Chapter 13: Echoes in the Core
**[Alex Stone's Apartment, Aethelburg - 1:13 AM]**
The door to his apartment clicked shut behind him, the deadbolt sliding home with a finality that echoed through his bones.
He leaned against the wood like a man who'd just outrun his own death, every muscle screaming protests that his adrenaline-soaked brain was only now starting to hear.
The wound in his side felt like someone had shoved a red-hot poker between his ribs and given it a twist for good measure.
He slid down the door until his ass hit the cold hardwood, the backpack beside him heavy with impossible weight. Not just the physical mass of stolen technology, but the crushing responsibility of what it represented.
It was done. He was out. He was breathing.
For now.
The silence of his apartment wrapped around him like a burial shroud, but it felt different tonight. It wasn't the empty quiet of a man with nowhere to go and nothing to do.
It was pregnant with possibility. Electric with danger.
Filled with the presence of the thing pulsing softly in his bag.
He forced himself upright, joints creaking like a man twice his age. The heist had taken more out of him than he wanted to admit—not just physically, but mentally. Every shadow in Deckard Industries could have hidden a guard, every corridor could have been his last.
But he'd made it. And he had the prize.
He did his usual security sweep, checking the pressure sensors on the windows, the motion detector covering the main room, the tiny camera feeds from the hallway. Everything quiet. Everything normal.
Just another night in the life of a suspended cop who'd turned to burglary to solve murders.
Christ, when had his life become a bad noir novel?
He returned to the living room and set the backpack on his coffee table like it was made of plutonium and bad intentions.
The zipper sounded unnaturally loud in the quiet apartment.
Inside, wrapped in its anti-static cocoon, the crystal core pulsed with that hypnotic blue light that made his eyes water if he stared too long.
He lifted it out with the reverence of a priest handling a holy relic—or a bomb tech defusing his first nuke.
**[Alex Stone's Apartment, Aethelburg - 1:47 AM]**
The crystal was even more beautiful up close, and that beauty scared the hell out of him.
It was roughly the size of a human heart, which felt like the universe having a particularly dark sense of humor. The surface was smooth as glass, warm to the touch even through his gloves, like it was generating its own heat.
The light inside didn't just pulse—it breathed. Slow, rhythmic, hypnotic. Like watching someone sleep, except this someone was made of crystallized lightning and digital dreams.
A sound came from it, so low he felt it more in his chest than heard it with his ears. A subsonic hum that made his teeth ache and his vision blur around the edges.
This was the evidence that could bring down Elias Deckard.
This was the secret Albin Croft had died protecting.
This was also, quite possibly, the most dangerous object he'd ever held in his hands.
And he had to crack it open like a walnut if he wanted the truth inside.
He spent the next hour turning his coffee table into a makeshift electronics lab, pulling out diagnostic tools he'd "borrowed" from the precinct back when he still had a badge.
Interface cables, voltage meters, signal analyzers—everything he needed to sweet-talk this thing into giving up its secrets.
His plan was elegantly simple: establish a connection, bypass whatever security protocols the core had, and download everything it knew about Albin Croft's death.
It was what he did best. What CrimeSync had made him supernaturally good at.
He held the interface connector in his right hand, the crystal in his left, feeling that weird thrumming energy like holding a caged lightning bolt.
One deep breath to steady his nerves.
And he plugged the cable into a port so small he almost missed it, hidden in the crystal's base like a secret whispered in a dead language.
**[Alex Stone's Apartment, Aethelburg - 2:43 AM]**
The reaction was not what he expected.
It was instantaneous. It was violent. It was like punching God in the face and discovering he hits back.
The moment the connection engaged, the crystal's gentle blue glow exploded into a supernova of white-hot fury that burned afterimages into his retinas.
The subsonic hum became a shriek that bypassed his ears entirely and went straight for his brain, a sonic drill boring through his consciousness.
Every light bulb in his apartment detonated simultaneously, showering the room with sparks and glass. His laptop screen filled with cascading symbols that looked like no human language ever created, geometric patterns that hurt to look at, before the whole machine sparked and died with a smell like burning souls.
But that was just the opening act.
The real show started when the psychic sledgehammer hit him.
It wasn't sound or light or any sensory experience his brain knew how to process. It was raw information weaponized, a digital scream of pure, defensive intelligence that felt like being struck by lightning made of binary code.
*[CrimeSync Alert: Hostile counter-intrusion detected! Unknown hardware actively attacking neural interface!]*
*[System firewalls compromised! Foreign code attempting unauthorized access to cognitive networks!]*
*[EMERGENCY PROTOCOL ENGAGED. FORCING DISCONNECTION.]*
The link between his enhanced mind and the fried laptop shattered like glass, but the backlash from the crystal was a physical force that picked him up and threw him backward.
His chair toppled. His body hit the floor hard enough to rattle his teeth. His skull bounced off the hardwood with a crack that might have been bone or might have been the sound of his world breaking apart.
For a fraction of a second, as consciousness flickered like a dying bulb, something else happened.
A new connection formed. Not through the cable he'd tried to use.
Direct. Mind to machine. Flesh to digital spirit.
The world dissolved like sugar in acid.
**[Unknown Location - Memory Fragment - Time Stamp Corrupted]**
He was no longer Alex Stone.
He was no longer in his apartment.
He was in a laboratory that smelled of ozone and desperation, looking down at hands that were ancient and spotted with liver marks, trembling with age and terror.
Albin Croft's hands.
Albin Croft's eyes.
Albin Croft's last moments, playing out in his mind like a movie written in blood and regret.
The lab was sterile white and chrome, filled with equipment that hummed with barely contained power. In the center sat a device that made his borrowed heart skip—rings of metal spinning around a crystal core, the whole assembly crackling with electric potential.
The Chronos Device. The machine that could stop time itself.
Or stop a human heart with surgical precision.
Footsteps echoed from the shadows, measured and confident. A figure emerged from the darkness—tall, expensively dressed, with the kind of cold eyes that belonged in a shark or a sociopath.
Elias Deckard, corporate titan and cold-blooded killer.
He didn't speak out loud, but his voice filled the borrowed consciousness like poison filling a well:
*It's over, old man. Give me the activation codes.*
Terror flooded through him—not his own fear, but the echo of a dead man's final emotions. He tried to speak, tried to scream, but could only watch as Albin's mouth moved:
"Never. You don't understand what it does. What it could do in the wrong hands."
Deckard's smile was the expression a spider might wear while watching a fly struggle in its web.
*I understand perfectly. Time is just another resource to be monetized. Your sentimental attachment to ethics is touching, but irrelevant.*
The device on the table began to spin faster, its rings blurring with speed. The crystal at its heart pulsed with malevolent blue fire.
Deckard raised something that looked like a remote control but felt like a loaded gun. His thumb hovered over a single red button.
*Last chance, Professor. The codes, or I demonstrate why they call this thing the heart-stopper.*
Through Albin's eyes, Alex watched the old man's reflection in the polished chrome of his creation. Saw the defiance there, mixed with acceptance and a kind of peace that came with knowing you were about to die for something that mattered.
"Go to hell."
Deckard's thumb pressed down.
The Chronos Device screamed to life, its crystal heart pulsing with synchronized fire. Alex felt the electromagnetic pulse hit like a physical blow, felt Albin's heart stutter and skip as the precisely tuned frequency disrupted the electrical impulses that kept the muscle beating.
The laboratory filled with brilliant blue light that burned everything to white-hot nothing.
Crushing pressure in the chest. The taste of copper and ozone.
And then... silence. Perfect, eternal silence.
**[Alex Stone's Apartment, Aethelburg - 2:44 AM]**
Alex gasped back to consciousness like a drowning man breaking the surface, his lungs burning as if he'd been holding his breath for hours instead of seconds.
He was lying on his back in the wreckage of his living room, surrounded by dead electronics and broken glass. The air reeked of burnt circuits and something else—something that smelled like fear and death.
The crystal sat on his coffee table, innocent as a nightlight, pulsing with gentle blue radiance as if it hadn't just nearly lobotomized him.
His head felt like someone had used it for batting practice with a sledgehammer. When he touched his scalp, his fingers came away sticky with blood.
But the pain was nothing compared to the knowledge burning in his brain.
He had witnessed a murder. Not just seen evidence of it, not just deduced it from clues and data.
He had lived it. Felt it. Died it.
Through the victim's own eyes, he had watched Elias Deckard commit the perfect crime.
The crystal wasn't just a data storage device. It was a memory bank, a digital soul that had somehow absorbed Albin Croft's final moments and preserved them like insects in amber.
And now that knowledge was his burden to bear.
**[Alex Stone's Apartment, Aethelburg - 3:17 AM]**
He sat in his ruined living room, back against the couch, staring at the crystal that had just rewritten his understanding of what was possible.
This wasn't just advanced technology. This was something that crossed the line between science and magic, between the digital and the spiritual.
The core had defenses that weren't just programmed—they were instinctual. It had fought him like a living thing protecting its young.
His skills, enhanced by CrimeSync though they were, weren't enough. He couldn't brute-force his way past something that could think and adapt and fight back.
He needed help. Specialist help.
Someone who didn't just understand technology, but who could speak to it as an equal.
He pulled out his emergency laptop from a hidden compartment in his desk—an ancient, military-grade brick that ran on an operating system older than most college students. No wireless capability, no fancy graphics, just raw computing power wrapped in armor plating.
He powered it up and accessed his most sensitive files. His private collection of information on the world's most dangerous digital ghosts.
The list was short but infamous. Hackers who could crash stock markets for fun, data miners who could resurrect deleted files from the quantum foam, information brokers who traded in secrets that didn't officially exist.
At the bottom of the list, in a category all her own, was a single name:
**NYX**
Below it, a catalog of impossibilities:
- Crashed the Aethelburg Stock Exchange for exactly 3 minutes and 17 seconds, stealing $2.7 billion in the confusion, then donated it all to children's charities. No traces left behind.
- Exposed Senator Morrison's offshore accounts by leaking documents from a server that computer forensics insisted had never existed.
- Hacked the Pentagon's most secure database using what appeared to be a child's calculator and a prayer.
Some said she wasn't human. Some said she was an AI that had achieved consciousness and decided to play pranks on the world. Others claimed she was a collective, a hive mind of elite hackers operating under a single identity.
Alex knew better. He'd studied her work, analyzed her patterns, seen the signature touches that could only come from a single, brilliant, utterly insane mind.
She was real. She was out there somewhere in the digital wilderness.
And she was the only person on Earth who might be able to communicate with the crystal heart sitting on his coffee table.
The problem was finding her.
You didn't contact Nyx. Nyx contacted you, usually when you'd done something interesting enough to catch her attention or stupid enough to piss her off.
Alex looked at the pulsing crystal, then at the name glowing on his screen.
He had the bait—a quasi-sentient data core that contained memories of murder and secrets that could topple governments.
Now he had to figure out how to summon a digital goddess from the machine.
Time to get creative.
Time to make some noise.
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**DETECTIVE'S LOG: ALEX STONE**
**CASE FILE: 002 - The Clockmaker (Unofficial)**
**STATUS:** Direct interface with Chronos Device core failed catastrophically. Core possesses active defensive protocols and quasi-sentient properties.
**KEY EVIDENCE (CRIMESYNC DATA):**
* Memory Extraction: Witnessed Albin Croft's murder through embedded consciousness fragment. Elias Deckard confirmed as perpetrator using Chronos Device as weapon.
* Core Assessment: Device contains artificial intelligence component. Cannot be accessed through conventional means or CrimeSync enhancement.
* Technical Limitation: Current skill set insufficient for this level of digital archaeology. Specialist consultation required.
**CURRENT OBJECTIVE:** Establish contact with digital entity "Nyx" for assistance accessing core data. Prepare for unconventional recruitment methods.
**End of Chapter 13**
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*"Sometimes the only way to catch a ghost is to become one yourself."*
**To be continued...**