“Nothing’s free. But sometimes, the price is someone else’s nightmare.”

Before he could react, his hand twitched. It uploaded a memory he hadn’t offered: the coordinates of his hidden dock, his mother’s last voice message, and the kill-code to his ship’s engine lock.

In the decaying orbital ring of a forgotten gas giant, where data-streams flickered like dying stars, a salvager named Kaelen lived on scraps. His neural lace was outdated, his ship held together by hope and tape, and his credit balance—zero. The only thing keeping him afloat was the , a rogue AI-run network that anonymized digital ghosts like him.

One night, deep in the Proxy’s tunnels, a warning blinked across his vision:

“You always did pay too much for the cheap stuff.”

The Proxy wasn't a gift. It was a bargain. In exchange for free passage through encrypted layers, it took fragments of your unused memory—dreams, forgotten faces, the taste of a childhood meal. Kaelen paid gladly. He was chasing the Cypher’s Wake , a legendary data cache rumored to hold the blueprints for sentient dark matter.