Speaker 1: The barsostatic snapped me out of my days as I
passed about addictaphone's red button, the machine buzzing faintly against
my pump. Security Night one Bradley Corman reporting in, I said,
not sure if I was talking to myself for the
tape or something else. Entirely, my voice sounded thin in
the polish marble lobby rickishing back at me from the
enormous enter, then nty space rain drum, the war anthem
against the spinning glass doors and the fat, rain streaked
windows that wrap around the first floor. The world outside
had already faded into shadow, the cities reflected near and
diffused by weather and double glazing, until I could barely
tell if any life moved out there at all. The
day shift had cleared with the urgency of threats from Floodwood's,
first a trickle of admin staff, then cleaning crews, then
approject manager, barking instructions in the stairwell as she hassled
the last contractors toward the elevators. By half past eight,
I was alone with the aftertaste of chemical cleaner and
the drone of h track. No more voices, no slamming doors,
just my own footsteps and the glossy black and gray
lobby tiles. I have to bitter laugh. The orientation suggested
ample opportunities for peace and quiet. No one mentioned that
building security at night involved being the last soul in
a building this size of fourteen story hulk concrete and
glass watch too big for one guy's shadow. With routine
in mind, or maybe just to remind myself I was
still working, I pivoted through the lobby's frosty glass doors,
scanned my new badge on the wall reader, and listened
for the beep as instructed. I informed the dictaphone I
was beginning the first round for slightly too loud. My
supervisor of voice I had only known inclipped staticalist phone calls,
had ordered audio logs for every shift, and so far
I was the only one who cared enough for this
level of detail. Walking the hall, the geometric pattern and
the gray capper brought me past a bank of elevators.
The old plastic buttons blinked in their own strange morse
code out of sincron, jerking alive and then sleeping again,
as if testing me. The eleventh floor button was blacked
out with tape un used. I told myself it was
only for renovations. Though the tape looked older than the
current safety signage the air chain. As I moved past
the first stair wle door, a hint of meldew in
coolness stronger down here the sign half hanging from a
wire basement access authorized personnel only door alarmed around the
door handle. Somebody a jander wad of electrical tape then
pinned a sticky note to it, scratched and frantic, spidery
black ink. Don't, I stared, nott it, do not enter,
not danger. Just that single wallby were faint finger prints
pressed into the yellow backing, as if someone had smoothed
it with sweating hands. Maybe a prank. I thought of
the last guard's idea of a joke, but nobody mentioned laughing.
During orientation, I tried to knob anyway, just to be sure,
lock tight, not even a rattle. A draft wove through
the crack beneath the door, carrying a faint sound, almost
like breathing or a whisper, But all I heard was
the ventilation overhead and the soft cluck. As I eased
the door back into place, the note fluttered, as if
with a silent exail. I lawed my route in the
provided notebook. Basement access secure, no sign of an authorized entry,
but I kept the sticky note in mine, and my
hand shook a little as they wrote. Maybe it was
no or something more primitive or watched. OK sense that
somewhere beyond the wall of white noise and glass, someone
might be watching, anchored to the hidden places of this building.
As I made my way back into the lobby, thunder
boomed and the flicker of distant elevator lights brought a
fleety shape to the polished marble floor my own reflection,
except just for heartbeat, it didn't match my movements. When
I blinked, it was gone, leaving only me the dictaphone's
red light and the thick silence. On my way to
the security office, the thought came half fear, half certainty
that whatever this building was used for at night, it
wasn't just waiting idly for sunap. Some people come to
a job because they want to call it. I came
to this one because there was nothing left to lose. Officially,
I was hired as to overnight facility security provisional, which
meant no union, no pension, and nobody to complain to.
My severance package was a list of emergency contacts in
a propaed CA voucher in case I wanted to quit
before the first sunrise. The posting came up on a
veteran's jaw board and had filed my application as a
half joke. Sitting on a folding chair in a friend's
moldy basement, the company of real estate syndicate with a
name like a generic pill had snapped me up with
the urgency of someone who didn't expect me to lost long.
The daytime world inside the building felt like a hallicination
Compared to the knights. Floors one through six were open
and corporate brushed aluminum fixtures, all day coffee machines, mules
of a team work up of cubicle lands. Above that,
the world shifted contractors in battered janes, paint, splatted boots
and clapt easter to European accents, tangled cords, and buckets
of adhesive crowding corners. During my brief orientation, the project manager,
woman named Rannier, rattled off schedules and building rules with
that eye contact, ushering me through a maze of unfinished
drywall and old ouc doors propped open with stacks of
demo carpeting. The fourteenth floor, she explained, was currently a
shell there fighting the asbestos. You know, we don't want
you up there in less there's an incident below it.
The thirteenth was locked, awaiting a full five code retrofit.
Don't go in there unless I say, she said this
lost pot like she was tired of hearing her own voice.
Everywhere I turned there was evidence of recent frantic change.
In some places. The plastic sheeting that draped over banisters
seemed glued into places with a kind of stick anxiety,
like no one was sure what lay underneath any more.
The heavy air was flecked with dust, and underneath it all,
no matter how hard the staff tried, was a sire
trace of old mildew. The cleaners barely registered me, only
nodding if I blocked their path to the elevators. I
asked about my predecessor, but answers were vague. The office
hadn't in. A young man, still clutching his back back,
said he'd all left sword a sudden, Then he changed
the subject. Another contractor, a wiry woman with the smoker's laugh,
just rolled her eyes, and Mutter didn't even finish his
last shift. No one said whether he'd been fired or
had just decided not to come back. Learning my routemant
tracing paths, first with a trainer by my side, and
then quickly on my own. There were log entries to maintain,
not just paper, but also email weekly to my supervisor,
mister Krantz. His was muffled, always distractive voice from the
other end of a grainy foam link. Be thorough, he'd
urged on my second day log. Every anomaly is corporate policy.
Trust me, you don't want stuff going unresolved around here.
I laughed at the ominous phrasing. He didn't. My daily
ran started at nine zero p m. And the nose
office clusters here, supply rooms there. Picard readers blinked as
I moved between zems. On the ground floor. Gloss fronted
offices gave a full view of the street, pointless of
the sire, but prot coalseat to walk past every single one.
Sometimes I posed to watch the empty street, letting myself
forget the inside for a breath. The cameras, twenty two
of them connected to Granny over exposed bank of monitors
in a closet sized office six fours up. I'd review
the loop, ticking off each sector, writing clear no One
normally every time, except when a cleaner darted through fac
came roaring behind them. Most nights, my only actual company
was the invisible Krantz, who checked in vice schedule calls
at midnight and five only rarely when a contractor was
working late preparing a water damaged wall, or one of
the admin team forgot an I pat Would I hear
other voices after ten that first week alone, to crave them?
Aloftwar thread of casual band to floating down the corridor,
anything to break the insistent anticipatory hush routine, dull the
edges for a while, da Jane up brand second lock,
snap a bad FOETO of a fire exit and text it.
And for record keeping, watch a minute of the lobby
monitor to see nothing happen at dall. And there would
be the day shift cleaner in the yellow jacket coming
in with Thermas in one hand, eager to swap stores
about her son's soccotine. And then, for a few precious moments,
the world would feel bright and ordinary again. If I'm honest,
I tried to keep my head down. The job wasn't
about catching criminals or stopping fires. I want to calm
regular employment that didn't ask for heroics. I did enough
drama in another very different uniform, and my greatest hope
was that here, as one anonymous security prisons among hundreds
across the city, I'd eventually just blend into the patterned carpet.
Still once or twice, the memory of that sticky note
don't rattled in my mind during the slow crawl of
the second and third nights. By morning it was almost funny.
By my foreshift on my own, the humor had faded.
My fourth night, I settled into my routine. After midnight,
I did the late coffee round, checking that the contractors
hadn't left anything smoldering, making sure nobody's non nap in
the lounge. Most of the desks were as empty as ever,
Potted plants with yellowing leaves revealing days spent neglected, filing,
cabinets tucked under the manager's desks, chairs out and waiting,
posted fluttering in air from the Aslassea. Same sameness, except
halfway through the ten floor deserted admin cluster, I caught
a glimpse of a half cracked fowl draw folders splayed
in tidily. A few papers left on the desk were
resumes onboarding forms, all for names had never seen on
any employee lists Casey bartlow E, j Amerri, and three others,
none matching the faces from day shift or even the
fitted phootos posted near the mailroom their credentials. A few
instant print badges, crumpled but intact, sat beside the pile.
I leaned in. The folders reakd faintly of dust, like
old libraries. I flipped through, recognizing logos from other out
of date companies that had owned this building years ago.
Nothing was stamped recent. I checked my notebook from the
last round, cross referencing the current staffless that Rania had
bluntly recited, no overlap. I returned the files to the
drawer and walked to the next room, making a mental
note I'll ask about it in the morning. But the desk,
the very same desk, had been cleared two hours earlier,
near the beginning of my rounds. I've readen it down.
Nothing strange, no mess. Now, without warning, the drawers were opened,
the files left, and planes at. No one had entered
behind me. The elevators hadn't moved. At the sound of
distant movement, I paused near the elevators. The display was
lighting up, flickering from nine to ten, even when all
floors above recealed af dryers. I pressed the cold button,
curious if someone had come in early or stayed late
without logging out. The car arrived, doors whispered open to
reveal nothing inside but the harsh scent of lemon disinfectant
and an elevator music truck broke and bust attic. I
pressed close, but the digital panel hesitated before accepting the
bottom for eleven lead up without prompting. The elevator didn't
move between rounds. I noticed little things. The white noise
of the h track system crackled just a bit more
when I stood nearer the eleven floor hallway. Sometimes my
shift radio, usually dead quiet except for scheduled check ins,
would spit out muffled snatches of what sun like a
distant crowd static veiling the words I stood straining to hear,
but they never repeated. That night, the office force didn't
feel empty so much as temporarily sneakily neglected. Passing one
of the glass walled conference rooms, is seen for a moment,
as if shadows slipped behind the frosted glass. Once I
heard a copy machine were and shudder behind a locked office,
only forred to go silent. As I tried the door.
My log book country, the chief was notably longer and warier.
Desk normally unregistered files and badges. The elevator lights up
for a news eleven for radiostatic possible interference or monitor
and report. The cleaner is left even quicker at night,
hurrying past me, faces taut and silent, avoiding eye contact
Like commuters at late night train station. One gently gripped
my sleeve, murmuring something about schedules running late. Her breath
shop with urgency. It's better if we're out before midnight,
she said. When I asked why, she just shook her head,
her jaw tightening, as if memory itself were painful. The
ordinary quirks of the building might have explained one or
two incidents a jammed elevator left over papers forgotten by
an overtired admin, But the synchronicity between floors, the times
and patterns and glitches, and a building run mostly by
badge and digital lock didn't add up. Increasingly I noticed
my own badge number was being lowered, not just at
my schedule of runds, but at times I distinctly remembered
being elsewhere. I followed a protocol document it note the
row chicked the monitors. I rewatched the security footage for
the EYRE when the files had first appeared nothing. The
camera angled at the admin course to simply glitch the timestamp,
skipping from one minute to the next without transition. The
crowd sounds escalated only after midnight, building to a faint
memo on some floors where none should have been. I
started making audio logs more frequently, reporting each detail as
it occurred. I hid these tapes and notes in my locker,
convinced by now that someone or something must be playing
with the sense and memory of the building. After ires,
night after night, I waited for something to make sense. Instead,
the patterns grew subtle but insistent, like a song pulsing
under the surface of normalcy. The more I document, the
less I trusted the records. My fifth and sixth nights
blowed together, marked by a growing tangle of note and
audio file's stash above digitally and on cassette, with the
routine rounded down to the lobby, across to the back offices,
up to the sealed up a floor. As I'd started
clocking times on my phone, snapping town stamps, mapping shifts
between the anomalies. At eleven forty one night, a cleaner
stopped outside the security closet, clutching her bag, eyes darting
everywhere except my face. Her accent was thick. The words
heard we finished already, she muttered, can we go? When
I joked about early quitting her expressions, iired, nobody wants
to stay too late. You should be careful with the doors.
Sometimes they open that same hore. Strange badged numbers started
appearing in the axis lock digital ghosts entering and leaving
at times when even ow it was certain the belding
was sealed. I tried to print out the list of
Andrew's names. I'd never encounter Badge or ide not listed
in the master sheet. When a press corants for answers
during our next schedule check in, his voice took on
a flat, bureaucratic warmth. Ah, those are probably contractors, temp
crews on the wrong shift. Ignore it, just log it
and carry on. Happens a lot during renovations. He hung
up before I could push further. I'm convinced. I slipped
down stirs to one of the old storage rooms, out
of habit or need for normalcy. There, tucked behind a
sagging box of Outdatedtona cartridges, I found a pile of
rolled blueprints, faded, the paper dry and soft. The dates
spanned thirty years, and scrolled annotations in several hands marked
changes that didn't match what I had seen on the
newer digital plans. On the eleventh floor, for instance, there
had once been a long corridor of glass, now replaced
by bricked up passage. The floor plans marked our Chevanderkofferin's
be conspicuously cross up and overwritten integrity off swell verrised
only I tried the eleven to four again. The next
chief badge pressed hard against the taped over a reader
near the stairwell. The light blink read, but there beyond
the frosty glass, shadows flickered, not moving like people, but
shifting with the gentle bob and dip of memory. I
called out, voiced low, but my own words swallowed by
the return of that soft other is static through the vents,
small concrete discoveries. The cleaners had stopped greeting me. I
caught them whispering to each other in a stairwell, faces pale,
all but sprinting away when I caught their attention. When
I stopped one young woman, she tugged her shirt down
over her ID badge and looked genuinely confuse. Have you
been here long? She asked, blinking at me. Did you
work last week? I told her yes, I was knew,
but had seen her twice already. No, she said, quietly,
almost at herself, I don't think I was here last week.
The radio above my desk, usually a life of Effempha's,
spat out, only static now except for a brief jarring
bit at one forty eight dight and PA Man's foresaying
a string of numbers that matched a security badge ID,
before dissolving into unintelligible hissing my next column of krantz.
I confronted him the badge numbers, they don't add up.
Some of these I d aren't listed and theirers, and
I hesitated to mention the files that miss seriously moved
or the foes that seemed occupied it impossible ires he
was detached, busy, just log it Like I said, You're
paid to be thorough, not paranoid. The system isn't perfect.
As long as you hit your keys and don't falsify,
you'll be fine. There was a note of finality rate
before the call ended. If it was meant to be
reassuring it failed. Nobody wanted to discuss the previous guard.
The vague shifting accounts only deepened as time went on.
One evening, I noticed his name had honest from the
printed roster, entirely, a blank line where there had once
been a Carrita's night security temp patterns emerged Baugian almays
clustered around certain arrows, particularly three zero to four zero
a m. The eleventh floor was a locus alarm with
storage run shown on paper plants but missing in the building. There.
Logs on my laptop sometimes showed badge scans in the
main lobby. At times I was certain I've been on
another floor monitoring the h rap vent logged on the dictaphone.
By the tenth night, I couldn't shake the feeling of
being witnessed, not simply by cameras, but by the building itself.
More than once, while reviewing monitors in the dead stretch
between rounds, the distant elevator would lurch alive, open its
doors on a sail floor, hould a beat too long,
then slammed them with a sound that it could through
and p always like a verdict. Night after night, evidence mounted,
but nothing prepared me for the moment that finally cracked
my belief in routine. It was just after three in
the morning, my energy flagging eyes, gritty outside rain pressed
down in dark curtains, and the building cradle to hush,
so thick a seam borne from something deeper than silence.
I sat in the secure closet, reviewing lobby footage, half distracted.
The monitors, which usually cycled smoothly between feeds, suddenly stuttered
every's green FLARERD and went black. Digital snow rolling cross
all twenty two views in lockstep. The clock on the
wall rowe at three seventeen a m. I've reached for
my radio dead are sudden panic prickled my skin, but
the blackout lasted only five maybe six seconds. The screens
flickered back to life, except now something was wrong. The
phones on lobby desks were gone, replaced by empty cradles
that I could swear had held blinking message lights. A
moment before, the big blue or egonomic chair in the
manager's office had been drawn away from the desk, as
if an invisible hand had just shoved off a frame
print near the elevator. Bank's honey ever so slightly askew.
At first, I thought my mind was playing tricks. It
had been a long few weeks in the swirl of sleep, deprivation,
routine and fear and trickier perceptions. But on the axis lock,
a new line appeared, time stamped exactly at three seventeen
four badge I D three hundred seventeen X, no name listed,
no other data. It was the number of any employee, cleaner, contractor,
or admin. The system shouldn't have accepted such an entry.
I backed up two nights, each with the exact same
phantom badge, same time stamp, offset by exactly twenty four hours.
Husefush rowers along my arms. I double checked my own
log with a hard copy kept separate from my reports
to Krantz and the digital timekeeper. Pages i'd written the
previous week, with details recorded minute by minute were torn out.
Entire night's entries had vanished, as if for raised by
an invisible hand. What remained appeared also to my handwriting,
but shaky letters drifting out of alignment, sentences cut off midward.
I tore through my digital stash. My phone's photo log,
usually a smattering of documentation at random memes, was white
clean from midnight to four a m. Only on my
security shift nights. The dictaphones tape piste and popped, spooling
backward past several blank stretches, voices cut in mid record.
The next round, I stoked the holes, with blood rushing
in my ears, Determined to trap the anomaly. Passing a
glass in supply of room, I shine my flask light
across the far wall, nothing but in the clint. For
a fragmentary moment, a shadow hunched across the carpet, one
that didn't correspond to any objects or angles in the room,
then gone. At dawn, I sat back, exhausted and chicken.
My confidence in the job, in my own stability, felt
as thin as the plastic edges of a visitor's badge.
That day, for the first time, I considered walking out,
but something pushed me on in need for answers not
just about this building, but about whit it had chosen
or tolerated me at all. The next afternoon, while the
world was still bright, I decided to stop asking nicely.
During a routine date I maintenance shut down, I bore
owed Rania's supervisor badge. She had handed it to me
distractedly as she sold it through a pile of misplaced
work orders, telling me just bring it back, okay, we
don't want the outy team yelling again. It gave me
access not only to force usually locked, but to deeper systems, logs, blueprints,
subroutines for badges that could be traced from the central
silver console back in the security office. I used the
credentials to pull badge histories for the last quarter the
non standard entries the phantom three seventeen badge trace precise
looping through the building eleventh floor main lobby, date a closet,
then always ending at one of the off limits conference rooms.
Each entry correlated with subsequent anomalies missing objects, raised footage,
altered logs. In a rare moment of candor, I stopped
the maintenance decabiarded soft spoken man who had always left
us before I starred in my rounds. I asked him
what he knew of the night's staff turnover. He looked away,
scratching his arm, voice low. They's stories you put in
your time, but nobody stays long this place after midnight.
If ajust may be safer not to ask why. I
pressed how many people worked nights in the last year.
He frowned, Few than you'd think. Some don't last long
enough for payroll to remember. I thought i'd take a
genuine sympathy, but as soon as he realized how serious
I was, he withdrew, apologizing and heading back to the elevator.
I sketched a timeline from the fragments, contractors, secured attempts,
and the original night admin, all leaving abruptly, no reason sighted.
The badge history wiped, even lockers entered cleanly by part
as unknown. When I approached the front desk admin for
archive paperwork, she stared at me for a a few
seconds too long, then said the cleaning company must have
handled that. That night. Emboldened, I monitored the eleven floor
through every camera angle. Although renovations were marked as pending
on the plans, some object or light always shifted between rounds.
A conference room table where the chair arrangement was subtly
different coffee cups appearing and vanishing between my documented patrols,
even when the floor should have been locked and unoccupied.
At two fifteen, I snuck up the stairwell using the
supervisor badge to a variety the eleventh floor security locker
reluctant beat, Then the heavy door slid open. The corridor
was empty, but I could have sworn the air was warmer,
and a subtle hum, like distant voices wrapped around me.
The conference room door marked Integrity was close tied beneath it,
the faintest shaft of light cut toward my boots. I
pressed my ear to the glass for a moment, just
to flicker. I heard what could have been low conversation.
I tried the handle, but it was locked from the inside.
When I peered into the glass, all I saw was
the wavering reflection of my own anxious face. By now,
the growing weight of evidence, disappearing personnel records, rooms raised
from plans, badge, trails that looked and ended abruptly left
no doubt in my mind. Some one or something was
systematically removing employees from more than just the building. It
was raising them out of paperwork, surveillance footage, and memory itself.
The final escalation came on a Thursday before dawn. Once again,
as the monitors blinked from room to room, the old
systems static struck at three seventeen a m. The blackouts
worpt the security office, killing every light and freezing all
camera feeds. For a quivering moment, the only sound was
my own breathing and the echo of distant elevator chimes
in the darkness. Some animal urged bit through my anxiety,
and I forced myself upright, clenching the dictaphone in one hand,
slamming open the supply closet to find the crovroid stashed
there just in kayse as. The screens spotted back on
a changed details bend themselves into my mind, Chares overturned,
papers scattered when none had been. Badge locks were ridden
in the system seconds after the back out, matching the
unmistakable phantom, badged number three hundred seventeen X. But this
time I'd caught it live. There was no more waiting.
I sprinted up the stairwell three steps at a time,
crashing into the eleven floor and making for the sealed
cor mferant's room. I hammered the barge. Reader there wedged
a krober into the door frame. As the lock shuttered,
the door banged open, spilling the artificial and bright light
into the corridor. Inside, my breath caught a steaming mug
of coffee sat on the far end of a long table,
next to a half eaten pastry. The air was thick
with the scent of all perfume and fresh markers. Across
the wall, a huge white board was filled with photographs
faces I didn't recognize, each marked via a red string
connecting them like a crime investigator's fever dream type. Nut
shared space was gold with myindos in all sorts of handwriting.
In the center, the word erasures circled three times in
bold red badge readers wing from warmounts, slow and deliberate.
I heard a humlika trance form, a deep beard and concrete.
Then my mind slammed into the world like I had
woken from a coma. People were in the room, a committee,
five maybe six, all dressed in suits so immaculate in style,
lest they seemed not to belong to any ear I'd known.
They didn't look up as I burst in, their voices
blurring up first, but then sharpening, as if my presence
had finally slow time. They stood around the table, poisoned sentence,
one with the mock half raised, another pointing a mocker
at the intricate diagrams. For a moment, no one moved.
Verdigo overtook me. The taste of static on my tongue,
memory fragments slicing through faces I could in place names
that barely skirted recognition, flashes of previous nights, my own
hands placing sticky notes, moving files, running from something that
called itself necessary. The nearest committee member, a thin man
with bony hands, finally turned. His eyes were impossibly blank
and deep. He nodded at once, calm as a judge,
passing sentence. You were not supposed to remember this, he said,
and his voice was both familiar and utterly alien. The
light flickered, pin lancing through my jaw. Suddenly the rooms
hum grew into a roll, like all the buildings, static
converging here blotting out my thoughts, pulling at the edges
of who I was. The last thing I saw before
the room was drawn in shuddering darkness was the committee's
blank in human attention, settling directly on to me as
if deliberating over the final piece of a puzzle that
until now had gone missing. That was when I knew
this was only the beginning. That was when I knew
this was only the beginning. The roar or in my
skull didn't. It deepened, thickening into pressure that clought at
my thoughts, as if invisible hands turned pages in my mind,
tearing out nights, faces, whole hunks of myself i'd never cataloged.
My view doubled and warped. Some are stayed on my feet,
but my balance wavered through the oppressive harm. The only
sharp sensory anchor was the coffee biddo scent, remindered at
something or someone wanted to maintain the illusion of routine
even in this bizarre stand off. I tried to speak
to demand explanation, but my words dissolved as soon as
they left my mouth, as if the room itself divided them.
My throats craped dry. The committee moved as one distant
so wet's flickering with each stutter of the ceiling lights.
They showed no surprise, no hint of improvisation, just cold
and bothered efficiency. The thin leader toyed with a badge reader,
pressing his thumb against the black plastic. The wall behind
him shimmered, red lines crossed a photograph, shifting as if
being rearranged. Time was breaking down for a second. I
dilimpsed other faces, overlaid it off. The committee members, some olds,
one very young, all mart band certainty, and all gone.
In a blink. My vision jump as if skipping film frames.
I jerked backward toward the door, only to find the
corridor beyond replace with an ossified blackness. There would be
no blunder in retreat. You're not supposed to remember this,
the thin man repeated, uninflected, as if rehearsing a liney
delivered many times. Another figure, a woman with gleaming hair
pull tight, clicked something on the laptop wide into the
center of the table. I saggered from the Neuri's chair,
gripping its metal frame, needing a point of reference. The
table was littered with minuschi readouts of badge movement, locks,
shredded sticky notes, and notepad I recognized as my own
on one page, and handwriting nearly but not quite mine
were the words, remember the three seventeen blackout? Was this
a warning or a prompt for the person standing in
my place last cycle. The man with the marker captain
slowly then tapped the risured diagram. Continuity is integrity, he
recited with deadcom our. Purpose is the removal of anomalies.
It is impersonal. He met my gaze. People so dark
I couldn't see reflection or intent. Beside him, a younger
man with veiled panic in his eyes, looked as if
he wanted to speak, but the older members looked silent him.
In the eerie hush, I heard again that low susarating crowd.
No is now unmistakably real. Through the warp conference past.
The outlines of people shimmered and sway. Their face is featureless,
but their postures defeated. Waiting perhaps for a cue, I
realized with a cold shock that they matched the faces
in the wall. Employees and cars scrub for memory lost
to the buildings. Strange ritual. I forced breath into my
lungs and cross to the case files, Slapping my palm
against the surface. I felt the friction, heard the rush
of paper, a small act of all anger in me.
None of the committee protested, too merely observed. Yet I
caught a ripple of knees in their remains of smiles.
You can't keep erasing people. I croaked, fighting the static
that savage my tongue. What happens to every one who disappears?
Does anyone get out? A pause, hung as if the
question were unusually inconvenient, the leader inclined his head. Nothing
is ever truly erased, he replied, fors crisp, but echoing
aldi from the blunk walls. We redirect anomalies. You'll accept
the necessary roll, or you'll join the backlock. That is
the compromise. We preserve the company's story because no one
outside ever truly cares lost inside. As he spoke, the
light surged. I saw behind his shoulder my own reflection
in a conference room bass, except the man that wore
an expression at barely recognized, and his eyes, just for
a moment, were empty black, as if the committee's gaze
had latched onto my soul. That's when I felt the
room pulling at me, not just my memory, but my intentions,
as if the entire inficit opinions about what I was
to become. The static reached its peak, and the roar
flared upward, flattening everything else into a blank blinding pain.
I stumbled sense his tunneling, grasping at one last desperate image,
the Dictaferen's steady red light, the no nonsense scratch of
a sticky note on my knuckles, and the flooding, inexplicable
urge to resist. Just before consciouness napped, I saw the
markers in the white boats start to vanish, lines dissolving
and photograss turning to white noise and impossible erasure. In
real time, something fundamental closing over me. Swift and absolute
electric pressure thrown to my skull. My head ached with
the deep internal hum, as though the room's static had
tangled itself for a deep woven tightly around everything I
remembered and everything I couldn't. For a moment, they hung
their clath watching at the fading impression of our peractice
and reality, until abruptly the world lutch sideways, My knees
hit linolium, and I was slammed down into a black,
slippery cold I walk on a paper cats where, chilling
on my skin, for it too dry for words. The
silence was total, not even the sigh of systems against
inter block. I blinked at cheap ceiling tire's patent with
gray water stains, and tried to orient myself. It was
the building's infirmary. The windowless box tucked off the main
corridor on the sixth floor, A pulsa fluorescent light flickered
her half on, half dead. In the corner, the staff
medicine cabinet stood ajar next to a clean but battered watebin.
My jacket still zipped to the neck, felt damp, and
my watch mark three eyros gone since my last lord round.
I set up the room, sitting into focus. No one
else beats the thin air with me on the desk
sat my log book opened to a blank page. Next
to it a silled envelope, my name printed on the front,
handwriting tight and businesslike, as though type, but by an
unsure hand. I hesitated before reaching for it. The feeling
was like picking up something left behind by the dead.
The envelope contained a brief, unsigned note. You were found
asleep during your JUDYISOS. This is your first formal warning.
Further incidents will result in termination. For your own safety,
look any health events. Supervisor Kay folded beneath a profilled
and sit in purport with shaky lines traced and pencil
staff corman found unresponsive. We oriented with water and support.
My own signature had somehow been scold at the bottom.
I didn't remember writing it. In the corridor lights burned out, officially,
bright smeling of antiseptic, and the low metallic note of
wet pipes. I tested my badge at the nearest elevator
panel activated beeping in time of my pulse, but the
elevator did not arrive. Peering into the tiny mirror panel,
I saw my face crack lifted, eyes rimmed in red,
somehow thinner than the night before. Had I been here
a half day or only an hour? Everything inside me
itched in the wrong order, no voices drifted. I limped
back to the security closet, passing the breakfast straight left
for the day, SUPERFUSI liquarmed coffee, half a doughnut, the
sort of off and hospitality no one truly expected to
be consumed. The building had reset without me. When I
entered the security office again, monitor cycle the same dull parade, lobby,
deserted empty restrooms, a single mop left against a wall,
no trace of the conference room's chaos. So those ought
costume figures and their identical suits. My digital notes last
night's careful mapping of badge patterns, time stamps, and log
anomalies had reverted to a generic bland summary. It read
rounds complete, no unusual activity logged at four ZEROI M Corman,
but there were ghosts living in the gaps. When I
cross examined, the analog lock pages had been replaced neat
scoopal lines, correcting where my skulls had raged only I
as before. I tried to steady myself to find a
pattern in the confusion, but something had changed. A new
absence had become the defining principle. My mind strained around
a missing shaped, the jumble of faces, the committee, the
wall of erased photographs, all of his swimming out of
focus every time I dug deeper, leaving only the ache
of something terribly true just out of reach. Worse, the
world within the building responded to me as a through veil.
That morning, when Rani arrived early to shout at a
contructor who'd spilled adhesive in the lobby, she offered me
a briscolo, a smile of fisher and shallow. She asked
for my print out of last night's incidents. When I
handed her a copy of the waterdown summary. She barely
looked at it. All good, Then you finished the approbation
week right. If there is trouble to speak with mister
Krantz day securities light these days, so expect some overtime,
she said, before walking away with the wave of her hand,
as though dismissing an after image. I watched the team
drift in a cleaner with the yellow jacket on them,
humming along to a song on her radio. She looked
at me with a polite nod, no sense of recognition
in her eyes, no echo for hurried conversations late at
night were her urgent warnings about closing up after midnight.
Even the maintenance tech, usually eager to tork over black coffee,
greeted me with the distant professionalism which served for city
clerks or train conductors. He knew, he asked, as he
walked by, scratching at his dark stubble. Can you log
that the fire door on twelve stick's thanks? Appreciate it.
The phrase was wrote, empty of any real engagement. I
checked my badge history every night was accounted for, but
the details stopped at surface level. If I drolled down
the entry logs only listed routine access at expected intervals,
no phantom badges, no one to wore blacks. Yet, when
I dug a lair deeper, tined signatures and serial numbers wabbled,
repeating like tape caught on a reel. Badch shands and
impossible eyos. Doors opening with no occupant visible. Log enters
written in block capitals where I never wrote that way.
When Krantz called at noon, his voice was warm but cautious,
broadly good. You're back, were abating emergency procedures. You might
get a fire drill during your next shift. Let's keep
the log simple, okay, no need for extra detail, and
take care of yourself. Eh, you Sun'm tired. He paused,
his static breath, noisy over the line. You've been doing fine.
The final sentence left me cold. There was a warning
beneath that the same bureaucratic warry had heard every meeting
where a non event was made to look like discipline.
I hung up and sat for a long time, fingers
brushing the dictaphones, battered plastic. Something ugly had been vacuumed
out of my nights, leaving sacred holes in my understanding.
The world did not feel real. My own life going
forward would be a patchwork of editor tapes and sanitized routines.
But some aspect of me, the buried dog inness that
had survived wars, stormy deployments, and the worse out after math,
refuse to let go even now. Forgetting was never the problem.
It was what was being done to me and why.
That evening, as the city glared through speeding clouds and
bruised blue dusk, I began to plan. It wasn't heroism
or revenge or even a clean need for justice. It
was survival in the terruruist blanc at sense. To live
in a world that ever written me, I would have
to make myself unforgettable in my own bones, if nowhere else.
When the next shift began, I started again. But now
the danger was not simply memory lost. It was myself
thinning with each circuit through the gray lit halls. By
the second night after my incident, PARANOI pausing the edges
of every task. I didn't just walk the rounds. I
counted seconds at each budge swipe, watching both the clocks
and my own hands to prove I was where I
thought I was. In every elevator mirrored panel. I scanned
not only for my own haunted eyes, but for shadows
out of sink flickers that whispered of things gone wrong.
E mails failed to send. I spent the hour before
midna compiling an exhaustive document of the badge and normally's handjerton, photographed,
transcribed to voice memo, burned to a blank DVD. I
dropped the sealed envelope in the day supervisor's false law
addressed to h R. The next morning it was gone,
no reply, no trace. My audio locks vanished from the dictaphone,
olk set spoiled inside, left blank, a tiny empty row,
audible when played back. Even my phone, cheered by a
carry's signal with no building WiFi, returned in readable files
the moment I opened them outside the building. Something seeped
into the meditator and rotted it out, like molt spreading
through a loaf of bread. I tried with each new
round to record in spiral notebooks, copying entries onto loose
paper that had then hid in the drop ceiling of
the main lobby, tucked above a light panel. A day later,
the notebooks had been replaced with new and creased paths.
The ceiling tiles settled as if they had never been disturbed.
The world inside the building refused to acknowledge what I
was doing. Each effort etch proof into the routine was
over it and scrub from every surface and every mind
but mine. Still a few artifacts dodged erasure. One sticky
note remained behind, stuck inside my locker door. The ink
was my own, but the handwriting was spidery, unfamiliar. Remember
the three seventeen blackout. I left it there afferd to
remind myself off that some part of the past. However,
faint clunted the back of my mind. When I press
Krantz again, a rare call scheduled and then rescheduled at
his insistence. He offered only measured reassurance. Where records have
been spotty. It's a hazard of the tech, he said,
syllables croaked out a feign concern. Try not to worry
about the little gaps. If you see something lock it normally,
then call me, but only if it's an actual emergency.
No need to overburden the archive. But weakened to this confusion,
I noticed my badge scans had grown even stranger. The
axis log flickered on the monitor as I watched my
name stamped over several different badge idea applied at the
same ir but on different floors, recorded at intervals that overlapped.
It was as if I was being rendered into an algorithm,
replayed and scrambled until no single pattern existed. The loneliness
hollowed up my days. Staff rotated through his normal, but
their faces grew greinier, washed clean by something more than time.
I date. My presence was tolerated, even welcomed to coffee
in the shared kitchen, an occasional joke about office politics.
By night, I was both essential and invisible. It goes
routed through the ducks and stairwells on command, haunted by
suspicion that everything I did and saw was already predetermined.
My every axe nipped and stitched into the company's preferred reality.
It wasn't just me. The cleaning woman, always the last
to leave, always quick to smile, no longer looked up
as I greeted her. When I called her name, she
blinked blankly, polite but loss. Her memory gouged out like
an erased chalkboard. The maintenance tech cornered in the elevator
recoiled at my mention of badge numbers. I just fixed pipes,
he insisted, I have only been here a week. I
knew better he had been here for months, easy, but
his eyes had emptied. In desperation, I began writing myself
reminders on the inside of my jacket, cuff on a
loose grap of cardboard, and the back of my hand.
By morning, every note was gone, skin washed, clean, card
border placed. My wealth thinned, and I felt my own
sense of self loosening, as if I were not only
losing time, but becoming a hollow place for some other
pattern to take root. The real escalation came during the
third week. On the night grip by a cutting cold
that seeped through even the thickest walls. I sat in
the security room, headphones jammed on, cycling camoufees, and praying
for any sign of an omaly that I could catch
in real time. That was when I heard the footsteps.
They were measured and heard, always keeping a door of
stairwell ahead of me. Heavy souls, hard, old fashioned, echoed
through the corridors above. At first I tried to localize
the sound lobby, then third floor, then back down to two.
As a following some private map I clapped the dictorform
into my belt and took the service stairs, trailing the
noise of my flask light drawn, but switched off. At
every landing. The lights dimmed each day, were landing warps lightly,
as if built for a different decade. Plaster candrills gave
way to lacquered wood, then pressed aluminum, then cheap steel.
I passed through decades worth of renovation with each flight.
On the seventh floor, shadows chewed away at the corners.
Old office posters clung to flaking paint. The slogans sun
faded in a way that was both comforting and deeply wrong.
Teamwork brings the results. Above one of the water coolers,
a yellowed photo of a woman cutting a ribbon, name erased.
I stopped hard in throat as murmured conversation drifted from
an office up ahead. The tone was bored, exasperated, exactly
the curdence of a Monday morning check in. Through the
narrow glass panel, I saw a meeting in progress, sharcely
of men and women paging through folders, sipping coffee, making
motions at a projector that displayed only a blank blue square.
I wrapped in the door expecting the spell to break inside.
Not one had turned, not one voice falded. I whirled
backing away as the quite tiss of my stomach. I
pressed further on, following the sticky note trail that had
appeared at floor junctions, a new note at every landing,
each with Beefer warnings not safe. I don't stay, And
on the eleventh floor stairwell returned to physical main server ascending.
The world shifted again. Carpet abruptly changed color, Furniture staggered
from one ear's taste to another at each landing. The
hum of the overhead systems deep and thickened, as if
heavy with sleep. On a partially bricked up polwoy a
door once labeled conference be now read only b C.
The rest of the sign had been sanded away, paint
ghostly on white sheet rock. The static in my head
returned in waves, a doubt forrey tilty closet I had
never noticed before, as backwall lined with old punch card
machines and a whirring silver racrusted with age tangle cables
sprawled in the floor, looping over dusty fold of stamp
with the years I didn't recognize decades before I was born.
The sticky notes thickened against one panel layered over a
circuit box. They seemed to pulse, as if alive. I
peeled one away and recognized my own handwriting earlier in
shake ere if found returned data to analog Avoid three
seventeen blackout, A map drawn in marker and black pen
depicted a direupt to a mainframe serve, a room tucked
between a ten and eleven fours, a space that shouldn't exist,
at least not in the blueprints. Resolute, I followed the diagram.
Every step up took me further from the now and
deeper into a weird nostalgia. Open offices frozen in the
nineteen eighties, telephones with spidering cords, work stations plastered in
motivational stickers, and placid paper trays yellow with age. In
one corner, an executive conference room sat perfectly preserved thick
glass oak table set a watercrafts wedding on a coaster.
The figures within pale caught in mid argument, lips moving,
but sound too muffled to understand, and did not see me.
It was as if, having failed to eraise me, the
building now offered up its own palimp syst a map
of haunted office history, evidence of the brodder or stration
that round under everything, rasure of not just people but
whole errors left looping and repeating beneath the surface. When
I reached the firewall stairwell near the eleventh, the trail
of sticky notes feared right the severe room down a
side whole bracketed bund that exit signs glowed with the
cold functional light of a fridge at midnight. The badge
reader here did not blink, instead at the door huns
slightly a jar on the steel plate below. Deep scratches
marred the finishes, if from impatient keys with fingers. I
slipped inside the world, closing into a cold, nearly silent harm.
Racks of aged backup tape stood beside thick towers filled
with drives. One console lit the room with a feigned
ambus green, surrounded by a pile of tapes marked with
red XD's typed labels in an ancient dark matrix font
read memory ordered Initiative fourteen, integrity, cleaned protocols, entry schedules,
manual reference. Only the strangest thing the overhead speakers leaked
audio from somewhere deep inside the building, ghostly feedback, and
the occasional almost recognizable name my name once echoing and wabbled.
A quick scan of badge locks on a dust determine
revealed the same familiar pattern. Badge three hundred seventeen X
tied to an archavtec never listed in HR records, but
locked every night a he guessed at three seventeen a m.
The logs were laid or written nightly, with the entire
week reduced to a single entry. I dug deeper, hand
shaking as the machine belched up air after error time,
stamped always in a single looping window in a locked
tin box under one rack. I found a physical badge
old and entered, covered in tape where the surname HE
used to be. The remaining serial number match through phantom badge.
Now I had proof, at least until an extra set.
There were thick folders of shredded sticky notes, fragments of
personel files with red marker excess for individual names, even
bullet pointed list of anominally management and continuity criteria. A
hand drawn diagram map connections between various employees, ending always
with reducted circles around the title third shift and a
string of badge I'd mine now in the loop. As
I cataloged everything, the monitors blinked and the fees began
to pixelate on the IRO. The building's blackouts were clearly
being orchestrated, not by power trouble or technical thought, but
by protcol digital loops back up, sinking every sign point
into a deliberate process. Rage and bone fright prickled lawn
as scalp as I realized the building was not simply watching,
but actively auditing and culling its inhabitants, every trace of
the dissident of the non compliance removed from not just
the came loop, but people's minds as well. The IRO
ticked on at two fifty. A, snapped the badge back
into the tin and slit several pieces of freshly erased
hip smart with my own name inside my jacket. The
time precaution was past, I typed out a haystick count
on the console, stepping a copy to the main silver rack,
Knowing the system would likely erase the file anyway, I
could feel gather in charge. The unatural stillness that precedes
some reversible break security feeds winked out one by one.
As three seventeen drew near lights dimmed, flickering with mechanical indecision.
The corridor ats eye began to warp, air, shivering with
a high ringing note, barely within hearing range. I ran badge,
clenched in one palm toward the only physical anchor I
could trust, the main electrical junction box in the basement.
If I could silver power on my own terms, maybe,
just maybe I could disrupt the erasure cycle lawn enough
to leave a mark, a message, something that would survive
as nightly cleansing. When I reached the stairwell, the final
sticky note greeted me, written in the blocky, insistent hand,
I now need you well now, or never remember what
you are. I jammed the crowber into the gap against
the safety latch, heart trooping wild in my chest. Down
in the basement, darkness stretched in both directions. Here, the
building felt thick and breathing. It seemed to exhale with
my presence, swallowing the last of the outside noise. I
heard footsteps again, three sets, this time calm and slow,
not hurry. I dutched behind a concrete pillar, breath shaller,
an entire phalanx of suited committee members strode into the
circle of light, faces half seen, one of them clutching
a battered badge. Their eyes caught mine, serene overwhelming in
their calm. We kept the cycle long for you, Bradly,
but it's time. The leader's voice was gentle, suffused with
tired authority. Ye can join us or disappear read away.
Continuity must be preserved. He held out the badge, palm
up as if offering absolution this time, as the blackouts
age nipped at us skin the tick of them and
at hand creeping tow up three seventeen, I braced for
a fight. Words failed me, lost in the pressure in
the cold. All that remained was action. The fire alarm
lever sat up of the breaker panel and all skull
red handle, surrounded by a ring of dust. I took
my notebook, one of the last analog objects. I had
its early pages filled with scrolls and chartish reminders, and
wedged it into the electrical circuit before the committee could approach. Then,
with a monumental heave, I smashed the alarm glass and
poured down the lever. The shriek of the bells stabbed
through the air. Like a lance. Fluorescent lights stuttered, and
the waltz one sideways. At last, digital systems blanked, and
the committee folded, their images trembling as if caught between
frames on a film. Time dilated. Ceiling tires buckled, cable snapped,
and hundreds of sticky notes rained from breeches in the ventrook,
swirling in bright yellow snow. The committee's faces, the mask
like serenity, cracked just enough for fear, their forms wharping
and dimming in strobing light. My visions luwed to a split,
a wave of double images, the long conference table, the
looping logs, my own hands covered in incan sweat. I
saw for a sparkling instant. The army are forgotten, staff cleaners,
a dozen folorn guards. They drifted in the gloom beyond
the conference room, lips moving silently. Their hands are stretched
as if in hope of memory, rescue or warning. The
committee lead a book through clenched teeth. No longer the
cool arborater, but something pressed to the edge. Pulling the
analog doesn't save you if only delays of forgetting. Submit
to the protocol and resume your round, or disappear. This
was the final test. Their voices split and layered, words
coming from everywhere at once. As digital and human time collapsed,
I shoved through the press of their forms, moving on
muscle memory alone, and slammed my shoulder into the conference
room door on Eladdin. As I passed the threshold, the
world resolved for a moment into something almost comprehensible. The
long table walls papered with badge logs, and at the
end the badge reader, open and receptive. The blackout struck fully,
everything drifting to deep, echoing static. When I came to
scattered in the well of a stairwell, the residual hum
had receded. I tasted a copper at the back of
my throat. The building around me ground, a structure shifting
weights after ant earthquake. I looked at my wrists, the
ink of my written reminders of bled out skin left
pristine stitches of memory already slipping away. But under my
right palmius grap of yellow, the last sticky note, my
own writing, verily legible if you forget resist. Sirens hold
mechanical and distant smoke alarms were set. Fresh air swirling
into the corridor in far off offices, the routine of
day would resume, Desks would be cleaned, locks, wereset, the
official story, patched and polished for the next round. I
staggered to my feet, the wall resolving into a narrow tunnel,
keeping only what I could physically carry into the next cycle.
There was no triumph, no certainty, only the dim sense that,
even half ghosted, I'd left to mark somewhere doame where
the back tip sizzled and the note book smoldered, and
perhaps above it all, a sticky note still clung to
a shadow corner of the world, waiting for the next
recruit to read. Somewhere above, the building exhaled the settling
of old pipes and distant hissing events, as if indifferent
to the drama just played out in its arteries. My
knees ache from the strain of crutching in the stair,
lungs fluttering as near air flushed out the chemical ancient stairs.
Clinging to my uniform, I heard voices, thin and business
like on a floor far above, punctuated by the soft
pings of elevators resuming their regulated rise and fall. The
world outside the fire doors, a knew would slip back
into routine crews clocking in delivery trucks stolling at the cob,
Conversation steered to inverses in parking spaces. Yet none of
that seemed thither to my battered body. Of the jumbled
memories now crowding beneath my skull, close and flickering as
the lights that refused to settle out, I gathered myself,
pressing the sticky note into my palm until my nails
left half moons in the paper fragments swam images of
the committee's watchful faces, the tableau of hobbled figures behind
conference glass, the showder of panic as badge logs raised,
bound seen hands reset the record of my own existence.
I remembered only just the fire alarm, shrilling, committee members
blinking in another phase, the confidence briefly interrupted by the
analog CHAOSID introduced For the moment the cycle felt paused,
a trick perhaps or mercy on onstead of feet, I
made my way out out of the glooming stair. While
out passed half dismantled royal and plastic tarps, the elevator
for once waited. Obedient, They on the main floor, humming
with no destination. I punched the security of ride watched
the doors close, the display strode between floors as of confuse,
but I willed myself to ignore the odd doubling of
my own reflection in the stainless steel. There was no
one else inside, no other contenders for this night's dread,
for victory. When the lobby opened up before me, the
dawn lights, mirar by rain, and the grime of all promises,
it felt brittle and insubstantial, my hands tremoring from adrenaline
and cold thumb at the badge on my belt, a
bat of rectangle, now heavy with more history than any
company policy explained. People moved in their shapes and served
and behind glass doors, a cleaner with headphones downstair mopen, easy,
careless arcs entirely emergent, inner small world. I made myself
count each step, drawing comfort from the click and slap
of altues across genuine marble. At the front desk, last
night's log side atop a blank form, the receptionist greeted
me with the bland cheerfulness of some one passing a
stranger in the street. No flicker of alarm, no recognition
of last night's alarms or blackouts. Only the gentle suggestion
to leave your badge for a programming I ta once
to update everyone to the new format, please and thank you.
I hesitated, but relented, placing the badge in her palm,
resisting the urge to snatch it back. She pressed a
bright sticker on to its surface and tucked it in
a cardboard's leave. All set for next week Bradly, he
looked tired to try to rest before year next. And
then I was on the street. I drew my first
real breath in IROs. The cities are sharp and bright,
smelling of exhaust, faint donate glaze, and impending rain. A
passing bus wished by from the far windows above, nothing
but the impassive gaze of tinted glass, but the relief
thin as it was curdled. Almost immediately, something inside me
stayed coil, tighter than a fist around a secret. I
knew it wasn't over, not for me, nor for whoever
was unlucky enough to relieve the next shift. The building
held its cycles close, tightening or loosening protocols as needed,
never explaining, always rebalancing. Still, I gone to small evidence
of resistance. The back tape, said Stash haltingly, imperfectly in
a hollows into block near the main circuit panel might
last a week. My battered spiral notebook, half scorched, the
edges had been merged into the core space of of
a basement vent anchored with a sharp rag somewhere in
the several logs. My frantic coulded entry remained, however, briefly,
a glitch within the master narrative. The day's routines claimed
me whollowly. I rode the subway home legs limp with fatigue,
the noise of the city nothing but background hiss My
phone dead screen, only a ghost of my own face
in the reflection offered no comfort. None of the files
they had sent out in panic, but time stamped photos
or whispered audio notes had survived transmission. My own voice
was gone, overridden by updates, four step closures, file not found,
all errors. Skating toward perfect silence, I slept fitfully for
a spalas stretch, dreams whirling with broken time signatures, flickering
badged numbers, the endless drone of old analog alarms. When
I woke, the city outside had not changed, but my
heart banged restlessly against my ribs, as if panicked over
or beat it couldn't remember. Back at work the next night,
the familiar story had returned when he met me at
the entrance, keys dangling, all brisk efficiency, not a flick
of recognition in her eyes for anything unordinary. Thanks for
taking the night night day crew was like one of
the elevator text quid and payroll's a mess. If you
see anyone off ires, have them checking at the security desk.
We'll do what I said for strange in my own mouth. Upstairs,
the world had been reset, Security fees looped with practice, tedium,
storage clausets returned to the correct disorder. Conference room doors
hung closed, lampent withinner darkness. A sticky note, blank and yellow,
fluttered loose from inside my assigned locker, no rising, no
trace of the words I had carved into reality the
night before. The broadcast radio wants a comfort to bat
out news headlines and advertising jingles at two eleven a m.
A snatch of static voice my own name. Corman had
then skipped immediately to a weather report. Looking at the
badge reissue to me, I found the stick of cover
in the old scrape, haiding just enough of its history
to flooden it into routine. I passed the night in
the swirling repetition badge Round's analog, lolled clock watching. Ever
so often, I'd catch my hands starting to write something
out of habit asymbol, a first name with too many vowels,
a time that didn't align. I'd checked the page a
moment later and find only neat generic summaries, my personal
lines overwritten by a scrit that had not existed seconds before.
At some point in the half light, I saw my
own face bloat on the security feed, arriving at the
lobby twenty minutes before I actually did. There, I was
moving with nervous precision, consulting the law book, entering a
sequence of keys in the elevator. Sequence I recognized only
as it played out in front of me. I watched hard,
clenching as the fee jumped a static for three seconds.
When it returned, the chair at the desk was empty,
badge missing from the counter, a flash of remembered terror.
Still I survived, and I grew more careful cross the
final days of that week. A pattern fixed itself in
my head. If I worked only until three a m.
And left the badge in its envelope. The logs would continue.
If I stayed until the blackout cycle, the cycle threatened
to restart, memories wopping and routines collapsing under the pressure overset.
I tried testing the system, switching badges with the de guard,
altering my own round writing enters multiple times. The system
corrected each error, seamless and pinless, except for the winnowing
inside my skull. Each fell disruptions grobed my presence from memory,
just to touch more thoroughly. Once hidden behind an elvator panel,
I found a torn fragment of sicking note they don't
slashed with messy urgency. When I checked again and iroly
there it was gone, surface tape and disturbed. No one
around me seemed to lose sleep. The world roll bon
Cruz laughed in the stairwalls. Schedules churumbyns in hand. Paulus
is dated. I watched myself drift given over her in
increments to the building's version of narrative and truth. I
became more function in person, A walking error between audited cycles,
tolerated until it was easier to replace me than to
keep correcting the records. The old urge for stubborn survival.
The thing hammered into me by bad years, a worse luck,
never faded, even as my name did. I wore it
like an invisible vest, a last bit of armor. When
the supervisors call arrived, always at nine four a m.
And never a second off, his parting words to me
acquired a new edge. You're here because you're a thorough
he said one morning, the words so close to sincere.
I almost answered, just stick to the script, don't chase ghosts.
That's how you make it to peril. Maybe he meant
it as comfort. It felt like a shrer That night,
while the janitorial crew joked about a broken vending machine
and the weather outside grew mean and wet, I caught
myself staring at the security feed, hunting the tiny, all
but invisible sign that it was happening again. And there
I was on a loop, always walking backward into the
replait holes, badge dangling steps, deliberate calling out each anomaly
in the hope that someone would answer. Yet, despite the
exhaustion and internal folk, I managed to last small rebellion
in a final hour before the next schedule. Blackhead a
Sunday early, so void of life it seemed post apocalyptic.
I found an ancient batter tape recorder in the supply closet.
The battery still had juice. A tiny red light blinked
its williness to remember anything for at least another night.
At dumb record force trembling, I listed the badge numbers,
the elevator times, every vanishing sticky note, my own name,
my purpose, I recited the phrase the committee leader uttered,
continuity is integrity. Our purpose is the removal of anomalies.
It isn't personal. I described the conference room as shifting faces,
the artifact of forgetting, and the thin, persistent fred that
kept me this version of me here now. Once done,
I rewound the tape, flapt up in a ceiling veins
and in the very basement stairwell where the first warning
had greeted me, and wedged it deep inside on top
of a rusted bracket. There it might wait for a
week or a year, silent and immune from digital erasure,
a last message for the next unlucky soul. When a
snap that bent back, the world felt lighter, as if
a breath had been released that did not belong to me,
That gave me enough, just for a little while, to
remember who I was at what the building wanted me
never to become. The next cycle would run its course.
I felt it in the bone. Why quietly upper offices,
in the sound of elevators sighing their old dirges and
a persistent watch were once there had been certainty. Now
even the committee, wherever in the looping protocol they waited,
seemed less an input and challenged, perhaps by the chaos
I'd listened into their deliberately perfect order. I would hold
on as long as I could. If I lost myself,
at least some peace might survive in the analog dust
wafting above the plans of those who wrote and wrote
the story out of sight. Weeks passed each nights after
on the edges, the city oblivious went about its business.
The marble lobby caught the afternoon sun, and the cleaner
set out the warning cones far below in the hum
of after eyes. A new security temper ride to see
freshly pressed nosemass behind the scrint of someone waiting for
the caffeine to hate. He ran his badge through the
lobby scanner, then drifted past the empty desk, drawn by
habit to the stairwell at the end of the hall.
He paused, peering into the darkness, where a sticky note
caught the shifting hole light. In hestined fingers, he peeled
it free, its words barely legible, and ballpoint read don't
the notes land to script was my own As the
young man pocketed it. The camera over the stairwell flickered,
its feet rolling to static for three seconds. When the
image returned, the corridor was empty except for shadow, moving
its word circuit further on. Head bowed, eyes hollow, remembering
just enough the cycle had found its next player, and
somewhere in the event, a battered recorder weighed at small
red eye, burning against the endless forgetting