Neural Ghosts

In the sweltering chaos of Lagos, a British Army medic faces a crisis not of blood or bone, but of the mind—where drone warfare blurs the boundary between combat and cognition.

In a high-tech medical bay, a soldier in tactical gear attends to an injured comrade, with nearby monitors showing brain scans that indicate a critical condition.

Lagos, Nigeria – 2045

The heat in Lagos was suffocating, thick with the scent of burning fuel and the rot of flooded streets. Above, the skyline flickered with the glow of drone swarms patrolling the megacity, their artificial eyes scanning for threats. Deep in a fortified British Army command post, Captain Ethan Cross, a General Duties Medical Officer, knelt beside his latest patient—Captain Daniel Reeves, a drone warfare specialist plugged directly into the war.

Reeves’ pupils were dilated, sweat pooled at his temples, and his fingers twitched, as if still gripping the phantom controls of the drones he commanded. His biometric monitors were screaming—cortisol off the charts, neural activity erratic. Ethan had seen soldiers break down before, but this was different.

"How long has he been like this?" Ethan asked, glancing at the officer's second-in-command.

"Started three days ago," Lieutenant Femi Okoye said grimly. "He stopped sleeping. Said he was hearing things. Seeing… memories that weren’t his. And then, this morning, he collapsed mid-operation."

Ethan pressed two fingers to Reeves’ wrist. Tachycardic. His breathing was fast and shallow. The neural link at the base of his skull pulsed with a faint blue glow.

"Memories that weren’t his?" Ethan repeated, his stomach tightening. "That’s what he said." Okoye exhaled, lowering his voice.

Doc, we think the enemy got in.

For years, rumors swirled about neural warfare—hacking into soldiers’ implants, rewriting thoughts, injecting false commands.

Lagos had become the perfect testing ground, with insurgents deploying biotechnological horrors that defied conventional defense. If Reeves’ mind had been compromised, every mission he’d commanded, every drone he’d controlled, could be turned against them.

Ethan activated his tablet, scanning Reeves’ neural telemetry. Spikes of abnormal activity danced across the interface, like static on an old radio. Something was there—something that shouldn’t be.

"Jesus," Ethan muttered.

"We need to act," Okoye said. "If the insurgents have access to his mind—"

"I know," Ethan cut in. "But we’re not just talking about hacking a drone. We’re talking about hacking a person."

Okoye didn’t flinch. "What are our options?"

Ethan glanced at the neural link again, then at his own medical interface. The British Army had protocols for neural resets, wiping compromised soldiers and rebuilding them from scratch. But this wasn’t some theoretical case study. This was Reeves.

"Let’s try tiered suppression first," Ethan said. "I’ll isolate the corrupted memories, lock them down. If that doesn’t work…" His throat tightened. "We talk about a full wipe."

He tapped into his telemedicine reach-back, connecting with specialists in the UK. If they could control drones from thousands of miles away, surely they could do the same for medical interventions. A holographic face flickered into view—Dr. Helena Varma, a neurophysiologist back home.

"I see the telemetry," she said instantly. "We need to move fast. There’s an anomaly in his hippocampus—likely external tampering."

"Can we excise it?" Ethan asked.

Varma hesitated. "Yes. But…"

"But what?"

"If the insurgents implanted a memory virus, we don’t know what happens if we start cutting. It could spread. Or worse—it could wipe out everything he was before."

Ethan clenched his jaw. He hated this. Medicine was supposed to heal, not rewrite.

Reeves stirred, his breath hitching. His lips moved soundlessly before forming a whisper:

"They’re in here," he rasped. His glassy eyes met Ethan’s. "They know me."

Ethan’s stomach twisted. He pressed a stabilizing injection to Reeves’ arm, pushing a mix of neurochemical regulators designed to suppress stress responses. His biometrics steadied, but Ethan knew that was just a bandage on a bullet wound.

"What do you want to do, Doc?" Okoye asked.

There was no time for a perfect choice.

A full wipe would erase everything—his knowledge, his skills, his personality. Would he even be Reeves anymore?

A suppression might work—locking away the corrupted parts of his mind like a forgotten file in an encrypted drive. But what if the enemy had buried a trigger deep inside? A word, a sound, an image that could wake up the virus?

And then there was the unthinkable: direct neural manipulation. The implants granted unparalleled access to the human brain. If they could hack memories, could they also delete specific ones? Selective amnesia. Surgical forgetting. Reeves might never know what had happened, but he’d still be him.

Ethan swallowed hard.

"Okoye, get the command team," he said finally. "We need to decide who Daniel Reeves is going to be when he wakes up."

Okoye nodded and left.

Ethan sat beside Reeves, staring at the glowing neural link at the base of his skull.

Just because they could erase a memory… did that mean they should?