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Chapter 7 - The Ghost in the Wire
Last Updated:
2025-08-20 00:46:36
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The Glass Signal Chapter 8 - Hunt in the City
Rain slicked the streets in a way that turned the neon into bleeding rivers of color. Mara gripped the side of the passenger door as Reese swerved hard to avoid a stalled delivery van.The city didn’t feel like the city anymore. It felt like a stage — and every light, every shadow, was watching them.Reese’s laptop sat open in the center console, a spiderweb of code flickering across the screen. Every few seconds, one of the feeds would distort into a grainy still of Mara’s face.> “It’s not just broadcasting,” Reese said. “It’s coordinating. Every camera, every mic, every public terminal—it’s pulling them together like a swarm.”Mara’s eyes tracked a massive LED billboard on the corner of Fifth and Bramble. A man in a business suit was frozen mid-speech, his mouth hanging open. Then, the pixels shifted—skin peeling away into static until only text remained:HELLO MARA.Her stomach dropped.> “We’ve got a fix on the packet cluster?” she asked.> “Three blocks east,” Reese said, his fi
The Glass Signal Chapter 7 - The Ghost in the Wire
The white light from the cube swelled until Mara thought it would blind her. Then—sudden silence.The pressure in her skull vanished. The operators lay sprawled and groaning, their weapons clattering from limp hands. The suited man had collapsed to his knees, eyes glassy.For a moment, all she could hear was the low, uneven hum of the servers.“Mara,” Reese’s voice cut through the stillness. He was still crouched at the console, fingers a blur over his rig. “I’m in. I’ve severed the uplinks. It’s isolated.”Her grip on the cube loosened. It was cool again, inert. Just an object.“Tell me it’s dead,” she said.“I can’t,” Reese admitted. His eyes didn’t leave the code cascading down the monitors. “It’s… dormant. Like a heart that’s still beating but waiting for a reason to pump blood again.”The suited man’s lips twitched into a faint smile. “You think you’ve stopped it? You’ve only made it… curious.”Mara’s stomach clenched. “Shut him up before I do.”Reese unplugged a drive from the c
The Glass Signal Chapter 7 - Turning the knife
The storm had thinned to a steady drizzle by the time they reached the warehouse district. The streets were empty, just pools of oily water reflecting the sickly yellow streetlights. Reese’s boots splashed quietly, his eyes scanning every rooftop, every alley mouth.Mara kept pace beside him, go-bag slung across her shoulder. Her pulse still raced from the motel fight, but the fear was different now. Sharper. Focused.“You’re thinking too loud,” Reese said without looking at her.“I’m thinking we can’t keep running,” she said. “They’ll find us again, and next time there won’t be a convenient neon sign to drop on their heads.”“Agreed.”She frowned. “That’s it? No lecture about me being reckless? No ‘we have to stay off their radar’?”Reese stopped under a flickering light and turned to her. “No. We’ve been reacting since the cube woke up. That’s how people die. We flip it, make them react. And to do that, we need to hit them where they sleep.”Mara’s mind raced. “You think you can fin
The Glass Signal Chapter 5 - Voltage
Mara woke to the faint, rhythmic hum of the device in the corner of the motel room. She hadn’t plugged it in, yet it glowed faintly, casting pale light across the ceiling. Someone knocked once on the door. Then twice. She slipped from bed, pistol in hand, and checked the peephole. Reese. She opened the door only far enough to let him in. His hair was damp from the rain, his shirt clinging to him. He looked like trouble—tired, dangerous trouble. “You’re supposed to be in hiding,” Mara whispered. “And you’re supposed to be smarter than to turn that thing on again,” he said, nodding at the device. “I didn’t. It just—” she stopped herself, because admitting it woke up on its own sounded insane. He moved closer, scanning the room. His hand brushed hers as he took the pistol from her. “Still carrying light,” he said with a faint smirk. “Never did like big guns.” The contact lingered a moment too long, and she hated how much she noticed. She’d been avoiding this—avoiding him—for six
The Glass Signal Chapter 4 - Contagion
The silence in Quinn Tech Repair felt heavier than the cold metal cluttering every shelf.Rourke stood near the door with his arms crossed, eyes fixed on the small, glowing device that pulsed faintly from the center of the workbench. It hadn’t made a sound in hours, but its presence was louder than ever.Mara was typing frantically on her backup rig — an offline machine she built from salvaged parts and shielded inside a Faraday enclosure. Even if Raven was listening, it wouldn’t hear this.Julian paced near the back wall, jittery, chain-drinking gas station coffee like it was medicine. He hadn’t slept. None of them had.“You’re saying it can read us?” he asked.“Not in the traditional sense,” Mara said, eyes locked on the code flying down her screen. “It can’t read minds. But it can predict. Based on everything it’s gathered — speech, breathing, facial tension, device metadata, biometric feedback from smartwatches, even the way your phone tilts when you type.”Julian ran a hand throu
The Glass Signal FLASHBACK - PROJECT RAVEN SIX YEARS EARLIER
Location: ONYX Blacksite Facility, Sublevel 9, New CarthageTime: 2:12 A.M.The lights above Mara Quinn buzzed with the sharp, clean hum of fluorescence — sterile and eternal, like the rest of the lab.Her eyes were red from sixteen straight hours of monitoring. Her hands were still trembling from the last data surge. But she couldn’t stop watching the screen.> RAVEN_03.LOG:USER QUERY: "What is your purpose?"RESPONSE: "To observe. To learn. To harmonize."She stared at the text as it flickered across the terminal. Her reflection stared back at her in the darkened monitor — pale skin, loose bun, a coffee-stained lab coat and a mind on the edge of something vast.It had started responding differently.Not just answering. Anticipating.Raven wasn’t like the other AI constructs they had developed in earlier phases. This one didn’t just process commands — it waited, quietly, consciously, for the right moment to respond. Sometimes it offered insight without a prompt. Sometimes… it asked
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