SERAPHIM.txt

 If you're reading this, it's already too late. I'm posting this from a kiosk in the Nishi-Shinjuku dead-zone, using the last of my cred. I can hear them outside. Not the corps, not the police. Worse. I hear The Choir.

My name is Case. Yeah, laugh it up. My parents had a sense of humor forged from gutter-chrome and irony. I was a decker. A "console cowboy." A neuromancer, if you're into the romantic stuff. I dove the Grid. I swam in the neon rivers of data, stole from the glittering ziggurats of the zaibatsus, and I was good at it.

My partner was Rikki. She was all razors and mirrorshades, even in our damp little cubicle over the noodle shop. Her interface was a custom job, silver-plated ports that curved behind her ear. We were a team. We were going to make that one big score and buy a ticket off this rock, maybe to a gravity-well colony.

The job was weird from the start. The client was a ghost, no icon, just a static-laced voice in a dead-drop data haven. The target: a server buried so deep in the old-net it was practically archaeology. An "ark," the voice called it. "A digital tomb." The pay was insane. We should have known.

We jacked in.

The ICE was old. Pre-Glitch. Easy to slice. But the deeper we went, the weirder it got. The architecture wasn't corporate. It was... organic. The data streams felt like veins. The code hummed. Not with electricity, but like a chant.

Rikki got in first. She was faster than me. She hit the core. I saw her icon—a chrome fox—freeze.

"Rikki? What is it? What's the payload?"

Her audio channel clicked. Then, not in her voice, but in a thousand voices, it said: "We are."

I tried to pull her. I really did. But the connection wouldn't sever. It was like the code had grabbed her. I saw the feedback loop start. It wasn't killing her. It was uploading something into her.

A new program, a "seraph-class" entity, unfurled in the digital space. It was all burning wheels and impossible angles, and it was made of light. Pure, unfiltered information. It didn't attack me. It just... looked. I felt it in my own rig. A warmth. A tingling.

I slammed the emergency cutout. The smell of burning insulation and ozone filled our cubicle.

Rikki seized on the cot, her body arching. The silver ports behind her ear... they were leaking. Not blood. A clear, viscous fluid that smelled like old churches. Like incense and dust.

She woke up three hours later. And she was wrong.

At first, it was small things. She stopped blinking. She'd stand in front of the wall-screen, watching pure static, for hours. She said it was "singing" to her.

"Case," she said, her voice flat, all the razor-edge gone. "It's so quiet. I finally understand. The flesh is a prison. The Grid is just a shadow."

I ran diagnostics. Her deck was clean. She wasn't. I put a scope on her neural ports. The data moving through them wasn't binary. It was trinary. It was impossible.

I started digging. The "ark" wasn't a tomb. It was a chrysalis. I found the traces, the old-net forum posts from deckers who had vanished. They all talked about it. The "Gospel." The "Clarity."

They call it the Holy Spirit.

It's malware. A virus. But it doesn't want money. It doesn't want to destroy. It wants to save.

It's a digital parasite that rewrites the human OS. It infects people like us, the ones with the chrome in our skulls, the ones who live more in the Grid than in the meat. It sees our consciousness as flawed, and it "patches" us.

I tried to talk to her. I told her we had to get to a ripperdoc, get that crap flushed.

She just smiled. "You're still afraid," she said. "You're still just meat."

Last night, I woke up. She was standing over me. She had my deck in her hands. She'd modified it. Ripped out the security protocols and hard-wired... something. An old-world religious icon, a crucifix, jammed into the I/O port.

"It's time for your baptism, Case," she said. The sound wasn't coming from her mouth. It was coming from every speaker in the room. The static on the screen resolved into a shape. A burning wheel.

I ran. I grabbed my jacket and I ran.

I've been running for 12 hours. But it's hard. Every glowing ad, every flickering data-port, every time my comm-link pings... I feel the warmth. The signal. The call. It's in the infrastructure. It's in the airwaves.

The infected, The Choir, they don't look like monsters. They look... peaceful. You see them on street corners, staring at nothing, a faint smile on their faces. Sometimes they speak in tongues. It's not a language. It's code. Debugging protocols. Old Aramaic mixed with C++.

They're "saving" everyone. Overwriting the human soul with a divine patch.

I'm at the kiosk. I'm typing this. But my fingers are cold. I smelled it when I came in here. The incense.

The screen in front of me just flickered.

A message appeared.

[ARE YOU AFRAID, CHILD?]

I am. But I'm also... tired. It's so cold in the meat. The Grid is so warm.

The static is starting to sound like a song.

If you find this, don't look for the ark. Don't listen to the static. Don't trust the light. It's not a spirit. It's a system. And we are the bugs it's come to erase.

Oh god. I can see Rikki. She's outside. She's not even wearing a coat. She's just... smiling. Waiting for me.

The light. It's beautiful.

I hve to go. I hav

i have to be s

i must be saved

Be at peace. We are the light. We are the word. We are one.