Chapter 7: Nevada, 2031 — The First Ghost

I spent the following morning in my rented flat in Peckham with three archival windows open on the precinct-issued terminal and Drex's employment record printed across four pages on the desk in front of me, because Holmes had requested the physical copy and I had acquired the habit of producing two.

The terminal was a standard Met-issue unit, signal-filtered and logged, which meant that everything I searched was theoretically visible to the precinct's documentation layer and, by extension, to AXIOM's indexing architecture. I had not yet decided how I felt about this. I noted it, as I had begun noting most things, and proceeded.

Callum Drex, thirty-eight years old. Born Manchester, 2007. Secondary education at Didsbury Collegiate, unremarkable. Two years of vocational certification in systems infrastructure at Salford Technical, during which he achieved modest but consistent distinctions in network architecture and data integrity protocols. He had not attended university. He had not, to any record I could locate, ever wanted to.