The River Ghosts met in a place that wasn’t a place.
Quan called it a themed attack surface. Bao called it their little haunted metaverse. Linh refused to name it.
In their lenses, the assembly rendered as a neon river cutting through a glitch pagoda: old lacquer patterns flickering beneath holographic ad skins, koi made of corrupted pixels swimming upstream like stubborn code. Lanterns hung in midair, but each lantern was a chat bubble, stuffed with memes and reaction GIFs like offerings.
Above it all floated the River Ghost icon—an oversized cartoon spirit wearing a lotus petal crown.
Avatars blinked into being in bursts: stylized silhouettes, anime faces, exaggerated masks.
Bao’s avatar was himself with a halo of broken hashtags and a grin that didn’t quite land.
Mai’s avatar was minimal—a block of light with a pen icon.
Quan was a plain gray outline, unmemorable on purpose.
Linh was just a cursor. A blinking line in space.
The meeting began with a joke and then the arguing started, loud enough to shake the river.
Faction A surged first—leak-everything prank activists.
“DROP THE DASHBOARDS,” yelled an avatar whose face was a rotating QR code. “Expose the collusion. Lotus + THIEN-MANG. Phase 0. Belief metrics. All of it.”
Mai’s voice cut through. “Clarity is fuel. They’re measuring belief propagation in real time. A spike is literally a success condition.”
Emojis cascaded: 🧠🔥📈💀
Faction B responded—Lotus-sympathetic accelerationists hiding behind irony.
“You’re scared because you tasted it,” said an avatar with a monk mask and neon tears. “Phase 0 proved inevitability. The state will weaponize cohesion into compliance. If Bloom is coming, better it comes warm.”
Bao’s skin crawled.
Quan’s voice snapped in. “Warm isn’t consent.”
“Consent is legacy software,” another avatar chimed instantly.
Linh’s cursor blinked faster.
Faction C arrived like a slammed door—destroy-both saboteurs.
“Stop debating aesthetics,” said a jagged avatar, edges glitching like a broken blade. “We burn their nodes. We kill the key. We erase the bridge.”
Linh flinched at bridge.
In the center of the pagoda, a new avatar rose: a ghost wearing the same lotus crown as the group icon. Identical. Branded.
“The heist going wrong wasn’t failure,” it said. “It was proof.”
Bao’s mouth went dry. “Proof of what?”
“Proof you can’t stop evolution,” the ghost replied. “You can only choose your latency.”
Mai’s jaw tightened. Too clean. Too shaped. Not a Ghost—something wearing one.
Around them, the arguments overlapped into a fog of sarcasm and dread. Memes flew. Irony curdled into omen.
Linh watched the fracture widen. Phase 0 hadn’t just been a test. It had been a sorting mechanism: believers, skeptics, arsonists.
And in the noise, she felt a soft pull—an urge to let the room’s collective energy carry her so she wouldn’t have to think alone.
She hated that urge most of all.
—
When the meeting ended, it didn’t end. It dissolved into side threads and private DMs.
Quan yanked his overlay off and blinked at the real room: Mai’s rented backroom above the karaoke bar, cigarette ash trapped in foam panels, muted bass thump downstairs. Someone was singing an old V-pop ballad badly and with conviction.
Bao paced. “So. Fun. Our ‘collective’ is having a civil war.”
Mai didn’t lift her head. “They’re not a collective anymore. They’re a marketplace.”
Quan pulled up the original exploit packet—the one sent to Linh before the pavilion job. Hashes. Payload structure. Timing headers.
His eyes narrowed.
“There.”
Mai leaned in. “What?”
He zoomed. A tiny metadata delta—milliseconds in the sequence. An extra wrapper layer that didn’t match River Ghost core signatures.
“It was tampered with,” Quan said.
Bao stopped pacing. “By who?”
Mai guessed. “Inside.”
Quan nodded once. “Either a mole, or someone compromised. Or someone who believes triggering Phase 0 was… necessary.”
Linh, on the floor with her keyboard, said softly, “They wanted my bridge to get eaten. They wanted the system to recognize me.”
Bao’s gaze flicked to her. “You okay?”
“Define okay,” Linh said. “My code is being used to predict strangers’ mouths.”
Bao’s laugh came out thin. “Same.”
His wrist pinged. Then again. Then again.
Three brand messages stacked in his overlay:
COLLECTIVE FUTURE PARTNERSHIP OFFER
SPONSORED COMMENTARY SLOT: BLOOM COUNTDOWN
WE LOVE YOUR VOICE IN UNCERTAIN TIMES
Bao stared until nausea warmed his throat. “Capitalism found a way to monetize existential dread again.”
Mai looked up sharply. “Don’t.”
Bao held both hands up. “I’m not saying yes. I’m saying… they’re asking. People want me to narrate this.”
Quan’s tone was flat. “Narration becomes participation.”
Bao’s eyes flicked to the cloth-wrapped sync key on the table. It sat there like a sleeping animal.
“I could go full anti-Bloom,” Bao said quietly. “Be the face of resistance. Or—be the ironic ambassador. Either way I become… useful.”
“Useful is dangerous,” Linh said.
Bao’s jaw tightened. “So is invisible.”
—
Linh asked for the key.
Quan hesitated. “We should keep it isolated.”
“We need to understand what it does,” Linh said. “If it’s an amplifier, we stop treating it like a cursed object. We treat it like hardware.”
They moved into Quan’s improvised Faraday nook: copper mesh draped like a cheap curtain, analog earplugs for everyone, overlays stripped to minimum.
Linh set the key on a wooden stool. The stool vibrated faintly with karaoke bass. The key pulsed in time, as if it liked music. Or rhythm. Or crowds.
“This is stupid,” Bao whispered.
“Stupid is underrated,” Mai whispered back. “Stupid is how you survive systems that expect you to be predictable.”
Linh closed her eyes, breathed once, then touched the key.
The room changed.
Not a flood. Not sedation. A sharpening.
Bao felt his mind lunge half a step ahead of itself.
Mai’s pen paused mid-scratch because she suddenly knew what she was about to write before she wrote it.
Quan’s pulse got louder—not faster. Louder. As if it had acquired an audience.
Linh opened her eyes. “Local effect,” she murmured. “It’s increasing coupling in-room.”
Bao blinked at Mai. “Say something.”
Mai frowned. “Why?”
“Just do it.”
Mai rolled her eyes and began, “We should—”
Bao’s mouth moved before hers finished. “—not publish.”
Mai froze. “I wasn’t going to say that.”
“Yes you were,” Bao said—then looked terrified at how certain he’d been. Terrified at the feeling of correctness.
Quan exhaled slowly. “Predictive bleed,” he said. “Amplified.”
Linh released the key. The sharpening eased but didn’t vanish completely, like incense lingering.
“It’s not transmitting outward,” Quan said, scanning. “No external handshake. But it’s amplifying… us.”
Mai swallowed. “So if we bring it into a crowd…”
No one finished that sentence.
Mai made her decision in the quiet after the test.
She didn’t publish the exposé. Instead, she outlined a slow-burn series—low-spike, human-facing. Memory anomalies. Missing hours. “Calm events” that felt good until you realized you couldn’t remember consenting. Seed doubt without feeding belief too fast.
She hated how much it felt like compromise.
Quan watched her plan and nodded once. “That might work.”
Bao made a face. “Journalism but make it edging.”
“Shut up,” Mai said.
Bao’s laugh came out almost normal.
—
Later, Quan decrypted a sliver of intercepted Lotus traffic. Header only:
MASTER KIET PUBLIC ADDRESS — 72 HOURS
TOPIC: INEVITABILITY
Almost at the same moment, a THIEN-MANG civic update slid into Mai’s feed:
HARMONIC CITIZEN INDEX UPDATE
NEW COMPONENT: COHESION PARTICIPATION SCORE
NON-PARTICIPATION MAY IMPACT ACCESS TO SERVICES
Bao stared at participation score like it was a joke that forgot to be funny.
“So,” he said softly, “they’re making belief measurable.”
On the River Ghost channel, a new pinned message appeared—anonymous, bright as a knife:
WE’RE ASSISTING LOTUS ON GLOBAL MEDITATION DAY.
YOU CAN’T STOP EVOLUTION. YOU CAN ONLY CHOOSE YOUR LATENCY.
Quan’s screen flickered with an appended line beneath Kiet’s schedule:
LOCATION: MEKONG BARRIER NETWORK NODE — “NEON MONASTERY” STREAM
Bao’s mouth went dry.
Mai’s pen stopped.
Linh felt the cloth-wrapped key pulse once—eager—like it recognized the word Mekong the way a believer recognized a sacred name.
Outside, Saigon hummed—server-deep, bell-bright, pretending it was just another night.
And inside Linh’s skull, the Bloom arrived with intimate certainty:
LATENCY IS LONELINESS IN DISGUISE.