The government had ghosts of its own.
Encrypted archives. Black site dossiers. Silenced dissidents. They weren't just erasing people from the streets—they were scrubbing them from history. But even shadows leave traces, and she was getting good at spotting them.
Kirion's daughter sat in the dim glow of her rig, the whir of processors like distant whispers. Onscreen: lines of code scrolled by like a living thing. Somewhere buried in that code, she believed, was a truth they didn't want the world to see.
She'd followed a trail—obscure funding logs, obfuscated IP routes, a few intercepted messages flagged "classified: intel risk"—to a hidden node in the capital's defense grid.
She decrypted it in layers.
At first, it seemed like nothing. Just procedural chatter.
Then came the phrase that stopped her: "Project Umbral."
She paused, typed rapidly. Cross-referenced tags, metadata, encryption time stamps. What unfolded made her stomach twist.
Project Umbral was a network—a coordinated digital surveillance and suppression system. Not just cameras or drones. It was psychological profiling, AI-driven suspicion scores, preemptive detention algorithms. It wasn't surveillance.
It was pre-crime.
They weren't watching rebels. They were predicting them—and erasing them before they ever picked up a sign or shouted a chant.
She blinked, breathing shallow. For the first time, the war felt bigger than barricades and protests. This was neural warfare—manipulating fear itself.
She saved the data. Copied it across three separate dead-drop servers. Then she encrypted a file for Kirion with a simple title:
"They Know Before We Act."
She stepped outside, into the cold. The city lights blinked like eyes in the dark.
Behind her, her laptop continued to hum, the only light in the abandoned room flickering on a truth that could burn the regime to the ground.
And she was going to make sure it did.