White Noise Thanos Kalamidas T h e O f f - V i g i l a n T e g r O u p The hollow Man White Noise Thanos Kalamidas Ovi ebooks are available in Ovi/Ovi eBookshelves pages and they are for free. If somebody tries to sell you an Ovi book please contact us immediately. For details, contact: ovimagazine@yahoo.com No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the writer or the above publisher of this book An Ovi eBooks Publication 2025 Ovi eBookPublications - All material is copyright of the Ovi eBooks Publications & the writer C White Noise White Noise Thanos Kalamidas The Hollow Man Thanos Kalamidas An Ovi eBooks Publication 2025 Ovi eBookPublications - All material is copyright of the Ovi eBooks Publications & the writer C White Noise T he city ran like bad code. Pixels of human misery fluttered in the night wind, caught between jagged light and the endless hum of electricity bleeding from the bones of ruined towers. Neon pulsed on Komura Finance Tower’s slick glass skin, strobed in error-looped kanji ERROR flickering across the corporate grid like a dying lizard tongue. The Hollow Man stood on the edge of it all, motionless, as if someone had forgotten to render him into the skyline. White mask. No mouth. No eyes. Thanos Kalamidas Just a void smooth as polished bone, turned to face the endless urban sprawl below, South Quadrant, Zone 4: Yakuza-held territory. Clinics where girls were rebuilt. Black-market VR brothels. Auto-forges where battlefield scraps were turned into bleeding- edge death tech. He didn’t see it, not the way humans did. The optic suite fed infrared, sonar, data overlays, anonymized surveillance threads. Heat-signatures cross-pollinated with facial recognition. Cars became weaponized glyphs. Buildings bled stats and subnets. The world was a corpse wired to scream. Inside the carbonweave suit: nothing stirred. No chemical surge. No moral tether. Just Kyle Rinn’s residual phantom, scrubbed raw by military-grade neurochemical deletion. Hollowed. They’d done it in a white room with soundless glass. Kept his eyes open. Showed him loops of war atrocities and fed impulse inhibitors into his spine. Day after day until every image became noise. Every scream, syntax. Now he moved on algorithm. Precision above principle. His handler called it “clean autonomy.” Others whispered: wet god. White Noise His voice cracked into comms. Flat. “Confirm subject.” “Takashi Yoneda,” came the woman’s reply, artificially filtered, robotic in rhythm. “Arms broker. Corporate freelance. Contract with Azimuth Black. Moving ten thousand inductive rifles to the African Western Zone. Weapons tagged as humanitarian medical equipment.” The data fed in. Hollow’s HUD blinked alive with convoy telemetry. Three SUV drones. Quad- legged, bullet-armored. Auto-aim railgun turrets nested in the roofs. Two aerial gunners, high-speed gyros, anti-personnel munitions. All masked under Komura’s AI traffic grid. Civilians none the wiser. Corporate war on silent mode. Didn’t matter. Hollow had jacked the grid two hours ago. He was the ghost in their systems now. He watched them like a God with nothing left to believe in. A flick of muscle memory and he moved, launched across the roof like a glitch in the environment, frictionless and without sound. Down Thanos Kalamidas the side of the building, catching a mag-line mid- speed, boots locking to the steel braid in perfect sync. Thirty meters above street level. Then twenty. Then five. And then he dropped. Impact. SUV roof bent under his weight. The polymer creaked. He punched through with a carbon blade, slid through the roof like mercury in a circuit. Driver: mid-thought. Dead before it registered. Passenger spun, mouth opening, pulling a smart- weapon free... Too slow. A sharp jab under the clavicle, another to the temple. Nerve bundle crushed. The light in his eyes flickered, then died. All within three seconds. The drone-SUV veered left, confused without its handlers. White Noise Hollow exited through the broken windshield as it crashed into a noodle stand, red paper lanterns bursting into liquid flame, customers scattering in slow-mo terror. Rain spit from the sky like malfunctioning static. Every LED in sight flickered as he stepped onto the wet asphalt. Yoneda’s lead SUV screeched to a halt. Turrets rotated. Scanned. The Hollow Man raised a single hand. Palm open. No threat displayed. No emotion offered. The AI paused, calculating threat vectors. Two-point-five seconds of hesitation. Too long. Hollow pulsed an EMP dagger from his forearm. A silent bloom of blue light. Blackout. Turrets dropped. Windows burst. Thanos Kalamidas Metal shrieked like something alive. The remaining SUV sizzled on its axles, sensors fried. One of the aerials nosedived into a ramen bar, exploded in a blossom of synthetic pork and shrapnel. The other wheeled mid-air, tried to get a lock... Hollow fired a guided shock-dart, low velocity. It spiraled, struck the undercarriage, and cooked the stabilizers. The drone spun out, clipped a power line, and tore itself apart in a shriek of steel. Silence. Then smoke. Then screaming. Yoneda stumbled out of the lead vehicle. One eye gone. Face a maze of blood and silicone. Suit torn. Left hand jittering in spastic loops from shock feedback. He saw the Hollow Man. The mask. Featureless. Icon of nothingness. White Noise He dropped to his knees on instinct. “I... listen... I can pay,” Yoneda gasped. “I’ve got data, crypto, high-grade intel... hell, I can flip on Azimuth, please, I can make this worth your... ” The Hollow Man tilted his head. Small twitch. Analytical. “You sell war.” The voice was monotone. Like a dead language whispering itself back into relevance. “I erase you.” He stepped forward. One motion. Caught Yoneda’s throat. Thumb pressed inward... crunch. No scream. Just a wheeze. A dying code execution. Yoneda collapsed in the street, convulsing. Rain washed his blood into the storm drains. Carried it off like data flushed from a dead server. Somewhere, sirens screamed. Too far. Too late. Too irrelevant. Thanos Kalamidas Hollow turned without ceremony. Stepped back into the alleyway shadows, vanishing into the data-smog and sodium fog. No witness. No trace. Only absence. A hole in the world where a man used to be. * * * * * * The rain never stopped. It didn’t fall anymore so much as existed, a persistent atmospheric artifact, like corrupted pixels on a failing screen. Tokyo Sub-Sector G9 was an infection blinking through the mesh of corporate sovereignty, forty stories of concrete and glass metastasizing under firewalls, overseen by neuromarkets and private militaries. Jürgen Brecht lived beneath it all, literally. Brecht’s vault was twenty-one levels down. No elevators. No external feed. Protected by a quantum-core biometric mesh, helix-coded DNA locks, and smart-matter drones with the temper of old gods. White Noise Didn’t matter. The Hollow Man wasn’t part of the known threat spectrum. He didn’t trigger alerts. He didn’t hack doors. He became the absence in your camera feed. The compression glitch in your drone’s vision. The sudden black bar in your audit trail. Inside the vault, Brecht was watching a playback of a drone strike over Mauritania. Vaporized rebels. Thermal afterimages flaring across the AR wall like gods turning pages. “Loud,” he muttered to no one. His voice echoed too loud. The AI assistant pulsed with soft blue edges in the corner. “Sir,” it whispered. “A latency disruption. External noise detected in corridor echo-threads.” He frowned. The playback looped again. Glitch. The rebels froze mid-detonation. The screen popped once, pixelated hard, then smoothed. Normal. He turned. Thanos Kalamidas The white mask was already there. No drama. No dramatic entrance. Just silence. Just inevitability. Hollow stood beneath the data-tree. The mask gave nothing. Not even attention. He was observing the systems, not the man. Brecht felt it, and it made him want to scream. “You want what? Revenge? Data?” Brecht’s voice cracked. “I got a dead-drop with enough crypto to retire every zealot in your sad cause. You know how many wars I prevented just by moving the fucking scale?” Pause. Static in the walls now. Rain, piped in for ambiance, turned into a hiss of white noise. “You don’t stop the system, freak,” he spat. “You are part of it. You’re the mythology that makes it work. Cut one head, two more grow. Hydra shit, you feel me?” White Noise The mask tilted. Not a nod. Not recognition. Just analysis. Then the voice. That dead, perfect voice. “I don’t cut heads.” “I delete networks.” One step forward. Brecht drew fast, a nano-shard pistol hidden in his forearm. Too slow. The Hollow Man’s left hand surged like fluid metal, fingers blooming open to reveal a filament dagger, black as sleep. He drove it not into flesh but behind Brecht’s ear, into the soft port designed for cognitive enhancement. A pulse. Malware ignition. Brecht arched, spine tensing like piano wire. No blood. Just light spilling from his eyes, as the malware set fire to his synaptic chain. His final sound was a click. Thanos Kalamidas He twitched once. Twice. Then stilled. A soft buzz rolled across the vault’s interior. Then came the cascading failure The servers behind him lit red. One by one... Shell corps collapsed. Proxy wars rerouted. Contracts corrupted. Money disappeared like a lie. Hollow watched it burn. From orbit, satellites spun error codes. In Nevada, a quantum vault failed checksum. In Lagos, an auto-drone hangar overloaded and exploded. The war screamed and stuttered and spat but couldn’t find the source. Couldn’t trace the origin. Because the origin was a ghost. * * * * * * Minutes Later He walked back through the corridors... no alarms. No guards left alive. White Noise Some had tried. He’d torn one’s lungs out in a flash-cut, no rage, no malice. Another had begged. Hollow dropped him into the geothermal core. The scream hadn’t even echoed. Up a maintenance shaft. Through an automated freight lift. Every security node burned behind him in digital silence. * * * * * * Outside. Rooftop. Midnight. The rain was thicker now, sheets of static that blurred the city into motionless oil. Hollow stood atop the G9 Tower’s skeletal framework. He paused. A flicker in the distance. Target? No. Observation drone. Branded corporate. Watching from across the skyline. Who sent it? Thanos Kalamidas His HUD ticked once. A single line of corrupted text appeared. You’re not the only one. He moved to intercept but the drone exploded mid-air. No signal. No origin trace. Just absence. For the first time, a delay in Hollow’s pattern. He turned slowly, static rising in his ear like a whisper. Below, the city pulsed with infinite layers. And something was rising beneath the layers. A counter-algorithm. Another shadow. Not a system. Not a man. Something else. * * * * * * Weeks passed. Deals collapsed. Brokers vanished. Wars short-circuited. White Noise The media called it coincidence. Burnout. Economic entropy. But in the low-code backchannels, they knew. They whispered it like gospel. “Hollow.” No manifesto. No emotion. No trace. Only patterns. Only silence in places where death used to speak. But somewhere, beyond even the hidden layers, another signal began to pulse. It knew his name. And it wasn’t afraid. The war didn’t end. But the system forgot who was profiting. And someone else just remembered. In the noise, something was listening back. Thanos Kalamidas White Noise The Hollow Man Thanos Kalamidas Ovi eBook Publishing 2025 Ovi magazine Design: Thanos