Neurostatic: The Ghost in Monte Cero - Chapter 4

Signal in the Dark

The room was quiet, but something had changed.

The masked figure from Null Signal—now unmasked, watching Yara like a wildfire he wasn’t sure whether to fear or follow—stood motionless. The neurodrive on the table between them pulsed softly in blue.

“Do you know what you’ve brought us?” the figure said.

Yara didn’t blink. “I know they’re willing to kill half the city to get it back.”

“No,” the figure said. “Worse. They’re willing to erase half the city. Every backup, every implant trace, every linked mind. You’re not a fugitive anymore, Lucía. You’re a firewall.”

Yara exhaled through her teeth. “I’m tired of being things I never chose.”

Ñandú’s voice buzzed through the room again, now clearer, as if the signal was syncing deeper.

“Choice is a function of memory. Remove one, and the other folds.”

The Null Signal operative nodded slowly. “He speaks in axioms.”

Yara crossed her arms. “He also screamed at me in Quechua when I tried to reboot the drive.”

“It was defensive subroutine,” Ñandú said, almost sheepishly. “I thought you were a SynDyne scrubber.”

“You thought I was corporate,” she said. “Guess I should be flattered.”

“You were better than corporate.”

The operative stepped away from the table and flicked on a nearby terminal—one of the old models, a deep-bore military rig that still worked offline.

The screen lit up with a city map. Monte Cero glowed red, yellow, and green—sector overlays flickering in predictive cycles.

“We’ve been running simulations,” he said. “If we broadcast what’s inside this drive, we can overwrite the synaptic dampeners in almost forty percent of the neural population. It would break the DreamNet.”

Yara raised an eyebrow. “You want to wake the whole city up?”

“That’s what we thought. Until now.”

He zoomed in. Sector 17. Cerro.
Then Buceo. Then Centro.

Each sector blinked red.

“What is that?” she asked.

“New deployments. Low-flying delivery drones. They’re loading them with aerosolized neuro-wipe.”
A beat.
“It’s not just containment anymore. It’s sterilization.”

Yara stepped back, stomach turning. “They’d kill their own users?”

“Not kill,” Ñandú said. “Reset. Memories erased. Dreams rewritten. Rebellion removed.”

The operative leaned forward, voice low. “They’re going to burn Monte Cero down before they let it remember who it is.”

Yara turned toward the window. Rain hit the broken glass in tiny shocks of static.

“We need to move,” she said.

“Where?”

“To the tower,” she answered. “Torre Antel. That’s where the broadcast node is. We jack in from the root, upload Ñandú to the DreamNet’s source, let him rewrite it from inside.”

The operative stared at her. “You’d be walking into the lungs of the system.”

“I’ve already been in its bloodstream,” she said. “Time to finish the job.”

“There is risk,” Ñandú said. “If I go in… I may not come out.”

Yara nodded. “You said you wanted to wake the sleeping.”

A pause.

“I did.”

She looked at the operative. “You in?”

The old rig buzzed. The map blinked. Outside, the sky cracked with thunder.

He pulled his mask back on. This time, the static face didn’t flicker. It burned steady.

“Null Signal is always in.”