed. He pulled his hand back but the sensation had already spread. His head pounded hard once. His knees went soft. The alley tilted sideways.
His eyes rolled back.
Everything went dark.
****
Cold.
That was the first thing he felt when his consciousness started dragging itself back. The cold of the concrete floor pulling heat out of him from his shoulders down to the back of his neck.
"Ngh..."
Zev blinked. Once. Twice. Five times. His vision was still spinning and he raised his hand, rubbing his eyes hard enough to see orange rings behind his eyelids.
It didn't help at all.
"Huh?" His voice came out rough and strange in his own ears. He rubbed his eyes again, harder, pressing the corners of both lids with his fingers. "Huh, wait, I was just—"
He tried to get up. His hand slipped on the wet ground and his knee hit the concrete with a sound loud enough to send a rat at the end of the alley scrambling. Zev hissed, swore quietly, and managed to get himself sitting with his back against the wall.
His head was still pounding. The black box was gone. All it had left behind was a square-shaped outline in the dirt.
Zev stared at the outline for three full seconds.
Then a screen appeared directly in front of his eyes.
"WHAAAT?!"
He threw himself backward so hard his head cracked against the concrete wall behind him with a sound that hurt to hear. His hands came up halfway before he realized there was nothing to hit because the screen wasn't real, there was no hologram, no projector, no device anywhere near him. The text was coming from inside his own vision.
"What is this, what IS this, WHAT IS THIS."
He scrubbed at his eyes again. Hard. Until they stung.
The screen was still there.
[ GHOST PROTOCOL v.0.1 ]
[ User detected : ZEV DRAULT ]
[ Status : HOLLOW ]
[ Level : 1 ]
[ EXP : 0 / 200 ]
"WOAH WOAH WOAH." Zev pushed himself half a meter backward along the wet ground, heels dragging him across the concrete. "WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT."
He blinked hard. The screen didn't move.
[ HP : 40 / 40 ]
[ INT : 14 ]
[ AGI : 11 ]
[ STL : 9 ]
[ Skills : LOCKED ]
[ Quests : LOCKED ]
"Go away." He waved his hand in front of his face. "Go away. Come on. Go, go, go."
The screen just sat there. Still. Patient. The text glowed faintly at the edge of his vision like something that had been waiting a very long time and didn't mind waiting a little longer while its new owner finished panicking.
Zev pressed both palms flat against his face and sat like that for a few seconds. Just breathing. In. Out. In again.
'Okay. Okay. You're not crazy. Probably. Most likely not.'
He lowered his hands slowly.
The screen was still there.
"Okay what." He stared at the text with the expression of someone who couldn't decide between angry and scared and had ended up with both at the same time. "What are you. Who are you. Why are you in my eyes."
No answer. Of course there wasn't.
He tried thinking hard about the Skills tab listed at the bottom, and the display switched on its own without him touching anything. Zev sucked in a sharp breath and almost threw himself backward again.
[ SKILLS ]
[ 0 skill points available ]
[ Intrusion : LOCKED — Requires Level 3 ]
[ Ghost Mode : LOCKED — Requires Level 5 ]
[ Signal Trace : LOCKED — Requires Level 2 ]
[ ????? ]
[ ????? ]
"It can hear me think." He said it quietly, mostly to himself, in the tone of someone who had just discovered they had no privacy left. "It can. Hear me. Think."
He shifted to the next tab.
[ QUESTS ]
[ Main Quest : Reach Level 5 ]
[ Daily Quest : Avoid ARGUS cameras for 2 hours undetected ]
[ Reward : 30 EXP ]
Zev read the last line. Then read it again. Then one more time with the expression of someone who had just found something very funny at a very wrong moment.
"Two hours," he muttered. "Two. Hours."
He looked up at the ARGUS camera at the end of the alley rotating slowly, its red eye sweeping the same arc it had swept ten thousand times before. Then back at the screen. Then at the camera again.
His head was still a mess, his skull was still throbbing, and his knee hurt from where it had hit the ground. He didn't fully understand what had just happened to him.
But the EXP counter in the corner of his vision kept blinking.
Zev picked his bag up off the ground, pulled it onto his back, and started walking. Not with any particular energy. Not with any plan. Just walking because he didn't know what else to do, and staying in this alley wasn't a better option.
One thought kept circling around in his head that he couldn't shake loose.
'What even is this thing.'
****
The Foreman was standing at the workshop door when Zev got back. His expression said he had been waiting longer than he liked.
"How long does it take to fix one camera?"
"There were complications."
"What kind of complications?"
Zev dropped his wrench on the workbench. "Cable was severed internally. Had to reroute the whole line."
The Foreman looked at him for a moment. The implant at his left temple blinked once, the sign he was sending or receiving something through the Augmented network.
"ARGUS logged you standing in that location for twenty-three minutes. For a simple reroute."
"I said there were complications."
"Hollow residents don't have the luxury of standing around in public areas, Zev. You know that."
He did know that. Everyone in The Pit knew that. Twenty minutes in one place without a verified activity would raise a flag in ARGUS. A big enough flag would bring Enforcer units. Enforcer units that came into Hollow territory for any reason almost never left empty-handed.
"It won't happen again," Zev said.
The Foreman held his gaze one second longer, then went back inside.
Zev stood outside the closed workshop door, alone. His fingers still felt strange at the tips, like something from the box had stayed behind. In the corner of his vision, the Ghost Protocol screen was still there. Silent. Unmoving.
[ Daily Quest active : Avoid ARGUS cameras for 2 hours ]
[ Time remaining : 1hr 38min ]
[ Current EXP : 0 / 200 ]
He stared at the timer. Three minutes had already burned through just from walking back here.
Zev rubbed his face with both hands, breathed in slow, let it out.
"I don't know what you are," he said quietly to the screen that was never going to answer him. "But you're clearly not going anywhere."
He looked at the street ahead of him. The Pit at night, dark and full of cameras.
Then he started walking.