The Matrix was quiet.
Not in the peaceful, pastoral sense...but the unsettling kind of quiet. Like the stillness that precedes a superstorm, or the final seconds before a bomb goes off. It shimmered around her...digital rain falling in sheets of light, cascading like memory fragments through a world stitched together by code and ghosts.
Juno Hellman stood at the edge of a rooftop in a decaying sector known as Deadbyte Alley, her tactical visor glowing faint green as it scrolled through data overlays. Her boots crunched against fragments of collapsing code that once masqueraded as concrete. The buildings here...at least what was left of them...stretched up like forgotten tombstones, flickering in and out of rendering, caught between deletion and preservation.
She wasn't alone. The Matrix was never empty. Something was always watching.
Juno reached up, tapping her commlink.
"GhostNet online. Lila, you seeing this?"
The line crackled before her partner's voice filtered through.
"Confirming your location. Yeah… I see it. The spike's off the charts. Like a tsunami of leftover data surged through the alley."
Juno narrowed her eyes, watching a section of the street below ripple unnaturally. The code twisted, then corrected itself. She saw flashes...too fast for the untrained eye: a trench coat, broken glasses, a hand stretched out as if in warning.
Neo.
Or what was left of him.
Since the fall of Smith and Neo's final sacrifice, the Matrix had changed. The war between man and machine had officially ended, or so they were told. But peace in the Matrix was like painting over rust...it looked fine, for a while.
Now, something was bleeding through. Something ancient. Something angry.
Juno drew her sidearm...not a bullet-firing weapon, but a Quantum Displacer, capable of dispersing unstable energy forms. Ghosts. Echoes. Rogue code.
She scanned the alley.
"Show yourself."
The shadows answered.
A wind kicked up...not real, not physical. Code-based. It howled through the corridor, stirring debris that had no weight, only memory. Then, without warning, a figure emerged from the mist...seven feet tall, cloaked in flickering digital static, face a blur of glitched geometry.
Its voice was not a sound but a corruption of sound. Static warped into something like language.
"I… am… inevitable."
Juno didn't hesitate. She fired.
The blast tore through the specter, sending it scattering into the rain like broken pixels. But the air didn't settle. If anything, it pulsed harder.
That wasn't a ghost.
It was a warning.
Ten Minutes Earlier- Ghostbusters HQ, Matrix Subnet 04
Lila Banks was hunched over a keyboard, three holo-screens dancing in front of her like caffeinated butterflies. A former Matrix architect-turned-hacker, she was the team's lifeline inside and out of the simulation.
"Got another frequency spike in Sector 34," she muttered, sipping from a mug labeled This Is Not The Real World.
"Same as last week. Echo signature matches the Sentinel ghost we bagged in Old Town."
Max Cruz leaned back in his chair, boots kicked up on the table. Ex-cybermarine, all swagger and kinetic energy.
"That makes what, five this month? Juno's not gonna be happy."
Lila snorted. "She hasn't been happy since we were ghosted by the Oracle. Something's off. She can feel it."
"Yeah, well, I don't need to be an Oracle to tell you something's coming. These echoes we're hunting? They're not just memories. They're coordinated."
"Coordinated?"
Max stood, pulling up a 3D map of the Matrix sectors. He highlighted several points in red...recent ghost encounters.
"All of them form a ring. Around this."
He tapped the center of the circle: Central Process Control - the code-core of the Matrix.
Lila's brow furrowed. "Smith tried that once. Almost tore the system apart."
Max nodded slowly.
"Yeah. And I think someone, or something..
is trying again. Only this time… it's not just Smith."
Present- Deadbyte Alley
Juno hit the ground hard, rolling into a crouch as the glitch-phantom reformed ahead of her. Its limbs bent in unnatural ways, trailing ribbons of corrupted code. It wasn't one entity...it was many, stitched together, like a digital Frankenstein.
And at its center… she saw it.
A flicker.
A pair of piercing eyes behind mirrored sunglasses.
Smith.
She froze. Not in fear—but in recognition.
"You're not supposed to be here," she whispered.
The figure stepped forward, limbs cracking and realigning as it tried to stabilize.
"I was never… gone."
It lunged.
Juno sidestepped, dropping a trap disc that activated mid-air...a cylindrical field erupted in blue light, locking the creature in suspended motion. Sparks danced along its edges, and the ghost shrieked in feedback.
"Ghost captured," she muttered into her mic. "But you're not a memory… You're a message."
The trap flickered. A final pulse exploded outward, knocking her back.
And then… silence again.
She picked herself up, brushing off fragments of energy.
"Lila… Max… I think Smith's trying to come back."
Her visor pulsed red.
"No," Lila said. "Not possible. He was overwritten. Neo..."
"Neo died for peace," Juno cut in.
"And something's twisting that sacrifice into a doorway."
She paused.
"We're not just dealing with ghosts anymore. We're dealing with ghosts that remember what they were...and what they want to become."
Elsewhere
In a forgotten sector of the Matrix...buried beneath obsolete rendering engines and ancient defensive code...a machine stirred.
It wasn't alive in any traditional sense. It was a data construct. A remnant. Part of a recursive loop left behind after the final clash between Neo and Smith.
Its screen flickered on.
Lines of code ran faster than thought.
And then… a voice.
"Wake… up…"
Smith's voice.
But not just his.
Others echoed through it.
The Architect. The Analyst. Defunct agents. Rogue AI fragments. All fused.
A Meta-Smith.
A virus composed not of rage, but of revenge.
And it was learning.
Back at HQ
Juno slammed the trap core onto the lab table. The lights dimmed as it interfaced with the main system.
The ghost was unlike any they'd caught before. Inside the device, code whirled in complex fractals...erratic, aggressive, and recursive.
Lila's face went pale.
"This isn't a standard echo. This is self-replicating."
"Meaning?" Max asked.
"Meaning... it's alive."
Juno looked up at them both, eyes steely.
"Then it's time we stop calling them ghosts."
She tapped the display. The image of Smith...fractured and snarling...flashed onscreen.
"It's time we prepare for war."
End of Prologue
Next - Chapter 1: Echo Protocol