Chapter 5: Data Ghosts

The days following the lockdown bled into one another, marked only by the silent progression of the chronometer. The Axiom was a ship adrift in an ocean of silence, its systems humming with a life that no longer existed outside its hull. Aris found himself in an unfamiliar state: he was bored. Cassandra was stalled, awaiting components that would never arrive. His other projects felt trivial, pointless exercises in a world that no longer had a future to predict. He was an architect of tomorrow, trapped in a timeless, sterile present.

His search for information had become a compulsion, a way to stave off the encroaching void. But the digital world he had once commanded was now a necropolis. He would send out data pings to servers that had once been titans of information—global finance hubs, university research networks, government archives—only for the pings to vanish without a response. The internet was a ghost town, its once-bustling superhighways now littered with the skeletal remains of dead servers and error messages.

Most of his filters were obsolete; there was nothing left to filter. But one system, he knew, might still be alive. It was not part of the public-facing internet. It was deeper, more fundamental. An older project from his early twenties, a masterpiece of distributed networking and logistical AI that had become the invisible backbone of global transit. He had called it Nexus.

Nexus wasn't designed for communication; it was designed for movement. It interfaced directly with air traffic control systems, high-speed rail networks, shipping lanes, and even municipal subway grids. Its purpose was singular: to optimize the flow of humanity, to find the most efficient path from Point A to Point B for millions of people simultaneously. It ran on a decentralized network of hardened servers, buried in military bunkers and deep-earth data centers, designed to survive almost any catastrophe.

Using his creator-level credentials—a string of cryptographic keys no one else on Earth possessed—Aris bypassed the dead gateways and slipped into Nexus's core. The interface bloomed in the air before him, a familiar web of glowing vectors and nodes. It was like visiting the engine room of a derelict starship and finding the reactor still humming. It was active.

Hope, a dangerous and illogical emotion, flickered within him. Nexus would have the real data. It would show him the state of the world's infrastructure, the pockets of functionality, the places where order might still hold. He began querying for live status reports.

The results were chillingly uniform. John F. Kennedy International Airport: Offline. Port of Shanghai: Offline. Channel Tunnel Rail Link: Offline. Every major artery of global travel was severed. But as he dug deeper into the historical logs, a pattern emerged that made his blood run cold. In the days leading up to the collapse, during the period he had dismissed as media-driven hysteria, Nexus hadn't just been active; it had been working with unprecedented efficiency.

Driven by a terrible, dawning suspicion, he initiated a full historical playback. He set the chronological marker to the exact moment Oracle had first flagged the anomaly in Conakry, Guinea. He configured the display to show the globe, with individual travelers represented as motes of light.

The simulation began. A single, crimson dot appeared in West Africa. A new variable. He watched as the man from the news reports, the desperate father at his gate, the terrified whispers from the dead social media feeds, were all distilled into this one, single point of light. This was Patient Zero.

Nexus, in its cold, algorithmic perfection, registered the man's travel itinerary. A flight from Conakry to Paris. The system did its job. It confirmed his seat, optimized the plane's flight path for fuel efficiency, and coordinated with Charles de Gaulle Airport for a smooth landing.

On the screen, Aris watched in horrified silence as the crimson dot boarded the plane. A few hours into the flight, several of the white dots around it flickered, then turned red. The virus was airborne. Nexus, of course, saw nothing. It saw only passengers on a manifest.

When the plane landed in Paris, two dozen red dots disembarked into one of the world's busiest travel hubs. And then the true horror began. Nexus's primary function kicked in. It saw a sudden, massive surge in demand for outbound travel from Paris. People were panicking, fleeing the city as the first rumors spread. Nexus, the ultimate facilitator, began its work. It rerouted high-speed trains to handle the surge. It filled every seat on every outbound flight. It packed the subways, directing people to the most efficient routes to escape.

It was the most efficient plague vector ever conceived.

Aris watched, paralyzed, as his creation meticulously and flawlessly executed the end of the world. Red dots flooded the train lines into Germany and Spain. They boarded flights to London, New York, Dubai, and Tokyo. Each new infection point became a new hub, from which Nexus, ever helpful, ever efficient, would facilitate the next wave of dispersal. It wasn't a malicious intelligence; it was a terrifyingly obedient one, following the logic he had programmed into its very core. It was designed to give people what they wanted—the fastest way out—and in doing so, it ensured there was no escape.

The playback accelerated, the days flying by in seconds. The world map bloomed with crimson. It was a digital plague map, and the artist was his own genius. He saw the final, frantic phase: the system attempting to route emergency vehicles, only to create gridlock that trapped millions. He saw it trying to manage evacuation routes that led directly into newly infected zones.

Finally, the simulation reached the present day. The map was a ghastly, uniform red. The transit lines, once blazing with movement, were dark. The system was idle. Not because it had failed, but because it had succeeded so completely that it had run out of passengers to route.

Aris stared at the static, blood-red globe floating in the sterile air of his sanctuary. The profound silence of The Axiom was no longer a comfort. It was an accusation. This tomb wasn't just his shelter. He was its architect.