UNREGISTERED

Act I: Secure Lines and Emotional Collateral

“Cap,” Roach said, quiet and razor-focused.

Price looked up. “Something?”

Roach frowned at his screen like it had insulted his clearance. “We just got breached. Fallback secure.”

Laswell looked up from her terminal. “That line isn’t even listed.”

Roach nodded grimly. “I know. It’s locked behind three-tier blackouts, buried subnetworks. We don’t just get intrusions on fallback. Hell, we don’t even get echoes.”

“Where’s it coming from?” Ghost asked.

Roach shook his head. “No source trace. She masked it before it existed. Whoever this is, her signal came through cleaner than NATO’s entire satellite web.”

Soap blinked. “Jesus—how’s that even possible?”

Roach didn’t look away from the stream. “I have no idea. Which makes her either elite, unstable, or both.”

Price narrowed his eyes. “Is the signal live?”

Roach nodded. “She’s waiting.”

Price leaned forward, calm and still. “Mute our side. Let it through.”

Click.

“—no, Echo, you do not get to judge me. Not when you’ve eaten socks. You have no moral ground.”

Ghost blinked slowly.

"I’m just saying—if Ms. Carter wanted me to make something emotionally resonant, maybe she shouldn't have assigned ‘express unity and individuality in one image’ like it’s a real thing humans can do without crying in tempera paint!”

Scraping sounds, a bark.

“You are not helping, Echo! Unity is—what, group identity? Community? Shared goals? Hugs and team shirts?!”

“But individuality is standing in the corner with your arms crossed, waiting for a bomb to take out unity, while customizing your jacket with safety pins!"

Soap: “I mean… she’s not wrong.”

“How do I combine those?! Paint a fist bump with an existential crisis floating above it?! I TRIED THAT. IT LOOKED LIKE SOCIALISM!”

Echo barked.

“Oh my gosh, don’t sass me! I’m TRYING, Echo! It’s three in the morning! School starts at seven! ART IS MY FIRST CLASS.”

A paintbrush snaps in half like brittle hope.

“I HAVE FOUR HOURS TO FINISH THE PHILOSOPHICAL EQUIVALENT OF A TED TALK IN WATERCOLOR.”

Gaz, quietly: “This is either a transmission error or an act of God.”

“If I fail this, I fail the class. If I fail the class... I can't fail art! No one fails art! Then—fine! Maybe I will become a terrorist!”

“Does terrorism even pay well? Honestly, maybe I should try it. At least war criminals don’t have rubrics.”

Alejandro whispered, “...Did she just threaten international peace over a school project?”

Then—

A pause.

“Wait.”
“Wait wait wait wait—is that light green?”

Soap elbowed Ghost. “Oh shit.”

“ECHO YOU TRAITOR, WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME THEY PICKED UP!?"

Devastated gasp.

“OH SHIT. That means—they heard the terrorism thing— they heard the terrorism thing—OH MY GOD —DON’T HANG UP.”

“Okay okay okay okay LISTEN. I hacked this line ON PURPOSE. Not to commit crimes—okay yes technically I committed several, but the reason was PURE.”

"You’re about to walk into a building rigged to explode. Like, massively. Makarov built a detonation daisy chain and labeled the trigger file ‘AnnualSupplyDrops.xlsx’, which should be a felony on formatting alone.”

Ghost, deadpan: “She found that faster than our last two analysts combined.”

“I only found it because I was procrastinating and cracked one of his dead shell networks because... I needed serotonin, okay? I didn’t MEAN to become the NSA!”

“So now I know too much, and you’re heading straight into a cinematic pile of doom, and I thought—hey, maybe I should do something useful for once. So I patched into your line to stop you from becoming the next scrambled eggs!"

“Cool. So. Uh... huge fan. Please don’t vaporize me for hacking you—OH SHIT. That sounded worse out loud—”

Another pause.

“Are you still there? Please be there. Because if I get arrested AND you die, I’m gonna be blacklisted harder than Donald fucking Trump after his first MAGA speech—”

There was silence.

Then Price, slow as dusk and just as dry, unmuted the channel.

“Start over.”

“And this time, give me something I can actually write in the mission brief.”