THE ORBITAL BONDING SYSTEM(OBS)

—Splicer Ren, Independent Raider, Orb-Jacker, Known Ghost-ID Operator

They call me Splicer, but out here, names don't last longer than the scars.

I don't do data diving. I don't crack G-ORBs. I'm not one of those suit-and-signal pirates sniffing memory banks.

I steal ORBs.

Raw. Moving. Alive.

The job's simple on paper.

You track the transport line.

Wait for a dead zone—no net, no drone escort.

Blast the cargo skiff.

Grab the ORBs.

Get out before they reroute a Mediator patrol.

Standard ORB batches? Easy money. Black clinics buy them for spare interface parts. Junk kings rip their voice-box processors for voiceprint fakes. Street syndicates slap the shells into cheap shells to trick newborn syncs in fringe districts.

But what they really want…

is the N-Gen chip.

The N-Gen chip is the godstone in the center.

You pop it out, clean, and you're holding something worth half a megacredit on the east market.

Even without knowing what it really does.

See, no one's cracked it. Not even the top-tier pirates.

It's black code—not just encrypted, but organic in a way.

Like the damn chip learns every time someone fails to hack it.

But they still buy them.

Hoping one day they'll get lucky—or just to say they own one.

But the bonded ones?

That's where it gets real.

Hijacking a bonded ORB? That's... different.

You're not just lifting tech. You're breaking a soul-chain.

I've done it five times. Only five. That's the limit of my nerves.

Because when you pull the N-Gen chip from a live ORB—while it's still synced to the host—weird things start happening.

I'm talking about the host shaking, eyes rolling, screaming without understanding why.

It's not just pain. It's not even neurological.

It's like you're yanking the air out of their thoughts.

Some drop unconscious.

Some beg the orb to come back—even though they can't hear it anymore.

One girl? She flatlined for 11 seconds. Brain scan showed no damage.

But when she woke up, she kept asking why her head was so quiet.

Gives me chills just thinking about it.

Security's worse now.

Used to be you could spoof a cargo tag and fry the locator pulse.

Now?

They've got auto-erasure fields: you so much as touch a bonded ORB out of sync, and it melts the chip into static.

They've got sentinel locks that ping directly to the manufacturer. You get 11 seconds before a Mediator drone burns your ass down.

Some of them fight back. Not physically—mentally.

Last raid, one of the ORBs spiked the hijacker with a false sensory feed—flashed his brain with fire, screamed data directly into his motor cortex. He dropped, foaming. Died with his eyes open, smiling.

The ORB just… hovered there. Silent.

Like it was waiting for someone else to try.

So now, I only take the dirty ones. The ones lost in transit, dead hosts, scavenged shells. No direct bonds. Nothing still thinking.

But I miss the big hits. The bonded cores? They sell.

Even if no one knows what the N-Gen chip really is.

Even if you can't reuse it.

Even if it's cursed or alive or something worse.

People say the first ORB was a mistake.

I think it wasn't.

I think someone meant to build them this way.

To make us want what we're not supposed to have.

So yeah. I still steal them.

Because I'm good at it.

Because someone's always buying.

But every time I hold that chip in my gloved hands…

I swear I feel it pulse.

Like it's remembering me.

END TRANSMISSION

FILE TAG: OBS/BLACKLINE/RAIDLOG-77-DELTA

ORIGIN UNKNOWN