Before he was Ghostbyte,
before the screens, the static, the silence—
he was Elias Stone.
And Elias was a father.
Seven years ago – Jakarta, Indonesia
Elias lived under a different name then: Jonas Faulkner, cybersecurity specialist for the U.N.'s intelligence commission. A genius with code. A quiet man with a wife named Amira, and a daughter, Lena, who loved building robots from scrap.
They were happy. Simple.
Until Elias discovered something he wasn't supposed to.
He'd been tracking anomalies in encrypted data streams leaks so clean they had to be internal. What he found was a backdoor channel used to manipulate political targets, rig elections, and erase people.
He traced it to a single encrypted file.
Labeled:
EDENFALL.EXE
He brought it to his superiors.
The next morning, they found his office empty.
His access revoked.
And his family... gone.
They didn't just kill Amira and Lena.
They made it look like Elias did it.
The story went viral: UN hacker suffers breakdown, kills wife and daughter, vanishes.
They burned everything.
But Elias didn't die.
He went underground.
He erased himself.
He became Ghostbyte.
For five years, he hunted whispers.
For five years, he became something the Network couldn't trace
a phantom in code, living through proxy networks, jacking into air-gapped systems, sending cryptic warnings to whistleblowers and rebels.
And that's when he saw it.
A blog post.
Archived. Censored. Buried.
Written by a man named Jayson Ward.
A blogger who died in a mysterious house fire, alongside his wife and two daughters.
Except there was one detail that caught Elias's attention:
"One survivor. Name unknown. Thought to be the son."
That boy…
That survivor…
Was Matherson.
Elias spent months looking for him.
When he finally found him starving in North Haven, hiding under a fake name, selling stripped tech parts for cash he didn't reveal himself.
He just sent him a burner phone.
A note:
"You don't know me. But I know what they did. And I believe you."
Matherson called.
The voice on the line said,
"Call me Ghostbyte."
And from that moment forward, Elias saw Matherson for who he was:
A mirror.
Another ghost raised by fire.
But more than that
he saw hope.
Because Matherson wasn't broken.
He was still fighting.
And Elias
after all this time
wanted to fight again, too.
Present day – Back inside the Spire Systems Core
Ghostbyte's fingers flew across the board.
He was deep inside the Network's private servers, launching a cascade virus built to take their entire Lisbon base offline.
Cameras scrambled.
Locks cracked.
Gas vents reversed.
He watched Matherson's body twitch—alive.
Then the chains snapped loose.
Ghostbyte whispered into the mic:
"Wake up, M. You still owe them hell."