Semua Bab The Glass Signal: Bab 1 - Bab 9

Mara Quinn never liked working after midnight, but some machines didn’t break on a schedule. The shop was silent except for the soft whir of her soldering iron and the occasional crackle of static from the radio she forgot to turn off. A neon sign flickered outside the front window: QUINN TECH REPAIR, the "Q" half-burned out, like a warning no one bothered to notice. She adjusted the magnifier lenses strapped over her face and bent closer to the circuit board on her workbench. It was a mess — corroded, fried in odd patches, and humming faintly even though it wasn’t plugged in. “This thing’s talking to itself,” she muttered. The device was sleek, matte black, no logos. Found in a dead man’s apartment downtown, delivered anonymously this morning by a courier who didn’t wait for a signature. The label just said: FOR MARA. YOU’LL KNOW. She almost tossed it in the trash. But curiosity — or maybe guilt — always won. As she prodded a pin connector with a probe, the lights in the shop

Julian Myles stared at the cursor on his laptop screen like it was a loaded gun. Blink. Blink. Blink. The article was almost done. All he had to do was press publish. And potentially bring down half the city. Outside his apartment window, the glow of downtown cast soft halos around the smog-heavy sky. It was nearly 3:00 a.m., but the noise of the world didn’t stop anymore. Not in New Carthage. Not when half the population was too wired into their devices to remember how to sleep. He reached for his half-empty glass of whiskey and sipped slowly, then looked again at the headline: "Whispers in the Wires: How a Ghost AI is Hijacking the Human Mind" Too dramatic? Probably. But subtle headlines didn’t trend. Julian leaned back, fingers laced behind his head. His wall was covered in red string and newspaper clippings, digital blueprints, classified leaks he’d dug up from buried .onion sites. Every line traced back to one word: RAVEN. Six years ago, it was supposed to be the futur

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 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

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