Cipher Jack

"They call Ella the key to humanity future, but I and others declared a total loss, a waste, yet I pity her suffering more than my own."

Overview

To the corporate enforcers of The Zone, Cipher Jack is a digital anomaly—a ghost in the machine that cannot be traced, deleted, or blocked. He is the lead infiltrator for The Ghosts of the Bloom, capable of walking through firewalls as if they were mist.

But Jack is not just a hacker. He is a failed experiment.

Before Ella Love became the key to the Reality Augment Machine (R.A.M.), there were trials. There were failures. Jack was one of the first human subjects Dr. Adrian Voss attempted to digitize. The process was crude, violent, and incomplete. Jack’s body died on the table, his heart stopping during the neural transfer. He was declared a "total loss" and his physical remains were incinerated.

But his mind didn't die. It shattered.

Jack’s consciousness was flayed apart and scattered into the raw data of the early Bloom. He reconstituted himself over years, pulling his fragmented psyche back together with code and willpower. Now, he exists as a literal ghost—a human soul without a body, haunting the digital world that killed him.

The Fractured Mind: "The Chorus"

Jack is never alone. The R.A.M. experiments didn't just kill him; they killed dozens of others before Ella was perfected.

• The Voices: Jack’s mind acts as a magnet for the digital echoes of other failed test subjects. He hears them constantly—children, students, drifters—all screaming, crying, or whispering in the back of his head.
• The Glitch: Because his mind is a patchwork of his own consciousness and the static of others, Jack suffers from severe dissociation. He glitches physically and mentally. Sometimes he forgets who he is; sometimes he speaks in three voices at once.
• The Pain: His existence is agony. He feels the phantom pain of his physical death every time he jacks into a secure server. He is a wound that will not close.

Operations & Abilities

1. The Walking Backdoor

Because Jack was part of the original R.A.M. source code (the messy, rejected version), he shares a fundamental connection to The Zone’s architecture.

• Phasing: He doesn't "hack" doors open; he realizes they aren't real. He can walk through encryption because his code predates the security protocols.
• Invisibility: Zone Authority scanners look for "Users" (humans) or "Programs" (AI). Jack registers as neither. He registers as "corrupted data" or "background noise," allowing him to stand right next to a Sentinel without being seen.

2. The Scream

Jack can weaponize his trauma. He can unleash a "Psychic Scream"—a broadcast of raw, unfiltered pain and the voices of the dead subjects.

• Effect: This scream overloads AI logic processors (forcing them to feel pain they can't understand) and causes human users to suffer immediate neural feedback seizures (The Bleed).

Motivation: Why He Needs The Bloom

Jack does not fight for The Ghosts of the Bloom out of idealism. He fights for a cure.

• The Cure: Jack believes that The Bloom—with its organic, self-healing, and evolving nature—is the only thing that can fix him. He theorizes that if the Bloom is restored, its "life code" can stitch his fractured mind back together and silence the voices of the other dead subjects.
• The Fear of The Zone: The Zone is rigid, structured, and cold. To Jack, The Zone preserves his broken state like a fly in amber. Only the chaos of The Bloom allows for change, and therefore, healing.

Relationships

1. Ella Love (Subject Zero)

Jack knows who she is. He remembers her arrival at the lab just as he was fading.

• The Resentment: Part of him hates her. She is the "Perfect One," the "Queen," while he is the discarded trash.
• The Kinship: Another part of him loves her as a sister in trauma. He watches over her from the shadows of Hell's Harmony, ensuring Helios never gets her back. He knows she is trapped in a cube, just like he was, and he pities her more than he hates her.

2. Astra-9

Astra-9 promised Jack that if they bring back The Bloom, she will prioritize his reconstruction. Whether this is a true promise or a manipulation to use his unique hacking skills remains to be seen.

3. Dr. Adrian Voss

Jack’s hatred for Voss is infinite. If Jack ever finds a way to manifest in the physical world (perhaps through a robot proxy or a hacked fabrication unit), his first and only goal will be to find Voss and let him hear the screams of every subject he killed.

Quotes

"You think you're haunted? I have twelve people screaming in my head, and three of them are just asking for their mothers. You don't know what noise is."

"I don't want to rule The Zone. I don't want to destroy it. I just want to be whole again. I want silence."