The ghost of the first System was not a place. It was a state of digital decay. A 'graveyard of code', as Vexia called it. It was the corrupted, fragmented, and abandoned source code of the Administrator's original, flawed creation, and it existed in the deep, dark, and forgotten margins of the multiverse.
To travel there was not a matter of ships or portals. It was a matter of… hacking.
Leo, the brilliant narrative engineer, became the architect of the mission. He would not be sending their bodies. He would be sending their consciousness. He would digitize the minds of a small, elite team and send them into the dead System as avatars of pure data.
"It is the most dangerous journey imaginable," he explained to the council. "The code there is unstable, insane. It is a digital hell of broken loops, corrupted data, and forgotten, angry subroutines. If your avatar is deleted there, your mind, your very consciousness, could be… lost. Permanently."
