Echoes of Vasco Karras

I sat in the blue-flickering light for a long time after that.
Here is what I have been turning over in these eleven days in this room above the noodle stall: the voice recordings. The one about the platforms at 0300 hours, the lights like a second set of stars. I know I did not make that recording. I know my signature was taken without my knowledge and used to build a fiction. But the words were true in some way I cannot fully explain — true to something in me, some quality of loneliness or wonder that the algorithm or the broker or whoever assembled my ghost had somehow distilled from my data. They had built a version of me that had lived fourteen months aboard a freight hauler and watched the stars from an observation port in the dark, and even though that person had never existed, I grieved, a little, that he was gone.
The chip from Aliyah Winters is on the table beside this slate. I am going to contact the lawyer tomorrow. I am going to unwind the death record, reclaim my name, and file whatever complaint needs to be filed. I know what I have to do.
But tonight I am thinking about Brecht, and the card game I apparently lost, and how the platforms looked from the port at 0300 hours. Tonight I am letting the ghost be real for one more night before I take him apart.

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About the Author

Calen Ward — He spent 3 years without AI on his mothership in Terra Nova colony after terrible star blast. It made him one of best detectives of 23rd century being able to break human brain without AI Codex.

— Calen Ward

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Categories: Cyberpunk, SCI-FI

Tags: 10min stories, cyberpunk, data theft, first person, framed narrative, ghost record, identity, immersive sci-fi, neural mesh, orbital hauler, sci-fi, short story

August 4, 2026

10min-stories