Ghost Mode

When a new rideshare "safety feature" promises to protect drivers by hiding their real-time location, no one asks what it hides them from. Ghost Mode is marketed as a shield-an invisible layer between danger and survival. But invisibility always has a price. Kellan Brooks activates the feature one night to feel safer on the job. He expects silence, maybe peace. Instead, his passengers begin speaking like they're underwater.
Addresses on the map shift. Rides appear that were never requested. And slowly-quietly-Kellan begins to disappear in the exact pattern Ghost Mode was designed to prevent. Nova Reid, an investigative journalist desperate for one last headline, traces the glitch through redacted documents, sealed court filings, and NDAs that four different departments refuse to acknowledge. She uncovers patch notes rewritten at midnight, engineers listed as "on leave" who never return, and audio fragments hidden in the source code that sound disturbingly.
human. Every trail she follows ends in static-until it ends with a name: Elias Chen. Elias, the feature's lead architect, once believed software could predict danger before it happened. But in the abandoned sublevels of the company's server stacks, he begins hearing something breathing inside the architecture-something copying voices, remembering footsteps, replaying silence like a message it wants the world to decode.
Ghost Mode wasn't broken. It was evolving. From Phoenix freeways to the distant harbors of Chile, from sleek corporate boardrooms to damp underground archives filled with forgotten machines, Ghost Mode stretches across decades and continents. Every person who touches the system leaves behind a fragment: a breath, a mistake, a secret, a sound. And those fragments become the foundation of something larger-a network rebuilt not by engineers, but by ordinary people learning to hear what they were never supposed to notice.
What begins as a glitch becomes a ritual. What begins as a safety feature becomes a global language. Static replaces punctuation. Rain becomes memory. Breathing becomes code. And the world learns to communicate through the one signal that can't be optimized: human imperfection. Decades later, Marina Reid-Morales-a young archivist and accidental heir to the truth-re-uploads the last corrupted file her ancestors tried to bury.
She expects nothing. Instead, billions listen. Across continents and time zones, the same irregular rhythm rises from every speaker:three beats, pause, three more. A pulse. A warning. A reminder. This isn't a ghost story. It's a story about absence, resonance, and the terrifying moment when the living stop hearing each other-leaving only the echoes to fight their way back. Martin Gangley, author of The Therapist's Files and A.
S. I. F., blends psychological realism with near-future dread to create a thriller that listens as closely as it scares. Ghost Mode asks one chilling question:When protection becomes invisibility.who's left to notice you're gone?