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Ghost Interrupt Zero: A Cyberstory + DJ Mix
elcome to 'Ghost Interrupt Zero,' a project that's a true labor of love for my brother Matt and me. This venture blends a rich cyberpunk narrative with a uniquely curated DJ mix, offering an experience that transcends traditional storytelling. In this tale, you'll meet Ash, a 15-year-old hacker prodigy known as 'R.LØ,' whose journey through the intricate world of AgileChaos and Ego Nova culminates in a gripping confrontation with the enigmatic Null_Infinity.
The accompanying DJ mix, featuring an eclectic selection from KMFDM to Daft Punk, is meticulously aligned with the story's arc, providing an auditory dimension that enhances the narrative. Complemented by striking AI-generated visuals, this project not only pays homage to the classic 80s sci-fi aesthetic but also redefines the way stories can be told and experienced. 'Ghost Interrupt Zero' is not just a story—it's an invitation to explore a fusion of creativity, technology, and art. We're excited to share this journey with you and hope it inspires as much as it entertains. Explore the teaser below!
Listen to the accompanying DJ mix:
Stream "CyberMix: Ghost Interrupt Zero" while you read (recommended).
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Read the full adventure on Medium
"Ghost Interrupt Zero"
Written by Matthew Wilson
.1.0 || AgileChaos
Ash was still getting used to hearing Agent voices in his head unbidden, but didn’t let it distract from his job. The resolution wasn’t great, since comms were beamed in through a greasy and discolored NeuroLink worn on the outside of his head, but that’s what d00n had given him. Said if Ash kept up with them, eventually he’d have a neural implant like the rest of them did.
The clan knew him as R.LØ. As a pledge, his job tonight was lookout. d00n, Gene Beam, lorelais, and other AgileChaos elders were trying to access someone’s proprietary data that they could sell to competitors. A typical clan fundraiser. Espionage and cybersecurity for smaller biz who couldn’t afford licensed specialists was how the clan funded itself. AgileChaos provided housing and food stipends for initiates, who they called Agents. Ash supposed that meant “agents of chaos” but to him it was just bluster. They weren’t destructive. Agents preferred to keep a low profile, through sneak jobs like data exfiltration, and stealing secrets that could be sold to traders looking for an edge on the stock market or the unregulated shadow market.
When times were good–which they weren’t currently–AgileChaos had been known to pay crypto to interns and pledges. Ash was going to need funds eventually, but all he wanted right now was to be around people who understood him. If he could help the clan find their way to better times again along the way, and they rewarded him with initiation and a stipend, so much the better.
He’d been a loner even when his parents had still lived in the real world, still acknowledged his existence. He was the only child of professionals who once had C-level jobs at a mid-tier Corporation. He didn’t remember what it was called, or what they did, but it was enough to provide what would have been a pretty good life for them…if they had bothered to live it. They lived in Serenica Heights Autonomous Zone, in a residential tower that had its own school and a private security force. Their flat was on the 40th floor, above most of the ground level air and noise pollution. The air pollution at their level didn’t smell as bad.
When Ash was around ten, not that his birthdays had ever been reliably celebrated, his parents’ Corporation was acquired and liquidated by a predatory private equity firm. A competitor had attempted a hostile takeover, which failed, and tanked their stock afterward. In desperation, the competitor’s board offered it to a famously ruthless PE firm in exchange for retribution against the corp that Ash’s parents worked for, thinking they’d be rescued in the process. The PE broke up both companies. There had been a time, his parents had said when explaining this, when that sort of thing wasn’t done. But since the government had privatized nearly everything after its collapse in 2061, they’d handed the country over to its most powerful Corps and oligarchs. Regulation had since become something you read about in history books, like shooting wars, or democracy.
His parents had been devastated, which Ash recognized in a child’s simple way, but he had no idea what to do. They had always been so busy with work that he barely ever saw them. His care had been delegated to nannies, household AIs, the school, and eventually to Ash himself, so when they’d suddenly had nothing to do with their time, it was like strangers had moved into the house.
Ash knew most people self-medicated with drugs or synthohol, but those of means, like his parents, used VR to escape the wreckage of their lives. The VR plane was different from the Net, the backbone of the economy and the domain of the Corporations that ruled the country. VR was all about realism, where the Net was mostly symbolic. VR required lots more processing power, and access was unaffordable for most.
At first they just made daytime VR trips while he was at school. They’d be unplugged when he got home, and they’d ask clumsy questions about his day. They’d bored with family life pretty quickly, though, and before long Ash was coming home to dark, cold rooms and his parents still in their suspension couches, heads cocooned in the interface rigs they had leased with their access subscriptions. The biz that owned the rigs started sending over a bot that would filter their blood and deliver nutrients via ports in their necks, which bypassed their excretory systems and prevented them from accidentally starving to death. Death was a lease violation, after all, so apparently this was a common practice. The MediBot was serviced by a drone that visited weekly, letting itself in via the same maintenance access the cleaning robots did.
After that, Ash never interacted with his parents again.
Meals were provided at school, and he’d figured out how to order food delivery on his parents’ dime on his days off. He didn’t know how much they had left until he figured out how to access the account later. It seemed to be enough to keep the maintenance drones coming, so he figured he could keep going too, if he was careful. So Ash learned to be frugal and managed to keep himself alive, but it was lonely living with the ghosts of his parents still in their room. They reminded him a little of the Integrated Post-Human Assets–which everyone just called zombies–that he occasionally glimpsed around the AZ, cleaning up toxic industrial waste, or climbing utility poles to splice broken fiberoptics; except they didn’t move in the eerie, jerking way that zombies did. They didn’t move at all.
Inevitably, Ash dropped out of school at 15. All students entered into voluntary contracts with the school corp, which were severable at any time by either party, and he took his option after deciding school just wasn’t for him. Saved some money. Having to get all his own meals and his own clothes printed regularly were small sacrifices for his new freedom.
While looking for relief from school, and then solitude, he’d discovered a latent talent for getting into places he wasn’t supposed to go–and for getting out again unnoticed. This was what they called hacking, and he was pretty good at it. He found out quickly that what people referred to as “the Net” was actually the Overnet, and there was a much more interesting layer that most of them didn’t know about called the Undernet. After making forays into the Undernet, he’d been contacted by someone called “d00n” on behalf of AgileChaos, who had noticed what he was doing. Fortunately for Ash, they didn’t think he was a threat, so he’d been invited to a clan meeting. Ash had never met anyone outside of his building or school, and being around others who shared both his interests and his abilities was intoxicating.
After he’d experienced it, he was embarrassed to realize how much he needed contact with other people in real life–but that faded when he remembered what his home life was like. His VR addict parents were breathing corpses, so of course he sought the company of the living. Who wouldn’t?
As R.LØ the hacker, he’d earned trust and respect from the clan while barely trying. He was competent, didn’t ask too many questions, and always volunteered when there was a job to do. Ash didn’t realize these were exceptional qualities. It’s just how he was.
One day d00n had approached him on behalf of the senior council about initiation. That’s how he found out about the implants, and they’d loaned him the grungy NeuroLink that made him a node on the proximity network they used to communicate on jobs. Supposedly, this kind of limited-range network was harder for Serenica’s Data Loss Prevention forces to locate and tap, which neutered the irony of them being in the same room, rather than being spread out and scattered all over when they were netrunning. It didn’t matter where you connected from if you were a user, but operators had to be careful.
Tonight’s job looked about done now, and the guys—many genders in the clan, but all “guys”—had found some juicy secret about a game ShigeruCom was developing that they could sell. His lookout job was usually boring, but he was one of the few pledges who was trusted to do it.
Any run where the secret abort code didn’t have to be used was a good one. He and d00n had a sequence of three code words that would enact the nuclear option, burn it all immediately, no questions asked. The code sequence was a full stack interrupt that would override all other inputs and go directly to the top of d00n’s attention via his cybernetic implant, and there was a specific response code for it. The jobs had all been good ones so far, so the sequence had never been invoked. R.LØ didn’t want to find out what would happen if it was. He figured he’d see it someday, but wasn’t looking forward to it.
Later, in meatspace, d00n asked if he had started on his initiation project. He’d previously explained that Ash needed to pick a major target and pull off a one man job if he wanted to be part of the clan. It couldn’t lead back to AgileChaos, but had to be verifiable by them. The elders would vote, and if accepted, Ash would receive the clan’s cybernetic implant as his initiation. They had a neurosurgeon on the take who would install it, making incisions in a certain pattern that would produce unique scarring on his scalp. Those scars identified hacker clans to each other, so he would forever be marked as an Agent of AgileChaos.
Ash could have gone on to meet them at the next crash site, but felt a pull to go home instead. It was such a rare impulse that he decided to follow it, back to the flat where his parents existed at the minimum level of what you could call life. The VR universe, which Ash had zero interest in experiencing for himself, was so addictive that people let their real bodies waste away to nothing. In the physical world they had little agency over their lives, so they chose to live in an artificial dream, discarding their vessels of flesh.
Ash made his way over to the street corner where he’d parked the e-bike he’d printed for this trip. He was a little surprised to find it still there. He’d secured it in one of the bike lock kiosks provided by the Serenica Heights AZ, but hackers knew how easily they could be defeated. It was always a relief to see the bike, with all of its cheaply printed and endlessly recycled parts intact, when he needed it.
He waved his hand at the PayPad so the required credits could be deducted from his embedded chip. The kiosk thanked him for his patronage and released his bike. He could hack the thing and get it to unlock for free, but he didn’t want to risk being caught for something so trivial. He didn’t want to be seen by the cameras on the AutoBus, or to pay for a TaxiDrone either. Printing a bike for each trip, and returning it for recycling and a fractional reimbursement for the materials recovered, was the best way he could get around.
He engaged the electric assist, donned his particulate mask, and headed home.
.1.1 || Nothing of Value Lost
After the elevator ride to level 40 and the walk down the long corridor, Ash had to swipe his hand a few times past the PayPad in his door before the charge went through and it unlocked. This wasn’t noteworthy in itself, but when the door unlocked, it did so more slowly than usual, as if its backup battery was in use and nearly dead. That got his attention.
When he walked in, an oppressive, invisible force stopped him, and a second later he realized it was a smell. He’d never experienced it before, but ancient genetic memory told him what it was. He noticed the emergency lights were on and nothing else worked.
Strangely detached, already knowing what he would find there, Ash seemed to float to his parents’ VR den. He opened the door slowly. The smell, which primal instinct had identified as Death, was a thickness in the air–almost tangible. His revulsion was so intense that black spots formed in his vision and he had to steady himself against the wall. He found the MediBot that was supposed to be keeping them alive, and was unsurprised to see that its lights were off and that fluids were not moving through its tubes.
He tried not to look at his parents, at the way their bloated stomachs stood out from their emaciated bodies, the way their skin had discolored, the rictus grins showing under the domes of their interface rigs. He told himself not to look at them, and then he looked anyway, wishing he was stronger. They were finally, actually dead. It was so quiet without the hum of the CPU’s liquid cooler, or their breathing, or the occasional clicks and gurgles of the MediBot he hadn’t realized he was so used to.
Ash shut the door, walked very carefully to his own room, and shut that door too. Opened the window, using the manual override, stiff from disuse. It was cold outside, but the air was fresher. The shock gradually faded.
The power in the flat was obviously out. The power in the building was not, or Ash would have had a very long and miserable trip up the stairs, or he would have just left. The MediBot had a backup battery that was supposed to keep it running for a day or two in case of utility outages, but it was as dead as its former patients. The outage must have been going on for at least a week. Why hadn’t the drone that maintained the MediBot done something about its battery?
Ash then realized his parents might have died in agony, toxins filling their bloodstreams as dehydration set in, since they had maintained their bodies at the barest margin of survival. He wondered if they felt it in VR and wondered what was happening to them. Ash thought he should probably feel something about that. He didn’t.
He then turned to the terminal in his room. One of his first successful hacks had been against his parents’ bank account, when he’d opted out of school and had to fend the rest of the way for himself. He’d reconfigured the biometrics to respond to him, and used that access to check the status of the bank account that all the bills, subscriptions, and countless other charges racked up by everyday living were paid out of.
It had finally run out. Overdraft fees were hitting the account for every microtransaction Ash had made in the last ten days, and the balance was impressively negative. The microtransaction for unlocking the door hit the account while he watched, and Ash saw the negative balance grow. Due to his parents’ credit rating, he guessed, the bank must be letting microtransactions go through–each with a fee they were happy to tack on–but apparently the utility and MediBot charges were not processing.
That explained what had happened, but how had he been so unprepared? He must have been so caught up in playing adult, and the euphoria of finding a clan to be part of, that he’d forgotten to check on it.
A thought materialized in his head like an evil omen: You did this to them. You could have stopped this.
A beat passed, and then Ash realized that really wasn’t true. It was their money that had run out, not his. It was his parents who had decided to abandon corporeal life and lose themselves in VR. This would have happened no matter what Ash had done.
As his thoughts progressed, Ash understood that he was now legally emancipated. This made no difference to his life in a practical sense, but it did mean that he was now a full adult, according to the Terms and Conditions that licensed the birth of all corporate citizens in Serenica Heights.
He was free, in the only way he thought he had never been. He just had to figure out what freedom actually was and what to do with it.
