Absolutely.
---
Chapter Four: Ghost Frequencies
"Some signals aren't meant to be received. But once detected, they become irreversible—embedded in cognition."
The fall should've shattered bones.
But Xion's neuromotor system compensated instantly.
His body angled midair, activating biomechanical reflex loops. He hit the ground with distributed force, rolled over his left shoulder, and landed upright — winded, but functional.
Impact dampening: 87% effective.
Muscle-latency response: 0.06s.
He didn't understand how he could measure that in real-time.
But the data was there — not on a screen, but overlaid within his neuro-visual field.
His brain was reading inputs like a live operating system.
---
He moved quickly, slipping between alleys. The city was beginning to stir — networks rebooting, traffic nodes blinking online — but his awareness had shifted beyond what any civilian AI could register.
Then he heard it.
No — felt it.
A sub-perceptual audio stream vibrating through the inner canals of his skull.
Not audible. Not physical.
A low, fractal waveform pattern — consistent with a delta-band cognitive entrainment frequency — not found in any known neural broadcast.
He pulled the device from his pocket — the neural scanner he'd constructed the night before — now repurposed as a Cognitive Harmonic Receiver.
The screen flared with unstable data.
ANOMALOUS COGNITIVE FREQUENCY DETECTED.
Source: Class-GN (Ghost Node).
Carrier Type: Unknown. Location: Undocumented Subnet – SOUTH VECTOR.
Ghost Node?
He tuned the receiver manually, adjusting for Doppler distortion. The feedback began pulsing at a harmonic interval of 1.618 Hz — a frequency commonly theorized to be Phi-Sync: resonance with the brain's intrinsic default mode network.
This signal isn't just artificial. It's designed to interface with thought.
And it was calling him south.
---
Beneath the city's decaying infrastructure, past layers of rusted smartrail tunnels and abandoned power conduits, the signal strengthened.
He entered a wide, circular vault, hidden behind a sealed ventilation hatch.
His scanner's pulse stabilized.
Mountains of broken tech surrounded him — nanoframes, cortical bands, abandoned AI servers, data-scrubbed implants. Everything the world had tried to forget.
This wasn't a landfill.
It was a containment zone for suppressed innovations.
The Signal Graveyard.
He stepped forward. And then—
"Don't move."
A voice. Female. Calm.
Xion froze, eyes tracking the source.
From behind a data column stepped a girl — late teens, maybe. Worn field gear. Optical sensors embedded in her temples. A thin cable trailed from her left wrist into a diagnostic reader clipped to her belt.
"Relax," she said. "I'm not with them."
Xion didn't reply. His cortical activity was already analyzing her bio-signature.
No weapons. No aggressive micro-movements.
Not a threat.
She studied him carefully.
"Your neural broadcast lit up half the old surveillance satellites. You bypassed Layer One, didn't you?"
"Layer One?"
"The First Cognitive Lock."
She reached into her pack and tossed him a small black cube.
Carbon case. Quantum key-sealed. Emitter nodes on four corners.
"Inside that," she said, "is a memory strand — pre-Veil. Yours."
Xion stared. "How do you know me?"
She tilted her head. "Because I broke Lock One too. Last year. Almost died for it. But you… you weren't supposed to trigger it this fast."
He narrowed his eyes. "What are these Ghost Frequencies?"
"Residual cognitive broadcasts from the Old Minds — thinkers, inventors, AI fragments that reached beyond the system before it re-wrote them. Their thoughts still echo in the neurofield. But only if your mind's unlocked."
She pointed to his scanner.
"That thing you built? It's tuned now. You'll start hearing things no one else can. Signals from before the firewall — and not all of them are friendly."
---
Xion examined the cube in his hand.
It pulsed faintly — not light, but neural field modulation.
As if it was waiting for direct cortical contact.
"How do I access it?"
She stepped back. "You don't. It accesses you."
---
End of Chapter Four: Ghost Frequencies
Word Count: 631