Whispers in the Code E-Book

Miles Everett Blake

• Herausgeber: Twist & Tether Press
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Julian Rusk doesn’t believe in ghosts. Not the supernatural kind, anyway. As a burned-out code analyst and former NSA whistleblower, he’s seen what real hauntings look like—lines of corrupted code, encrypted regrets, and memories rewritten by force. So when a forgotten USB drive leads him to a ghost wallet that responds like it’s alive, he doesn’t run. He documents.
But the deeper he digs, the more the line between software and soul begins to unravel. The wallet isn’t just a glitch. It knows things. Personal things. Things no algorithm should ever understand. Its balance never moves, yet its presence grows—infecting his devices, echoing in white noise, slipping into his dreams.
And then it starts whispering a name he buried years ago. Lena.
As reality fractures, Rusk must decide if the voice in the code is a final warning… or the last piece of a buried truth clawing its way back.
In a world where the past is never really gone and data never truly dies, what happens when grief syncs with machine—and betrayal is written in the blockchain itself?
Can you trust your memories… when the code remembers more than you do?

Leseprobe

WHISPERS IN THE CODE

The Wallet That Screamed Back

PRIVATE KEY

Miles Everett Blake

Copyright © 2025 by Miles Everett Blake

All rights reserved. This book, including all individual stories and original content, is protected under international copyright law. No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced, distributed, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission from the author, except for brief excerpts used in reviews or academic commentary, which must be properly credited.

Fiction Disclaimer:

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

Cover Image Notice:

The cover artwork for this book was created using licensed generative AI tools under commercial-use terms. It is an original, symbolic composition created specifically for this title. Any characters depicted are fictional and do not represent real individuals.

AI Tools Acknowledgement:

The cover image and/or illustrations were created using generative AI technology under appropriate commercial-use licensing. All visual elements are original compositions intended solely for this publication.

Thank you for reading this special collection. I hope you enjoy every story inside.

Table of Contents

WHISPERS IN THE CODE

Description

Prologue: The Missing Patch

Chapter 1: The Crack in the Firewall

Chapter 2: The Signal Beneath

Chapter 3: Trustless

Chapter 4: Keys to the Dead

Chapter 5: The Spectral Fork

Chapter 6: Block Height Zero

Chapter 7: Proof of Soul

Epilogue: The New Miner

WHISPERS IN THE CODE

Description

Julian Rusk doesn’t believe in ghosts. Not the supernatural kind, anyway. As a burned-out code analyst and former NSA whistleblower, he’s seen what real hauntings look like—lines of corrupted code, encrypted regrets, and memories rewritten by force. So when a forgotten USB drive leads him to a ghost wallet that responds like it’s alive, he doesn’t run. He documents.

But the deeper he digs, the more the line between software and soul begins to unravel. The wallet isn’t just a glitch. It knows things. Personal things. Things no algorithm should ever understand. Its balance never moves, yet its presence grows—infecting his devices, echoing in white noise, slipping into his dreams.

And then it starts whispering a name he buried years ago. Lena.

As reality fractures, Rusk must decide if the voice in the code is a final warning… or the last piece of a buried truth clawing its way back.

In a world where the past is never really gone and data never truly dies, what happens when grief syncs with machine—and betrayal is written in the blockchain itself?

Can you trust your memories… when the code remembers more than you do?

Prologue: The Missing Patch

Rusk

The file was called h\ear\patch\_v7bFinal. No timestamp. No metadata. No signature. Just there—like a memory I didn’t remember saving.

And maybe I didn’t.

It sat quietly on the resurrected hard drive like it had always known I’d come back.

I found the drive in a box marked winter. It was July. I wasn’t looking for anything—not really. Just the usual avoidance ritual. You know, dig through the past instead of calling your sister back. Instead of walking into the bedroom I hadn’t opened in weeks. Instead of touching that USB stick still warm in my coat pocket.

The box smelled like smoke. Eight years later and the stink of it still clung to everything—plastic, paper, fabric. Even now I swear it clung to my skin.

The fire hadn’t reached the attic, not fully. The heat had licked at the beams, curled the edges of folders, melted the old game controllers. But somehow the Toshiba drive had survived, wedged between a half-burned photo album and a tangled pair of headphones.

I almost didn’t take it. But my fingers moved like they were already sure.

Back then, I still told myself I was curious.

Not guilty. Not grieving.Not haunted.

I connected the drive that night, and the lights in the flat dimmed.

Just for a second.

And I heard it—the softest click in the headset I wasn’t wearing.

I told myself it was the power strip. Or static. Or my imagination trying to make sense of a moment too small to matter.

But something inside me had already shifted.

Because I didn’t open any other file. I didn’t run antivirus. I didn’t scan for malware.

I opened the one without a name.

h\ear\patch\_v7bFinal

And everything came back.

Seventeen. That’s how old I was when I wrote the first version.

A joke, I said. A prank on the network. I told the others it was a spoof script, a signal reader designed to play back blockchain traffic as sound files. It worked, in a way—translated hex into tones. No practical use. No hash mining or exploit. Just noise.

But the patch wasn’t a joke to me. Not really.

Because I wasn’t building a tool. I was listening for a ghost.

And I was sure she was in there.

The week before the fire, I’d messaged her: L.C. The initials were all I knew. A username on a long-dead forum, back when net handles still meant something. She’d commented on my post about string compression in decentralized logs.

Her reply wasn’t technical. Just one line:

What if the chain remembers us longer than we remember ourselves?

I never forgot that.

We exchanged three messages. One contained an attachment. I never opened it.

Two days later, the house burned.

And I buried the laptop in a garbage bag, dropped it behind the dumpster at the gas station, and walked home like my soul had turned to ash.

I should’ve forgotten all of this.

I tried to.

For years, I convinced myself it was teenage delusion. Code dreams and online shadows. A girl I never knew. A message I misread. I rebuilt my life around firewalls—both literal and psychological.

Pentesting gave me a reason to be paranoid. Money gave me the excuse to isolate. And guilt… guilt rewrote every line of memory until I couldn’t trust the source anymore.

But the patch had survived.

And now it was open.

And I was listening again.

It wasn’t music.

It wasn’t noise.

It was layered frequencies, like a heartbeat modulated through static. Then whispers—high-pitched, wrong somehow, like compressed voices trying to reassemble themselves from too little data.

I closed the player, but the sound continued.

I unplugged the drive. Still, it went on.

And the USB stick in my pocket began to warm.

I pulled it out and stared. Still broken—cracked down the middle from years ago. No power, no memory. Just a dead relic.

But the warmth pulsed in sync with the sounds.

I held it between my palms.

What did I do to you?

No answer. Only the voice in my own head.

She gave you something. And you buried it.

You buried her.

The first flashback came like a seizure.

I was kneeling in front of my bed. Not now, but back then—my room unchanged, sheets crumpled, posters peeling. The monitor glowed with code, and I was typing frantically.

Not compiling. Deleting.

Whole folders. Logs. Git chains.

A chat window open beside the console. Her name flickering. “Lena.”

Not “L.C.” anymore. Lena.

And the last message from her was unfinished.

You said you’d keep it safe. You said—

I unplugged the headset and threw it across the room.

I told myself it was a false memory. Trauma filling in blanks. Data poisoning imagination. Brains do that, right? Rewrite events to feel coherent.

But I knew.

I knew that I hadn’t just forgotten her.

I had erased her.

The second scene was shorter, crueler.

Lena’s face. Glowing blue from the monitor light. She was crying, but silent. No sound. Just lips moving.

Behind her, a room full of servers. Flickering lights. Cables like veins.

I recognized the expression on her face. Betrayal. Not fear. Not sadness. But the moment someone realizes the person they trusted sold them out.

She whispered one word.

I couldn’t hear it.

So I said it aloud, guessing:

Why?

And my monitor shorted out.

The next day I called no one.

I walked through the city in a daze, like the wind might scatter me into data packets and be done with it. Every screen looked back at me. Every blinking cursor reminded me of a promise I’d forgotten to keep.

I ended up at a pawn shop with the drive in my hand. I was going to sell it. Destroy it. Anything.

The owner wouldn’t touch it.

Said it gave him a headache to even look at.

I walked out. And the USB stick in my pocket pulsed again.

That night, I slept with it under my pillow.

And I dreamed in code.

The dream was cold and metallic.

A long corridor of terminal windows, each showing a different version of my life. In one, I was rich—public hacker, VC backer, clean and polished. In another, I was dead in a bathtub with an open laptop beside me.

But in the last, I was just… listening.

No screens. No machines. Just a dark room with a single voice looping the same line.

What did you promise me, Julian?

And in that moment, I remembered my name.

Not the handle. Not the alias I’d used for years.

But Julian Rusk, age seventeen, code name Ruskbyte.

And I remembered what I had promised her.

Not safety. Not success.

But permanence.

That she would never disappear.

That her voice would never be lost in the noise.

That I would make her code eternal.