There's no sound in the moment before a crash.
No screeching tires. No screaming engines. Just the hum of the system. And the silence of a million simulations.
Then—
The voice.
"Rai—shut the system OFF!"
It's already too late. The air vanishes from his lungs. The virtual steering wheel snaps out of his hands. And the HUD glitches—turning blood red.
And then comes the fire.
Everything collapses.
The world goes white.
Rai Tanaka jolted awake, body slick with sweat, breathing like he'd just pulled 6Gs through Eau Rouge. His pulse thudded in his throat. The sim pod's red exit light blinked above him, flashing a warning across his eyes:
Neural sync error
System override: Manual disconnect
Session Terminated
He yanked off the visor, falling forward as the pod's restraints loosened. Cold air punched into his chest, chasing the heat from the simulation.
He was back.
Sort of.
The scent of burning plastic still lingered in his nose.
I didn't die, he thought, gripping the edge of the machine.
No applause. No celebration. Just the distant hum of cooling fans, a flickering halogen bulb, and the stale, garage-like stink of the underground testing bay.
He stumbled out of the pod and reached for his jacket, lying crumpled beside a crate of broken tire sensors.
The door slammed open.
A tall figure with storm-gray eyes strode in, fury in every footstep.
"You absolute idiot."
It was Dev Mehra. Senior technician, former karting champion, and the only person still trying to stop Rai from killing himself inside a machine.
"You ran Ghost System at full sync? In this dump? Without a medical team? Are you insane?"
"It had to be full."
"You could've flatlined in there."
"But I didn't."
Dev paced like he wanted to hit something. He nearly kicked over a toolbox. "You're not your brother. You don't need to prove anything. That system—"
"Killed him. I know."
Rai zipped up his jacket and sat on the edge of the sim rig's platform, staring at the scuff marks on the floor. He'd lost count of how many times they'd dragged his body out of this machine.
But this was different. This time… something had clicked.
The system hadn't just fed him visual data. It had responded. It had learned.
A single word still echoed through his mind from the sim's final moments. A voice. Artificial. Not Dev. Not his own.
Something deeper.
"Compatible."
"Do you even hear yourself?" Dev snapped. "That thing's banned from every FIA-sanctioned sim. Even private academies don't touch it anymore. Why do you keep dragging your life through it?"
Rai didn't answer.
He was too busy looking at the black burn mark on the sim pod's left input port.
That wasn't just overheating.
That was ignition.
The Ghost System had synced. Fully. For the first time since his brother's crash.
And it hadn't killed him.
That night, he didn't go home. Not yet. The rain had started by the time he walked down the alley behind the abandoned storefront that covered their testing center. Water dripped through gaps in the rusted signage above.
He slipped past the locked gate and into the back room of what used to be a kart shop. There, buried under a tarp, was his brother's old kart.
Red, white, and black. Number 37.
The one his family refused to throw out.
He uncovered it slowly, like it still mattered.
You got all the glory. All the cameras. I got the ghost you left behind.
He dropped into the cracked plastic seat, turned his face up to the leaking ceiling, and closed his eyes.
The rain on the roof felt like applause.
The next morning, everything changed.
He returned to the sim bay expecting another lecture.
What he found was a sealed data drive sitting on the console. No label. No instructions.
Just a message on his phone from a number that didn't exist:
"If you're still alive, you might be worth watching.
Ghost Line doesn't recruit. It survives.
Akuma GP — Dock 3. Don't be late."
He stared at the message. Then the drive.
Then the open sim pod that had nearly fried his brain.
He smiled, just a little.
The academy was supposed to be dead.
Akuma GP was once the rising star of the junior circuit. A talent farm. Then came the scandal. Illegal sim systems. Driver fatalities. Banned from F4. Lost all FIA backing.
The name was poison.
But somehow… it still breathed.
Dock 3 was hidden behind a line of rusted shipping containers, barely visible under layers of dust and forgotten pride. He pushed open the metal door.
The stench of rubber, oil, and regret hit him like a wall.
And in the middle of it—
A black Formula car.
Sleek. Undecaled. Raw.
Covered in dust but screaming power.
No team logos. No sponsor brands.
But on the side, etched in faint red letters:
GHOST LINE
"Thought you wouldn't come," said a voice.
Rai turned.
A girl stood near the car's rear wing, arms crossed, eyes sharp. Mid-twenties. Tactical boots. A data tablet in hand.
"Name's Kiera Voss. Engineer, tactician, and certified miracle worker. You're late."
"You're real?"
Kiera smirked. "As real as the system that tried to fry your brain."
She walked past him, brushed a layer of dust off the car's nosecone, and tapped the red letters.
"This car has killed two drivers," she said calmly. "The system inside it hasn't been touched in five years."
"Why me?"
"Because you're the only one stupid enough to survive it."
She tossed him a black visor helmet with a red flame-streaked edge.
"Welcome to Ghost Line."
Rai caught the helmet mid-air. Its weight surprised him. Not heavy—but dense, like it held more than carbon fiber and a half-splintered visor.
There were heat marks along the chin bar. Scoring near the jawline. As if the helmet had already lived through fire.
He flipped it over and saw something etched into the inside.
Not a brand. Not a number.
Just a name. Scratched in with something sharp and deliberate:
Elias Tanaka.
He didn't react. Didn't flinch. Just stared at it.
Kiera raised an eyebrow. "You okay?"
"That was my brother's name."
She blinked once. That was all. Then turned back to the car, pulled off a tarp that half-covered a rig of monitors and chassis readouts. The dust cloud that followed sent a few moths fluttering toward the ceiling.
"Didn't know that," she said, brushing off the tablet.
"But I guess the car knows its driver."
Rai set the helmet down on the table. The name was real. Scratched, old, deep. Not decorative. Personal.
He stared at the black-and-crimson car in front of him.
This was it. This was the place my brother died.
But somehow, it wasn't cold.
It was alive.
"Alright, listen up," Kiera said, snapping him back. "This isn't a charity. This team? We're not here to make you famous, and we sure as hell don't care about your sob story."
"I didn't ask you to."
"Good." She shoved a tablet into his hands. "You're not here because of skill. You're here because the system chose you."
"That's not comforting."
Kiera smirked again. "Don't get comfortable. You're going to wish it hadn't."
She pointed to a display screen flickering to life behind him. A slow-loading 3D diagnostic of the car's neural sync pathways crawled across the monitor. Red blocks. Yellow loops. Glitched-out data strings. At the center was the nucleus: the Ghost System core.
"Last time this thing was activated, it melted part of the chassis and nearly gave the driver a seizure mid-turn," Kiera said flatly. "We've done modifications. But no guarantees."
Rai's eyes didn't leave the screen. He was watching the pulse. The same heartbeat signature from his simulation crash.
He could feel it again.
The rhythm wasn't artificial. It was familiar.
Alive.
"When can I test it?"
"You don't." Kiera crossed her arms again. "Not yet."
"Why?"
"Because Ghost Line doesn't just run tests. We run through fire."
Rai didn't ask more questions.
He stayed. For hours.
Helped clear equipment.
Listened to Kiera explain the car's modified energy harvesting system, the way the Ghost System piggybacked off telemetry data, how it predicted corner entry patterns milliseconds before real-world drivers could blink.
They didn't just use machine learning. They used pain.
Stored echoes of every crash. Every injury. Every loss. Fed back into the system's AI, processed like race data.
Ghost System didn't teach you how to win.
It taught you how not to die.
That night, he slept in the corner of the garage.
No bed. Just a rolled-up jacket, a blanket that smelled like old rubber, and the faint hum of monitors still cycling data in standby.
And in the middle of the night—
He heard it.
A soft, static-laced voice in the dark.
Driver: RAI TANAKA
Ghost Link: initializing…
Subject accepted.
Run One: Awaiting ignition.
The next morning, Kiera wasn't alone.
Three new people stood near the car, watching him with crossed arms and unreadable expressions.
"Meet the crew," Kiera said, nodding to each of them.
A tall, dark-skinned guy in a sleeveless hoodie gave a lazy salute. "Call me Luka. If it's broken, I fix it. If it's unfixable, I race it anyway."
Next to him, a girl with buzzed platinum hair and mismatched eye colors leaned against the wall, chewing a toothpick. "Imani. I run sims faster than you crash real cars. And I crash a lot in sims."
The last member, a stocky figure with grease on his jaw and a nervous twitch, raised a wrench and muttered, "Artem. I do brakes. Also… sometimes cry under pressure."
Rai blinked.
"You're the team?"
Imani rolled her eyes. "What, you thought we'd have catering?"
Kiera laughed. "Welcome to Ghost Line. Population: failure. Until now."
Three days later, he got the call.
Not a message. Not a test.
An actual call.
Live.
A woman's voice on the other end. Cold. Measured.
"Tanaka. This is Sierra Clarke. Race engineer and head strategist for Seraph Aether Racing. We need to talk."
"Do I know you?"
"You will. You're in my sector now. And I don't like data anomalies with god complexes."
"Wow. You're fun at parties."
"Ghost Line has been flagged for illegal system activity. Just thought I'd give you the courtesy before the grid swallows you."
"That a threat?"
"A forecast."
Click.
Rai lowered the phone.
Sierra Clarke.
He'd heard that name.
Graduate of the FIA Engineering Academy. Called "the mind behind the machines." Fastest strategic mind under 25.
And apparently… watching him.
He turned back toward the car.
The visor gleamed in the sunlight bleeding through the garage slats.
Behind it, the words still echoed.
Ghost Link: Awaiting ignition.