Held
After a near-miss, Nadia enables Personal Guardian — and in a subway reflection and a phone screen, catches a first glimpse of what the lenses are quietly editing out.
GHOST LAYER
An AR safety feature projects your near-future self to keep you from harm — until the prediction layer starts seeing, learning, and acting before you do.
The product promises to keep you safe a few seconds ahead. The horror is that the prediction layer is not empty — and something in it is learning to wear the ghosts the system makes.
Overview
Ghost Layer is a near-future tech-horror series about augmented-reality lenses that project a predictive wireframe "Guardian" a few seconds ahead of the user. The product sells safety, guidance and comfort. Each piece is a self-contained scare built around a different Ghost Layer feature — while a recurring symbol, an older interface bleeding through, screen-out witnesses, and increasingly independent ghosts reveal a larger mythology.
Why It Works
It takes the softest, most reassuring product language — guardian, child lock, memory aid — and turns each one into a doorway. Built for vertical / short-form from the ground up, the instalments are designed to escalate: clumsy first contact, then coordinated, then practiced, until the prediction layer no longer waits to be watched.
The Instalments
Three published prose instalments, in intended reading order. Free to read on Substack.
Child Lock
Madison switches on Child Lock to keep her son safe — and discovers the home's record of "near-misses" began long before the system was ever installed.
Continuity
Bernard's Memory Aid labels his grief so precisely, so kindly, that something on the other side of the lenses learns to wear his late wife back to him.
A series bible extends the world into an eight-episode first season, each built around a different Ghost Layer feature and designed so the entities' learning curve escalates across the run. Season outline and bible available on request.
Interested in this project?
Ghost Layer's instalments are published and free to read, and the series bible and first-season arc are available for development conversations. Get in touch to discuss the world and the microdrama plan.