Whispers' signal was a broken thing, a fractured ghost in the static of the secure channel. "...inconsistent reports… city data scramblers… same event, three locations…" The voice was strained, a whisper indeed, battling against something trying to drown it out. I listened, processing the corrupted stream. Disinformation. Not just local noise, but something deeper, systemic. Hero sightings that defied physics, news feeds echoing lies I'd already verified as false hours ago, now appearing as gospel fact somewhere else entirely. Simultaneous footage. It wasn't just hacking; it was… reality manipulation through perception. Nauseatingly efficient.
The source, Whispers finally pinned it down, was buried deep. A Communications Hub. Half-built, soaring into the perpetually smog-laced, neon-scarred sky of Skyline Splice. A chaos zone where the advanced, the experimental, and the outright illegal coalesced. Few knew the tower existed. Fewer knew what was happening inside. Whispers suspected an experimental satellite relay uplink, broadcasting not just corrupted data, but something laced with multiversal code. Gaslighting entire cities, across realities. A weapon designed to erode trust, scramble global coordination, and perhaps, lay the groundwork for something far worse. Control through engineered chaos. It was precisely the kind of subtle, insidious threat that slipped under the radar of powered individuals but screamed on my frequency. A lie could rewrite the world. I couldn't let that stand. Not because I cared about the world, but because lies… they interfered with the transactional nature of my existence. They were unreliable variables. And I dealt with absolute certainty.
The building was a skeletal titan, wrapped in hard-light scaffolding that pulsed with energy. Drones, silent and watchful, patrolled the perimeter at varying altitudes. Hybrid security protocols meant standard tech had limited effect. My usual methods of outright bypass were too risky; this kind of place would have layers of automated countermeasures that escalated instantly. Infiltration required a different approach. Adaptation.
I adjusted the collar of the cheap, generic uniform. The face I wore was a young one, unremarkable. My younger form. I carried a thermal delivery box, non-descript, unremarkable. The mission required layers. First, I needed to see, to understand the rhythm of the outer shell, the patterns of the lower-level personnel. My goal wasn't immediate entry; it was observation. Thirty minutes as a phantom delivery tech, mapping sensor grids, recording drone frequencies, noting shift changes, and identifying entry points. My mind, a cold engine of logic, processed the data streams from my contact lenses, building a 3D model of the security lattice in my head.
Hours later, tucked away in a derelict construction lot several blocks away, the younger form dissolved. The face rippled, features flattening, skin turning a uniform, light-absorbing grey. Faceless mode. My true null state. The delivery uniform was shed, replaced by the silenced, matte-black weave of my operational gear. Magnetic boots locked onto my feet. Grappling lines, micro-fine and near-invisible, were secured to my wrists and waist. The night wind of Skyline Splice howled around the half-built tower, a convenient cover for ascent.
I moved like a shadow shedding itself. The magnetic boots clicked softly against the plasteel spine of the tower. Repelling lines paid out or retracted with silent efficiency as I climbed. Higher and higher, the city lights blurred below, reduced to an abstract painting of light and shadow.
The higher I got, the more complex the security became. Proximity sensors woven into the hard-light scaffolding pulsed invisibly. Acoustic dampeners made sound disappear. But I had anticipated this. My suit ran passive scans, highlighting the energy signatures of the sensors, displaying their range and timing as shimmering overlays in my vision. I flowed through the lattice they created, a current finding the path of least resistance.
I reached the level Whispers had indicated. Heavy blast doors sealed off the interior. Standard entry was impossible. But standard entry wasn't my method. I located a service conduit, barely wide enough for my body, hidden behind a complex cooling array. A tight squeeze, but I've done worse. Minutes later, I dropped silently into a maintenance corridor. The air here hummed with barely contained energy. I was close.
The corridor fed into a large chamber. The air inside was thick with the smell of ozone and hot metal. At the center, the uplink core pulsed. It wasn't a machine so much as a contained storm of light and energy crackling. Tendrils of pure code, visible in the faint shimmer, writhed within the containment field. This was the heart.
But the heart had guardians. Automated security drones floated near the ceiling, silent sentinels. And waiting near the core itself were two figures. Not standard guards. Enhanced.
One was a woman, her form sleek, metallic implants visible under her skin at the neck and wrists. Byteburn. Cybernetically augmented comms specialist. Known for unleashing focused electromagnetic pulses that could fry wetware and disrupt shielded electronics. Her eyes, enhanced optics, scanned the chamber, missing nothing.
The other was a brute of a man encased in a heavy, dark grey exo-frame. Hammertech, by the look of it. Pulseweight. A gravity-shifter, capable of altering local gravity fields to crush opponents or hurl objects with impossible force. He stood like a mountain, the exo-frame groaning softly with each shift of his weight.
The moment I emerged from the conduit, they reacted. The drones swiveled, targeting lasers clicking into place. Byteburn's implants flared with a soft blue light. Pulseweight shifted his stance, the floor plates groaning under the localized gravity distortion already forming around his feet.
There was no negotiation. No warning. They had to be removed.
Byteburn was already initiating her EMP sequence. That pulse would fry my gear, leave me exposed. It had to be stopped now. My hand moved before the thought fully formed, guided by instinct honed over decades. A throwing blade, ceramic-coated, designed to evade sensors, materialized from a wrist sheath. It was a single movement. The blade spun end over end, a blur in the low light, aimed not at her head or chest, but at the primary comms port on her neck, where the bulk of her cybernetics connected.
It struck true. A high-pitched whine erupted from Byteburn's implants, cutting off abruptly. Her body seized, collapsing forward onto the control console, smoke curling from the damaged port. One down. Efficient. Lethal.
Pulseweight roared, a sound amplified by his exo-frame. The gravity distortion around him intensified, the air growing heavy, pressing down. He brought one massive fist down, intending to turn the floor beneath me into a crushing vice. But I wasn't there. I was already moving, a low crouch, a burst of speed across the chamber before his attack landed. I didn't engage him directly. His strength was too great, his gravity powers unpredictable. He was a hammer; I was a scalpel.
I saw the weakness. He was too reliant on the exo-frame's power, too rooted to the ground it distorted. Directly above him, a heavy maintenance platform hung suspended by thick, reinforced cables. My mind calculated the tensile strength, his weight, the impact force.
I fired. Not at him, but at the supporting cable directly above him. My silenced weapon spat a single round. The bullet screamed through the air. The cable parted with a violent snap.
Pulseweight, his gravity field focused downwards, suddenly found the world above him giving way. He roared in surprise and fury as the heavy platform plummeted. He tried to shift his field, anchor himself, but it was too late. The platform slammed into him with crushing force, pinning him against the floor, the exo-frame groaning and sparking under the sudden, focused weight. He crumpled into the wreckage of the platform and the twisted metal of the chamber floor, silenced.
Five bullets spent in total. One for the cable, four more for the drones that were now firing wildly, their targeting systems thrown off by the chaos. Each shot was precise, hitting optical sensors or flight stabilizers, sending them pinwheeling or crashing to the floor. No wasted motion. No hesitation. No witnesses left standing. The chamber fell silent again, save for the hum of the core and the hiss of burning metal.
I approached the uplink core, my mind already shifting focus. Whisper's data spike was sleek, designed to interface with systems that bordered on theoretical. It pulsed with its own contained light. The core pulsed back, a monstrous, hypnotic rhythm. I located the primary interface port, buried within a nest of energy conduits.
Inserting the spike was like plunging a knife into pure energy. The data spike began its work, flooding the core with the specially designed virus. It wasn't meant to destroy the system, but to corrupt its foundation. To make the lie stutter, falter, and die.
The pulsing of the core became erratic, juttering like a damaged heart. The hum dropped in frequency, then rose to an unbearable whine. On auxiliary monitors around the chamber, I saw feeds begin to flicker. News anchors freezing on screen. Holograms dissolving into static. Then, black screens, city-wide, across multiple perceived locations. The synchronized lies were failing. Confusion was spreading, yes, but it was the confusion of waking up, of realizing the ground beneath your feet wasn't what you thought.
Before I left, before the system collapsed entirely, I accessed the failing broadcast channel one last time. Used the data spike to inject a single, concise message into the dying feed. A ghost in the machine, a final, cold assertion.
"Truth doesn't need permission. Neither do I."
The words hung in the digital air for a nanosecond before the system convulsed entirely. Alarms shrieked, a deafening klaxon that finally jolted the tower's automated defenses into full alert. Auto-locks slammed shut with heavy thuds, sealing off corridors, trapping anything still inside. I had anticipated this. It wasn't a problem; it was the signal for the next phase.
My escape route wasn't a door or a staircase. It was the void. I ran back towards the exterior wall, towards a section I had scouted earlier – a sheer drop, hundreds of stories down, exposed to the wind. The fastest way out was straight down.
I bypassed the auto-locked access panel with a burst of localized EMP from my gear – just enough to override the lock for a second. The panel slid open, revealing the howling void outside. Sirens wailed below, growing closer. Searchlights began sweeping the lower levels.
Stepping out onto the ledge was stepping into emptiness. The wind tore at my suit. Below, Skyline Splice was a dizzying panorama of lights and shadows. There was no fear. Only the calculation of trajectory, wind shear, and terminal velocity.
I pushed off.
The freefall was exhilarating in a purely physical sense. Gravity took hold, pulling me downwards at increasing speed. The tower rushed past, a concrete and steel cliff face. My body was a controlled projectile. Hundreds of feet dropped away in seconds. Below, the chaotic lights of the city swam towards me.
At the calculated altitude, I activated the hard-light parachute disk. It flared into existence below me, a shimmering, energy-based shield that caught the air, braking my descent with brutal force. The sudden deceleration compressed my spine, a brief, sharp pain that was instantly registered and dismissed. I controlled the disk's shape and angle, gliding now, angling towards the pre-planned extraction point – a dark, forgotten alleyway hidden beneath the city's elevated highway system.
The disc dissipated silently moments before I landed softly on the grimy pavement. The sounds of the city rushed in, no longer muffled by altitude. Sirens still wailed from the tower, futilely searching the heights. I was already gone, dissolving back into the urban sprawl.
Back in the sterile anonymity of my hideout, I watched the news feeds. It was chaos. Anchor feeds cut out mid-sentence, replaced by emergency broadcasts urging calm, offering contradictory explanations. Holographic billboards flickered, displaying fragmented, nonsensical data streams. The lies were gone. The confusion was real, raw, messy. But under the surface of the chaos, something else was happening. People were questioning. Looking for confirmation from multiple sources. Talking to each other. They were thinking again.
A gun can silence a voice. It's a simple, brutal equation. But a lie… a lie can rewrite the world. It can warp perception, erode reality, turn friend against friend, make truth irrelevant. It's a more complex weapon, and in some ways, more dangerous. Tonight, I had dismantled the engine of a world-rewriting lie. Not out of altruism. Not for justice. But because that kind of uncontrolled variable was intolerable. It interfered with my operations. It was a mess that needed cleaning.
A gun can silence a voice. But a lie… a lie can rewrite the world.