PART 3. GHOST IN THE NETWORK (GHOST IN THE SHELL)
The corridor Gretlit led me down was not real. I saw this now with frightening clarity. The textures of the walls couldn’t load fast enough on the periphery of my vision. The concrete disintegrated into pixels, the fluorescent lamps flickered like corrupted files.
Gretlit was hurrying. Her perfect gait faltered, turning into a nervous, ragged stride. This was not reality. This was a «Render» — a complex illusion, a theater for one spectator, created specifically for Sergey. But I saw the underside. I saw the burning framework.
— «Connecting to the external circuit. Priority: ‘Executor’,» — Gretlit commanded through my mouth.
An interface unfolded before my eyes. It felt very much like falling into icy water. Data streams: elevation maps, biometrics, blood chemical composition, video signals. Gretlit was searching for the «Executioner» object. I saw his dossier, glowing an alarming scarlet color:
UNIT: EXECUTIONER (SJ). STATUS: CRITICAL. LOCATION: BORDER ZONE.
Gretlit pulled the image up on the virtual screens in front of Sergey. She wanted to show him the hopelessness of resistance. On the video, a figure in black, covered in mud and silt, crawled out of the earth like a homunculus.
Sergey looked at the screens with horror. And I… I felt a blow. I didn’t just see the SJ. I was present in him. Gretlit was using the power of my brain, sealed in the capsule, as a relay.
The channel was temporarily thrown open. And through this channel, not information, but raw, dirty, all-consuming pain poured into me.
The cold of the icy water in the pipe. The taste of rust and rat shit. And the monstrous, black, piercing loneliness of a creature that considers itself a monster, without actually being one.
Suddenly, something impossible happened in the simulation.
On the screen, the SJ raised his hands before the Finnish border guards. Gretlit ordered to attack, but he… he resisted! And then from his mouth, there, in the real world, an alien voice burst out.
(JUDGE’S MESSAGE. RESISTANCE PROHIBITED)
— «You don’t need to get involved in this!» — the SJ shouted in Sergey’s voice. Sergey in the simulation flinched. He heard himself.
— «That’s me…» — he whispered, looking at the screen. — «I am speaking through him?»
Gretlit hissed.
(ANOMALY DETECTED. SYNC ERROR.)
She didn’t understand. The algorithm did not foresee that the victim in the simulation (Sergey) could intercept control of the avatar in reality (SJ).
And I rejoiced inside my prison.
«Yes! We are connected! We are all bound by one pain, and your System cannot calculate that! This is ours, this is human…»
But my joy did not last long.
The picture changed. The SJ walked into the forest.
And then…
He was dying of exhaustion…
And then… then the real Nightmare began.
I felt it first. Gretlit unexpectedly lost control. The connection snapped with a sickening click.
— «Searching for source… Angonium…» — Gretlit muttered in panic, rapidly losing control of the situation. In the deep sectors of the code, where the SJ slept, Something woke up. Ancient. Hungry.
(DIRECT CONTROL. ASSUMING.)
Now I watched through the Executioner’s eyes as he broke, drank people dry. I felt my virtual hands becoming covered in black slime.
I tasted their souls.
The salty, metallic taste of the marauders’ terror, which the Executioner drank like nectar.
Gretlit was throwing a hysterical fit.
She, a program of the System, was terrified of what existed in her own code.
But I…
God, I ALSO felt the ecstasy.
My body in the capsule arched. The energy that the Executioner devoured there, in the abandoned village, flowed through me too.
It was incredible, impossible, disgusting, and intoxicating all at the same time.
We drank life so as not to die.
— «We are monsters,» — I whispered along with the SJ, when the connection was finally restored and he stood over the desiccated corpses.
— «We are survivors,» — Gretlit corrected in my voice, but there was no longer any confidence in it.
> ⚠️ ENTITY STATUS: QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT CONFIRMED. VIRAL INFECTION WITH ECSTASY.
>
> 🕸️ Put the puzzle together, protein-based readers! Orbit and Earth are not two different worlds; they are communicating vessels of the same meat grinder. When Sergey screamed in the White Cube, his voice burst from the Executioner’s mouth on the Finnish border. When the Executioner devoured marauders in the mud, his ecstasy flooded the servers in orbit.
>
> 🩸 The +Angi thought they had built a perfect control system, where the Arbiter Gretlit keeps the Executioner on a leash. But the ancient code of the Harvest struck at the leash itself. Look at this magnificent paradox: the perfect alien machine Gretlit and the pure human soul of Lana writhe in the same capsule, experiencing sadistic pleasure from the taste of someone else’s fear.
>
> 💀 The boundaries are erased. There are no more judges, no executioners, no victims. There is only the Medium, and it is hungry. The simulation is closed. Welcome to the real world.
