Mister Rom Packs -

“What does that mean?”

Kestrel woke up on the floor of the workshop. Her cheek was cold and blank—just a patch of dead synthetic skin. The CRT monitors were dark. And on the cot, Harold P. Driscoll opened his eyes.

“The hand is a later development. The fragments, you see, want to be whole again. But they have no bodies. So they’ve started… borrowing. The hand was grown by a cluster of Harold’s anxiety subroutines using stolen biomatter and a hacked 3D meat-printer. It’s not trying to type. It’s trying to remember how to type. Harold was a hunt-and-peck typist. It’s the only motor memory that survived.”

“You can take it out,” Mister Rom Packs said. “I have a procedure. But it will hurt. And Harold will feel it. He’ll send more fragments. Hands. Eyes. Teeth. He’ll build himself a body from stolen parts, and he’ll come looking for the piece of himself you carry.” Mister Rom Packs

Mister Rom Packs took the hand from Kestrel with surprising gentleness. He carried it to a workbench littered with soldering irons and spools of copper thread. He plugged a cable from the back of his skull—from the port labeled TOUCH —into a reader on the bench. His eyes went distant. The static on the monitors rippled.

“Those,” he said, “are for stories that haven’t been written yet.”

Kestrel sat up slowly. The weight in her head was gone. In its place was something stranger: a quiet certainty that she had been changed. Not by Harold’s ghost, but by the silence she had felt behind it. The silence that remembered. “What does that mean

“I don’t want a ghost in my head,” Kestrel said, backing away.

“That’s my knock,” she whispered.

“We’re missing the core,” Mister Rom Packs said on the eighth night. They sat in his workshop, surrounded by the hum of CRT monitors. The reassembled Harold—now a torso, one arm, and a head that had not yet opened its eyes—lay on a cot in the corner, breathing in shallow, mechanical gasps. “The SELF fragment. Without it, he’s just a collection of reflexes. He’ll wake up, but he won’t be anyone.” And on the cot, Harold P

“Where is it?” Kestrel asked.

“Or?” Kestrel said, because she was a ferret, and ferrets always look for the other door.

He looked at her over his glasses. Then he looked at the back of his own skull, at the ports labeled FUTURE. POSSIBILITY. HOPE.

“Haunted is the right word,” Mister Rom Packs said. “About ten years ago, a data packet got lost. A very specific packet. It contained the compressed consciousness of a mid-level logistics manager named Harold P. Driscoll. He was being uploaded—corpo immortality trial, very expensive, very illegal. But the transfer corrupted. He didn’t arrive at his shiny new server-cluster. Instead, he splintered. Pieces of him lodged in the infrastructure of the Spire like shrapnel. One fragment ended up in the traffic light system—now he makes every light on Level 3 turn red at the same time, twice a day. Another piece lives in the public address system; that’s why the elevator music sometimes sounds like a man weeping.”