Prologue: SHA-256 Hash

There were no stars in Dome City.

Only the pulse of neon—sickly, insistent—beating through the smog like a dying heart. The rain, if you could call it that, fell in gauzy sheets of synthetic mist, each droplet laden with the Overseer’s promises. Purified air. Regulated climate. Compliance ensures harmony. The lies pooled in the gutters, shimmering with the rainbow sheen of chemical runoff.

A girl crouched in the shadows of a forgotten arcade, its flickering sign spelling out NOSTALGIA in fractured holograms. She was small, though not young. Hunger and suspicion had carved her into something sharp. Her name, if it mattered, was Lin, but names were currency here, and she’d traded hers long ago. She pressed a palm to the arcade’s cracked window, feeling the hum of dead machines through the glass.

“Some truths are too heavy for the light, Mei-Mei.”

Her father’s voice, always her father’s voice, threading through her thoughts like a ghost in the wiring. She couldn’t remember his face anymore, only the smell of solder and jasmine tea, the way his hands trembled as he showed her how to rewire a surveillance drone. “See? They watch us, but we can watch them back.”

The arcade’s door creaked. Lin froze.

A figure stood silhouetted against the neon bleed of the street—a man in a trench coat too heavy for the cloying humidity. His face was hidden beneath a hat’s brim, but she knew his gait. The slight limp, the way his left shoulder dipped as if weighed down by secrets.

A Broker.

He didn’t speak. Instead, he tossed a holochip at her feet. It glowed faintly, a tiny ember in the gloom.

“Burn it,” he said, his voice a rasp of static. “Or don’t. But you’ll want to see.”

Then he was gone, swallowed by the mist.

Lin stared at the chip. It throbbed in her hand, warm and alive.

Nonce 0x1A3F

She is six, maybe seven. The air tastes of copper and burnt sugar. Her father’s workshop is a nest of wires and half-dismantled drones, the walls papered with blueprints she isn’t allowed to touch. He’s humming—a song from Before, he calls it, though he never says before what. A newsfeed flickers on a cracked screen: the Overseer, faceless and golden-voiced, extolling the virtues of the new filtration systems. “A brighter future,” it says. “A safer tomorrow.”

Her father snorts. “Safety’s just another cage, Mei-Mei.”

He opens a panel in the floor. Beneath it: a transmitter, its guts spilling out. “This is how we fight,” he says, handing her a screwdriver. “Not with guns. With truth.”

She doesn’t understand, but she takes the tool. The metal is cold.

The holochip’s data unspooled in her mind—not through a screen, but directly into her neural jack. A flaw in the system, a backdoor left ajar.

“Project Chimera,” whispered a voice that wasn’t a voice. *“Phase IV: Cognitive Alignment.”

Images flickered: bodies suspended in gel-filled tanks, their skulls cracked open to cradle sleek metal nodes. Surgeons in mirrored masks stitching circuitry into muscle. A child—strapped to a chair, electrodes mapping the fear in her synapses.

“Compliance is not obedience,” intoned the Overseer. “It is evolution.”

Lin ripped the chip free. Her hands shook.

The arcade’s walls seemed to breathe, closing in. Neon letters spat and fizzed. NOSTALGIA. NOSTALGIA. NOSTALGIA.

She fled.

AES-256 Encryption

She is twelve. The drones come at dusk.

They tear through the market like steel hawks, their spotlights carving the crowd into pieces. Someone screams. Her father shoves her into a drainage pipe, his eyes wild. “Stay hidden. No matter what.”

She watches through the grate as they take him. His glasses shatter under a boot. The drones hum as they lift him into the smog, his shadow dissolving like ink in water.

Later, she finds the transmitter. It’s still warm.

The Glitch District welcomed her with its usual chorus: the static hiss of illegal broadcasts, the clatter of scavengers picking through last week’s riots. Lin kept to the rooftops, where the mist thinned, and the Overseer’s eyes struggled to focus. Below, the city sprawled—a circuit board of flickering light and decaying steel.

She paused at the edge of a fire escape. Graffiti marked the wall: a phoenix, half-scrubbed away, its wings frayed into tendrils of code. Someone had written beneath it: THEY LIE.

The holochip burned in her pocket.

“Burn it,” the Broker had said.

But how could one burn something when all they were given was ashes?

Salt 0xDEADCODE

She is fifteen. The Whisper Network finds her.

A woman with an eerie cybernetic eye presses a knife to her throat. “Your father’s work. Where is it?”

Lin doesn’t flinch. “Gone.”

The woman laughs. “Nothing’s ever gone, kid. Just… misplaced.”

She leaves a comm frequency scratched into the wall. Lin memorizes it, then burns the wall down.

The safehouse was a coffin buried three levels beneath the Undercity. Lin sealed the door, her breath fogging in the chill. The walls wept condensation, and somewhere, water dripped—a steady, mocking rhythm.

She slotted the holochip into her datapad.

The files bloomed again, sharper now. Project Chimera. Neural compliance. A list of names, redacted to oblivion. And at the end, a single unencrypted line:

SUBJECT ZERO: STATUS ██████

A knock.

Lin’s hand flew to her stun baton.

“Open up, little ghost.”

It was the woman with the creepy eye.

Lin hesitated, then keyed the door.

The woman filled the doorway, her tattooed arms crossed. “Broker says you’re digging where you shouldn’t.”

“And?”

“And I’m here to make sure you don’t get eaten by the shadows.” She tossed Lin a respirator. “We’re going up.”

Cipher Suite TLS_ECDHE

She is seventeen. The second time she sees a Broker.

He stands in the ruins of a church, its stained glass replaced with sheets of scrap metal. The air smells of ozone and burnt sugar. “You’re her,” he says. “The daughter.”

She aims her stun baton. “Who are you?”

He smiles. It doesn’t touch his eyes. “A friend. Or an enemy. Depends on the day.”

He offers her a chip. “Your father’s last transmission. He wanted you to have it.”

She takes it. When she looks up, he’s gone.

The rooftop was a graveyard of satellites, their dishes rusted into skeletal blooms. The smog had thinned, revealing the Dome—a vast, shimmering hemisphere that swallowed the sky. Beneath it, the golden spires of the Overseer’s citadel pricked the horizon like needles.

The woman lit a synth-cigarette. “You know why they call it the Dome?”

“To keep us in.”

“To keep them out.” She exhaled smoke. “Or that’s the lie. Truth is, it’s a filter. Lets the light in, the truth out.”

Lin followed her gaze. The Dome’s surface rippled, a mirage of liquid gold. “What’s underneath?”

“Same thing that’s underneath everything.” She crushed the cigarette. “More lies.”

A drone shot past, close enough to ruffle their hair. Lin’s hand went to the holochip.

“They’ll come for you,” She said quietly. “Not the Enforcers. Them. The ones who made Chimera. You’ve seen their face.”

“I haven’t seen anything.”

“You will.”

Zero-Knowledge Proof

She is twenty. The first time she kills.

An Enforcer corners her in a derelict subway car. His face is young, younger than hers. “Please,” he says. “I don’t want to do this.”

She breaks his neck. His helmet rolls away, revealing eyes wide with relief.

After, she vomits. The Whisper Network hums in her ear: **You did what you had to.

She isn’t sure who she’s trying to convince.

They found the lab on the edge of Sector 9, its entrance disguised as a recycling plant. The air stank of bleach and something sweetly organic.

The woman disabled the guards with practiced ease, their bodies slumping like cut puppets. Lin stepped over them, her boots sticking to the floor.

Inside, the tanks glowed. Children. Dozens of them, suspended in viscous blue gel. Tubes fed into their spines; their skulls were shaved, dotted with electrodes. A screen above each tank flashed vital signs.

SUBJECT 23: COMPLIANCE ACHIEVED

SUBJECT 24: COMPLIANCE ACHIEVED

SUBJECT 25: COMPLIANCE ACHIEVED

Lin’s datapad buzzed. The holochip’s files surged, aligning with the horror before her.

Project Chimera.

They weren’t just building soldiers.

They were building faith.

Quantum-Resistant Sig

Her father’s hands, trembling as he wires the transmitter. “They’ll tell you it’s for safety. For order. Don’t believe them, Mei-Mei. The only thing they want to control is the truth.”

“Why?” she asks.

He hesitates. “Because truth is the one thing that can kill them.”

The alarms blared.

Lin ran, the woman at her heels. Behind them, the lab erupted—a fireball of data and gel and screaming metal. The explosion painted the smog crimson.

In the chaos, Lin thought she saw someone—a Broker, watching from a nearby roof. His face was unreadable.

Then the drones descended.

Block #???

She is here. Now. The city spreads beneath her, a living thing. She feels its pulse in her teeth.

The holochip’s final message plays in her mind: Don’t find me. Find the truth.

She doesn’t know who sent it. Doesn’t care.

The phoenix on the wall whispers: Burn it all.

She lights a match.

BSOD 0x0000007B

In the Undercity, a child finds a holochip half-buried in ash. She slots it into her toy drone.

Images bloom: a lab, a fire, a girl with black hair and eyes like fractured glass.

The child smiles.

Somewhere, a phoenix spreads its wings.