Mira grabbed her bag, the clunky drive warm in her hands. The hunt for the other drivers had just begun. And somewhere, in a cold data vault, her father’s ghost was waiting to be rebuilt.
Mira hesitated, then whispered her father’s name. The drive whirred to life, its laser burning through a hidden layer of the disc inside—not data, but a compressed AI consciousness. A holographic face flickered on her screen: a younger version of her father, with kind eyes and a panicked voice.
The disc ejected. On its shiny surface, a set of coordinates was now laser-etched.
“Mira. If you’re seeing this, I’m trapped in a corporate server farm. ‘Goldplay GP-1005’ is the backdoor. ‘Driver Indirl’ is me—Indirl is short for ‘Independent Internal Relay.’ I fragmented my mind across twenty old drives. You have to find the other nineteen before the company scrubs them.”
