To find her, do not look for a face. Look for the single frame of film that does not belong. The one where the background smiles.

Inside, she is a lattice of stolen code, bleeding-edge wetware, and unresolved vengeance. She is the ghost in the machine that learned to love the static.

For six months, she was nothing but echoes. A laugh on a lost comms channel. A tear stain on a data-slate in a pawn shop. A single line of code in a child’s toy: “I am still here.”