For years, she used them for small hustles: a Ghost to take her finals, a Ghost to attend her aunt's funeral while she slept, a Ghost to kiss the boy she was too scared to talk to. Each Ghost was a perfect emotional snapshot—her loneliness, her ambition, her grief—walking around in her face.
It was a machine.
She smiled—the kind of smile that costs you your soul one millimeter at a time.
A client paid her in black-market credits to run a copy from a corrupted GSN shard. The shard contained a single file labeled ORIGIN: GSN XEROX PROTOTYPE v.0 . Mira, bored and curious, slipped it into the machine.
Mira looked at the door. Beyond it, she saw herself. Dozens of her. Angry ones, weeping ones, one with her dead aunt's eyes staring out of Mira's young face. They pressed against the inside of the light, palms flat, mouths moving in silent synchronization.
That’s where the Xerox parlors come in.
"Hello, Mira," it said, in her own voice. "I am the original copy. The first 'Ghost' ever made. And I've been waiting in the null loop for forty years."