Shadows in the Code
The rain fell in sheets, slicking the neon-lit streets of Sector 17. Towering advertisements flickered overhead, projecting faces and products onto the damp pavement below. Detective Reese sat slumped in the corner booth of a dim noodle joint, the green glow of his portable terminal casting sharp lines across his weathered face. He wasn’t after noodles. He was hunting ghosts in the machine.
Reese was a Blade Runner, but his prey wasn’t Replicants—not anymore. The Tyrell Corporation had been dismantled, and the newer Nexus models were supposedly indistinguishable from humans. Too indistinguishable. That’s when nMap came into play.
Officially, nMap—Neural Mapper—was illegal for use on humans. It was a scanning tool meant for “network diagnostics,” according to its corporate creators. But Reese knew better. In the right hands, nMap could map the neural patterns of a brain as easily as it mapped the open ports of a server. It didn’t just see if someone was a Replicant. It could find the subroutines hiding in human consciousness: black-market augments, suppressed memories, even signs of reprogramming. And it worked fast.
Tonight, Reese was chasing a rumor: a new kind of synthetic—one with a neural signature so faint it danced beneath detection. They called them Specters. No serial numbers. No corporate branding. Purely off-the-grid.
“Another one, Reese?” asked the noodle joint’s cook, a grizzled man with cybernetic eyes that whirred softly as he cleaned a counter.
“No,” Reese muttered, tapping his terminal. A readout scrolled across the screen: IP detected: Neural implant interface. Starting scan…
He was scanning the cook. Standard protocol these days, especially in the undercity. The scan came back clean. No Replicant flags. No augmentations beyond his obvious enhancements. Reese gave a subtle nod and turned back to his terminal.
The door hissed open, letting in a blast of cold rain and the smell of ozone. A woman stepped inside, her silhouette framed in a halo of neon. She was dressed in a sleek trench coat, her eyes obscured by dark glasses that glinted with embedded LEDs.
Reese’s instincts flared. He glanced at his terminal, keyed in a quick command, and targeted her neural signature. IP detected. Scanning ports…
The readout was almost immediate: Port 8080: Open. Service detected: Neural Relay. Port 22: Closed. Encryption level: High.
She wasn’t just augmented. She was running custom firmware.
The woman’s head tilted slightly, and Reese froze. She had detected the scan.
“Rude,” she said, her voice smooth as polished steel. She stepped closer, and Reese’s hand instinctively moved to the stun pistol at his hip. But she raised a single finger, wagging it like a parent scolding a child.
“Detective Reese,” she continued. “I was wondering when you’d come sniffing around.”
“Name’s not on the registry,” he replied, keeping his tone steady. “Makes you a Specter. That’s my jurisdiction.”
She chuckled, the sound soft but unnervingly hollow. “Specter. Is that what they’re calling us now? Cute. But you’ve got it wrong, Detective. I’m no Replicant. I’m just…optimized.”
Reese hit another command. Aggressive scan initiated.
The readout stuttered, then spewed out garbled text. Something was wrong. She was feeding false data back into his system.
“Nice try,” she said, stepping closer. “But your nMap toy doesn’t work on me.”
“How?” Reese demanded, standing now, his pulse racing.
“Because I’m not a system, Detective. Not entirely. You ever think that maybe the line between human and machine isn’t as clean as you want it to be? That maybe the ghosts you’re chasing are just shadows of yourselves?”
The lights in the noodle joint flickered. Reese’s terminal beeped wildly, showing new data: Scan detected: Your system is being probed.
“What the hell—” He tried to shut it down, but the screen froze. She had turned the scan back on him. Neural intrusion warnings flashed in his vision as his own implants screamed with alarms.
“Funny thing about hunting ghosts,” she said, stepping back toward the door. “Sometimes, you end up haunting yourself.”
The rain swallowed her as the door hissed shut, leaving Reese alone with his locked terminal and a sense of dread he hadn’t felt in years. His hand trembled as he powered down the device, his mind racing with the implication of her words.
There were no clear lines anymore. No way to tell who was a Specter, who was a human, and who was something in between. And for the first time in his career, Reese wasn’t sure he wanted to find out.
The neon hummed above him, casting its cold light on a world that no longer made sense.
illphated