Chapter 302: Ghost Data
The engine’s echo was gone, leaving the neighborhood draped in a heavy, watchful quiet. Sirens hadn’t arrived yet, but I could already see curtains shifting in windows, neighbors peeking out with frightened eyes, wondering if what had happened here would bleed onto their carefully trimmed lawns.
I leaned against the low fence in front of the Stewards’ home, glass glinting in the grass near my boots, catching the afternoon light like tiny mirrors of what just happened.
Blank.
The name still hovered in my System log, an empty placeholder wrapped around an S-Rank threat. I had only seen something like that once before.
Mark.
Or, more accurately, Subject 3834.
I closed my eyes, letting the breeze cut across my face as I forced myself to remember. It had been a while since I last talked to him. I wonder if he’s still in Europe where he killed Director Connor.
Or...did he make it back home? He always told me that he’d be the one to find me.
The System had shown me his name when I first used Scan on him, and it was exactly like this: Blank. No aliases, no real identity, no social existence.
Just an empty slot where something human should have been.
I assume it’s because Mark is a subject, an asset, a ghost with no past and no future, someone who never had a name to begin with, or whose name was scrubbed so thoroughly it never existed in the first place.