Neurostatic: The Ghost in Monte Cero - Chapter 3
The Shadow Below
Sombra stood motionless at the edge of the helideck, his coat billowing in the wind like a tattered flag. Forty-three stories above the flooded streets, the sky was an electric bruise—stormlight caught between the towers of Monte Cero’s Upper Zone.
Below him, the city pulsed like a circuit board stitched into a corpse. Glowing arteries of traffic. Data beams cutting through rain like scalpels. The hum of the DreamNet—always present, always hungry.
He didn’t look down. He already knew what waited there.
Instead, he stared at the blinking holo-map hovering in his palm.
TARGET: LUCÍA FERREIRA (YARA)
CLASSIFICATION: NEURAL BREACH – LEVEL OMEGA
PRIORITY: IMMEDIATE RETRIEVAL
ASSET ATTACHED: "ÑANDÚ" – SENTIENT NEUROCODE (UNSTABLE)
Behind him, the landing platform hissed. A door slid open.
“Agent Delgado,” said a voice like boiled glass. Smooth, strained. Corporate.
Sombra turned.
Director Méndez stepped out of the shadows, flanked by two armored neuroguards. Her face was unmodified—rare among SynDyne brass—but her eyes were pure chrome.
“I didn’t authorize a Level Omega escalation,” she said.
“You didn’t see the footage,” Sombra replied.
Méndez walked past him, hands behind her back. She stared out over the city.
“They say this one’s different,” she murmured. “The girl. The code. It speaks.”
“It thinks,” Sombra corrected.
Méndez turned. “That’s not possible.”
“It shouldn’t be,” he said. “But neither was emotion-sharing in subcortical sectors, and your labs sold that tech last quarter.”
She didn’t flinch. Just stared at him.
“Do you believe it’s alive?” she asked.
Sombra didn’t answer right away.
A drop of rain slid down the edge of his visor. Below them, another drone formation fanned out, cutting through the haze like arrows.
“I believe it remembers,” he said at last.
Méndez narrowed her eyes.
“That’s worse.”
She waved her hand. A new window opened in the air: a heatmap of the city, red zones lighting up across Aguada and Ciudad Vieja.
“They’ve taken her into Null Signal territory,” she said. “Which means we’re escalating.”
“To what?”
Méndez smiled, tight and surgical.
“To silence.”
Sombra’s jaw tightened. “Civilian casualties?”
“Acceptable noise,” she said. “You have twelve hours before we deploy neuro-wipe aerosol in the sector.”
He looked at the map. Thought of the graffiti he’d seen in the Shallows on a previous hunt.
"TAMBIÉN LOS DIOSES OLVIDAN."
Even gods forget.
“Understood,” he said.
But in his chest—somewhere beneath the augmentations and surgical edits—something old stirred. A name he couldn’t remember. A memory left behind.
Lucía Ferreira.
