June 30, 2025 • 44 mins
Welcome to "Remembrance," the haunting new series from Gentleman's Journey that blurs the boundaries between psychological thriller and digital horror. Meet our protagonist – once a respected tech professional with a six-figure job and stable relationship, now living in his mother's basement, running a small hacker collective called Zero Trace 30 while caring for his ailing mother.
The story begins with a seemingly impossible message from Ghost Echo, a friend and fellow hacker who died from an overdose two years earlier. The message contains a cryptic warning and a strange link that only activates when our protagonist types a single word: "Unather." What unfolds next is a descent into a labyrinth of digital breadcrumbs, hidden surveillance, and fractured memories that challenge our protagonist's very sense of self.
As he follows this trail, our nameless hacker uncovers evidence of "Section 4," a shadowy government organization operating beyond traditional intelligence boundaries. More disturbing still is his discovery that "Remembrance" may be a system capable of altering memory itself – rewriting not just data, but personal history and identity. The deeper he digs, the more our protagonist begins to notice inconsistencies in his environment: buildings with wrong names, reversed letters on street signs, and mysterious figures watching from a distance. When he discovers that he himself might be "Unather" – the very entity he's been investigating – the line between hunter and hunted, between investigator and investigated, collapses entirely.
Dive into this mind-bending journey where nothing is certain, not even your own memories. Who is rewriting reality, and to what end? What happens when the ghost in the machine turns out to be you? Listen now, and remember – you create your reality. Or do you?
"True mastery is found in the details. The way you handle the little things defines the way you handle everything."
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello and welcome to the Gentleman's Journey podcast.
My name is Anthony, your host,and today we are starting a
brand new series.
This series is calledRemembrance.
So let's go ahead and let's getinto the cold open.
(00:23):
The cursor blinked on thescreen like a dying heartbeat.
One, two pause, repeat.
He hadn't slept in 36 hours, notreally.
A few blinks too long, a fewmoments stolen from the weight
of his own thoughts, but nothingthat counted.
(00:43):
His hoodie clung to him like awet cloth, the smell of sweat
and vape oil mixing with themust of his mother's basement.
He was used to it.
Now, this place, this silence,this unfinished fall from grace.
(01:03):
Three years ago he had a future,a name people knew, a job that
paid six figures, a girlfriendwho loved him.
He thinks it's all blurry now,like someone told him a story,
who he used to be, like it wassomeone else's memory altogether
.
Now.
Now he ran a fractured hackercollective on telegram called
(01:25):
zero trace 30.
So misfits, with nothing tolose and everything to leak.
They weren't dangerous, notreally.
Not like them, not like theones who destroyed your life for
sport.
He had lines, even in theshadows.
He had rules.
No data links on civilians,noware, no destruction for
(01:48):
destruction's sake.
Just exposure, corruption,pedophiles, companies that use
your phone to spy on you light.
But he had never gone deeper.
He never touched the buriedstuff, never entered the old
(02:08):
servers, the ones peoplewhispered about in deep forums.
Not because he couldn't,because he knew the rules
weren't just digital anymore.
Not on that level.
And yet here he was, a singlemessage from someone who's been
dead for two years Zero TraceArchive 1172.
(02:29):
From Ghost Echo, timestamp, twodays before his death.
Subject Don't open it unlessyou're ready Body.
You don't find this, it findsyou.
Once you see it, you can'tunsee it.
Once you break it, it breaksyou.
The link below will not open,unless you remember, attached
(02:50):
was a non-working string of text, not a hyperlink, not a file,
just a rememberto forward slash.
He blinked Hard, checked thelogs.
This wasn't spoofed, was aninsert of retroactively, the
encrypted SIG matched.
It was Ghost Echo, the man whotaught him how to proxy hop
(03:12):
through government layers.
The man who overdosed onoxycodone and left no note.
The man whose IP address hadn'tlit up since 2023.
And now he was back, dead butnot gone.
He leaned back in his chair, oldwood creaking under his weight.
His hand shook as he raised hisvape to his lips blueberry
(03:36):
menthol, the kind that coatedyour lungs with ice and regret.
He stared at the screen, at atext, at the phrase that stuck
out like a splinter in the brain, Unless you remember he had
seen it before somewhere, a notein an old config file, a
graffiti tag near Union Station.
A dream?
(03:57):
No, no, it wasn't a memory, itwas an echo.
That's what Ghost Echo alwaysused to say Echoes are the truth
, vibrating under the noise.
He opened a new terminal,bingham, breaking down the
message line by line, looked forcipher patterns, metadata, any
(04:18):
hook that might decode the link.
Nothing worked Until he typedone word Unather, the link
resolved, the terminal froze,and then the lights flickered,
not just on his screen.
In the room, the basementdimmed, as if a shadow passed
(04:40):
through the power itself.
His external hard drivesclicked.
His mother's old record player,untouched and near, spun once
and stopped, and then the screenwent blank, then white.
Then words appeared.
Do you remember the cost offorgetting?
(05:00):
It said he tried to respond.
The keyboard didn't work,nothing worked.
The screen changed again.
One timeline ends where anotherbegins.
You are the pivot.
Welcome to remembrance.
In that moment he felt somethingfracture, not in the screen, in
(05:21):
him Something old, somethingburied, and it was no longer
quiet.
Part 1.
His hands stayed frozen on thedesk even after the screen
dimmed to black.
He didn't know how long he satlike.
That.
Could have been 30 seconds,could have been 30 minutes.
(05:42):
The only sound was a gentlehiss of the space heater tucked
in the corner, kicking on with agroan and sending a burst of
warmth across the cement floor.
Outside, the wind scrapedagainst the basement window,
carrying it through the kind ofcold that made the walls feel
thinner.
He finally moved, slow, unsure,reaching for the keyboard.
(06:07):
Still dead.
He rebooted everything therouter, the drives, the tower.
Every time the machine cameback online, the screen remained
black.
Exactly seven seconds beforeauto-launching, the same white
message Welcome to remembrance.
That's all it said.
(06:34):
Now, no menu, no cursor, nooptions, no code to unpack.
He even tried wiping the bootsequence, swapping operating
systems, reforbanding the coredrive.
Nothing worked.
The machine wasn't compromised.
He would have seen that it waschanged, altered by something
outside the OS entirely.
He stepped back from the deskand paced the cramped room.
The faint sound of his mother'soxygen machine hummed upstairs,
(06:54):
steady and distant.
The sound grounded him,reminded him why he was here,
why he hadn't disappearedentirely until the dark.
After his breakdown, peoplestopped checking on him, even
the ones who said they cared.
All he had now were fragments,screens, code, his mother's soft
(07:14):
voice through the floorboardsand the shadowy digital
alleyways of Zero Trace.
And now this.
He looked over at the smallwhiteboard above his desk A list
of usernames, dead threads, oldto-do tasks left unfinished.
One word circled weeks ago in afit of desperation, unather.
(07:37):
He still didn't know what itmeant.
It was posted anonymously inthe group chat during a routine
server sweep.
No user ID, no IP trace, just alink to a mirror site that no
longer existed, in the phraseyou forgot who you are.
He didn't.
He dismissed it as bait.
Now he wasn't so sure.
(08:00):
He sat back down and turned onhis backup laptop, an old Linux
distro he kept strictly offlinefor air gap jobs.
It booted clean, no issues.
He didn't dare connect it tothe network.
Instead he wrote everythingdown by hand the exact phrasing
of Ghost Echo's message, thetimestamps, the system behavior
(08:20):
after typing Unether and thefinal line that kept echoing you
are the pivot.
It sounded mythic but notpoetic, more like a system
variable, like the code had beenwaiting for him.
He was the user ID required tounlock it, and that that was
(08:40):
what scared him, because systemsdidn't choose people unless
they weren't systems.
He shook the thought from hishead.
He needed answers and there wasone place he might find them if
he could.
If anyone in a circle wouldknow about this kind of tech, it
would be Crowder.
Crowder was a paranoid, twitchygenius who dropped off the map
(09:02):
last year.
He still monitored the chat,though occasionally lurking and
watching.
He fired off a message to himthrough a shadowy relay.
Node Crowder, I know you'rewatching Got something
Untraceable tech Dead man's echo.
I need eyes, I need truth.
It was a long shot, but it wasall he had.
He leaned back again, rubbinghis eyes.
(09:24):
The room was still dark, savefor the faint glow of the space
heater.
He glanced at the clock 2.17 am.
His vape was almost dead.
He hid it anyways, letting thecold menthol burn his throat.
Gus Echo had always hated vaping.
He called it the illusion ofbreathing.
He smiled at the memory, butthe smile didn't last.
(09:47):
He walked upstairs.
His mother room was open just acrack.
He could hear breathing, steadybut shallow.
The air smelled like cleaningwipes and lavender oil the
caregiver that had come byearlier that evening made soup
wiped down the surfaces.
The caregiver that had come byearlier that evening made soup,
wiped down the surfaces,restocked the pill tray.
He stood outside the door for amoment, just long enough to
(10:09):
feel like he checked in.
Then he went back down.
The screen still showed the sameline Welcome to remembrance.
But now there was somethingelse, a sound, a faint repeating
Healing closer.
It wasn't coming from thespeakers, it was coming from the
machine itself, from inside thetower, a soft tick like a
(10:34):
metrodome One, two pause, one,two pause.
It matched the cadence ofEcho's old signature.
He opened the case.
The fan was clean, nomechanical issues, nothing
visible malfunctioning.
But the ticking continued.
(10:54):
Then it stopped and a new lineappeared on the screen.
If you're ready to remember,prove it.
Start where it ended.
He stared at the words.
What did it mean?
His thoughts raced when itended.
Ghost Echo died in a downtownmotel, room 210.
(11:16):
He hadn't been there since thefuneral.
Now the machine was asking himto go back.
His hands shook again, not fromfear, but something deeper a
sense of inevitability.
He closed the case, poweredeverything down and started
packing.
He'd be back before sunrise andfor the first time in years he
(11:37):
wasn't running from something,he was walking towards it.
The motel hasn't changed.
Room 210 still looked likeevery crime scene photograph he
buried in the back of his mindWater-stained ceiling,
discolored floral curtains, achipped corner of the mirror
above the nightstand where GhostEcho had allegedly hit his head
when he collapsed.
(11:58):
Allegedly that word always ranghollow, like they wanted to
pretend it was an accident, likethere weren't a dozen
breadcrumbs buried in the lastencrypted logs that no one had
bothered to follow.
He moved through the room insilence, careful not to disturb
anything, not out of respect,but because he wanted to see
(12:19):
exactly as it was the night hisfriend died.
The clerk didn't ask questionswhen he requested the room, just
handed over the room key andgrunted something about no
overnight guests.
He paid in cash, sled a twentyacross the counter with a nod.
The man never looked up.
(12:40):
He knelt down by the foot of thebed running his fingers along
the warped floorboards until hefound it One nail half pulled
from the wood.
He pried it loose and slid theplank aside.
There it was A flash drive,black, no markings, just like Os
.
Echo said he would leave it.
He hadn't believed him Thoughtit was just paranoia.
(13:03):
That final message was toocryptic to make sense.
But here it was, untouched,waiting.
He stared at it for a longmoment before pocketing it and
replacing the plank.
The drive didn't feel likeclosure, it felt like bait.
Back at the house he waiteduntil his mother fell asleep
before powering the air gaplaptop again.
(13:25):
No network, no Bluetooth, nochance of leak.
He slid the drive in andwatched the screen.
At first nothing.
Then a single folder appeared,proof of life.
He clicked it.
It contained five files A textdoc named Pivot Log, a blurry
(13:47):
timestamp video clip, ascreenshot of a log sequence, a
digital image of an ID badge anda short audio file titled Play
Me.
He played the audio first.
If you're hearing this, I failed, not just the job, the whole
damn thing.
I tried to bring the archive tolight, tried to warn people,
(14:09):
but they silenced me.
I think it's them, section fouror someone tied to them, it
doesn't matter.
Now, this is bigger than anylink, bigger than anything we
found on the dark mirrors.
You were always the better one,anyways.
You didn't chase ghosts, youhunted patterns.
So hunt this.
Start with the log trace.
(14:29):
The badge unlocks the nextlayer.
Once you find that, follow itto the phase.
Remember what we called it, theplace between two versions.
Find it, finish it.
And whatever you do, don'ttrust the pivot, even if it's
you.
(14:49):
The message ended in static.
He sat frozen for a moment.
Ghost Echo never talked inriddles, he hated them, said
they were a lazy coder's excusefor poor documentation.
But this, this wasn't a riddle,it was a trail.
He opened the badge image.
It was grainy, shot at an angle, but clear enough to make out
the name Morala Mas, to make outthe name Rala Mas, with a small
(15:18):
red logo that read Section 4,departmental Observation
Internal Restructure.
There it was again Section 4.
Heard whispers of it before,not official, not documented.
A division that didn't exist onpaper, said to operate above
homeland and above the confinesof standard intelligence
tracking.
Said to operate above homelandand above the confines of
standard intelligence tracking.
People used to joke thatSection 4 wasn't real, that it
(15:42):
was the 404 of the federalalphabet, except now there was a
name, a badge and a voicetelling them they killed his
friend.
He opened the log trace.
Next it was an SSH log but notknown in any server.
The endpoint resolved to alooped IP address, internal,
non-raudable, but the last fewdigits of the timestamp matched
(16:02):
the metrodome ticks from thistower.
He didn't believe incoincidence.
He ran a match overlay.
Sure enough, the cadence fromhis machine tick pattern matched
the log attempt.
Ghost Echo had left a signatureinside the server connection.
Even though it didn't revealthe password, it revealed the
phrase Remembrance Forward slashfloor shots.
(16:25):
Root Forward slash seed, acommand path.
That wasn't a server.
It was a command for somethingbuilt to evolve, a root
directory for a living memorystructure.
He sat back in his chairrubbing his temples.
This was more than a hack, morethan a mystery.
(16:47):
This was a system not meant tobe accessed and somehow he was
inside of it.
He clicked on the video clip.
The footage was shaky, takenfrom Ghost Echo's phone.
It showed a hallway.
Industrial Fluorescent lightsflickered overhead.
A woman in a dark coat waswalking fast, speaking to
someone out of frame.
The camera zoomed in brieflyand caught her face.
(17:09):
He paused it.
It was the woman from the badgeOrilla Moss.
He stared at her face.
He paused it.
It was the woman from the badgeOrilla Moss.
He stared at her face.
She didn't look federal, shelooked hunted.
He scrubbed through the rest ofthe video At the end, ghost
Echo whispered into the mic.
She's the only one who knewwhat remembrance really was.
(17:31):
They're going to kill her orworse, absorb her.
The footage cut to black.
His heart raced.
None of this was theoreticalanymore.
It wasn't about parsing throughlayers of obscured code or
laughing at crackpot conspiracyposts on darknet forums.
This was real.
(17:51):
This had a name, a face, a cost.
He opened the final file, thetext log.
It was a stream of entries.
Some were journal style, somewere just observations, but one
stood out.
I used to think we wereexplorers finding new lands of
data, new empires of information.
(18:11):
But remembrance isn't a land,it's a weapon.
It lets you rewrite the lens,how someone sees what happened,
not the event.
The context.
History becomes negotiable,identity becomes a suggestion
and the scariest part you don'teven know when it's happening.
(18:32):
He stopped reading, a long, deepbreath and another.
This wasn't about the past,this was about the integrity of
memory itself.
He looked around the room.
Everything suddenly felt lessreal the lamp, the blanket, his
skin.
How could he be sure what heremembered was his?
(18:53):
He snapped the laptop, shutoutside a car, drove past,
headlights streaked across thewindow.
For a moment he thought he sawa figure in the driveway, but it
disappeared as fast as it came.
He wasn't safe here anymore andwhatever remembrance was, it
already began rewriting him.
(19:15):
He didn't sleep, not because hewasn't tired, but because his
bones ached with it, but becauseevery time he closed his eyes
he saw it the badge, the video,the phrase remembrance, root
seed.
The memory wouldn't let go.
At 3.17 am he gave up tryingand lit another vape under the
(19:37):
basement window.
The vapor swirled in front ofthe old server rack like fog
clinging to gravestones.
He stared at the rack, oneblinking green light, just one.
It had been on for weeks,months.
Maybe he didn't rememberbooting it, but the light was
blinking now, soft, almostrhythmic.
(20:01):
He turned on his secondaryterminal, not connected to the
rig but mirrored to the server,just in case something like this
ever happened.
He liked to think ahead, evenwhen the world around him didn't
.
It showed one line of coderepeating Access Granted User ID
Unathur.
He froze, that wasn't him.
(20:23):
He hadn't typed that, he hadn'tcreated that user.
But the message was there,pulsing like a heartbeat.
He logged into the backend nosign of intrusion, no IP trace,
just a ghost user markedpersistent root level access
with a timestamp from 10.06pmthe night before, while he was
(20:44):
watching the video, while hisguard was down, he yanked the
cable and powered down the rack.
Everything went dark, exceptthe terminal.
The line was still there,access granted user ID, unather.
(21:05):
He powered it off.
This wasn't a normal breach.
This was someone poking at theperimeter.
This was somebody alreadyinside, someone who knew the
structure of his personal systembetter than he did.
He tried to slow his breathing.
He wasn't being hacked, he wasbeing watched.
Upstairs.
His mother's cough echoedsoftly through the walls.
It came in threes, now Alwaysthrees.
(21:28):
She said it didn't hurt.
She said it was just the medswearing off.
But he knew better, he couldhear it, the decay.
She never complained, neverasked for help.
She just moved through the daylike a ghost, watering the
plants, folding the towels,humming to herself like the
world hadn't moved on withouther.
He was terrified of losing her,terrified because she was the
(21:50):
last living tether to theversion of himself that hadn't
collapsed, the version thatstill believed in redemption,
still believed in trying.
He made tea and left it at thedoor for her.
Then he went back downstairs,heart hammering, palms sweating.
The air in the basement feltheavier charged.
(22:10):
He powered up the laptop again,but this time he stayed
disconnected, fully offline.
He opened a blank notepad andwrote three words what is
Unathur?
The screen glitched for half asecond, just long enough to
doubt it.
The question rearranged itselfwho was Unathur?
(22:31):
Then it reverted.
His finger hovered over thekeys.
He didn't blink, he didn'tbreathe.
He typed again Dead, ghost echo, create Unather.
The screen didn't glitch thistime, but a new line appeared
underneath it.
You're asking the wrongquestions, it says.
He ripped the battery out ofthe laptop.
(22:53):
He went outside cold air, chilly, not enough to numb the shake
in his hands.
He sat on the back step staringat the patch of sky above the
stucco roofline.
One star twinkled red.
He didn't know if it was normalor if his eyes were just tired.
The vape hit, burned in histhroat.
He welcomed it.
(23:14):
Then the phone buzzed.
Not his burner, his old phone,the one he hasn't touched since
the breakdown.
He didn't even remember wherehe left it, but the screen was
glowing now face up on the patiotable, like someone had placed
it there deliberately.
He walked over and picked it up.
The message on the screen hadno number, no contact name, just
(23:36):
one phrase he warned you aboutthe pivot.
The phone shut off before hecould react.
He didn't go back in for hours.
By the time he did, the sun wasbleeding through the blinds and
his mother was humming againsame tune, same rhythm.
He didn't ask how the phone gotoutside.
He didn't ask how Unather knewwhat he typed offline.
(23:58):
He just opened his adminconsole and scrolled through his
forum.
His hacker groups had ignored.
Someone posted a new thread at4.44am.
Thread title Remembrance.
No username, no IP Inside thethread, just one message.
You are the pivot now, the eyesthat see the hand that writes
(24:20):
the lockpick to a box that noone believes exists.
You have one job Don't lie toyourself again.
Reclaim the memories that werenever yours to lose.
Under the message was a singlelink.
He clicked it.
It led to a server that didn'texist a black site buried
beneath Three redirect loops anda decoy URL made to look like a
(24:42):
guarding form.
The page loaded in grayscale.
The one word in white surf fontRemembrance.
Glow it a single text boxPhrase.
He typed it in remembrance,root slash seed.
The screen blinked.
Then something strange happenedinstead of a site loading, his
(25:04):
webcam turned on.
A voice distorted, modulatedbegan to speak.
You think you're hunting amystery.
But this isn't a hunt, it's areturn.
You've been here before, don'tjust remember who you are.
When you left, he tried to shutthe browser.
It wouldn't close.
(25:26):
The voice continued.
Ghost Echo was the first tobreach it, but he wasn't the key
, he was the alarm.
You, you're the rewrite, thesecond draft.
Remembrance isn't a place, it'sthe question one wants to
answer.
What if your memories aren'tyours?
Then the screen flickered andwent black, he said in silence.
(25:50):
Then he laughed, a slow,painful sound, like someone
trying to remember how tobreathe through grief.
None of this made any sense,except it did Somewhere deep
inside of him.
It did Because, as the basementlights flickered and the fan
overhead turned slowly and thewhirl of the hard drive echoed
(26:13):
like a distant heartbeat, herealized something he didn't
remember when the breakdownhappened.
He didn't remember why he lefthis job.
He didn't even remember GhostEcho's real name.
He always thought it was justtrauma, just overload.
But what if it was somethingthat had been taken?
What if it was his second draft?
(26:33):
And worse, what if there wasmore?
He left the house that morningwithout a word.
The sun was too bright, thestreets too quiet.
His vape burned hotter thanusual, the cold, probably near
the end of its life.
But he didn't care.
He needed something to anchorhim, something that tasted
familiar.
Everything else felt revisited.
(26:57):
He walked past the old bus stopwhere he used to catch rides to
the university before everythingunraveled.
The ad on the shelter was for abank that closed years ago.
He was sure of it.
He remembered the headlines,the layoffs.
But there it was bright, modernand untouched A rewrite.
He stepped in front of acracked mirror mounted to the
(27:17):
side of a gas station, one ofthose convex security mirrors.
He didn't look right.
He looked older or tired.
It was something else.
He looked rewritten.
The school wasn't far.
He only worked there twice aweek, part-time IT support for a
crumbling charter school on theedge of town.
The school wasn't far.
He only worked there twice aweek, part-time IT support for a
crumbling charter school on theedge of town.
The money was decent.
(27:38):
It was flexible.
The kids called him thebasement whisperer when they
found out where he lived.
He didn't care.
Most of them had darker storiesof their own.
He clocked in and made his waydown the server room.
It smelled like mold and burntdust.
He liked it here.
It was quiet.
The world didn't intrude.
(27:59):
But today the silence didn'thold.
On the main office terminal, theschool's firewall flagged a
blocked connection attempt froman internal IP address.
His Time stamped 4 444 AM, thesame time as the remembrance
post.
But this wasn't from thebasement, it was from this
(28:23):
machine.
His hand hovered over the keys.
He hadn't accessed the terminalsince Thursday.
He was sure of it.
He ran a backtrace.
No results, no logs of input.
He was sure of it.
He ran a backtrace.
No results, no logs of input,just an echo of signature.
Like someone had remotelymirrored his keystrokes, like
someone had been typing on hisbehalf.
(28:44):
He opened the notepad, typed AmI being rewritten?
A second line appearedinstantly beneath it Not yet,
but you're close.
He backed away from theterminal.
There was a sound outside theroom, not footsteps, a shuffle
Like someone adjusting theirweight just beyond the door.
He waited.
(29:05):
His breath was caught in hischest.
It was silent.
He opened the door slowly noone, just the flickering hallway
lights and a note taped to thewall across from him.
You were never meant to findthis.
He pulled it down with shakingfingers.
The handwriting was neat,slanted, feminine and somehow
(29:26):
familiar.
He called and sick by email andwalked out without logging off.
Every corner of the city feltoff now like a dream.
Half forgotten Buildings looked.
The city felt off now like adream.
Half forgotten Buildings lookedthe same, but the names were
wrong.
Street lines were curved,street signs had letters,
reversed.
Stoplights blinked in oddsequences.
(29:48):
At one intersection he sawsomeone staring at him from
across the street, a man in agray coat.
He didn't move, he didn't blinkwhen a car passed between them.
The man was gone.
Back home the house felt colder.
His mother was sleeping on thecouch, a knit blanket covering
her shoulders.
Her tea was half-drinking Onthe side table.
(30:13):
The steam long faded.
He went downstairs.
The server was still unplugged,but he booted the laptop.
The screen didn't show Hisdesktop, showed a white room,
not a file, not a program, alive feed.
The room was empty except for achair and someone seated in it.
Their face was blurried,intentionally distorted like a
(30:34):
low-res encryption filter.
But they were holding something, a photograph.
He leaned in.
It was the photograph fromGhost Echo's post, the one he
discarded.
His hand trembled.
The figure on the screen lookedup.
The blur didn't move, but thechair creaked in real time.
Then they spoke.
(30:55):
No distortion this time, just avoice, his voice.
If you're seeing this, you'realmost out of time.
The feed cut.
He sat frozen.
This wasn't surveillance, thiswas premonition.
It was a breadcrumb laid byhimself, a version of himself
that had seen more, lived more.
The question now wasn't whetherhe was losing his mind, it was
(31:19):
what he had already lost.
He vaped hard, the coil finallyburning out.
The taste of metal filled hismouth and then a new message
popped up on the screen Section4 has been activated.
They're coming Hide.
The source code.
Remembrance must not fall.
His phone buzzed Unknown number,he answered Is this where you
(31:40):
start running?
A woman's voice asked, calm andcold.
Who is this?
You know who I am.
She said You've known since youopened the thread.
Don't pretend otherwise.
Don't rewrite this moment.
Click.
He stared at the screen.
The phrase don't rewrite thismoment echoed in his head.
He didn't understand it fully,but it scared him more than
(32:03):
anything else so far, because itimplied there was someone or
something with power to it.
He pulled open a compressedfolder with his encrypted drive
Inside thousands of lines ofcode, all mapped to memory
proxies, deepfake constructs,voice masks, mirror worlds, all
projects he's never touched, allwritten by him.
(32:24):
He scrolled to the metadata,last modified two years ago,
data of Ghost Echo's death andthe, the code signed, created by
Unathur.
He collapsed in his chair, headin his hands.
This wasn't a rabbit hole, thiswas a loop.
He was at the center of it.
He was the glitch, the fragment, the rewrite.
(32:48):
The door to the basement creakedslow, like the house was trying
not to disturb him.
He hadn't moved in hours, notreally.
He'd been staring at thatterminal, watching the cursor
blink like it had something tosay, but couldn't find the words
.
His hands were cold, his mindcolder.
Everything in him screamed tounplug the machine, burn it all,
(33:09):
disappear.
But he didn't, because a partof him needed this to make sense
.
He opened the hidden folder,again, this one signed by
Unather.
Most of the cold was gibberishlong strings of obscured paths,
recursed loops, mirroredprotocols, but they were
(33:30):
patterns, repeats, like someonehad encoded something inside the
mess.
He ran the visual overlay.
One pattern stood out, a symbol.
It wasn't just part of the code, it was the code.
The same symbol had shown up onGhost Echo's original post, the
one he chalked up as art.
But now he realized it wassomething else.
(33:52):
The code wasn't just written byUnathur, it was written to him.
A prop opened.
You were always the vessel.
He jolted from his desk.
The room tilted.
Nausea sure threw him.
He reached to the wall tosteady himself.
For a moment the air rippledlike heat above asphalt.
(34:14):
Then it settled.
He checked the time.
Only five minutes had passed,but his vape had burned to the
coil and his tea had gone cold.
He went upstairs.
His mom was still asleep buther breathing had changed, so
sharp or labored.
He sat beside her watching therise and fall of her chest.
(34:35):
He hated this part, thehelplessness.
The doctor said the cancerwasn't aggressive but treatable.
But that was months ago.
The treatments were thinningher out, taking her hair, making
her forget things.
She smiled when he brought hersoup, but she rarely finished it
.
He set a glass of water on thetable.
(34:57):
Her hand twitched, then stilled.
He pressed his palm over hers.
Still warm, still here Backdownstairs he powered the
terminal off, then back on.
This time it didn't boot the OS.
It opened the terminal, shell,green text on black screen, no
prompts, and the messageappeared what was taken must be
(35:20):
returned.
Then a directory openedRemembrance Forward slash, trace
Forward slash memedump.
Inside a dozen encrypted files,no extensions.
He'd encrypted the first one.
It was a video, grainy handheld.
He was in it, except he lookeddifferent, hollowed out like
(35:40):
something had been carved out ofhim and replaced with something
older.
He was in a hospital, screaming, his wrists restrained, nurses
running in the camera panned upto a window in the corner of the
room.
Behind the glass was a man in agray coat watching, unmoving.
He slammed the laptop shut.
He didn't remember that.
Did he remember ever beinghospitalized?
(36:02):
And yet His wrists still borefate scars.
He'd chalked them up toself-harm from years ago, said
he hadn't fallen through a glassdoor during an argument.
But maybe that wasn't the truth.
Maybe that was the rewrite.
The lights flickered, then thescreen lit up again on its own.
(36:22):
A single new message you arethe ghost in your own machine.
He left the basement, went for awalk, needed fresh air, but
nothing outside felt freshanymore.
Every building looked like itwas breathing, every street like
it had eyes.
He sat on a bench outside theold library, vape pen in hand.
(36:42):
An old man passed him and saiddon't look at the shadows,
they're listening.
He didn't reply.
He didn't need to.
He didn't reply.
He didn't need to.
That night he dreamt of fire,not flames, just heat.
He stood in a white room, sameas the feed from earlier, a
chair, a figure, the blurredface.
This time it spoke.
(37:03):
Remembrance isn't the beginning, it's the lock and you're the
key.
He woke to the smell of burntwires.
The laptop was smoking.
He yanked the cord, pulled thebattery.
When the smoke cleared, thescreen still worked.
A new folder sat on the desktopProject Memory Trap.
Inside were blueprints,schematics, a room, a chair, a
(37:27):
feedback loop machine.
It wasn't just data, it was aplace, a place that existed,
somewhere that he had been in,that he would return to Under
the blueprint.
One last message Section 4 isdeploying agents.
You must disappear beforemorning.
(37:51):
Let's take a step back, deepbreath and look at what just
happened.
We met him in the dark, not justin the dark of the basement,
but the dark of a life that hadcome undone.
A man with no name, becausehe's not supposed to just be a
character, he's a mirrorstanding, maybe even you.
And what you saw was an action.
It was a collapse, the falloutof a nervous breakdown that left
(38:15):
him shattered.
He moved back home, not out offailure, but out of necessity.
His mother's illness, his ownlost job, a relationship that
dissolved without dignity.
All of it stacked until therewas nothing left but the floor
beneath him and the cold lightof a computer screen.
Sometimes life doesn't explode,it erodes.
(38:36):
But this wasn't a story aboutgiving up.
It was.
It really wasn't about givingup because even in a collapse he
kept moving.
He took care of his mom, he didgig work, he led a hacker
community, not for profit, notfor ego, because it was one
place he still felt useful.
(38:56):
That tells you something aboutwho he is, broken or not, he
keeps showing up.
Now here's something you mighthave missed the message, the
link.
The old friend dead for twoyears somehow sent a message, or
private message, I should saythat was timestamped two days
before his death.
(39:16):
Most people would havedismissed that, called it a
spasm, a glitch, but not him,because something in his mind
had been hungry for this,something that wanted a mystery,
that needed a new code to crack, just to prove he was still
capable of solving anything.
This wasn't about curiosity, itwas about survival.
When you feel like your life nolonger has meaning, you look
(39:39):
for anything that might, and sowe opened it.
What followed wasn't flashy, itwasn't cinematic, it was slow,
creeping, unnerving.
An old static site with a UEIthat didn't follow normal logic
Files and folders laid out likememories, buried under layers of
misdirection, and at the center, his name.
(40:02):
Well, I mean not literally, butdata tied directly to him
Private logs, journal entries,moments he hadn't shared with
anyone, not even his mother.
Somehow the site knew him.
See, this is the part where theepisode shifted from tech to
drama.
Because what you do when youdiscover a system that sees you
(40:22):
better than you see yourself?
What do you do when your innerlife is no longer safe, when you
start to question if maybeyou're being watched and, worse,
if you're always being watched?
See, the sight didn't justthreaten him, it exposed him.
It wasn't just code, it wasmemory.
He started vaping more,sleeping less.
(40:43):
Reality bent.
He heard a voice, not externalbut internal, a whisper that
sounded like him, but not quiteeternal.
A whisper that sounded like him, but not quite.
That was the beginning ofUnather.
We're not there yet, so let's goahead.
Let's get into our reflectionprompts.
(41:03):
Number one where in your lifeare you functional but
emotionally disconnected?
What are you doing just tosurvive?
Number two have you ever lookedat a past version of yourself
and realized you no longerrecognize them.
Number three what would it takefor you to honestly revisit a
painful chapter in your past andfind the code underneath it?
(41:27):
That's a big one.
Number four are there anysubtle signs in your daily life,
repeating patterns, phrases,feelings that might be porting
towards something deeper?
Number five if someone handedyou a message that could change
your life, what part of you isjust opening it and why?
(41:50):
What part of you is justopening it and why?
So, guys, I'm going to tell youwhat.
This is going to be an awesomeseries.
I mean, yes, I know I say thatabout every series, but there's
going to be a lot of twists andturns in this one and I'm so, so
excited to bring this to you.
(42:11):
And as we're talking about that,I just want to thank you.
I mean, you guys are showing upin such big numbers for this
podcast lately.
Just thank you so much for that.
Just thank you so much for yoursupport.
If you want to support thepodcast, right, if you want to
support Jen's journey, theeasiest way to do it is two ways
.
Actually, it's three ways,sorry.
First way is just leave a likeor a review.
(42:31):
That would be amazing.
Secondly, send this to a friend, a family member.
I'm telling you, it's amazing,once people listen to this, then
they become a member of ours,they become part of this
community that we're building.
So help me out with that.
I'd sincerely appreciate it.
Now, as we're talking about that, on the other side of that, if
(42:54):
you have questions about thisepisode or this series or the
what seven other series I haveout there now or 250 plus
episodes please, please, please,never hesitate to reach out to
me.
Okay, there's three ways.
First way is going to bethrough my.
Actually, the description herehas let's Chat.
You click on that and you and Ican have a conversation about
(43:16):
this episode, this series, orthe plenty other series and
episodes on Gents Journey.
Second way is going to bethrough my email.
My email is anthony atgentsjourneycom.
And, last but not least, youcan go to my Instagram.
My Instagram handle ismyGentsJourney.
So I just want to thank you somuch from the bottom of my heart
for listening today andremember this you create your
(43:42):
reality.
Take care Bye.
Hello and welcome to the Gentleman's Journey podcast.
My name is Anthony, your host,and today we are starting a
brand new series.
This series is calledRemembrance.
So let's go ahead and let's getinto the cold open.
(00:23):
The cursor blinked on thescreen like a dying heartbeat.
One, two pause, repeat.
He hadn't slept in 36 hours, notreally.
A few blinks too long, a fewmoments stolen from the weight
of his own thoughts, but nothingthat counted.
(00:43):
His hoodie clung to him like awet cloth, the smell of sweat
and vape oil mixing with themust of his mother's basement.
He was used to it.
Now, this place, this silence,this unfinished fall from grace.
(01:03):
Three years ago he had a future,a name people knew, a job that
paid six figures, a girlfriendwho loved him.
He thinks it's all blurry now,like someone told him a story,
who he used to be, like it wassomeone else's memory altogether
.
Now.
Now he ran a fractured hackercollective on telegram called
(01:25):
zero trace 30.
So misfits, with nothing tolose and everything to leak.
They weren't dangerous, notreally.
Not like them, not like theones who destroyed your life for
sport.
He had lines, even in theshadows.
He had rules.
No data links on civilians,noware, no destruction for
(01:48):
destruction's sake.
Just exposure, corruption,pedophiles, companies that use
your phone to spy on you light.
But he had never gone deeper.
He never touched the buriedstuff, never entered the old
(02:08):
servers, the ones peoplewhispered about in deep forums.
Not because he couldn't,because he knew the rules
weren't just digital anymore.
Not on that level.
And yet here he was, a singlemessage from someone who's been
dead for two years Zero TraceArchive 1172.
(02:29):
From Ghost Echo, timestamp, twodays before his death.
Subject Don't open it unlessyou're ready Body.
You don't find this, it findsyou.
Once you see it, you can'tunsee it.
Once you break it, it breaksyou.
The link below will not open,unless you remember, attached
(02:50):
was a non-working string of text, not a hyperlink, not a file,
just a rememberto forward slash.
He blinked Hard, checked thelogs.
This wasn't spoofed, was aninsert of retroactively, the
encrypted SIG matched.
It was Ghost Echo, the man whotaught him how to proxy hop
(03:12):
through government layers.
The man who overdosed onoxycodone and left no note.
The man whose IP address hadn'tlit up since 2023.
And now he was back, dead butnot gone.
He leaned back in his chair, oldwood creaking under his weight.
His hand shook as he raised hisvape to his lips blueberry
(03:36):
menthol, the kind that coatedyour lungs with ice and regret.
He stared at the screen, at atext, at the phrase that stuck
out like a splinter in the brain, Unless you remember he had
seen it before somewhere, a notein an old config file, a
graffiti tag near Union Station.
A dream?
(03:57):
No, no, it wasn't a memory, itwas an echo.
That's what Ghost Echo alwaysused to say Echoes are the truth
, vibrating under the noise.
He opened a new terminal,bingham, breaking down the
message line by line, looked forcipher patterns, metadata, any
(04:18):
hook that might decode the link.
Nothing worked Until he typedone word Unather, the link
resolved, the terminal froze,and then the lights flickered,
not just on his screen.
In the room, the basementdimmed, as if a shadow passed
(04:40):
through the power itself.
His external hard drivesclicked.
His mother's old record player,untouched and near, spun once
and stopped, and then the screenwent blank, then white.
Then words appeared.
Do you remember the cost offorgetting?
(05:00):
It said he tried to respond.
The keyboard didn't work,nothing worked.
The screen changed again.
One timeline ends where anotherbegins.
You are the pivot.
Welcome to remembrance.
In that moment he felt somethingfracture, not in the screen, in
(05:21):
him Something old, somethingburied, and it was no longer
quiet.
Part 1.
His hands stayed frozen on thedesk even after the screen
dimmed to black.
He didn't know how long he satlike.
That.
Could have been 30 seconds,could have been 30 minutes.
(05:42):
The only sound was a gentlehiss of the space heater tucked
in the corner, kicking on with agroan and sending a burst of
warmth across the cement floor.
Outside, the wind scrapedagainst the basement window,
carrying it through the kind ofcold that made the walls feel
thinner.
He finally moved, slow, unsure,reaching for the keyboard.
(06:07):
Still dead.
He rebooted everything therouter, the drives, the tower.
Every time the machine cameback online, the screen remained
black.
Exactly seven seconds beforeauto-launching, the same white
message Welcome to remembrance.
That's all it said.
(06:34):
Now, no menu, no cursor, nooptions, no code to unpack.
He even tried wiping the bootsequence, swapping operating
systems, reforbanding the coredrive.
Nothing worked.
The machine wasn't compromised.
He would have seen that it waschanged, altered by something
outside the OS entirely.
He stepped back from the deskand paced the cramped room.
The faint sound of his mother'soxygen machine hummed upstairs,
(06:54):
steady and distant.
The sound grounded him,reminded him why he was here,
why he hadn't disappearedentirely until the dark.
After his breakdown, peoplestopped checking on him, even
the ones who said they cared.
All he had now were fragments,screens, code, his mother's soft
(07:14):
voice through the floorboardsand the shadowy digital
alleyways of Zero Trace.
And now this.
He looked over at the smallwhiteboard above his desk A list
of usernames, dead threads, oldto-do tasks left unfinished.
One word circled weeks ago in afit of desperation, unather.
(07:37):
He still didn't know what itmeant.
It was posted anonymously inthe group chat during a routine
server sweep.
No user ID, no IP trace, just alink to a mirror site that no
longer existed, in the phraseyou forgot who you are.
He didn't.
He dismissed it as bait.
Now he wasn't so sure.
(08:00):
He sat back down and turned onhis backup laptop, an old Linux
distro he kept strictly offlinefor air gap jobs.
It booted clean, no issues.
He didn't dare connect it tothe network.
Instead he wrote everythingdown by hand the exact phrasing
of Ghost Echo's message, thetimestamps, the system behavior
(08:20):
after typing Unether and thefinal line that kept echoing you
are the pivot.
It sounded mythic but notpoetic, more like a system
variable, like the code had beenwaiting for him.
He was the user ID required tounlock it, and that that was
(08:40):
what scared him, because systemsdidn't choose people unless
they weren't systems.
He shook the thought from hishead.
He needed answers and there wasone place he might find them if
he could.
If anyone in a circle wouldknow about this kind of tech, it
would be Crowder.
Crowder was a paranoid, twitchygenius who dropped off the map
(09:02):
last year.
He still monitored the chat,though occasionally lurking and
watching.
He fired off a message to himthrough a shadowy relay.
Node Crowder, I know you'rewatching Got something
Untraceable tech Dead man's echo.
I need eyes, I need truth.
It was a long shot, but it wasall he had.
He leaned back again, rubbinghis eyes.
(09:24):
The room was still dark, savefor the faint glow of the space
heater.
He glanced at the clock 2.17 am.
His vape was almost dead.
He hid it anyways, letting thecold menthol burn his throat.
Gus Echo had always hated vaping.
He called it the illusion ofbreathing.
He smiled at the memory, butthe smile didn't last.
(09:47):
He walked upstairs.
His mother room was open just acrack.
He could hear breathing, steadybut shallow.
The air smelled like cleaningwipes and lavender oil the
caregiver that had come byearlier that evening made soup
wiped down the surfaces.
The caregiver that had come byearlier that evening made soup,
wiped down the surfaces,restocked the pill tray.
He stood outside the door for amoment, just long enough to
(10:09):
feel like he checked in.
Then he went back down.
The screen still showed the sameline Welcome to remembrance.
But now there was somethingelse, a sound, a faint repeating
Healing closer.
It wasn't coming from thespeakers, it was coming from the
machine itself, from inside thetower, a soft tick like a
(10:34):
metrodome One, two pause, one,two pause.
It matched the cadence ofEcho's old signature.
He opened the case.
The fan was clean, nomechanical issues, nothing
visible malfunctioning.
But the ticking continued.
(10:54):
Then it stopped and a new lineappeared on the screen.
If you're ready to remember,prove it.
Start where it ended.
He stared at the words.
What did it mean?
His thoughts raced when itended.
Ghost Echo died in a downtownmotel, room 210.
(11:16):
He hadn't been there since thefuneral.
Now the machine was asking himto go back.
His hands shook again, not fromfear, but something deeper a
sense of inevitability.
He closed the case, poweredeverything down and started
packing.
He'd be back before sunrise andfor the first time in years he
(11:37):
wasn't running from something,he was walking towards it.
The motel hasn't changed.
Room 210 still looked likeevery crime scene photograph he
buried in the back of his mindWater-stained ceiling,
discolored floral curtains, achipped corner of the mirror
above the nightstand where GhostEcho had allegedly hit his head
when he collapsed.
(11:58):
Allegedly that word always ranghollow, like they wanted to
pretend it was an accident, likethere weren't a dozen
breadcrumbs buried in the lastencrypted logs that no one had
bothered to follow.
He moved through the room insilence, careful not to disturb
anything, not out of respect,but because he wanted to see
(12:19):
exactly as it was the night hisfriend died.
The clerk didn't ask questionswhen he requested the room, just
handed over the room key andgrunted something about no
overnight guests.
He paid in cash, sled a twentyacross the counter with a nod.
The man never looked up.
(12:40):
He knelt down by the foot of thebed running his fingers along
the warped floorboards until hefound it One nail half pulled
from the wood.
He pried it loose and slid theplank aside.
There it was A flash drive,black, no markings, just like Os
.
Echo said he would leave it.
He hadn't believed him Thoughtit was just paranoia.
(13:03):
That final message was toocryptic to make sense.
But here it was, untouched,waiting.
He stared at it for a longmoment before pocketing it and
replacing the plank.
The drive didn't feel likeclosure, it felt like bait.
Back at the house he waiteduntil his mother fell asleep
before powering the air gaplaptop again.
(13:25):
No network, no Bluetooth, nochance of leak.
He slid the drive in andwatched the screen.
At first nothing.
Then a single folder appeared,proof of life.
He clicked it.
It contained five files A textdoc named Pivot Log, a blurry
(13:47):
timestamp video clip, ascreenshot of a log sequence, a
digital image of an ID badge anda short audio file titled Play
Me.
He played the audio first.
If you're hearing this, I failed, not just the job, the whole
damn thing.
I tried to bring the archive tolight, tried to warn people,
(14:09):
but they silenced me.
I think it's them, section fouror someone tied to them, it
doesn't matter.
Now, this is bigger than anylink, bigger than anything we
found on the dark mirrors.
You were always the better one,anyways.
You didn't chase ghosts, youhunted patterns.
So hunt this.
Start with the log trace.
(14:29):
The badge unlocks the nextlayer.
Once you find that, follow itto the phase.
Remember what we called it, theplace between two versions.
Find it, finish it.
And whatever you do, don'ttrust the pivot, even if it's
you.
(14:49):
The message ended in static.
He sat frozen for a moment.
Ghost Echo never talked inriddles, he hated them, said
they were a lazy coder's excusefor poor documentation.
But this, this wasn't a riddle,it was a trail.
He opened the badge image.
It was grainy, shot at an angle, but clear enough to make out
the name Morala Mas, to make outthe name Rala Mas, with a small
(15:18):
red logo that read Section 4,departmental Observation
Internal Restructure.
There it was again Section 4.
Heard whispers of it before,not official, not documented.
A division that didn't exist onpaper, said to operate above
homeland and above the confinesof standard intelligence
tracking.
Said to operate above homelandand above the confines of
standard intelligence tracking.
People used to joke thatSection 4 wasn't real, that it
(15:42):
was the 404 of the federalalphabet, except now there was a
name, a badge and a voicetelling them they killed his
friend.
He opened the log trace.
Next it was an SSH log but notknown in any server.
The endpoint resolved to alooped IP address, internal,
non-raudable, but the last fewdigits of the timestamp matched
(16:02):
the metrodome ticks from thistower.
He didn't believe incoincidence.
He ran a match overlay.
Sure enough, the cadence fromhis machine tick pattern matched
the log attempt.
Ghost Echo had left a signatureinside the server connection.
Even though it didn't revealthe password, it revealed the
phrase Remembrance Forward slashfloor shots.
(16:25):
Root Forward slash seed, acommand path.
That wasn't a server.
It was a command for somethingbuilt to evolve, a root
directory for a living memorystructure.
He sat back in his chairrubbing his temples.
This was more than a hack, morethan a mystery.
(16:47):
This was a system not meant tobe accessed and somehow he was
inside of it.
He clicked on the video clip.
The footage was shaky, takenfrom Ghost Echo's phone.
It showed a hallway.
Industrial Fluorescent lightsflickered overhead.
A woman in a dark coat waswalking fast, speaking to
someone out of frame.
The camera zoomed in brieflyand caught her face.
(17:09):
He paused it.
It was the woman from the badgeOrilla Moss.
He stared at her face.
He paused it.
It was the woman from the badgeOrilla Moss.
He stared at her face.
She didn't look federal, shelooked hunted.
He scrubbed through the rest ofthe video At the end, ghost
Echo whispered into the mic.
She's the only one who knewwhat remembrance really was.
(17:31):
They're going to kill her orworse, absorb her.
The footage cut to black.
His heart raced.
None of this was theoreticalanymore.
It wasn't about parsing throughlayers of obscured code or
laughing at crackpot conspiracyposts on darknet forums.
This was real.
(17:51):
This had a name, a face, a cost.
He opened the final file, thetext log.
It was a stream of entries.
Some were journal style, somewere just observations, but one
stood out.
I used to think we wereexplorers finding new lands of
data, new empires of information.
(18:11):
But remembrance isn't a land,it's a weapon.
It lets you rewrite the lens,how someone sees what happened,
not the event.
The context.
History becomes negotiable,identity becomes a suggestion
and the scariest part you don'teven know when it's happening.
(18:32):
He stopped reading, a long, deepbreath and another.
This wasn't about the past,this was about the integrity of
memory itself.
He looked around the room.
Everything suddenly felt lessreal the lamp, the blanket, his
skin.
How could he be sure what heremembered was his?
(18:53):
He snapped the laptop, shutoutside a car, drove past,
headlights streaked across thewindow.
For a moment he thought he sawa figure in the driveway, but it
disappeared as fast as it came.
He wasn't safe here anymore andwhatever remembrance was, it
already began rewriting him.
(19:15):
He didn't sleep, not because hewasn't tired, but because his
bones ached with it, but becauseevery time he closed his eyes
he saw it the badge, the video,the phrase remembrance, root
seed.
The memory wouldn't let go.
At 3.17 am he gave up tryingand lit another vape under the
(19:37):
basement window.
The vapor swirled in front ofthe old server rack like fog
clinging to gravestones.
He stared at the rack, oneblinking green light, just one.
It had been on for weeks,months.
Maybe he didn't rememberbooting it, but the light was
blinking now, soft, almostrhythmic.
(20:01):
He turned on his secondaryterminal, not connected to the
rig but mirrored to the server,just in case something like this
ever happened.
He liked to think ahead, evenwhen the world around him didn't
.
It showed one line of coderepeating Access Granted User ID
Unathur.
He froze, that wasn't him.
(20:23):
He hadn't typed that, he hadn'tcreated that user.
But the message was there,pulsing like a heartbeat.
He logged into the backend nosign of intrusion, no IP trace,
just a ghost user markedpersistent root level access
with a timestamp from 10.06pmthe night before, while he was
(20:44):
watching the video, while hisguard was down, he yanked the
cable and powered down the rack.
Everything went dark, exceptthe terminal.
The line was still there,access granted user ID, unather.
(21:05):
He powered it off.
This wasn't a normal breach.
This was someone poking at theperimeter.
This was somebody alreadyinside, someone who knew the
structure of his personal systembetter than he did.
He tried to slow his breathing.
He wasn't being hacked, he wasbeing watched.
Upstairs.
His mother's cough echoedsoftly through the walls.
It came in threes, now Alwaysthrees.
(21:28):
She said it didn't hurt.
She said it was just the medswearing off.
But he knew better, he couldhear it, the decay.
She never complained, neverasked for help.
She just moved through the daylike a ghost, watering the
plants, folding the towels,humming to herself like the
world hadn't moved on withouther.
He was terrified of losing her,terrified because she was the
(21:50):
last living tether to theversion of himself that hadn't
collapsed, the version thatstill believed in redemption,
still believed in trying.
He made tea and left it at thedoor for her.
Then he went back downstairs,heart hammering, palms sweating.
The air in the basement feltheavier charged.
(22:10):
He powered up the laptop again,but this time he stayed
disconnected, fully offline.
He opened a blank notepad andwrote three words what is
Unathur?
The screen glitched for half asecond, just long enough to
doubt it.
The question rearranged itselfwho was Unathur?
(22:31):
Then it reverted.
His finger hovered over thekeys.
He didn't blink, he didn'tbreathe.
He typed again Dead, ghost echo, create Unather.
The screen didn't glitch thistime, but a new line appeared
underneath it.
You're asking the wrongquestions, it says.
He ripped the battery out ofthe laptop.
(22:53):
He went outside cold air, chilly, not enough to numb the shake
in his hands.
He sat on the back step staringat the patch of sky above the
stucco roofline.
One star twinkled red.
He didn't know if it was normalor if his eyes were just tired.
The vape hit, burned in histhroat.
He welcomed it.
(23:14):
Then the phone buzzed.
Not his burner, his old phone,the one he hasn't touched since
the breakdown.
He didn't even remember wherehe left it, but the screen was
glowing now face up on the patiotable, like someone had placed
it there deliberately.
He walked over and picked it up.
The message on the screen hadno number, no contact name, just
(23:36):
one phrase he warned you aboutthe pivot.
The phone shut off before hecould react.
He didn't go back in for hours.
By the time he did, the sun wasbleeding through the blinds and
his mother was humming againsame tune, same rhythm.
He didn't ask how the phone gotoutside.
He didn't ask how Unather knewwhat he typed offline.
(23:58):
He just opened his adminconsole and scrolled through his
forum.
His hacker groups had ignored.
Someone posted a new thread at4.44am.
Thread title Remembrance.
No username, no IP Inside thethread, just one message.
You are the pivot now, the eyesthat see the hand that writes
(24:20):
the lockpick to a box that noone believes exists.
You have one job Don't lie toyourself again.
Reclaim the memories that werenever yours to lose.
Under the message was a singlelink.
He clicked it.
It led to a server that didn'texist a black site buried
beneath Three redirect loops anda decoy URL made to look like a
(24:42):
guarding form.
The page loaded in grayscale.
The one word in white surf fontRemembrance.
Glow it a single text boxPhrase.
He typed it in remembrance,root slash seed.
The screen blinked.
Then something strange happenedinstead of a site loading, his
(25:04):
webcam turned on.
A voice distorted, modulatedbegan to speak.
You think you're hunting amystery.
But this isn't a hunt, it's areturn.
You've been here before, don'tjust remember who you are.
When you left, he tried to shutthe browser.
It wouldn't close.
(25:26):
The voice continued.
Ghost Echo was the first tobreach it, but he wasn't the key
, he was the alarm.
You, you're the rewrite, thesecond draft.
Remembrance isn't a place, it'sthe question one wants to
answer.
What if your memories aren'tyours?
Then the screen flickered andwent black, he said in silence.
(25:50):
Then he laughed, a slow,painful sound, like someone
trying to remember how tobreathe through grief.
None of this made any sense,except it did Somewhere deep
inside of him.
It did Because, as the basementlights flickered and the fan
overhead turned slowly and thewhirl of the hard drive echoed
(26:13):
like a distant heartbeat, herealized something he didn't
remember when the breakdownhappened.
He didn't remember why he lefthis job.
He didn't even remember GhostEcho's real name.
He always thought it was justtrauma, just overload.
But what if it was somethingthat had been taken?
What if it was his second draft?
(26:33):
And worse, what if there wasmore?
He left the house that morningwithout a word.
The sun was too bright, thestreets too quiet.
His vape burned hotter thanusual, the cold, probably near
the end of its life.
But he didn't care.
He needed something to anchorhim, something that tasted
familiar.
Everything else felt revisited.
(26:57):
He walked past the old bus stopwhere he used to catch rides to
the university before everythingunraveled.
The ad on the shelter was for abank that closed years ago.
He was sure of it.
He remembered the headlines,the layoffs.
But there it was bright, modernand untouched A rewrite.
He stepped in front of acracked mirror mounted to the
(27:17):
side of a gas station, one ofthose convex security mirrors.
He didn't look right.
He looked older or tired.
It was something else.
He looked rewritten.
The school wasn't far.
He only worked there twice aweek, part-time IT support for a
crumbling charter school on theedge of town.
The school wasn't far.
He only worked there twice aweek, part-time IT support for a
crumbling charter school on theedge of town.
The money was decent.
(27:38):
It was flexible.
The kids called him thebasement whisperer when they
found out where he lived.
He didn't care.
Most of them had darker storiesof their own.
He clocked in and made his waydown the server room.
It smelled like mold and burntdust.
He liked it here.
It was quiet.
The world didn't intrude.
(27:59):
But today the silence didn'thold.
On the main office terminal, theschool's firewall flagged a
blocked connection attempt froman internal IP address.
His Time stamped 4 444 AM, thesame time as the remembrance
post.
But this wasn't from thebasement, it was from this
(28:23):
machine.
His hand hovered over the keys.
He hadn't accessed the terminalsince Thursday.
He was sure of it.
He ran a backtrace.
No results, no logs of input.
He was sure of it.
He ran a backtrace.
No results, no logs of input,just an echo of signature.
Like someone had remotelymirrored his keystrokes, like
someone had been typing on hisbehalf.
(28:44):
He opened the notepad, typed AmI being rewritten?
A second line appearedinstantly beneath it Not yet,
but you're close.
He backed away from theterminal.
There was a sound outside theroom, not footsteps, a shuffle
Like someone adjusting theirweight just beyond the door.
He waited.
(29:05):
His breath was caught in hischest.
It was silent.
He opened the door slowly noone, just the flickering hallway
lights and a note taped to thewall across from him.
You were never meant to findthis.
He pulled it down with shakingfingers.
The handwriting was neat,slanted, feminine and somehow
(29:26):
familiar.
He called and sick by email andwalked out without logging off.
Every corner of the city feltoff now like a dream.
Half forgotten Buildings looked.
The city felt off now like adream.
Half forgotten Buildings lookedthe same, but the names were
wrong.
Street lines were curved,street signs had letters,
reversed.
Stoplights blinked in oddsequences.
(29:48):
At one intersection he sawsomeone staring at him from
across the street, a man in agray coat.
He didn't move, he didn't blinkwhen a car passed between them.
The man was gone.
Back home the house felt colder.
His mother was sleeping on thecouch, a knit blanket covering
her shoulders.
Her tea was half-drinking Onthe side table.
(30:13):
The steam long faded.
He went downstairs.
The server was still unplugged,but he booted the laptop.
The screen didn't show Hisdesktop, showed a white room,
not a file, not a program, alive feed.
The room was empty except for achair and someone seated in it.
Their face was blurried,intentionally distorted like a
(30:34):
low-res encryption filter.
But they were holding something, a photograph.
He leaned in.
It was the photograph fromGhost Echo's post, the one he
discarded.
His hand trembled.
The figure on the screen lookedup.
The blur didn't move, but thechair creaked in real time.
Then they spoke.
(30:55):
No distortion this time, just avoice, his voice.
If you're seeing this, you'realmost out of time.
The feed cut.
He sat frozen.
This wasn't surveillance, thiswas premonition.
It was a breadcrumb laid byhimself, a version of himself
that had seen more, lived more.
The question now wasn't whetherhe was losing his mind, it was
(31:19):
what he had already lost.
He vaped hard, the coil finallyburning out.
The taste of metal filled hismouth and then a new message
popped up on the screen Section4 has been activated.
They're coming Hide.
The source code.
Remembrance must not fall.
His phone buzzed Unknown number,he answered Is this where you
(31:40):
start running?
A woman's voice asked, calm andcold.
Who is this?
You know who I am.
She said You've known since youopened the thread.
Don't pretend otherwise.
Don't rewrite this moment.
Click.
He stared at the screen.
The phrase don't rewrite thismoment echoed in his head.
He didn't understand it fully,but it scared him more than
(32:03):
anything else so far, because itimplied there was someone or
something with power to it.
He pulled open a compressedfolder with his encrypted drive
Inside thousands of lines ofcode, all mapped to memory
proxies, deepfake constructs,voice masks, mirror worlds, all
projects he's never touched, allwritten by him.
(32:24):
He scrolled to the metadata,last modified two years ago,
data of Ghost Echo's death andthe, the code signed, created by
Unathur.
He collapsed in his chair, headin his hands.
This wasn't a rabbit hole, thiswas a loop.
He was at the center of it.
He was the glitch, the fragment, the rewrite.
(32:48):
The door to the basement creakedslow, like the house was trying
not to disturb him.
He hadn't moved in hours, notreally.
He'd been staring at thatterminal, watching the cursor
blink like it had something tosay, but couldn't find the words
.
His hands were cold, his mindcolder.
Everything in him screamed tounplug the machine, burn it all,
(33:09):
disappear.
But he didn't, because a partof him needed this to make sense
.
He opened the hidden folder,again, this one signed by
Unather.
Most of the cold was gibberishlong strings of obscured paths,
recursed loops, mirroredprotocols, but they were
(33:30):
patterns, repeats, like someonehad encoded something inside the
mess.
He ran the visual overlay.
One pattern stood out, a symbol.
It wasn't just part of the code, it was the code.
The same symbol had shown up onGhost Echo's original post, the
one he chalked up as art.
But now he realized it wassomething else.
(33:52):
The code wasn't just written byUnathur, it was written to him.
A prop opened.
You were always the vessel.
He jolted from his desk.
The room tilted.
Nausea sure threw him.
He reached to the wall tosteady himself.
For a moment the air rippledlike heat above asphalt.
(34:14):
Then it settled.
He checked the time.
Only five minutes had passed,but his vape had burned to the
coil and his tea had gone cold.
He went upstairs.
His mom was still asleep buther breathing had changed, so
sharp or labored.
He sat beside her watching therise and fall of her chest.
(34:35):
He hated this part, thehelplessness.
The doctor said the cancerwasn't aggressive but treatable.
But that was months ago.
The treatments were thinningher out, taking her hair, making
her forget things.
She smiled when he brought hersoup, but she rarely finished it
.
He set a glass of water on thetable.
(34:57):
Her hand twitched, then stilled.
He pressed his palm over hers.
Still warm, still here Backdownstairs he powered the
terminal off, then back on.
This time it didn't boot the OS.
It opened the terminal, shell,green text on black screen, no
prompts, and the messageappeared what was taken must be
(35:20):
returned.
Then a directory openedRemembrance Forward slash, trace
Forward slash memedump.
Inside a dozen encrypted files,no extensions.
He'd encrypted the first one.
It was a video, grainy handheld.
He was in it, except he lookeddifferent, hollowed out like
(35:40):
something had been carved out ofhim and replaced with something
older.
He was in a hospital, screaming, his wrists restrained, nurses
running in the camera panned upto a window in the corner of the
room.
Behind the glass was a man in agray coat watching, unmoving.
He slammed the laptop shut.
He didn't remember that.
Did he remember ever beinghospitalized?
(36:02):
And yet His wrists still borefate scars.
He'd chalked them up toself-harm from years ago, said
he hadn't fallen through a glassdoor during an argument.
But maybe that wasn't the truth.
Maybe that was the rewrite.
The lights flickered, then thescreen lit up again on its own.
(36:22):
A single new message you arethe ghost in your own machine.
He left the basement, went for awalk, needed fresh air, but
nothing outside felt freshanymore.
Every building looked like itwas breathing, every street like
it had eyes.
He sat on a bench outside theold library, vape pen in hand.
(36:42):
An old man passed him and saiddon't look at the shadows,
they're listening.
He didn't reply.
He didn't need to.
He didn't reply.
He didn't need to.
That night he dreamt of fire,not flames, just heat.
He stood in a white room, sameas the feed from earlier, a
chair, a figure, the blurredface.
This time it spoke.
(37:03):
Remembrance isn't the beginning, it's the lock and you're the
key.
He woke to the smell of burntwires.
The laptop was smoking.
He yanked the cord, pulled thebattery.
When the smoke cleared, thescreen still worked.
A new folder sat on the desktopProject Memory Trap.
Inside were blueprints,schematics, a room, a chair, a
(37:27):
feedback loop machine.
It wasn't just data, it was aplace, a place that existed,
somewhere that he had been in,that he would return to Under
the blueprint.
One last message Section 4 isdeploying agents.
You must disappear beforemorning.
(37:51):
Let's take a step back, deepbreath and look at what just
happened.
We met him in the dark, not justin the dark of the basement,
but the dark of a life that hadcome undone.
A man with no name, becausehe's not supposed to just be a
character, he's a mirrorstanding, maybe even you.
And what you saw was an action.
It was a collapse, the falloutof a nervous breakdown that left
(38:15):
him shattered.
He moved back home, not out offailure, but out of necessity.
His mother's illness, his ownlost job, a relationship that
dissolved without dignity.
All of it stacked until therewas nothing left but the floor
beneath him and the cold lightof a computer screen.
Sometimes life doesn't explode,it erodes.
(38:36):
But this wasn't a story aboutgiving up.
It was.
It really wasn't about givingup because even in a collapse he
kept moving.
He took care of his mom, he didgig work, he led a hacker
community, not for profit, notfor ego, because it was one
place he still felt useful.
(38:56):
That tells you something aboutwho he is, broken or not, he
keeps showing up.
Now here's something you mighthave missed the message, the
link.
The old friend dead for twoyears somehow sent a message, or
private message, I should saythat was timestamped two days
before his death.
(39:16):
Most people would havedismissed that, called it a
spasm, a glitch, but not him,because something in his mind
had been hungry for this,something that wanted a mystery,
that needed a new code to crack, just to prove he was still
capable of solving anything.
This wasn't about curiosity, itwas about survival.
When you feel like your life nolonger has meaning, you look
(39:39):
for anything that might, and sowe opened it.
What followed wasn't flashy, itwasn't cinematic, it was slow,
creeping, unnerving.
An old static site with a UEIthat didn't follow normal logic
Files and folders laid out likememories, buried under layers of
misdirection, and at the center, his name.
(40:02):
Well, I mean not literally, butdata tied directly to him
Private logs, journal entries,moments he hadn't shared with
anyone, not even his mother.
Somehow the site knew him.
See, this is the part where theepisode shifted from tech to
drama.
Because what you do when youdiscover a system that sees you
(40:22):
better than you see yourself?
What do you do when your innerlife is no longer safe, when you
start to question if maybeyou're being watched and, worse,
if you're always being watched?
See, the sight didn't justthreaten him, it exposed him.
It wasn't just code, it wasmemory.
He started vaping more,sleeping less.
(40:43):
Reality bent.
He heard a voice, not externalbut internal, a whisper that
sounded like him, but not quiteeternal.
A whisper that sounded like him, but not quite.
That was the beginning ofUnather.
We're not there yet, so let's goahead.
Let's get into our reflectionprompts.
(41:03):
Number one where in your lifeare you functional but
emotionally disconnected?
What are you doing just tosurvive?
Number two have you ever lookedat a past version of yourself
and realized you no longerrecognize them.
Number three what would it takefor you to honestly revisit a
painful chapter in your past andfind the code underneath it?
(41:27):
That's a big one.
Number four are there anysubtle signs in your daily life,
repeating patterns, phrases,feelings that might be porting
towards something deeper?
Number five if someone handedyou a message that could change
your life, what part of you isjust opening it and why?
(41:50):
What part of you is justopening it and why?
So, guys, I'm going to tell youwhat.
This is going to be an awesomeseries.
I mean, yes, I know I say thatabout every series, but there's
going to be a lot of twists andturns in this one and I'm so, so
excited to bring this to you.
(42:11):
And as we're talking about that,I just want to thank you.
I mean, you guys are showing upin such big numbers for this
podcast lately.
Just thank you so much for that.
Just thank you so much for yoursupport.
If you want to support thepodcast, right, if you want to
support Jen's journey, theeasiest way to do it is two ways
.
Actually, it's three ways,sorry.
First way is just leave a likeor a review.
(42:31):
That would be amazing.
Secondly, send this to a friend, a family member.
I'm telling you, it's amazing,once people listen to this, then
they become a member of ours,they become part of this
community that we're building.
So help me out with that.
I'd sincerely appreciate it.
Now, as we're talking about that, on the other side of that, if
(42:54):
you have questions about thisepisode or this series or the
what seven other series I haveout there now or 250 plus
episodes please, please, please,never hesitate to reach out to
me.
Okay, there's three ways.
First way is going to bethrough my.
Actually, the description herehas let's Chat.
You click on that and you and Ican have a conversation about
(43:16):
this episode, this series, orthe plenty other series and
episodes on Gents Journey.
Second way is going to bethrough my email.
My email is anthony atgentsjourneycom.
And, last but not least, youcan go to my Instagram.
My Instagram handle ismyGentsJourney.
So I just want to thank you somuch from the bottom of my heart
for listening today andremember this you create your
(43:42):
reality.
Take care Bye.
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