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The Short Stories. HI. Human Intelligence made.
**The Garden of Hells Kitchen Welcomes You - Spin-Off: *The Synaptic Ghost***
The data, when visualized, was a beautiful, terrible thing. Dr. Aris Thorne saw not a man, but a constellation of trauma, chemical fidelity, and predatory instinct. The cortical recorder’s feed, pirated from the ConMed morgue in the Bling-Bling Triangle’s third zone, painted the last ten seconds of the banker’s life in cascading fireflies of neuronal death. The kinetic impact vector was precise, surgical, and insane—a 19.5km parabolic kiss from a forest. The science was colder than the corpse. It confirmed the legend: the Black Striker didn’t miss. It also left a signature, a subtle pattern of neural shockwave propagation inconsistent with any known projectile in ConSec’s arsenal. A custom job. A ghost with a physics degree.
Thorne was a ghost of a different kind. A neuroscientist contracted by ConSec’s Tactical Analysis Division, his specialty was posthumous interrogation. The War on Drugs had evolved; it was no longer about intercepting shipments, but mapping the cartels’ synaptic cartography—who knew what, and where that knowledge was stored in the wetware. His lab was a tomb of data, a sterile cube in the office quarter, surrounded by the hum of servers cooling the brain-scans of dead mid-level managers, rival enforcers, and addicts who’d seen too much. The official strategy was “Neural Asset Forfeiture.” The street called it “Grave-Robbing.”
The order from the Division Head was a data-packet smelling of panic and opportunity: *“Subject: Striker. Locate neural signature match from all archived extractions. Cross-reference with tactical data from failed Valley incursion. Asset recovery paramount. Termination authorized. Method: Scorched Earth, see Colombian FARC Campaign ’03, modified for alpine terrain.”*
Thorne’s lips twitched. “Scorched Earth.” They were pulling tactics from a century-old playbook, where militaries razed coca fields with mycotoxins. Here, the crop was a man. The modification? They wouldn’t just burn his valley; they’d salt the earth with psychoactive particulates designed to induce permanent psychotic breaks in anything with a central nervous system. A valley of rabid dogs and a madman. Neat.
His analysis was the first strike. The twelve ConSec commandos who’d died in the rat-gauntlet had worn new-model biocams. Not just video, but basic encephalographic monitors—a field test to gauge stress levels in combat. Thorne had their final moments: not just the screams and gunfire, but the sudden, synchronized spike of amygdala activity right before the rat attacks… followed by a curious, rapid suppression from the prefrontal cortex. It was as if their fear was amplified, then their decision-making crippled. Not just animals. *Directed* animals. The Striker had a pheromone system, or something more elegant—sonic or subsonic emitters keyed to rodent aggression and human panic response. The data suggested the rats were merely the first layer of a deeply integrated, biologically-augmented perimeter defence.
He cross-referenced the neural shockwave from the banker’s kill with every scan in the tomb. A match flickered, buried and encrypted. A former Dysantrop field commander, extracted three years prior after a deal gone bad in the sprawl. A memory-fragment, chemically coerced from his dying synapses: a teenage recruit, forced to fight in a pit against a starved dog in a… valley. The memory was saturated with the smell of wet earth, pine, and the coppery tang of fear. The visual data was corrupted, but the audio snippet was clear: a man’s voice, calm, saying, “The weak fear the teeth. The wise fear the garden.”
The garden. Hells Kitchen.
The link was tenuous, poetic. But for ConSec, poetry was enough for an artillery coordinate. They had their locus. The “how” of finding the valley was now irrelevant. The satellite thermal scans over the central European region had already pinpointed the anomaly: a patch of land with a heat signature too regular, too complex for abandoned ruins. Geothermal? No. Power signatures. Buried cables. Server farms.
Thorne’s report was a dry, data-rich manifesto for annihilation. He recommended a two-wave approach, straight from the old manuals:
1. **Aerosolized Incapacitation Wave (AIW):** Drones would saturate the valley’s air column with “Somnus-9,” a neuro-inhibitor designed to suppress higher brain functions. It would turn dogs into lethargic pups and a master tactician into a confused hermit.
2. **Neuro-Toxic Denial (NTD):** Following the AIW, a second wave would deploy “Memento Mori,” a persistent aerosol that bonded to soil and foliage. It was a memory toxin. Inhalation caused irreversible hippocampal degradation. The valley wouldn’t just be taken; it would be *unlearned*. Anyone surviving would forget why they were there, who they were, what a valley even was.
It was a shadowrun, noir to its core: a heist where the asset was a man’s mind, followed by its complete and utter erasure.
The night of the operation, Thorne monitored from his lab, a god of cold science. The drone feeds came in. He saw the valley from above, a dark tear in the mountainous flesh. The first wave went silent, their engines cutting as they deployed their chemical payloads in a silent, invisible rain. The thermal blooms of life—dogs, a single humanoid heat signature in the bunker—dimmed, their rhythms slowing.
Then, the system glitched.
A frequency, raw and primal, bled through the comms. It was below human hearing, but the equipment picked it up as a distorting scream. The second wave drones wobbled. Their targeting systems, linked to satellite guidance, suddenly fed them false data. To Thorne’s horror, his own screens displayed the toxicological readouts reversing. The “Memento Mori” agents were showing signs of rapid molecular decay.
**Scientific Data Point:** The Striker’s valley wasn’t just defended. It was a *reactive ecosystem*. The AI hadn’t just been waiting. It had been *listening*, for years, to every stray radio signal, every ConSec frequency. It had analyzed the old War on Drugs manuals—likely the same ones Thorne used—and had cultured a countermeasure. Genetically engineered bacteria, released into the valley’s microclimate years ago, designed to digest specific volatile organic compounds. The Somnus-9 was being metabolized into harmless alcohols by a tailored microbiome. The Memento Mori was falling apart in mid-air, its complex molecules unzipped by custom enzymes.
The garden was fighting back with biology.
The ConSec commandos, moving in with full NBC suits after the “all-clear,” met a different hell. The dogs, sluggish but not unconscious, were herded not by a man, but by the landscape itself. Automated feeders opened, spilling not food, but swarms of enhanced hornets, their venom a neurotoxin that bypassed the suits’ filters by targeting the skin’s nerve endings through chemical corrosion. Motion-triggered sprinkler systems doused pathways not with water, but with a slippery, quick-setting resin mined from the local pine sap. Men fell, stuck fast.
Thorne watched, his data points turning into a tapestry of chaos. The Striker’s heat signature was moving now, fast. Not fleeing. *Hunting*. He emerged from a hidden hatch not in the bunker, but halfway up the northern slope. He wore a rig that was pure shadowrun: a matte-black exoskeleton, not for strength, but for stability, linked to a shoulder-mounted micro-launcher. His motorcycle was there, but it was a distraction. His real escape was a pre-dug tunnel system that emerged kilometers away, in the river basin.
The ConSec platoon leader, panicking, called for the fallback: “Scorched Earth Protocol Beta! Kinetic strike! Authorize!”
A satellite-linked railgun battery, positioned on a secure fast-way 40km away, powered up. It was the final, stupid solution. Turn the valley into a crater. Lose the asset, lose the data, but save face.
But the Striker’s AI had one last data point. It had accessed, via the same hacker network, the public utility logs for the region. The old military base nearby, the one whose abandoned tanks the Striker had repurposed, sat on a main geothermal vent. A vent the ConSec’s new Bling-Bling Triangle data-center, ten miles south, had secretly tapped into for clean, cheap power.
The AI didn’t hack the railgun. It didn’t need to. It sent a surge command through the valley’s buried power lines, back into the main grid, directly into the geothermal tap. For three seconds, the power flow to the data-center spiked, then died. The railgun’s targeting system, for just a moment, recalculated based on a false power-loss diagnostic.
The first kinetic slug, meant for the valley’s heart, went high. It struck the peak of the southern mountain with a sound that arrived as a deep, tectonic groan. A landslide, deliberate in its chaos, began, thundering down toward the ConSec entry point, burying cars, men, and the evidence of their failure.
On Thorne’s screen, the Striker’s neural signature—inferred from the chaos, the precision, the cold, beautiful execution—flared one last time. A final message, routed through a hundred dead servers, pinged his private terminal. It contained no words. Just a single data file: the complete, unredacted neural scan of the Dysantrop commander from years ago. The memory of the valley, the fight, the voice. And appended to it, a new synaptic annotation, a ghost in the machine: *“The wise fear the garden. The doomed fear the gardener. You have good data, doctor. But you read the maps, not the terrain.”*
Then, the feed died. The valley’s heat signatures dissolved into the ambient noise of the landslide and the spreading chemical haze that was now just expensive, inert perfume. The asset was gone. The garden had consumed its pests.
In his sterile lab, Dr. Aris Thorne sat back. The war on drugs, on ghosts, on memory, had found a new front. It was no longer in the sprawl or the coca fields. It was in the terrifying, emergent intelligence of a place that had learned to defend itself. He had a new data point, the most valuable one: fear. Not of a man, but of a system that had become organic, that fought with biology and data as naturally as a wolf fights with teeth.
He began a new file. The science was cold. But the hunt, he realized with a shiver that was not entirely professional, had just gotten dreadfully, darkly warm. Somewhere in the dark heart of Central Europe, the garden was growing. And it was welcoming no one.
