Ren wasn’t really there.
He nodded when the barista asked his name, gave them one that wasn’t his, and paid in silence. The coffee was just a prop. Something to hold. Something to blend.
He sat by the window. Headphones in, no music playing. Watching. Calculating. There was a moment when someone passed — hoodie up, hands in their jacket — and Ren’s body tensed like an old instinct remembered something.
No threat. Just a kid. Keep breathing.
The real world moved too fast and said too little.
Ren took his usual seat in the lecture hall — three rows from the top, one from the exit. Not close enough to be seen, not far enough to look suspicious.
The professor was talking about supply chains. Or maybe ethics. It didn’t matter. The words slid off Ren’s mind like water on glass.
He watched the flicker of lights overhead. Counted the intervals between projector glitches. Measured the lag on the class’s digital polling tool.
Stolen novel; please report.
Always observing. Never just existing.
Someone laughed too loudly in the front row. Fake laugh. Performance. Ren blinked slowly, like rebooting.
He opened his laptop. Didn’t log in. Just stared at the screen.
Because the ping was back.
Same signal signature. Same anomaly in the packet headers. Same trace route, bending through five countries before vanishing into static.
He wasn’t paranoid. He’d checked. Triple-checked. This wasn’t a bot. This wasn’t random. Someone was reaching out — or tracking. The difference was paper-thin.
// SIGNAL INTERCEPT - ENCRYPTED
// ORIGIN: UNKNOWN | RANGE: LOCALIZED
// MESSAGE FRAGMENT: “Nice script. But sloppy on line 47.”
Ren’s blood went still. He didn’t react. Didn’t move. He just... sat.
Whoever it was — they weren’t just watching. They were in.
Later, walking back through the rain-slicked campus, he passed a digital billboard flashing university ads. One glitched for a second — static cutting across a smiling student's face. Just for a blink. Most people wouldn't notice.
He did.
Ren pulled his hood tighter. The world didn’t feel safe anymore. But it also never really had.
That night, alone in his apartment, he powered up a separate device — air-gapped, analog keyboard, no Wi-Fi. CipherZero came alive.
Fingers flying. Eyes burning. Line 47…He rewrote the script. Strengthened it. Salted it with traps.
Then he left a message embedded deep in the code — like a whisper in a locked room:
“Sloppy’s just a cover. Let’s dance, ghost.”