SYNTHDRIVE

Prologue: The Endless Road

The year is 2087. The sky hasn’t been blue in decades.

Ash drifts like snow over broken highways, caught in the sickly glow of dying neon. Towering ruins claw at the clouds, forgotten cities swallowed by sand and silence. Somewhere out there, nature is still trying to reclaim the bones of civilization. But not here. Not on the road.

Kayley drives.

The world collapsed long before she was born. She doesn’t remember how or why. All that matters now is motion – forward, always forward. Her car is more than a machine; it’s her shelter, her weapon, her last remaining tether to something that might be called a life. Its engine purrs like a synthetic tiger, cybernetics humming beneath the hood, patched together from scavenged dreams and rusted miracles.

The only constant companion is the radio: a low hiss of static, broken now and then by distant broadcasts. Sometimes old jingles, half-eaten by time. Sometimes voices – frantic, cracked, begging, preaching, warning. Most days she tunes it out. But lately… something’s changed.

The static isn’t random anymore.

Chapter 1: A Whisper on the Wires

It started a few weeks back. Four tones. Distorted but deliberate. Almost musical. They’d pulse out across the static like sonar, hidden between fragments of broken advertisements and corrupted emergency alerts. They had something mysterious to them, a feeling of mystery and secret but at the same time, struck something in Kayley, that made them feel all too familiar. Just four tones. Yet, it felt like the weight of the world weighed upon whoever heard them.

Kayley had heard them before – briefly, accidentally. But now she started hearing them every day. She didn’t speak of it to the scavengers at the trade posts or the grim-faced engineers manning the old fuel stations. Most called it “wasteland madness” when whispers from the wire began sounding like songs. But Kayley had learned to trust her instincts. And her instincts told her that someone – or something – was calling out.

The road became a rhythm, a ritual. The hum of the engine under her fingers, the glow of the dashboard gauges, the neon wash of decayed billboards rolling by. And always, the radio. The four-tone pulse. The mystery, that became oh so familiar by now. She wasn’t really sure, what it meant or why it felt so familiar to her but she was neither scared nor confused by the tones, unlike many of the scavengers she met, who were scared to death whenever the topic of the four tones was brought up.

She had heard rumors. Not direct conversations, just fragments caught during trades or overheard over drinks at gutted diners. A name passed between cracked lips with reverence or fear – Synthdrive. It wasn’t really even spoken about, only in mere whispers and whenever it passed someone’s lips, it did so instantly accompanied by a scared look over one´s shoulders, as if to make sure, nobody heard what had just been said.

A city? A machine? A trap? Nobody knew. Nobody ever knew.

But Kayley couldn’t shake the feeling that it was real—and that the radio pulses weren’t just random noise. They were a map. A key. A challenge.

Or maybe an invitation.

Chapter 2: Echoes of the Grid

By the time she reached the ruins of Junction 16, Kayley was known as a survivor. Scavengers nodded when she passed. She carried scars, stories, and upgrades bolted into her ride that most couldn’t afford or even dream of finding. She had made her name. And while it cost her dearly, she wouldn’t have it any other way. If given the choice, she wouldn’t trade her past for anything. It defined her. It had made her who she was now. It shaped her into the survivor she was.

The outpost there was dim and half-dead, like most things. But it had power. And that meant terminals. She found them quickly – two hackers in patched synth-leather, crouched in front of a humming console like priests before an altar. The screen bled static, but they were running packet traces. Old-world code. Their fingers flew over the keyboard in mindboggling speed and with astonishing accuracy. Kayley couldn’t help but be in awe of their abilities. She stood there for a moment, admiring the display of pure hacking prowess. Sure, in the outposts pretty much everybody knew their way around terminals but being this fluent and adept in old-world code? That was rare. And a sight to behold.

When she asked what they were tracking, they spoke of The Grid. So it was real. More than just a rumor. It was real. A ghost of the internet, a surviving digital underlayer connecting long-dead infrastructure. Most of it was noise, riddled with corrupted files and broken AI loops – but some parts were alive. Some parts had secrets. They told her about a name whispered among data-runners and salvagers alike: the Grid Master. A phantom who could swim in corrupted systems and walk out with clean code, schematics, even coordinates to buried tech.

“You’re serious?” Kayley asked, arms crossed. She couldn’t believe their words. It sounded too much like a myth, a legend told around camp fires on mild summer nights. Their stare became even emptier and more earnest, than they had already been before. They looked at each other in disbelief and shock that anybody could doubt the info they had just given her. Then the older one of them looked at Kayley and spoke, slowly and in all seriousness. “We don’t make jokes about legends.”, he said plainly.

Chapter 3: The Titan’s Shadow

Kayley’s reputation grew with every mile of dust chewed by her tires. She didn’t just survive anymore – she hunted. And her name struck fear into the hearts of even the most battle-hardened scavengers and wastelanders. She had earned that. Fought hard for it.

After ambushing a rogue convoy near the collapsed megabridge at Sector 9, she picked clean the remains of the lead vehicle – a reinforced courier transport bearing a long-dead corporate emblem. Inside the wreckage, she found something strange: a hardened data chip, almost pristine. She had never seen a chip like this before. It looked like old-tech. It was old-tech. In fact, the chip probably was older than her. This chip had seen the old world, long before the skies had turned darkened and multi-colored and the world had gone to hell.

It wasn’t easy to crack. Even her upgraded neural tools, which would have cracked modern algorithms in a heartbeat, strained against its encryption. But after two sleepless nights in a rusted bunker with static pounding her skull, the chip coughed up a single partial schematic. What she saw made her blood run cold. She was no engineer or scientist and she couldn’t be sure, but she thought she knew, what she was looking at. The design was clearly a generator – massive, impossible in scale. No known vehicles or outposts had ever used anything like it, of that she was sure just by looking at the sheer size of the damned thing on the schematic. Its output could have powered a city. Unfortunately, much of the actual text on the schematic was corrupted and not recoverable. Which was a shame, she was sure that much of it would have helped her getting a better understanding if what she was looking at. One word, however, stood out of the corrupted lines of illegible jibberish, as it was clearly legible and undistorted:

TITAN

The stories she had last heard as a child came rushing back. Whispered horrors about war machines from before the collapse – city-killers, AI-controlled monsters built to fight humanity’s last wars. Most dismissed them as apocalyptic myths. Ironic, as clearly the world they all lived in now had to come to pass somehow and from the looks of many of the settlements and cities that had not been rebuilt in time, at least Kayley had no trouble believing that huge combat robots may have had something to do with it. Kayley never subscribed to the general opinion that all of that should have just been myths but now, holding that chip and having seen the decrypted schematic, she knew the stories were real. The Titans had been real. And at least one of them had left something behind.

Chapter 4: A Glimpse in the Machine

Kayley, ever since decrypting that chip, had begun a new journey. She knew she had to find whatever it was, the Titans had left behind. It had been a treacherous journey – a lot of scary dangerous kilometres lay behind her and the adventures she had been through had made her harder and more experienced. Kayley was no longer just a driver. She was something else now – a hybrid. A blade in the storm. Not only was she now a battle-hardened force to be reckoned with, she had taken in and absorbed all the knowledge, mysteries and lore of the old world she could get a hold on. Read every book and listened to every story. She also bought or stole every cyber-update and implant she could find that would help her on her quest. She was no longer „just“ Kayley, nor was she any longer just a Driver or Grid Runner – she had become a Road Warrior, a Highway Legend in her own right.

After coming across a particularly interesting group of scavengers led by a Grid Runner by the name of Hawthorne, she decided to hide away close to their outpost. Hawthorne was a handsome, middle-aged man enhanced with more grid tech and neural implants she had ever seen. He emanated wisdom, experience and respect, downright oozing an aura of knowledge out of every pore. Kayley felt he had knowledge she needed. He had a way with terminals and old-world code, she had seen that clearly when she observed him and his crew. She would lay in waiting, seeing what they brought in or transported out. When the time would come, she would go in there and see, what secrets Hawthorne had hidden in his outpost. One evening her time had come. Hawthorne and his men went out on a scavenge and left the hideout completely unattended. She was all the more disappointed when she spent almost two hours looking behind every nook and cranny of the outpost just to find nothing at all. Just when she was about to leave the outpost disappointed and angry, she heard a crackle from the door. „Oh girl, you have no idea, what you are dealing with here.“, Hawthorne said and without hesitation shot a bolt of plasma energy from his wrist blaster right at her. She ducked behind a desk just in time to see the plasma bolt burn the desk to a crisp within seconds. When she stood up again, she saw Hawthorne leave the outpost. Seconds later, she heard an engine roar and cry out, tires screeching and when she reached the door, she saw his car slithering onto the highway. She smiled. „It is on. Would not have it any other way.“, she said with a scary smile. She would enjoy this.

After a brutal chase across the salt flats, she salvaged the shattered enemy vehicle and pulled a strange cybernetic implant from the neural cradle. A direct interface jack—designed to link human minds to systems far beyond normal control. She looked over to Hawthorne. His corpse crackled with lightning from the charge she had hit and neutralized him with. Her attack was not meant to kill him but her electric charge had caused a malfunction in his wrist blaster and now his corpse was engulfed in bright, green plasma fires, burning to a crispy husk. „Fancy. No wonder you got as far as you did.“, she said to the corpse behind her. This interface was an asset. Valuable. And it would bring her another step closer to the end of her journey. She carefully uninstalled the interface from the wreck of the dead Grid Runner’s car and began modifying her own dashboard to fit the new piece of equipment in. A direct link was risky, but she was committed and this interface had the potential to get her so much closer to where she needed to go. She risked it and established a direct link.

When she plugged in, the world shattered around her. The road vanished. Her senses inverted. She didn’t see the car – she was the car. Fuel levels flowed as code. Engine heat buzzed as frequency. Her thoughts blended with machine logic, her heartbeat syncing with electric pulses. She was terrified. And euphoric. The sky was no longer this purple and green and blue flickering, neon-lighted and polluted thing it had become ever since the world had gone to hell. It now shone brightly – still in neon colors and crackling ever so slightly under the light of distant neon flashes of lightning but beautiful and not at all scary anymore. It was organized. It had structure. Almost completely taken in by the beauty and order of the grid, she lost track of time and paid attention to nothing else. And then, all of a sudden…something else. A flicker in the system. A crack in the mirror. A second presence. Watching her move through the grid, surfing on her code, facilitating her search for whatever it may have been the Titans had left behind. As soon as she noticed she ripped the jack out, interrupting her connection with the interface. She gasped. That was close. Then she looked up in fear and surprise. The presence hadn’t left. Some part of it had stayed behind, lodged deeply in the systems of her implants, whispering to her. A ghost in the shell.

Chapter 5: The Neon Prophet

The road led her to the edge of the dead zone – a strip of irradiated nothingness where only the mad and the desperate wandered. There, buried in a canyon of crushed chrome and flickering cables, she found the hermit. After her experience with the interface she had stolen from Hawthorne, she had spent months looking into the depths of the grid – the normal way. The hermit had been a lucky find. But she knew, she had to meet him in person.

He called himself the Neon Prophet and his cave was a shrine to the old world. Monitors stacked like towers, displaying loops of shattered code and fractured memories. Piles of old server racks and computers lay around, making navigating through his cave more like wandering a maze. He welcomed her like an old friend, eyes lit with glowwire circuitry. She told him about the voice in her systems. The feelings she couldn’t shake. The presence, that had never really left her ever since she connected to the grid using Hawthorne’s interface. The name it kept whispering: Synthdrive. The prophet listened to her story, silently and giving her the time she needed to tell it. When she was done, he nodded slowly. „It chose you.“, he said, simply and calmly. „What you experienced…what stuck with you, is the Chrome Ghost. An ancient warrior AI of the old world. Once human, now transformed. It was abused to do the old humans bidding, destroying cities and killing enemies. And it is filled with regret ever since. It never wanted to hunt or kill, never wanted to destroy and maim. Once the deed was done and could not be reverted, it looked upon the results and felt deep shame and regret. Ever since it lay in waiting, searching for the one, testing various grid runners.“, he told her in his calm and soothing voice. The Chrome Ghost had been a scientist. The lead scientist of a project called Synthdrive. „But that was before the world burned down to the hell we live in now. Before the war.“, he added. He told Kayley about the war and how it had all begun. How project Synthdrive had been abandoned in favor of creating the massive combat robots the warrior AIs had been made for. And how the Chrome Ghost had been drawn into the great war instead of following up on Synthdrive. „You know, as a scientist, he had no interest in war. But back then, not unlike today actually, money and power rules everything. And without money, he would not have been able to continue with project Synthdrive. He had no own funding. So he had to obey the orders issued by his government to create a warrior AI. They promised him he would be able to return to his project after that. Little did they all know, the world would not be the same anymore just days later.“, said the hermit.

The Neon Prophet then proceeded to tell Kayley how the Chrome Ghost came to be. About the horrific accident which fused his mind with the AI he was working on. How the government, instead of trying to help and restore him, shoved his AI conscience into a massive, hunking combat bot and sent him to war. How he at one point simply shut down all that remained human in his conscience and just followed his programming. His own programming. The Chrome Ghost turned out to be the deadliest of them all, leaving nothing but wastelands and destruction in his path. Kayley swallowed and looked into the hermit’s sad eyes. „But why me?“, she asked. Her voice was raspy and sounded tired, sad and hopeless. The hermit looked her in the eyes and tried to smile. „Because you listened.“, he replied. „Because you were not afraid to look and keep looking.“, he added after a moment of silence. He rose up from his chair and took a step towards her, laying his hand on her left shoulder, giving it a quick encouraging tap. „And because you’re the one who might just make it through.“, he said, this time managing to smile at her with open, friendly eyes full of ancient wisdom.

Chapter 6: Running the Wires

Kayley wasn’t just chasing a myth, a vapor, a legend or even a faint voice in her circuits anymore – in a way, she was chasing herself. The static on the radio had become a symphony, and the pulses of the Grid pulsed inside her skull like a second heartbeat. After the talk she had with the Neon Prophet, she was no longer afraid of using the interface. She embraced it. Together with the Neon Prophet’s help she had made improvements to the interface and modified her dashboard to fully integrate it. With the neural jack refined and bonded to her implants and her car’s systems, she began to dive back into the grid. Dataruns. Deep dives. All while still making the actual physical journey in the real world: she would drive at cruising speed – 100 kilometers per hour down scorched wasteland roads – while her mind slipped sideways into the Grid. There, among the streams of corrupted code and feral protocols, she learned to move like a whisper. She siphoned data, skimmed lost memories, tore blueprints from dead servers. All guided by a now familiar presence she was no longer afraid of: the Chrome Ghost. What had initially scared her to death left her in fear was now not only a friend and constant companion. The Chrome Ghost had become a part of herself.

One day, while diving deep within the husk of a collapsed corporate server hive, she found more glimpses of the truth. Project Synthdrive had not been a vehicle, device or program. It had not even been a place. Project Synthdrive was a massive gateway, a bridge built to make a pathway through the final collapse of the real world into the grid. Once she had learned how to communicate with the Chrome Ghost’s presence, he had told her everything and the data chunks she had just uncovered, were the last piece of the story. He had known that the world was going to hell. That it was doomed and the wasteland cyber hell they all lived in now had always been destined to come to pass. The purpose he had developed Project Synthdrive for was to escape the dying physical world by uploading the consciousness of the civilization into a simulated paradise. A digital sanctuary to escape the barren and hopeless world the actions of cruel and greedy governments and corporations had left humankind in. A last hope at salvation. The logs Kayley had uncovered in the data chunks just right now confirmed it: up until the point, Chrome Ghost had been forced to work on the warrior AIs instead, billions had been spent. Thousands had died in testing, consciousnesses likely lost in endless loops and data streams, never to be recovered. Kayley stared at the data chunks in shock and awe. „What the hell were you thinking…“, she whispered and flinched only seconds later as Chrome Ghost sent a charge of electricity through the neural jack. But he wasn’t angry or malicious. She dove deep into her shared consciousness, exploring the emotions of the combined lifeform she and Chrome Ghost had become. What she felt wasn’t anger. It was pain, disgust at himself and regret. She knew, nothing of this had been his plan. His intentions, like so often, had been good. And in his good intentions he had been completely oblivious to the pain and deaths he had caused.

The project was lost after the war. There was nothing to return back to. But fragments of it remained on the grid, in the data streams. And some one – or something – was still protecting them. And suddenly she understood. The presence she now shared her consciousness with was but a mere glimpse of the Chrome Ghost. He was still out there somewhere.

Chapter 7: Meeting the Ghost

Kayley had lost count of all the runs she had done. It must have been several hundred.

It happened on what must have been the 250th run or more. Kayley crossed into the core of a forgotten government relay station buried beneath the empty husks of what had once been a massive metropolis. At first, she had no idea what she had uncovered. To her, it just looked like yet another dusty old ruin and she had very little hope she would find anything of worth down here. After all, she never did in all the runs before. Had it not been for the constant nagging reminder of her mission by the part of Chrome Ghost’s consciousness she shared her own mind with, she had almost abandoned the quest. But here, at last, in abandoned, dusky government relay station number 209 she was greeted by the remains of a massive combat bot. His guns empty, missile pods expended, the massive 28 meter high body of the combat bot lay before her in the dust of the otherwise empty cargo hall of the relay station. She felt its presence, even though the empty and spent robot lay there without moving or a single indication of „life“.

At last, when she came a couple of steps closer, the Chrome Ghost greeted her. Not with words but with images and sensations. A deep sensation of the regret and remorse she had already felt from the part of his consciousness she had bonded with in the grid – just about a thousandfold stronger and more profound. It was almost too much for her to cope with. „For a machine, an AI devoid of human emotions, you have pretty strong feelings there, my friend.“, she said softly. „Hold some of it back though, will you? You’re coming on real strong there, pal.“, she said and her voice cracked a bit, showing how much effort it took her to withstand the wave of emotions coming from the Chrome Ghost. A wave of images shot through her mind as a response: trees and blue skies, a man and a woman taking a walk through a park. People laughing, living, enjoying live. Green grass. A kid jumping back and forth between the man and the woman. She understood. She nodded to the lifeless machine in front of her. „I get it. I know. I know you were human once. I am sorry. You just overwhelmed me, you know?“, she said softly. As if to overwhelm her even more, the imagery in her mind suddenly changed. The trees and the grass were not green anymore but bright red and orange – burning and smoking. She saw images of missiles being launched, satellites falling from the skies, burning and bursting into thousands of pieces. Then there was the woman again. She was wearing a lab coat, sitting in front of a massive old-world terminal, hammering in code in ridiculous speed and accuracy. And suddenly Kayley realized the mistake she and the Neon Prophet had made. The Chrome Ghost was a woman, before she became the entity she was now. Not a man.

Her name had been lost, overwritten in time and lost even to her own consciousness. What was left of her, was her remorse. It was overwhelming. Every image, emotion and notion she sent over to Kayley was accompanied by that strong feeling of remorse and regret for her actions. Kayley understood but she really wished, she’d stop. It got in the way and it made communicating with Chrome Ghost just that much harder for Kayley.

Kayley began shaking. In an all too human gesture she laid her hand on the giant combat bot’s head and nodded slowly, encouraging the Chrome Ghost to continue her story. The next wave of images began flowing into Kayley’s mind, showing her diagrams and schematics of the gateway code of Synthdrive. Kayley saw herself lying on a hospital bed, tied to machines and cables and clearly dying. Seconds later, she woke up again in a digital void, empty and silent. She looked around and saw nothing, just an endless desert of black, dark, scary nothing. Then, slowly and steadily, the black void became a bright and beautiful scenery not unlike the park one Chrome Ghost had shown her before. Then a sudden switch back to black. Right in front of her bits and pieces of code appeared floating in midair. The face of the woman who became the Chrome Ghost appeared floating next to the code. Kayley realized, Chrome Ghost was trying to tell her about the Synthdrive gateway but the code was old-world code and pretty sophisticated. Way too sophisticated for Kayley. „I don’t understand this.“, she said. The floating head nodded. More code appeared, with comments and a couple of more floating images supposed to tell her more but of course it wasn’t enough. Chrome Ghost noticed Kayley’s overwhelmed, confused expression and the imagery stopped abruptly. Instead, footage of celebrities of the old world appeared, taken from interviews and shows and cut up so they spelled out for Kayley, what Chrome Ghost could not tell her herself directly.

THE | GATEWAY | IS | REAL. | IT’S A | ONE | WAY | STREET. | THERE | IS | NO | RETURN.|

Kayley nodded. Finally they were getting somewhere. She looked at the floating image of the once human lead scientist. „You want me to find the gateway. The Synthdrive. Why? To get us all into a better, if be it only simulated, world?“, she asked. The floating image changed into an image of Chrome Ghost destroying a city, shooting missiles at houses and blasting guns at humans. Then the scene zoomed in at Chrome Ghost’s face and for a moment Kayley couldn’t help a tiny giggle coming out of her mouth. There was something inherently funny about a frowning, massive combat bot shaking its head. Then she realized. Chrome Ghost was trying to tell her, that she hadn’t understood at all. It slowly dawned on her. „You mean…no, it can’t be.“, she said. Chrome Ghost changed back into the floating image of the woman she once was. The floating image nodded. „We’re…we’re already in it?“, Kayley said. More of a realization than a question. „We’re already in it. All of this is not real. But…if this hellhole is the supposedly prettier simulation, what the hell does the real world look like? How burned up and broken must it be, if this is supposed to be the more pleasing simulation?“, she said. Chrome Ghost remained silent. And somehow, that made it even worse for Kayley.

Chapter 8: Master of the Grid

Kayley no longer needed the Prophet. Or the scavengers. Or the whispers. Not after having met the Chrome Ghost for real. She had spent the better part of the past year training with the Chrome Ghost, getting to know the grid better than ever. With the new awareness of what she had perceived as the real world being a scam, nothing but a simulation and actually not the real world, came the awareness that every simulation can be manipulated. It was all code, ultimately, wasn’t it? And code could be manipulated, exploited, abused to one’s benefit.

She was legend now. A Grid Master. She could run the wires blindfolded. She could bypass AI firewalls mid-drive. She could tear data from the bones of megacorps servers like meat from overcooked chicken bones. Even the Ghost was surprised about how adept Kayley had come ever since they first really met. Kayley herself had a different view on that. From what she understood, she was the only person in this simulation who actually really knew it was a simulation. And the Ghost had made it clear to her, that she could not tell anybody just yet. Not, before they had reached their goal to reactivate the Synthdrive gateway again.

After she had left the ruins of the government relay station, the Chrome Ghost returned – not as a vision, but as a presence beside her, steady and clear. They didn’t speak – even this new presence of the Ghost had not regained the ability to actually speak – as much as simply understand each other. They were kin, mirrors from opposite ends of the collapse, now, that Kayley understood. This made the rest of the journey a lot easier, because she had a lot to learn and the Ghost had a lot to teach. Understanding each other had helped with that a lot. One thing she learned from Chrome Ghost had to do with the needs and requirements that came along with her quest. To open the Synthdrive gateway, she would need a power source beyond anything left in the world. She would need the heart of a Titan – the fusion core of one of the massive combat bots that destroyed the real world. Kayley closed her eyes, and the old schematic on that courier chip flashed behind her eyelids. The dots connected. The path was clear.

Chapter 9: Idol of the Wastes

People stepped aside when she entered. Settlements lit their perimeter lights when they heard her engine on the horizon. By now, she was no longer considered a Grid Runner or even a wastelander. She had been made into a myth herself. People no longer called her a scavenger or wastelander. They no longer called her „the girl in her car“. They called her hope.

She hadn’t asked for the attention, but she accepted what they offered: upgraded synthfuel, encrypted map caches, whispered secrets from old military vaults. Everyone believed she was going somewhere no one else could. That she would find the key to making everyone’s lives better. For all she knew, they migh just have been right. A part of her still had doubts but if all Ghost had told her was true, she just might have been the hope people saw in her.

It had now been about two years after she and Ghost had first met. She didn’t feel ready. Ghost smiled at her and flooded her mind with a wave of encouraging, uplifting imagery. Ghost showed her a reprise of all that she had learned in the meantime and while she still had doubts, she felt better. „You’re right. You did teach me a lot. But this quest is a tall order. I am not sure I am ready for it.“, Kayley said. Ghost smiled at her reassuringly. Then she looked out the front screen and pointed in the direction she wanted Kayley to drive. It saddened Kayley a bit because she knew, that this would be the beginning of the end of her journey. It would also mean, Ghost would leave her soon and she’d never see her again. Ghost might have been „just“ an apparition, a manifestation of the consciousness of woman who had died decades ago and turned into an AI consciousness, but in the past two years, Kayley had also built a relationship with her. Something, she was not looking forward to lose. She sighed but nodded. She turned the car in the right direction and stepped on the gas. The engine roared, picking up speed rapidly and catapulting them through mild summer night under a pink and blue sky at 150 kph.

About three hours later they arrived at their destination. Kayley parked the car at the edge of a canyon called The Glass Crater. The Glass Crater were the remains of a huge megalopolis that was destroyed by Titans and nuclear bombardment. The enormous heat and pressure waves caused by half a dozen nuclear missiles had reduced the city to rubble and melted tons of windows together, creating a canyon made of molten steel and glass. The canyon gave up a greenish-blueish glow. Partially because of how the sunlight was reflected by the glassy and metal surfaces but partially also from the still raging radiation caused by the high yield nuclear warheads that created the crater in the first place. Kayley wasn’t sure, how good an idea it was to stand so close to that radiation. Those were, however, not concerns she could indulge right now. The Titan was at the very bottom of the crater, several kilometres further inside. That’s where the Titan lay. That’s where Kayley needed to go. She looked over to Ghost. Ghost nodded. „Well then.“, Kayley said and sighed. And with that, she began her descent into the crater.

About an hour of climbing and sliding down hills made of molten metal and glass Kayley was almost there. A mountain of metal, fused into the glass and the surrounding earth, its war-scarred frame still glowing with residual heat and radiation from the ancient battle, the Titan’s remains lay piled up right in front of her. Its heart – a singularity fusion core – was still working, giving off a vibrant green and blue light, pulsating from the fusion reaction. She got in closer. There was a slight crackling noise. The core still provided the Titan’s remains with power and some of the systems seemed to be still active. Among others, the automated defense grid. Kayley had no intentions of getting electrocuted, so she tried working her way around the conductive relays. Ghost had showed her the schematics of the Titans, detailing exactly how each system worked. Thanks to that preparation, she knew exactly where to touch and where not to. Still, the Titan’s remains were neatly and orderly laid out but rather piling up the way they fell after the explosions. Some parts were fused and molten down, some parts clearly looked as if they no longer were attached, where they were supposed to. It made the task of removing the fusion core more difficult but she was still hopeful. She took her time, proceeding carefully and paying close attention to what she was doing, focusing on each step with thorough care. It took her over two hours but at the end she stood at the edge of the Titan’s remains, a fully intact fusion core in her hands. Radiation had long begun burning her skin and her lungs but she didn’t really care. The hot desert wind whipped her leather coat around like ghostly apparitions. In the distance she could hear a herd of cyberbeasts growling. She pulled out the modulator from her backpack – a piece of old-world technology the Ghost had told her how to build. She connected it with the frequency tuner and slid both device parts into the metal frame she had made to connect both parts with the fusion core. She looked at Ghost, question marks in her eyes. Ghost smiled and nodded. And then Ghost sent her one last flash of information: the frequency. The key to the gate. Kayley nodded. „I’m ready.“, she said. Ghost nodded, folded her hands together in a gesture of gratitude and with a light crackle and glitch she vanished into thin air. Kayley sighed. „I’m gonna miss you, girl.“, she said and slid the fusion core into the compartment of the frame it was meant for. Modulator and frequency tuner came to life almost instantly, buzzing and humming with the enormous power provided by the fusion core. She took out a neural jack and a cable from her backpack and connected both parts. Then she plugged in the output jack into the device. The hum got slightly louder. „Here goes nothing.“, she said and plugged the other end of the neural jack cable in her neural implant, establishing a direct connection. She could feel the raw, limitless power of the fusion core flowing through the device. The interface came to life instantly and she couldn’t help but admire the ultimate efficiency and beauty of it all. It was a clean, efficient interface without unnecessary decorations. „Let’s hope you taught me well, Ghost.“, she said and began putting in the key frequency.

Chapter 10: The Synthdrive Gateway

The world screamed. Light exploded from the device Kayley had activated in the crater. The ground split. The sky rippled like glass struck by a stone. A bright aurora filled with greens and blues, reds and yellows splurted out of the device, focusing about a meter above the ground in a ball of colorful light in front of her. For a moment, it looked as if the light show was all that was going to happen. For a moment, Kayley thought, she had made a mistake, combined the parts wrongly or messed up the frequency modulation. Then a loud bang broke the silence accompanied by another explosion of light. When she dared open her eyes again, she couldn’t believe what she saw. The ball of light had torn open reality itself when it exploded. This was the actual Synthdrive gate. This ripple in space-time, this bridge between two different realities. A perfect horizon of shimmering blue and green lights, pulsating with insurmountable zero point energy. She took a step closer. The gateway was crackling with energy. Its surface looked like an ever flowing ocean, wavey and full of energy.

Now, that the gateway was opened, she smiled. „A pity you’re not here to see this, Ghost.“, she said. „You’d probably have liked this very much. „, she added, broadening her smile. The gate rippled with energy, the crackling got a bit louder. Before she knew it, Ghost appeared next to her. Not a mental appariation or halluzination this time, but a fully corporeal manifestation of the lead developer of the Synthdrive project. Kayley didn’t trust her eyes. Ghost smiled at her. „I am here. And you have a choice to make now, Kayley.“, Ghost said. Kayley looked at her, confused and irritated. „You speak? We spent all this time gesturing and guessing and flooding my mind with images and you can actually speak?“, Kayley said with a clear undertone of anger. Ghost smiled. „I get how you must feel now. I wasn’t strong enough before you opened the gateway. It’s that simple. I just couldn’t get a strong enough transmission through to give you more than a see-through apparition. Speech was out of the question. I am sorry.“, Ghost said and Kayley slowly began to figure something out.

What if all had been so very different from what she thought was the reality? What if Ghost never died? What if Ghost was actually still in the real world, trying to guide Kayley out of the simulation? Ghost smiled. „You are beginning to understand. Good. Then you are ready to make your choice now.“, Ghost said. Kayley looked around one last time. The neon-drenched skies rippled with energy from the gateway. The herd of cyberbeasts was still roaming around in the distance. Her car, still parked on the edge of the crater above her, shimmered in the last rays of the vanishing sun. She sighed. As crappy as this wasteland world was, it had been her home for as long as she could remember. Was she really ready to leave all this behind, even if it wasn’t actually real? She took a deep breath. She looked at the gateway. She looked back at the car on the edge of the crater and the road behind it. „Step through. Leave the simulation and come back to us in reality. Help rebuild the old world. Or stay here, in the simulation. Fight in the wastelands, fight for survival. Until the end of eternity. With all that you’ve learned from me, this should be fairly easy now. But it won’t be real.“, Ghost recapped her options. Kayley smiled and stepped through the gateway without looking back once more.

She stood at the threshold. Reality pulsed in front of her – broken, brutal, cruel, but real. The simulation behind her was the reality she had known so far – also broken, also brutal, also cruel, far from perfect and not real. A world that fell. A sky that never turned back to blue. A place full of pain, hunger and despair. And yet, it had been home for all her live. It was a known constant. The way through the gateway was unchartered territory.

Kayley closed her eyes. She remembered the scavengers who gave her food when she had none. The traders who shared maps over firelight. The Prophet muttering in his cave of screens. The hackers grinning as they cracked lost protocols. The outposts that dared to hope. She remembered the hum of her engine. The glow of her modified dashboard. The silence of the highway at three in the morning – apart from the roar of her engine – when she was cruising through the neon-drenched desert at 150kph. She opened her eyes and smiled. She took one last, deep breath and stepped through the gate. Reality – or what she thought to be reality so far – broke down around her. She felt as if something grabbed at something deep in her stomach and pulled her through a tiny little hole.

THE ROAD NEVER ENDS

Epilogue: The Road Never Ends

Kayley slid into the driver’s seat. The door hissed shut. Her fingers brushed the ignition. The engine roared to life like a wild beast waking from a dream. She looked up. The world outside was still broken. But this one was real. The sun wasn’t shining in shades of green, blue and purple. There was no neon-drenched atmosphere. The grass along the highway was green and the sky was bright blue. This reality…the real one, it wasn’t all that different from the one she had known all her life. The colors had changed but the world itself was still broken. Unlike the world in the simulation however, this one could be rebuilt. And she would help doing that. She shifted into gear and smirked. „I’m coming home.“, she said to the empty car and the empty highway that lay in front of her. She stepped on the gas. Rubber screamed against asphalt. Dust and dirt from a highway that hadn’t been used in ages exploded behind her as she tore away from the crater, which in the real world wasn’t all that different from its counterpart in the simulation. Kayley had learned very early on after her decoupling from the simulation that the real world hadn’t faired that much better than the simulation and that the simulation, instead of being the perfect, clean and wonderful world Ghost had intended it to be, had been warped to the cruel wastelands Kayley had known all her life. Unlike in the simulation though, the planet itself had time to heal. And the people? Those very few that could be freed from the simulation, like herself, had a chance. A chance to rebuild.

She didn’t really know, what lay ahead. She didn’t need to. Her life in the simulation may have not been real per se in the way this life now was. But the road had always been enough for her. It always would be. She didn’t need to know, what lay ahead. All she needed was the road.

The story ends here. But the road…the road never ends.