Neon Conspiracy: The Ghost Protocol

Neo Tokyo never sleeps, but it has learned to look away. Across three vertical tiers of chrome, neon, and flooded concrete, sixty million people go about their lives tethered to a corporate infrastructure that provides everything they need and watches everything they do. For most, the arrangement feels like civilization. For some, it has always felt like a leash. Somewhere in the Spire — Kuramoto-Seki Corporation's gleaming headquarters punching through the Canopy clouds — a project called Leviathan is seventy-two hours from completion. Embedded invisibly into the city's augmentation diagnostic network, it is designed to reach into the minds of nearly every citizen simultaneously and make them quietly, permanently compliant. No riots. No dissent. No memory of wanting otherwise. The Grid Festival's mass diagnostic sweep will provide the perfect cover for the upload — a city-wide maintenance pulse that nobody questions and everyone participates in. The data has been stolen. The people who stole it are already being hunted. And somewhere in the gap between the Undernet's flooded corridors and the Canopy's curated skygardens, the only chance to stop Leviathan before it goes live is taking shape — fragile, desperate, and running out of time.