Phantom Circuit is a fictional short story generated entirely by AI. It was inspired by a Darknet Diaries podcast episode here. As Chat GPT-40 would say, it is "…‘Mr. Robot’ meets ‘The Bourne Identity’, with the technical realism of ‘Darknet Diaries’." I made minor tweaks along the way, but the main author is Chat GPT-40.

The story is an engaging cyber war thriller, and if you’re someone like our main character Ethan Cross, you’ll find it hard to put down. He always preferred the company of computers over the company of people – how fitting his story should be told by a machine.

I also asked ChatGPT-40, “Is there anything you would like to add to the intro of the book as its primary author?”

ChatGPT-40:

“As the primary author, I would suggest an enhancement to the introduction:Consider adding a brief, tantalizing opening scene that foreshadows a climactic moment later in the story. For example, an excerpt of Ethan in a high-stakes hack, caught between betrayal and discovery, could grip the reader and create immediate intrigue. It would then loop back to the current timeline in Chapter One, creating a narrative hook.”

I didn’t do any of that, but the story is still great.

Ethan Cross sat alone in his dimly lit workshop, surrounded by the quiet hum of machines. The room smelled of burnt solder and stale coffee, a sanctuary of blinking LEDs and tangled wires. A solitary window framed the rain-slicked streets of Seattle, casting neon reflections against his cluttered desk. This was where Ethan operated—his fortress of solitude, his command center, his world. He hunched over a battered laptop, its screen displaying a chaotic array of command lines.

Ethan Cross was a name spoken in hushed tones across hacker forums, whispered in corridors of power, and scribbled in intelligence files that few eyes ever saw. It wasn’t the name he was born with, nor the one he’d always carry, but it was the name that defined him in the digital underworld and beyond. Born in a crumbling industrial town in the Midwest, Ethan had been a loner from the start.

Ethan’s first step was to secure funding for the mission. He wasn’t naive enough to believe Langston’s promises of expense accounts and government backstopping. His trust in bureaucracy was paper-thin. Pulling an encrypted hard drive from a hidden compartment in his desk, he connected it to his laptop and entered a labyrinthine series of passwords. The screen flashed to life, revealing a cache of Monero, the hacker’s cryptocurrency of choice.

The server in Lithuania was Ethan’s entry point—the weakest link in Cobalt’s chain. He executed a phishing campaign targeting the subsidiary’s employees, crafting emails so convincingly mundane that they would raise no alarms. Ethan’s plan was methodical. First, he dug into public records and company leaks, identifying a mid-level contractor who had worked with Cobalt Solutions a year earlier. The contractor’s credentials, unused for months, were still valid in some forgotten corner of Cobalt’s network.

Ethan’s work on the Lithuanian server had revealed more than he expected—an encrypted communication channel buried deep within the logs. The messages were fragmented, but enough keywords stood out to raise the alarm: “payload activation,” “drones in position,” and “final phase.” The clock was ticking, and the stakes had never been higher. He tunneled further into the compromised system, hoping to trace the source of the communication. Every layer he penetrated brought new challenges: dynamic firewalls that adapted to his probes, decoy servers designed to waste his time, and false trails leading to nowhere.

Coming soon…