/028_The_Carbon_Ghost

Nov 4, 2024

24 min read

1 - The Black Loop

After discovering my own abilities, I began settling into my role as part of Shadowtask. Since Locke’s run-in with the Red Dogs at the warehouse on the dock, I’ve been riding a surveillance route most evenings that passes through all main and connected streets that lead to it. Data informed me that these gangs often move around and don’t settle on individual locations, though I’ll take any excuse for a cruise with Gelert.

Tonight, I received a notification on my visor. Most of what appears on Gelert’s HUD is routine telemetry. Traffic updates. Weather warnings. System diagnostics. The kind of information you stop noticing after a while. This one was different.

// NOTIFICATION //

EVENT: WIDOWMAKER

LOCATION: DARK DISTRICT > THE BLACK LOOP

ENTRY WINDOW: CLOSING SOON

The helmet highlighted an event called Widowmaker. I don’t know why. Maybe Leon scheduled it. Maybe he intended to go there… or maybe it’s just another fragment that’s resurfaced. Either way, every lead I’ve followed through Leon has brought me closer to understanding both him… and myself.

A quick search returned almost nothing. No information was available online either. No advertisements. No race schedules. Just fragments, scattered across the dark corners online. Deleted forum posts, betting slips, and posts buried deep enough within Solai’s network that most people would never stumble across them by accident. Widowmaker? An entry window to what? This event took place somewhere within the Dark District, but nobody was willing to share an exact location. Luckily enough, the coordinates in my visor already had.

The last time I’d followed mysterious coordinates into the Dark District, I had to fight off an android that wanted me dead. You’d think this would be enough to deter me, yet regardless as to what was awaiting me, I just couldn’t resist. The coordinates led me through the city to one of the perimeter gates that surrounded the Dark District. I’d seen these walls before during my first mission with Caine. Massive slabs of concrete and steel wrapped around the district’s boundary, separating the city’s Dark District from the rest of Solai.

As I approached, I could already hear it. The roar of multiple engines. Dozens of them. The thunder like sound carried over the wall, accompanied by occasional cheers from somewhere beyond the gate. Whatever Widowmaker was, it was already underway. I was met by a pair of security guards stood next to the entrance. One spoke to me as I rolled towards him.

“Registration closed ten minutes ago.”

Before I could respond, a siren sounded somewhere beyond the wall. The crowd erupted into applause. I looked toward the gate.

“You’re too late.”

The guard said, folding his arms. I was about to turn Gelert around when another voice called out from behind him.

“Wait.”

The second guard walked closer to me. His eyes moved from the bike, to my helmet, then to me. For a moment, he didn’t say a word. The noise from the other side of the wall seemed to disappear entirely as he continued to analyse me.

“You seeing this?” he asked.

The first guard looked me over again. Whatever he saw, his demeanour changed instantly. I had no clue what was going on, before I had time to respond the second guard reached into his jacket, inputted something into a handheld device, and moments later the enormous gate between me and Widowmaker began to move. Metal screeched against concrete as a narrow opening appeared.

“Go on…” he said.

I looked past them toward the growing gap. “What’s going on?” I asked. The guards’ expressions grew confused as their eyes followed me, tracing Gelert and me. Neither of them responded.

The opening widened. The cheers from the other side became much louder.

“Race starts in 60 seconds”

A race? Is that what this is? If Widowmaker is the event, then the Black Loop must be the name of the track. I couldn’t resist. My adrenaline spiked…nothing makes me feel alive more than riding does. I rolled through in first gear before either of the guards changed their minds. The gate closed behind me.

What waited on the other side was much larger than I’d expected. The Black Loop stretched through a maze of abandoned factories, apartment blocks and old industrial areas, lit up by floodlights casting long shadows across the racing grounds below. Crowds of people stood on rooftops overlooking the circuit. People sat on balconies and footbridges suspended between buildings. Thousands were there, eager to watch.

It felt less like a street race and more like a city-wide celebration. The lineup itself consisted of twelve racers. Cars, bikes, quads. Each machine looked heavily modified. Some had insignias painted on them, others carried no markings at all. Armour plating, reinforced suspension, oversized engines and improvised bodywork were common. Most looked capable of surviving a war zone, not a race.

As I rolled onto the track heads started turning immediately. People stared and conversations stopped as I rolled past towards my starting point, the last position.

Faint chatter began to spread through the crowd as people shifted their attention to me and Gelert. I couldn’t hear what they were saying over the sound of the engines. The other riders noticed the mood shift too, looking over their shoulders at me with equal curiosity as their engines purred heavily. Whatever it was, I had the distinct feeling that I’d just become the topic of conversation.

Suspended above the starting line was a countdown display. By the time I noticed it, only twenty-five seconds remained. Each second the countdown decreased, the crowd became louder, more rowdy, more eager for the race to begin as engines roared to life around me.

With 15 seconds remaining, the atmosphere changed. Conversations disappeared as thousands of eyes shifted from one another to the circuit ahead. The rider beside me glanced in my direction, then looked again. Whatever reaction I’d seen from the guards and the crowd, this matched it exactly. It was an intense stare. Then, without a word, they seemingly snapped out of it, lowered their visor and faced toward the track.

The countdown reached ten seconds. The other riders, the crowd, nobody was looking at me anymore. Their eyes were locked on the circuit ahead as their engines screamed and revved around me.

3..2..1

The siren sounded and the crowd erupted as the racers launched from the line. I felt a surge of adrenaline. The familiar warmth I’ve been feeling in my chest lately began to grow as Gelert started drawing power from me.

Data had spent weeks upgrading and refining Gelert’s systems. Until now I’d only caught glimpses of what the bike was capable of. With no idea what the Black Loop would throw at me, it looked like I finally had an excuse to stop holding back.

2 - Splitlane Echo

Twelve racers launched from the starting line, engines screaming as they fought for position. Within seconds our formation turned into chaos. Metal scraped against metal. Vehicles collided and battled for space, veering off course before correcting themselves. Nobody backed off. Nobody held back.

The crowd loved it. Every impact was met with cheers. Every near miss resulted in an even louder reaction from the thousands gathered around the track, watching from rooftops, and balconies above. I realised quickly that Widowmaker wasn’t simply a race. It was a game of survival with a finish line.

The circuit itself was just as dangerous as the competitors. The Black Loop clearly wasn’t built for racing. It looked like a route carved through years of abandonment and neglect. Broken sections of concrete littered the road. Twisted rebar stuck out from crumbling, collapsed barriers. Abandoned industrial machinery sat where it had been left years ago, slowly rusting away. Cracked drainage channels, old construction equipment and shipping containers all narrowed some sections of the course to barely a single vehicle’s width.

The Black Loop wasn’t trying to accommodate racers. It should have bothered me but honestly, I found myself feeling more alive, more present with every passing second on the track. I wanted the challenge. Every movement felt sharper than usual as Gelert continued to draw power from me. The bike responded instantly to even the smallest adjustment, leaning willingly into corners, steady, grounded. Data’s upgrades had clearly made it faster, sharper and more responsive, but Gelert still had the same handling, the same feel, the same soul it always did.

I held my position near the rear of the pack through the opening corners, choosing to sit back and observe. The racers ahead of me already knew this track. I didn’t. One rider clipped a pile of broken concrete entering a corner and nearly lost control. Another was deliberately forced into a barrier by a heavily armoured truck that seemed more interested in eliminating competition than actually racing. I stayed patient. Ahead of me, racers fought for position as I studied the circuit and the chaos unfolding around it.

Then I saw my first opportunity. A rider ahead entered the next corner too aggressively, clipping a cracked drainage channel that cut across the road. Their rear wheel lost traction for a split second, forcing them wide on the exit. The opening was small. At these speeds it didn’t need to be any bigger. I rolled on the throttle and pushed Gelert through the gap before it could disappear. Twelfth became eleventh.

The rider immediately tried reclaiming the position on the following straight. Their engine screamed as they pulled alongside me, close enough that I could make out layers of scratched paint and dented bodywork beneath the floodlights. For a few seconds we ran side by side. Then the circuit narrowed between two abandoned shipping containers. I held my line. They backed off. Eleventh became tenth.

The more time I spent on the track, the easier it became to read. Corners that had felt dangerous moments ago now felt familiar. I started spotting patterns. Learning where obstacles gathered. Where the road surface changed. Which riders relied on aggression, and which relied on skill. The race hadn’t become any safer, yet I was becoming way more confident amongst the chaos.

That’s when I noticed it…Not a rider. Not exactly. Just a brief flicker across the edge of my visor…

I blinked and it was gone, part of me thought maybe I’d imagined it. The floodlights overhead were so bright they were causing all sorts of reflections across the visor. Combined with the speed, the noise and the constant movement around me, a visual glitch wasn’t exactly impossible.

I dismissed it and returned my focus to the race. The opening lap continued around me as racers fought for position. I found myself boxed in between a heavily armoured coupe on my left and another rider on my right. We were travelling side by side with barely six feet separating each of us.

Ahead, the track narrowed. What had started as a wide stretch of road was quickly tapering into a much tighter section between a row of abandoned shipping containers and a collapsed concrete barrier. Someone was going to have to back off. Nobody was going to.

At the time, I couldn’t understand it. What are these people racing for? Credits? Reputation? Bragging rights? Whatever the reason, they were willing to risk everything for it. Part of me found that ridiculous. Until I realised I was doing exactly the same thing. I wasn’t there because Shadowtask sent me. I wasn’t chasing answers or information.

I was there because I wanted to be. The anger. The anxiety. My frustration. All of it disappears when I ride.

The gap ahead continued shrinking. A sudden sense of urgency washed over me as the familiar warmth in my chest continued to grow. I couldn’t explain it. It wasn’t adrenaline. For a split second every instinct I had was telling me something was wrong. The feeling hit me so suddenly that my eyes immediately snapped toward the armoured coupe.

A warning appeared across my visor.

COLLISION IMMINENT

I looked left. The driver wasn’t aiming for the gap. They were aiming for me. The armoured car swerved violently in my direction. I hit the brakes hard, forcing Gelert to fall back. The driver cut across the space I’d occupied moments earlier and drove straight into the rider on my right.

There was no attempt to avoid the collision. No hesitation. They hit them deliberately. The front corner of the coupe slammed into the side of the bike and launched it across the circuit. The rider never had a chance to recover. Both the bike and rider skidded sideways before crashing directly into one of the shipping containers lining the edge of the track. The impact sent a cloud of dust and sparks into the air. Bodywork exploded across the road.

Did the driver in the coupe just kill that guy? It didn’t seem to matter, the crowd went wild at the sight of destruction.

The coupe slid across the road briefly before regaining traction and continuing deeper into the circuit as though nothing had happened. I looked back over my shoulder. The bike was destroyed. I couldn’t see the rider amidst the cloud of smoke and sparks.

The crowd erupted. The race carried on. So did I. I rolled back onto the throttle and accelerated after the armoured coupe. Whatever happened to the rider behind me was already being drowned out by the noise, the speed and the chaos of the Black Loop.

The warmth in my chest continued to build. Even amidst the shit going on around me, my confidence was growing. Every action, every turn, every twist of the throttle. The rush, the speed, the stakes… I found myself embracing it, craving more.

I pushed Gelert harder with every corner. Braking later. Accelerating sooner. Taking lines I probably wouldn’t have attempted an hour earlier. The more I trusted the bike, the more it rewarded me for it. It felt so natural. Not effortless. Just… right.

A few corners later, the flicker returned in my visor, and this time it stayed. A rider appeared ahead of me. Not physically. Projected. The image shimmered faintly against the road ahead, made up of pale blue telemetry lines and static. Sections of the bike glitched intermittently, breaking apart before reforming moments later. For a second it looked almost real. Like another racer had somehow materialised on the circuit in front of me. Then I realised what I was actually looking at. The projection wasn’t occupying the road. It was being rendered onto my visor.

It almost felt like a replay. I watched as the projection carved a perfect line through the apex, leaning into the next corner before accelerating away. Then it vanished. A few seconds later I reached the same corner. Without really thinking about it, I followed the same line. The difference was immediate. Gelert carried far more speed through the corner than I expected. By the time I reached the next straight, I was already closing the gap to the rider ahead. I rolled on the throttle. Tenth became ninth. I glanced back toward the corner, shocked at how much time I’d gained.

The projection cut out again as the race continued around me. Up ahead, two riders were fighting over the same piece of road. Sparks rained down from the side of a barrier as one of the riders clipped the other entering a corner. Debris fell to the floor, a mixture of rubble and metal, adding to the Black Loop’s already difficult terrain.

I cut around the pile of rubble, closing the distance between the riders in front of me even more. Then it appeared again. The projection emerged from nowhere, leaning low over the bike as it entered the next sequence of corners. The visuals flickered violently, fragments of static breaking away from it before snapping back into place. I watched carefully. The line wasn’t aggressive. It wasn’t reckless. It looked smoother than everybody else’s. Less effort. More speed.

The projection disappeared around the next corner. A few seconds later I reached the same section of track. Again, I followed the projections path, and again, it worked. As the corner opened, the two riders battle for position drifted slightly wide ahead of me. I didn’t, I followed the line I just observed. Ninth became eighth. At that point I stopped wondering whether the projection was real. It didn’t matter, the results spoke for themselves.

Who is this rider? Why their telemetry was suddenly appearing inside my visor? Whoever they were, it was clear they knew this track better than anyone else. The projection continued to appear periodically throughout the race. Every now and then it would materialise ahead of me, carving through the circuit before vanishing again shortly after.

My time on the circuit meant I was steadily getting faster either way, whether I chose to follow the projected rider or not. The corners that had seemed intimidating and chaotic at the start of the race now felt readable and predictable. The obstacles, the other riders and their riding styles all started falling into place in my mind.

I was beginning to understand the rhythm of the track.

By the time the first lap ended, the Black Loop had already claimed at least one rider. The display above the start line flashed briefly as I crossed beneath it.

Lap 2.

3 - The Carbon Ghost

The second lap felt completely different. I crossed the line in eighth place and realised I wasn’t thinking about survival anymore. I was focussed, the kind of focus that strips everything else away. Shadowtask. Alice. Rico. At the moment I couldn’t have cared less about any of those things. The very aspects of my strange existence that previously carried such huge weight, in this moment meant nothing. The track. The next corner. The next rider. The next opportunity. It’s all that mattered.

My vision narrowed in, the noise dampened around me and the circuit no longer felt like a maze of obstacles and unpredictability. I could see the flow of it now. I felt the rhythm. Corners chained together. Hazards revealed themselves earlier. Opportunities appeared before they happened. The Black Loop was still dangerous. Riders were still crashing. The crowd was still cheering every collision like it was part of the entertainment. None of that had changed.

The difference was I wasn’t trying to survive Widowmaker anymore…I was trying to win it.

Eighth position became seventh. Seventh became sixth. The overtakes came quicker now, more calculated. I wasn’t throwing Gelert into gaps and hoping for the best. I was reading the race differently. The rider in sixth took every corner wide, trusting their speed over control. I waited until they overcommitted into a left-hand bend, then cut tighter beneath them as their tyres fought for grip against the cracked surface. Sixth became fifth.

The next positions were much harder to take but I was determined, riding has never felt this good. Fifth quickly became fourth. Up ahead, two more racers were locked in a battle for second place. One of them was the armoured coupe from earlier. The sight of it immediately caught my attention. After crossing paths earlier and seeing their willingness to kill, I was way more guarded than I have been with the other riders I’ve overtaken. Judging by the damage scattered across their bodywork, I wasn’t the only rider they’d attempted to remove from the race.

The vehicle beside them was a heavily modified sports car that looked equally unwilling to surrender position. Neither driver could break away and neither driver was willing to settle for third. Every corner became a battle. Each straight offered another attempt to force the other into a deadly mistake. They switched lines constantly, blocked aggressively and left almost nothing open behind them.

I needed to close the gap quickly, I shifted my focus, corner by corner I sliced through the track, shaving seconds off my lap until the distance between us disappeared. Now second place was within reach.

That was when I started hearing the crowd differently. Not louder. Different. Sections of people were standing now. Some pointed and shouted at me from the other side of the barrier, others were shouting across balconies and rooftops as I passed beneath them. At first I couldn’t make out the words. Then fragments of their collective murmurs cut through the chaotic noise of The Black Loop and its riders.

“Look at the bike! The helmet!”

“No way…”

“Look at how he rides!”

Both riders were frantically trying to gain the position. The inside line was covered. The outside wasn’t much better. Every route forward was blocked. Every time one gained an advantage, the other immediately took it back. They were intimidating, but I knew I was faster. I pushed harder. I tried setting up an overtake. Nothing. I carried more speed through the next corner. The gaps were too tight.

The more I tried to force my way through, the less progress I made. For the first time in the race, frustration started creeping in. I knew I was faster. I knew Gelert could handle me opening the throttle more. The key to me passing these two was to shift my focus.

Trying to create an opportunity didn’t work, I needed to let one reveal itself. I relaxed my grip on the controls and let my attention settle back onto the track. I stopped looking for a gap and simply watched the movement in front of me. That’s when I saw it. Not the inside. Not the outside. Not a gap.

The absence of one…

The space between the two vehicles expanded and contracted repeatedly. As both riders battled it out, time seemed to slow down around me, and in that moment I found it. Their tempo. It clicked. I knew what I had to do, Gelert responded instantly, harmoniously. I shifted down a couple of gears and waited until the opening between them appeared, just as I’d predicted.

This was my chance.

I twisted the throttle as Gelert surged forward beneath me, the engine screaming as the distance between myself and the two cars vanished almost instantly. Both drivers noticed me at almost the exact same moment. Their helmets turned as Gelert accelerated directly toward the shrinking space between them. For a fraction of a second all three of us occupied the same piece of road. Before I could blink Gelert was already through, cutting through the narrow gap between them.

Fourth position now became second. I looked over my shoulder, catching a momentary glimpse of their expressions behind their visors as the gap collapsed behind me. It was the same expression I’d seen from the guards at the gate. The same expression I’d seen from the rider beside me on the starting grid. And now it was spreading through the crowd.

Recognition. Disbelief. Then realisation…

“THE SPLITLANE?!”

“WAS THAT THE SPLITLANE?!”

The reaction spread through the circuit like wildfire. All eyes were on me.

“I TOLD YOU!”

“IT’S THE CARBON GHOST!”

“LOOK AT HIS RIDING STYLE!”

People were standing now. Pointing. Shouting. Entire sections of the crowd were no longer watching the race. They were watching me. The noise continued building as I carved my way through the track, the crowds’ individual voices became impossible to separate from one another. What began as scattered shouts quickly grew into something larger, spreading from one section of the circuit to the next until thousands of voices were chanting the same two words.

“CARBON GHOST!”

The sound rolled across the Black Loop like thunder.

Carbon Ghost? Splitlane? None of it made any sense. All I knew for sure was that not a single person in Solai has ever looked at me the way these people did. I didn’t know who they thought they were watching, or why Gelert, my helmet and the way I rode seemed to mean so much to them.

Their chant followed me through the circuit as I accelerated away from the vehicles I just cut between. Balconies, rooftops and footbridges blurred past in flashes of movement and light, thousands of people shouting the same name as I raced to catch up to the rider in first place.

I can’t pretend it didn’t feel good, and the feeling hit harder than I expected. I felt it in the way my grip tightened around the handlebars. In the way the familiar warmth in my chest burned hotter with every repetition of their collective chant. In the way Gelert responded beneath me as though it had been waiting for this, for me to stop holding back completely.

I shifted my focus back to the race. The rider in first place was still nowhere to be seen. Every now and then I’d catch a glimpse of a taillight disappearing around a distant corner, or hear the faint echo of an engine somewhere ahead, but whilst I’d been fighting my way through the ranks, they’d spent the entire race pulling further away.

I asked my helmet to locate the rider in first position.

“Distance to race leader?”

WIDOWMAKER

POSITION: 2 / 12

LAP: 2 / 2

1ST POSITION DISTANCE: 412 METRES

The rider wasn’t just leading the Black Loop. They were dominating it. The crowd’s chants followed me around the circuit as I accelerated deeper into the Black Loop. Their voices echoed between abandoned buildings and rusting industrial structures.

“CARBON GHOST!”

I checked the distance again. 378 METRES. A few turns later: 341 METRES. The gap was shrinking. Eventually, the blur I’d been following came into focus as I got closer. It was a motorbike. Red. Low, and fast.

For the first time in this entire race, I was studying another rider instead of the track itself. They barely moved on the bike. Every move looked deliberate. Every corner looked rehearsed. They weren’t wrestling the machine through the circuit, they were flowing through it. Whoever they were, they could ride.

The rider glanced over their shoulder, my guess is they’d heard the crowd and they knew someone was coming. The rider adapted swiftly, their lines became tighter and more defensive. Each time I found an opportunity to pass it disappeared before I could execute.

I stayed on them. With every corner I gained a little more ground. And with every corner the crowd’s chants continued, echoing throughout the Black Loop.

“CARBON GHOST!”

Every repetition seemed to feed the pool of hot fiery energy building inside my chest. The rider glanced back again, and again. They knew I was coming. Catching up to them seemed inevitable, I’d already closed the gap significantly. As I picked up speed on the straight, they did something I didn’t expect.

At the end of the straight, the circuit wrapped around the perimeter of an abandoned industrial building. Loose pieces of concrete and other construction debris lined the outside barrier where parts of the structure were collapsing into the road. The rider deliberately clipped a huge pile of rubble. Not enough to lose control, but enough to dislodge a piece, causing a chain reaction that led to huge chunks of the unstable pile to spill across the track.

My visor lit up immediately.

HAZARD DETECTED.

I hit the brakes hard. Gelert handled the abrupt change in pace very well, a second or two later the bike was back under control.

When the dust settled, the rider was gone. So was the time I’d made up. I looked up. The finish line was visible in the distance. Visible between the floodlit buildings ahead. The rider in first was heading straight for the final sector. The riders behind me were fast approaching too. I couldn’t see them yet, but the roar of their engines let me know they weren’t far away.

That’s when my eyes drifted towards something I’d been ignoring all night. A section of road hidden behind flickering holographic warning barriers.

CAUTION.

Every lap I’d passed it. Every lap I’d dismissed it. The route broke away from the main circuit and disappeared into darkness. Beyond the holographic barriers, the road simply ended. A massive chasm split the industrial district in two, swallowing roads, buildings and entire sections of infrastructure. Floodlights illuminated fragments of broken concrete hanging over the edge, but even from this distance I couldn’t see the bottom.

Suddenly, something surfaced. A memory? A vision?I couldn’t tell. For a split second the Black Loop disappeared. I saw the same section of track from a different perspective. The same barrier. The same chasm. The same impossible gap stretching out into darkness. Floodlights illuminated the edge of the drop. Thousands of people were screaming. The projected rider I’d been seeing throughout the race had materialised in this memory. The people in the crowd were ecstatic.

“He’s actually doing it!?”

“The Dead Drop!?”

The rider accelerated toward the jump. No hesitation. One objective. Full throttle ahead. The motorcycle launched off the edge of the chasm, leaving the ground beneath it. For a moment it hung suspended above the void.

The memory vanished, but the feeling didn’t. The red hot ember burning in my chest remained, surging harder than ever before. I realised I’d felt this exact sensation once already. The android. The tower block. The moment I pushed beyond my limits to protect myself. This wasn’t adrenaline. It was power. Only this time it wasn’t coming from me alone.

The connection that existed between Gelert and me, I could feel energy moving through it. Every vibration from the engine resonated through my chest. Every pulse through the handlebars felt stronger than the last. The harder I pushed, the stronger it became.

The crowd’s chants continued rolling across the Black Loop.

“CARBON GHOST!”

I looked towards the finish line, the rider disappearing towards it, then back at the Dead Drop. At this moment I knew what I had to do. The thousands of people screaming the name they had given me had grown the pressure inside me to breaking point. The only way I was going to win this was to risk everything.

I dropped a gear, then another, and Gelert roared beneath me as the holographic warning barriers rushed closer. The chasm opened ahead, vast and impossible, whilst the crowd became a wall of noise behind me. The energy surging between Gelert and me had become impossible to contain.

I stopped questioning. I stopped doubting. I stopped caring about what I was supposed to be. For the first time since waking up in that motel room, none of it mattered. Not Leon. Not Alice. Not where I belonged. Nothing. There was only the track, the jump, and the certainty that had settled over me.

The piping hot pressure inside my chest reached its limit. I twisted the throttle all the way open, letting out what could only be described as a war cry, screaming at the top of my lungs as I sped towards the chasm. The last thing I saw before leaving the ground was the finish line beyond the deep void. As my tyres left the ground and the road disappeared beneath us, my visor displayed one final notification.

HEART ENGINE PROTOCOL: ENABLED

SYNCHRONISATION: COMPLETE

4 - Heart Engine

As Gelert carried me out across the Dead Drop, I focussed on the far side of the chasm. Although floodlights illuminated broken sections of roadway and industrial structures scattered throughout the darkness below, my attention remained fixed on the landing ahead.

Beneath me was a drop large enough to kill me instantly. Ahead of me was a landing I would never have attempted before tonight. Behind me was an entire circuit full of racers trying to catch me. Yet suspended above that chasm, I felt completely at peace. A peace I’d never felt before. No anxiety. No doubt. No fear. Just, motion…

The Heart Engine notification still lingered on my visor. The warmth that had been building throughout the race was still there, red hot, powerful, though it no longer feeling unstable. The pressure was gone. The energy flowing between Gelert and me had settled into something else entirely. It felt balanced. Controlled. Like whatever connection existed between us both had finally found its true rhythm.

The far side of the Dead Drop rushed towards me as I flew over the chasm. The road on the other side approached fast. I felt the transfer of energy flow between Gelert and me as we braced for impact. The front tyre struck the tarmac first, the suspension compressing heavily beneath me as Gelert absorbed the impact and clawed for grip. The rear wheel slammed down a fraction of a second later, giving us a surge of speed. We fucking made it. Second position became first.

The crowd erupted into a huge echoing roar, filling the circuit with a heavy rumble as their chants continued, for more passionately now.What lay ahead were a series of collapsed barriers, scattered debris and broken sections of roadway. Obstacles littering the final stretch between me and the finish line. Normally I’d have been thinking several moves ahead. Braking points. Lines. Weight transfer. Traction. Now all of a sudden I wasn’t doing any of that. I didn’t need to twist the throttle. I didn’t need to squeeze the brakes. I didn’t need to shift my weight or consciously guide the handlebars. Every intention flowed directly into the machine without delay. No movement. No effort. No translation between rider and motorcycle. I realised I wasn’t controlling Gelert through my body anymore. I was controlling it through instinct. I noticed a gap had appeared between two piles of debris, and before my hands could react, Gelert was already moving toward it. Not on its own, but because I wanted it to. I wasn’t watching the bike make decisions for me. I was making them. The difference was that somewhere between leaping over the Dead Drop and sticking the landing, the physical process of riding Gelert had disappeared.

I didn’t understand what the Heart Engine Protocol was at the time, I only knew how it felt. There was no separation between thought and movement anymore. The moment an intention formed, Gelert had already carried it out. No hesitation. No delay. No translation. The bike wasn’t responding to my inputs. It was responding to me. We weren’t working together. We had become one. The final sector unfolded beneath us in a blur. Every obstacle. Every correction. Every adjustment happened exactly when it needed to.

I looked over my shoulder to see the rider behind us struggling to close the gap I had created. With the finish line 50 yards away I eased off the throttle, allowing Gelert’s engine to settle into a low growl beneath me as we cruised over the line. Gelert settled to a stop, engine idling, as though the bike was catching its breath along side me.

The crowd erupted one final time. The noise was deafening. Thousands of people stood screaming from rooftops, balconies and elevated walkways overlooking the Black Loop. Some were jumping up and down. Others were pointing directly at me. Everywhere I looked people were chanting the same two words.

“CARBON GHOST!”

The sound rolled across the district like thunder. In the moment it was impossible to process everything that had just happened, though I can’t pretend I didn’t enjoy it. After everything I’ve been through, after months of confusion, uncertainty and constantly questioning my own existence, it felt good. Really good. These people didn’t care about what I was, they didn’t care where I’d come from. They saw my ability to ride and they celebrated that part of me.

My nerves calmed, my eyes drifting across the crowd as I listened to them chanting the name they’d given me. Then I saw her…

At first I thought she was real. Standing amongst the spectators only a few feet away from Gelert was a woman I’d never seen before. Short blonde hair. A warm smile. She wasn’t cheering like everybody else. She was looking directly at me.

Everything around me became softer, quieter, fainter. Until my focus was fully on her. She stepped closer to Gelert and ran her hand across the fuel tank, smiling to herself as she looked the bike over. We locked eyes for a moment.

“You always did know how to build something beautiful.”

The way she looked at Gelert. The way she smiled at me. We knew each other.

She vanished as quickly as she appeared. The memory collapsed around me and reality returned all at once. The roar of the crowd bleeding back into my mind as though someone quickly turned the volume back up. The crowd was no longer standing behind the barriers. They were flooding onto the circuit.

“IT’S HIM!”

“IT’S THE GHOST!”

Hundreds became thousands in a matter of seconds. People were climbing fences, jumping railings and pushing through trying to get closer. Their hands reached out towards Gelert. Towards my jacket and my helmet. Someone grabbed my shoulder. Another person tried lifting my visor.

They were surrounding us in a frenzy. I couldn’t stay there. Shadowtask have continuously told me to try and keep a low profile, having thousands of people ‘recognise’ me at an illegal street race is not an ideal situation. Though I can almost guarantee Caine will think it’s ‘cool as fuck’, in hindsight there’s that at least.

I twisted the throttle. Gelert roared so loudly that the people closest to me physically jolted backwards. The crowd opened just enough for me to see a gap, I didn’t waste it. I launched forward, scattering people out of the way as I accelerated across the circuit and away from the finish line.

Their chants followed me into the night, spilling over the border walls and rippling through the city as Gelert carried us into the darkness.

“CARBON GHOST!”

Who is the Carbon Ghost?

Why do they call me that?

Who was the woman in my memory?

Out on that track, I became everything they believed I was. Their cheers filled something inside me that I never knew was empty. For one night, I wasn’t just a collection of someone else’s memories wrapped in synthetic flesh. I was real. I mattered to them.

Will I return?

If they want to see a ghost…

Then I’ll give them no choice.