Speaker 1: I never wanted to see those security feeds again. I'm
only making this recording now because it's the last thing
that might make sense of what happened. And my hands
won't stop shaking unless I talked through it. He'd think
ten years as a cop, Knights included would have armored
me against the absurd. But nothing prepares you for watching
someone vanish on a camera you know is supposed to
show everything, not blink, not even the shadows making sense anymore.
The feed I can't get out of my head plays
on loop A sword of self inflicted torture. I hit plate,
needing to see if I missed anything. It's the same
every time. The woman in the red coat strides in
past eight forty nine, looks over her shoulder toward nothing
far as I can make out, and heads into the
women's restroom. Nothing strange there. I fast forward speed set
to s eight. No one comes out. Five minutes ten.
I watch both exits scan for her and the mirrors
hung on the wall tiles, even scan the reflection in
the stainless bin at the end of the sinks. But
after two thirteen that morning, she's gone. Her phone was
found propped on the restroom sink unlocked. Her carry on
bag sitting beside the hand dryer shows a half crushed
pack of almond snacks and her boarding pass first on
Francisco flight that didn't board until Aida and all untouched.
No one pulled her from the stall. Staff ran the
full sweep by three zero. The restroom's dead end, no
service corridor, no trap door. I walked it myself three times,
checked above the drop, ceiling panels, ran upon along every
cold length of metal and tile. She just stopped existing
and the phone. The IY guy Rob said the only
thing running when he check was a camera app It
had been left recording facing nothing but the white tile
and the blue glare of the motion sent so lights.
Half an hour of jrumpy video, then static about when
she'd have disappeared from our view. There's a strange sound
in the recording, easy to miss unless you're listening for it,
the faintest whisper under the hiss of ay events, like
someone mouthing syllables just below audibility. Sometimes it seems to
say her name, though I can't be sure. It's up
something old and cold in the gut. I keep coming
back to that clip frozen on the thumbnail. I thought,
if I could just catch the micro second her shadow flicker,
that would set things right. It didn't, And isn't that
the worst of it? The building lined with cameras, no
blind spot nowhere, and watch still manages to erase someone
in plain sight. My supervisor called it a technical glitch.
Maybe he did base corruption a day, a loss event.
She cited all the usual things, software update, human error,
But the clocks across the system didn't pause. This just
a gap. One moment standing in the middle of the
wells most finely watched airport, the next nothing. That's the
image I dream about now, the smooth, unspooling security feed
rewriting itself endlessly, every frame of her vaprized, wearing that
bright red wall coat, the phone left, with the stat
at creeping higher at the whisper, too shapeless to recognize.
Not a sound you can fix with reason or protocol.
I wonder if I'll ever shake the feeling that she's
still there, flickering between the pixels, somewhere terminal for asterisk.
A year ago, if you'd ask me, i'd have said,
overnight airport security work was as and regular as any
job gets. My name's Josh Eller forty one back problems cuts,
the over suspect in a slick coat, badge traded for
patch reading, aviation security, no side arm, just a heavy
flashlight and the authority to file paperwork. Some officers joke
that the night shift in Terminal four is haunted. I
liked it because that men quiet, no foot chases, no board,
teenagers locked in Baffom's taging the doors. Maybe a lost
bag or stuck elevator, nothing more than a few radio
calls per night. Terminal full size is the first thing
newcomers talk about. His sprawls crossed glass and metal holes
like a ship that round a ground and sheetruck and steel.
By midnight, the day shuttles are long gone. The few
remaining passengers eat package sandwiches or stae at their folons,
waiting for delayed red eye flights. Your voice echoes in
the empty sections. That echo convinced me I was never alone,
even surrounded by rows of sleeping gates and humming vending machines.
Rouchine was my anchor. Each night at ten p m. Sharp,
I'd punch in, take the circuit down, arrivals up the escalator,
pasturinat the counter should wave with two fingers, coffee in
her of the hand, and end by the Military service
lounge near the secure gate. By one a m. Most
of the concourse lights dim to energy saver mode. Only
the far en neargates fifty one fifty it stayed half
bright thanks to international flights bill over. The cold was
different at that ire, a slink that crept under your
shirt collar, no matter how much you layered up when
battered the glass from the outside, a howling sound funneled
by the design of the roof. Technically you would suppose
to hear any win through that much insulation, but no
one told the terminal architects. The graveyard shift brings out
a unique cast. There's Sam, probably in his late sixties
or older. He's worked the night janitor schedule for as
long as any one remembers. A solid brown man whose
mop became part of his shadow, always humming the same
tune as he went down the tile head got jokes
about being the only one alive after three a m.
Always with a crooked grin. We've crossed paths and the
quieter ends, trading anecdotes about everything from crumbling seat cushions
to the never ending battle with airport carpet stains. Sam
always appeared just before you realized you needed him. A
sword of on their present sentinel. Ween A spent most
nights catching up on ill and crew paperwork. Single mother
on double overtime. She preferred the piece in the steady paycheck.
She was sharp, didn't let herself get dragged into gossipel
management spats. If he asked Riena about the terminal at night,
she just shrug her and mutter that the real horror
is coworker group chat. She meant it too, though sometimes
I caught her casting sideways, look at empty seats as pinched.
Just a fraction two type passengers become ghosts in a
different sense of people waiting on hard plastic chairs with
open laptops, their faces glazed under the sickly light. Some
would wonder stretch, their legs, go blank with exhaustion until
a delay announcements snapped them out of their reveries. I
found piece in their predictability, a ballet of tired humanity.
Occasionally the routine did hiccup. A utility cart abandoned in
a wrong section, A schedule for floor waxing off by
fifteen minutes. It never seemed like more than slopiness. One night,
the intercom blasted a five second burst of static, no words,
nothing scheduled for that time. The maintainers logged it as
interference from a passing taxing plane. Another shift, the cleaning
sweeper doubled back over a space covered already, making me
wonder if Sam was pulling a jerk. I shrugged off
most of it. There are always little inconsistencies in buildings
run by too many overlapping departments and two freecompetent supervisors.
The emptiness was always physical, even friendly to me. Loneliness
was preferable to chaos. I liked that my rounds were scripted,
the faces few, the tasks predictable. If the night ever
grew uneasy, a power flicker, an echo that didn't quite
rebound the right way, I just turned up the security radio,
told myself it was all building noises and that was
the normal, regular world. I counted on and tall. Terminal
four began swallowing people, and the cameras kept telling the
same impossible story asterisk. It started subtle enough that even
as I'm recording this now, I wish I'd ignored it.
Management shot over an instant lagaroutine review. My supervisor assured
me just a couple of unchecked boxes in the system.
A businessman missed his morning flight the friday before Delta,
page him three times. Security was called in. No bag
left behind, but his costa aid in the garage. Earlier
that month, a janitor, one of our own, never clocked
out after a cleaning shift. Fingerprints ganner locked him entering
the supply closet at two nine a m. Nothing after that.
The cases were flagged as unrelated by higher ups, both
likely personal reasons, as if men impress suits and pensioners
with steady routines decide to vanish for a change of pace.
I took to the cameras more out of habit than hope.
The system lets he scrub through feeds, speed them up.
Watch dozens of ghost flicker and out. Nothing stood up
for a while. When I hit rewind from March six,
there she was, the woman with the red wollcoat. Something
drew my eyes to the time stamp two thirteen a m.
She's walking with purpose. There shouldn't be there at that
dire knee slightly bent as if bracing for a GUSTA
I can't feel from the tape. She pushes into the
rest room the low Another woman in sight emerges after
less than a minute, then nothing. I keep staring, willing
myself to spot the tinest flaw, any break in the feed.
But the seconds tick onward, clean and relentless. The only
alterations are the digital glitches. Minupis al bloom on the
upper right, a ghostly patch of noise that flickers like
a heat shimmer, not enough to notice if you weren't
looking for it. I replay her movements again, no cut,
no paws. She goes in is simply not there any more.
When I flagged it for the supervisor, she shrugged and
needed to close the report get ready for the next
night's airline audit. Maybe should change clothes and dabble back
to she suggested, Or maybe the camera just missed something
while switching battery modes. I disagree, but she sent me
back to finishing locks for vending machine checks like nothing
had happened. The phone they found was another thing altogether.
It had been prop up, so it faced the stall dollers,
its front camera active. When I played the video, that
static was unsettling in away TVs, nor never could be
a smear of gray and blue, crawling over half the screen.
The recording ran for thirty two minutes, though the last
visual was nothing but tile. In the faintest reflection of
a court underneath, you could almost discern voices, not clear,
not language, just overlapping syllables, breathed through clenched teeth. Even
when I cranked it to max volume, it was more
texture than lourd. Yet sometimes my mind shaped it into
meaning her boarding past number, a repeated phrase in a
woman for as I can't remember knowing something about come
find me. When I let go of conscious listening, it
would twist into things I told myself years before, whispers
old as loss. By then I knew this wasn't just
miss paperwork. Something genuinely inexplicable had happened, and the evidence
meant to clarified only made it worse. I began to
worry about the holes, the events that hadn't been flagged
because there had been no one left to report them. Asterisk.
The night thing truly shifted. I was tapping out my
notes for the previous incident. The monitors hummed overhead soft
as some one mosquiteros. At exactly two twenty seven a
m I saw the red missing flag go up in
the staff tracking dashboard. Captain Alan Bryce's pallet last wiped
his axis card by the lounge on level two. No
one answered his phone. The prefly crew waited by the
security gate. I checked the system. His duffel was left
by the locker's badge, found on an otherwise undistowed bench,
like he expected to return. I swept the fea's column
by column, my skin calling in a way I remembered
from blood slicked accident. Scened as if the badness in
the room was hiding right at the corner of my eye.
It's parate recordings. Yet not a single second caught him
departing the staff way, just static moving in and out
of the dead spots the screen up, putting artifact glimmers
that made my vision tick. No one passed either way
for a quarter hour after Bryce vanished. Pattern's crystallized from repetition.
When you see little Jackson procedure become constant, that's when
paranoid turns useful. Most disappearances lined up between two zero
and four zero A, and typically in parts of termin
or four or were staff thinned nearly zero bathrooms and
in foo court the bulb lit corridor behind the baggage sort,
never the busy sections, always off the main arters. I
pulled logs for the past two months. Then Sam caught
my attention. Janitorial check ins the last ree nights, every
time flagged for concoursifur, even though his badge should have
shifted throughout all five ooins. I found his cigature scribbled
on three identical slips for the same three Ayo block.
Talking it out with Rheno, she pointed out how she
passed him every time. Funny thing. I swear he was
out by cup side just before I saw you. She
choked it up to about scheduling, but I didn't like
how his name crawled across the logs like a watermark.
Called them dead zones of the stretches between main gates,
where the radios inevitably glitched, coffee makers flickered off, and
passengers grumbled about lost phone signal. It's just a building,
but even machinery guessed the creeps. After midnight, one woman
reported a persistent ringing in the ears, staff complained about
the waiter, and footsteps sounded off near the sealed maintenance
entrance behind Gate fifty six. I always assumed it was
the insulation failing the sort of oversight architects drown and paperwork.
Night after night, the sensation shopenedd Ecker's stepping out of time,
shadows heavier than they should be, The coldness deepened, as
though shared with a breathing presents lying just under the tiles,
watching back. Normal incidents, plugged toilets, floor abuffer breakdowns became
loaded with the knees. Sam didn't crack as many jokes.
One night he locked eyes with me at the age
of gate fifty one and mouthed something I didn't catch.
Thence one as marbger closet with belly, and nowd that
shell inside me had started to At last my shift
management didn't care for my escalation. My supervisor wagged her finger,
you're spooking the kid's heller. Run your report. Drop these
ghostorers that followed for short but padded the extra logs.
Ran my own checks off shift. One night, I dashed
portable recorders in the nun dead zones by the old
vending bank. Atop a seldom used payphone behind the maintenance closet,
near where Bryce had been. I set up my phone's
camera two disguised behind a stack of lakwakan's in the
terminal lounge. Sleep became a joke, replaced by cycles of
reviewing feed, scribbling notes over building glands. I didn't register
it as obsession until I caught myself stirring into mirrored glass,
praying for a human face to be looking back. What
did I find? Blurring figures and two frames on one tape,
A woman's outline pressed against the security glass outside the
clothes dealt a lounge lips moving and slow lip in mution,
but the town stump stamped her After her official disappearance,
Palm's ID registered near seft at Ires. The master Locke
said he was at home. Each time I tried to
trace the anomaly, the feed would skip. Sometimes the screens
would spit out the same face, faint, deniable but familiar,
the kind of hauntsy because the brain is desperate to
force meaning on to static. Reena noticed first that Sam
was acting off late one shift. She caught me by
the locked admin office, saw Sam again to night Saint
Jakett say Mark. She whispered, eyeing the whole as if
afraid of being overheard. But he was heading the wrong way,
said something strange about some one following him. Since then
she grew distant, nervy, like she was the one being
checked on. Concern gnawed at me. Either I was closing
in on something genuinely dangerous, or the insomnia was doing
what sleeplessness does best to turning every coincidence into a
threat asterisk. The first rail break came after another excruciating dawn.
I set out to make sense of the mounting madness.
My desk sprawled with printed screen shots where had marker
sketches drawn over matprint outs extracts from the scheduled databases.
I ran simultaneous video feeds before disappearances, stepping frame by frame,
one thing repeated with a consistency I couldn't dismiss. Right
before each person vanished, the footage warped. Digital static crawled
across the lower edge of the picture, corrupting a time
stump for two or three frames. Sometimes the shape patterned
like a rough human silverette. Sometimes it was just an
expanding gauze swallowing grate at bled outward before fading to normalcy.
It wasn't there in any uneventful footage. Only before a
missing person. Curiosity overran the need for plausible explanations. I
dug into the system back end maintenance logins registered every
third or fourth night from system accounts assigned to people
long cleared from peril. Names I had seen stamped in
the rogue cleaning slip sounds, being the most recurrent, surfaced again,
presumed retired or relocated. But here they were clocking in
accessing teruminals, ferishing again in the tangle of background scripts.
I was cataloging these ghostly logans where my fon rang
a private extension blinking in the old display. At two
forty three, A m ween's voice barely above his jost.
I just saw myself, She sounded, gnossius tear thread underneath
on the monitor in the old staff lange, the room
that's been sealt since forever. I was walking past, but
I never went there. Static swallowed half her sentence, if
you see me again, don't let her leave. I called back,
no answer. The same rasping static from the bathroom video
bled into the phone line, so thick a hout to listen.
Desperation of me chasing physical trails, the though sealed corridors,
sound once jerked about the ones that supposedly rerouted under
the new food Corps. I began tracing the electric subpanel logs,
each by correlating to a clock, fountom badge, each matching
a dead's own arreor police training died hard inside me.
You find the pattern, you follow it to the source.
That's when I had to choose keep looking reports for
managers who didn't care or follow the scent into the
dark sealed mouth of the terminal. As to Ersk, I
started with blueprints. The deeper I went, the more contradictory
the terminal's cuts became official plan shot standard sensible layers
of loop around the rental car counters, two staff tunnels
under arrivals cross referencing with plants from the late eighties,
I noted lounges, maintenance rooms, and corridors that no longer
appeared physically. Service level be a curved utility run referenced
in a five year old elevator maintenance brief. But the
elevator wouldn't even open to the floor. Now I risked slow,
careful conversations with people who worked there longer than me.
The storers came piecemeal dicads back Terminal fourhead of false
staff recreation wing closed after an unspecial incident. All times
muttered about the media room, a half forgotten broadcasting center,
where roomors swelled about ghosts, slips in time, maintenance workers
being locked inside for days. Officially, it all got painted
over sealed in phases behind the knee drywall and led displays.
A trembling maintenance binder unearthed from a storage crate held
a redactive four mintile lines blacked out, but phrases survived.
Unsanctioned construction access, emergency reroute and response to system overload.
All network path was isolated per recommendation. The long guy
reviewed logs and blueprints. The less the building mates ends.
How our usage grass rose and fell in invisible patterns
spiking along unused wiring, always aligned with the disappearance. Every
instant plotted along the same subtle spiraling patha ghost loop
circling under the security wing, reappearing in a forbidden zone,
the staff now only referenced with a look. By that time,
paranoia had sunk in. I wore a body cam at
all liars checked for my own name in the badge locks,
half expecting to find myself clopped out on night. I
hadn't even worked. I stopped mentioning the truth to my
supervisor plays like Terminal four bureaucracy bills on silence not explanation.
Every detail mapped to truth darker than any old CoP's
mow fantasy. This wasn't about a criminal, a glitchy camera,
or one more missing suitcase. There was a scar in
the airport foundation, a circular windstitch shat and forgotten. Yet
somehow it kept chewing through the present, swallowing anything unlucky
enough to cross its path, that just the wrong ire
on during It would take more than paperwork or prayer.
But every night sense that something was awake, waiting where
the cameras went blind grew stronger, and every night I
found my route drawing me closer to that seal silent
heart where the old Rikers wore not to go Asterisk.
On the last night, I still believed I could steer
my fate. I loaded my jacket pocket's flashlight, a police
badge tarnished by time, all my spare batteries, and the
infernal foam of the freezing video. The main concourse cack
reed one forty seven a m as I signed the
latest round of useless reports, I navigated by the oddities
followed the temperature dip walk past the humming empty eight
a m keep to the margin of the dead zone
corridor behind Gate fifty six. Those there should have been
locked yielded to my badge, sometimes of the fight, sometimes
as if the lock were expectant. Descending into the service corridors,
the world outside trickled away, replaced by a cocoon of
low voltage, light and clanging water pipes. Down here, time
shed its edges, age, old gum still fresh beneath benches,
the tang of different industrial cleaners thickening the air. I
passed a warning sign area closed for renovation. Paint half laked,
electronic gadget jittered, the flat light beams stuttering. As I
pressed farther, My breath fogged in the sudden coldness. As
I rounded the bend into the core of the loop,
the wall sweated, frost, old signage, media reumorthoised staff only
faint beneath smears of white lads, paint, fluckers of movement
head too quick for my eyes to truck registered as
recent footprints in dust, heel and toe outline, just enough
to be noticed, then lost. As the path shifted left
a voice, distant but coiled, echoed from beneath fent grills heller.
It carried the tones of rhina or maybe Sam. I
called out. My voice rebounded, unfamiliar, echoing with a metallic timber.
Mine own name sounded foreign, now deeper, half dead. TV
monitors lined the narrow walls, The screens pulsed with wet
static Cursely after image is barely visible, the lost staff flickering,
repeating single gestures and endless sloops. A uniform figure on
one's green poles to pick up a bag, but his
face broiled away into a bloated mask of pixels. Another
showed the woman in red, always at the edge of
movin out a frame. My flashlight blinked for a six second.
My own reflection appeared on screen, sitting at a desk
in a place I'd never been. My hands moved, but
the gestures didn't match my own intention. I pushed past
the video wall, stumbling through a half john access door,
the forgotten chamber beyond and folded the real staff lounge
lawn bared old maintenance jackets hung from pegs. All were
faded in tags, Sam brys, others. I couldn't place, doughnut boxes,
fossilized slump beside and open that up, running an ancient
looking feed, empty chairs and unmoving clock, a layer of
static crawling in and out doors, bolted from the inside,
claw marks, scoring the paint. The air tasted a freezer,
burn copper and ozon. There, I sort for the first time,
myself living a knot, standing in the far mirror, a
walled corner, frozen at the edge of the frame. I
was both inside and outside myself, peering at a body
that might have been a memory or a possibility, held
at the cross roads by the loopin static that fed
off its own hum. I reached for the image, hand
shaking the screen, fleck coat, time and identity fracturing across
a thousand shards of possibility. The phone in my pocket
rattled as if someone had called, though its screen was blank.
Out of the static, thousands of voices wild, all mumbling,
half remembered words of warning, plea accusation. The wall shouted,
the temperature plummeted when I stepped back. Alarm shrieked from
every unseen corner, as if the system itself wanted me dead.
I don't remember calling for help yet, strong hands dragged
me out the artificial daylight of the main concourse, blinding me.
As the police shouted my name, I was up on
my feet, blinking, clutching the useless phone. A voice at
the edge, may be Sam, maybe Rhena. Maybe nobody whispered,
now you know. As they checked my id, the old
staff jacket draped over my arm left the line of
melted frost in the clinic's tiles. I tried to describe
what I'd seen, but my throat closed on its alf.
My mind spun with the knowledge that in terminal for
records could be purged. Walls were painted, and yet the
past came back, looping, hungry for more. I survived, but
nothing about me truly made it our hole, and above
it all, the security feed played on in my skull,
the woman in the red coat stepping into nothing, forever
missing from every angle but one I would never be
able to share. That morning, after my brief, blessedly brief
release from the strangling quiet at the service level, the
world rushed in on me, too fast and too bright.
The officers driving me halfway to the security office before
the airport's day rhythm caught up, and by then my
teeth wouldn't stop chattering. They wrapped me in a foil blanket,
peppered me with questions I could barely answer. I tried
to explain what happened, what I saw, even as the
details tumbled out of grasp before I could collect them.
All I could really do was point at the phone
in my fists. The screen dark, heatless, but it felt
cold through my glove. Easiest call of the night, one
of the younger officers muttered as he led me through
the corridor, avoiding my eyes. The airport health tech, a
tired woman built for neither panic nor fantasy, led me
to the clinic. She pressed a steaming cup into my hands,
then left me alone with forms and silence. There beneath
for us bulbs too clean and flat to allah for ghosts.
I considered the edges of my own memory. What sequence
of steps had actually brought me to that silver room.
My sense of time had crashed. I'd left my office
at maybe two in the morning, but the clinic clock
said nearly six. I tried recalling the exact order. The
path through suburb will be the brig in the static,
my face in the warped dustpot. Monitors all the details
blurring like fogged glass. A gap had opened somewhere in
the night. The phone in her phone still haunted my pocket.
I thumbed it on, searching for signs of power, the
battery indicator blinker. It then went black again before the
home screen appeared. The only thing left in storage was
that endless video, still refusing to play all the way through,
always snacked in a jag of static. In the thirty
sickond minute, I set it aside, but already I heard
a faint rhyme of words in my memory. I knew
I shouldn't listen, shouldn't dig, but I couldn't help myself.
I kept looking for the impossible pause, the exact frame
in which the whispering started. The voice at the edge
sam rhena, my own, somebody forgotten, and circled the rim
of consciousness. Had it been real? Had I only imagined it?
Down there? The echo of long lost workers not into
the concrete. The memory of frosts and the handles, and
those worn old jackets with name tacks, The way they
edges caled up, as if waiting for some one to
slip back into them, clung to me, and every time
I blinked a caught a glimpse of the woman in
the red coat, not facing me, always about to turn
the corner. I was Later the day staff found me
in the clinic's quiet room, wrapped in the same jacket
I hadn't registered collecting during my descent. They called management,
who fumbled through questions. I had no script for why
were you in a close section? Heller? Who let you
in there? I told them what I could have left out,
what would sound insane? I found evident sold badges, frozen rooms,
computers running old feats. I insisted, But the more I spoked,
the more of their eyes glazed over. They took my badge.
They drew up a red up sponge and pending review.
I was escorted out with a kindness that felt like
walking under water. The world muffled each movement, not quite registering.
I clutched the cooling cup coal, seeving through the base.
My steps are could across the concourse, now alive with
business travelers and children wheeling cartoon bags. No one looked
at me. My uniform as kew only made me invisible again.
I imagined how the tapes would play it back. A
security officer in a high vest jacket, stumbling vacantly through
the main lounge, mouth working eyes never catching focus. The
sun lazed through the airport's giant glass facade and insistent
clinical reminder the time, but continued without my permission asterisk.
The consequences started, though slow bureaucratic boil the instant I left.
Supervisors began patching reports, closing out staff, incident files with
brisk official language, a dad a loss, badge, malfunction and
substantiated entry to controlled area. My statement was taken, Coppett
then mostly ignored, checked off under night shift fatigue. I
signed papers because refusing would only make things worse. No
one mentioned the sealed doors, the clothes on on his hooks,
or the room of looping feeds. Captain Bryce's bag was
logged as found unclaimed. The woman in red was simply
presumed misconnection. Luggage returned to Elin Sam Shifts were distributed
across a poll of photos to his name, quietly had
and assigned to any one time. All location management didn't
once doors as spot vi acshually not, with the maintenance
crew threatening to strike after two more of their foots DIDNTJO.
We were never told whether the police ever found anything
in the old corridors. I doubt they looked. I never
sought the officers from that night again. As for Reena,
I texted, I called, but her phone was set to voicemail.
The kind was just a monotone recording for out of service.
Her locker spotless and slept in. Not even a twine
of hair or crackmuk. The only trace a bold red
check mark on her last daily sign off entered by Rene.
Three twenty eight a m. I caught another agent who'd
known her. She transferred hurd. She was burnt out, single
momlots of them. Vanish is tough. His tone made clear
he'd heard nothing, or maybe he just wanted not to hear.
I tried to Lost and Found, but the clerk only shrugged.
We got that old back handful of coats, hard to
tell whose they are. You want me to log us
a visitor so you can claim something, I declined. The
objects from the dead zone stayed in touch, stacked where
only other ghosts would find use for them. At home,
I barely slept. The dreams followed me, empty corridors, coming
into ink, black loops, glimpses of faces wrest fat against glass,
Every surface lined with frost. I replayed footage so many
times that I felt the grooves of the timeline burn
into my retinas. At certain point, obsession became compulsion. What
minute at the stat again to the file whose name
was called next? On the ghosts Pierre? How many files
rattled with the corruption that always always came at the
same mire. I'd find myself pacing my living room at
two in the morning, not quite sure if I was
awake or back. In an omelet passage beneath the terminal,
Sometimes its crawled through the shift's schedule, staring at names
and clock ins, cross referencing against headlines of missing people
from the city. The paper trail led nowhere. With every
phone call, every report of the sense of being a
raised from the official story sharpened more than once. I
saw glimpses of myself in mirrors or Carara feeds, my
own face, but was something off, as unfocussed, jaw working,
as if nothing words I couldn't hear. Just for a moment,
I would think, was that the same frame I saw
in the old staff lunch down in Sabolvobi. The air
in my apartment took on the climate of termin or four,
dry much too cold for the season, touched by sandical
pat's detergent and static. Even after everything had its clung
ti ad skanscan use alerts for ourn explainedancies intairport, always
hoping one day some one else would break the pattern,
would see what I had seen alive from willing to believe.
Late at night, the airport's life flight tracker would stutter.
Sometimes a terminal map would flicker Gate fifty six, briefly
relabeled as a media r M, then snapped back. I
forced myself to close the laptop before the KOSO reached
the end of the concourse. Somewhere in their database, I
knew the loop continued. The system would write some one
else in and out with every disappearance, more ghosts for
the airport to lock away, for the surveillance fees to
walk pixel by pixel, for the static to swallow, until
only those who paid the worst kind of attention would
ever know they were missing. I lasted a week on
administrative leave before the col A ride. Heller your final
checks process, thank you for your years of service. That
was there the end of my official story at Terminal four.
Nothing tied to my actual badge, nothing tying me to
all that had happened there, just the series of ticked
boxes in an account system that still late at night
would flicker hell act I for one unreadable mell a
second before, or see me again? But the ferne, the jacket,
the unknow marked marks of frost on my own hand.
When I woke from those dreams. This proved I hadn't
left the building as clean as they wished. An every
time I replayed it, hovering shuddering video file, the static
under the tiles and through the wire, seeing the little
lad waiting for someone new, someone not careful enough to
sit down and let their adeline marriage indistinguishably with the rest.
That's how it began to gnaught me that maybe, for
all I tried, maybe no one ever really is terminal,
for not the passengers, not the staff, not the stories,
not even the ghosts who still know the jaitors wrote
by heart at three a m. Each vanishing court, between frames,
each echo, waiting for another set of eyes to believe
the impossible feed and try, like me to find a
way out. I didn't recognize my own hands at first,
in the hard light of the airport clinic, my fingers
seen swollen, tinged, with a faint tinge of frost, as
if I'd reached into some refrigerated at leet and berely
managed to pull myself free. The airport doctor Rene led
over my pupils, frowning. Her questions brisk rehearsed, how many fingers?
What year? Where are you? I mumbled through them. She
made another note. My budge clipped my uniform a few
hours ago was gone, probably handed to one of the
police officers who pulled me out of the service corridors.
The only physical thing I kept was her phone. The
woman in the red coat pressed so hard in my
palmmet left and indent. Security kept their distance after initial statements,
shuffling in and out of the cut and partitioned cubicle,
their radio voices tense but remote. The world aside kept moving.
Announcements bled through the walls. All pre boarding hand abandoned
back on Carousel seven for a little while, My sorry
clung to the edge of their routine, a nuisance to
be filled out and filed away. A glance toward the
nearest geniformed officer told me everything I needed to know.
Whatever I had said about underground rooms and looped camera
feeds had made the rounds, and the consensus was to
treat me as a minor security problem, not a witness
or survivor. The staff nurse wept my temperature again, frowned,
asked where I'd been. Her badge read ivy. She had
eyes like someone who'd seen too many grave yard chift mishaps,
and her patience for my confusion was thenning. You were
incodorant when they brought you up from where was it?
She checked her chart, pursed her lips, maintenance corridor or baggage.
Your statements don't align well. When I tried to answer,
the words jammed several be old staff lounge media room
frostened the walls. I watched the idea's collapse under the
weight of her practical gaze. She pressed a cup of
water into my good hand, then clicked her pen shut. Holaki,
you didn't have a hard incident, mister Heller. We logged
you at five o eight a m. Wandering the restricted mezzanine.
Nothing about it made sense, not even to me. The
officers exchanged looks when my name was mentioned. One muttered
about incident reports not matching up. How two teams had
gotten simultaneous distress calls from different ends of the terminal,
both supposedly from me. Apparently I'd been found twice eight
minutes apart, in sections separated by two floors and a
magnetically locked door. The system flight both enters as a
person found that line that would become part of the
odd little legend of Terminal four, and a suspected justification
for deleting everything else about that night. By mid day,
my supervisor showed up, neutral faced, clipboard in hand, her
turn prime for damage control. Heller, you'll need to surrender
your batch compliance reviewed the CCTV for the morning. Some
instances in access limited areas. I'm sure you understand the
pressure on these investigations. She didn't say it, but I
could see she was already rewriding me as a minor embarrassment.
It was over, and I was expected to vanish smoothly
like the rest. I asked about Reena. Her expression froze
for a moment, then moved on, we've reassigned her shifts
internal transfer. It's not your concern now, Josh. She marked
a box on her sheet, said something about counseling resources,
then excused herself before I could ask about the missing
captain Sam, or even the locked rooms. I'd seen it before,
the corporate version of Getwellson's End, Get Gone. She left
the door jar. As his steps faded, I saw through
the frosted clinic window a maintenance work of trrodging down
the central concourse with a cleaning cart. His outline familiar.
It was Sam's rolling gate to her tea, same old
navy jacket, but the face under the harsh eli D
didn't register. I stood, ignoring the bright pulse of pain
in my knee, intent on catching him before he made
the next corner. But the hallway was empty when I
stepped through. Only the hum offending machines and a patch
of frost and the floor suggested anything real had passed by.
My status in the system changed that week, not fired,
not in so many words, but reassigned out of terminal access,
subject to investigation, strictly off the roster a pending further review.
My badge ceased to function, my key cards flagged no access.
Text to my supervisor bounced back and read instead. I
received a politely worded threat of trespass prosecution if I
was found in staff areas. No mention of Sam, no
sign of Rena's name in any schedule or report. The
pilot's disappearance was quietly rewritten as a failed call in
a local news blurb, likely massaged by the airport's PR team,
mentioned as spatsaff absences and a technical order of overnight
video systems. They called it a routine investigation. All things
I learned could be swept away with the right tone.
The aftertaste of the service level wouldn't leave me. The rooms,
the frosts, the looping video. It all barreled back whenever
I closed my eyes. I stopped sleeping through the night,
kept finding myself scanning terminal for as digital blueprint on
my phone, searching forums for trace of the vanished staff.
No one seemed to remember in a her badge, her locker,
even her parking space had been reassigned, as if she
never existed. The memory of her always crumpled with your own.
That must call haunted more than the physical cold. Sam's
absence left gaps only someone who cared about buff floors
and trash pick up with sense track and started to overflow.
Streaks of grime crept along the groat, the staff board,
and the wall outside admir now displayed only night agents
had barel in you, A subtle paranoia called in. Colleagues
passed me in the airport's public spaces with wool drape
politeness and certain whether to not or avert their eyes.
Some acted as if I was contagious, others as if
I was invisible. We know you weren't well, man, said
Daddy from baggage, not quite meeting my gaze. You can
be all right, I lied easily. The world ticked on,
and I faded into the nubs of bureaucracy, at least
stread through which a cold wind of Terminal four could
now whistle freely. After two weeks, I accepted that I
wouldn't get my post back, not even if I begged.
Management stopped responding to requests for appeal, sighting pending mental
health clearance, insamnia, and the persistent feeling of moving through
a lapping realities only cemented my exile. When I called jar,
a familiar chorded voice pinched and genderness rather off the
holding pattern. Thank you for your inquiry. Please wait for
formal communication for your own safety. Do not return to
terminal for the rest of my life. Rank to fit
the hollow they'd carved out my modest apartment overlooked the skyline,
but everything in it reminded me of workhole badges, year
end certificates, case folders. I'd never managed to throw away.
The physical world round me seemed to flecker detail skipping
like a bad video feed, the light of my fridge,
sometimes strobing my phone, vibrating at midnight with miscalls from
enlisted numbers that evaporated when checked. That spring, the airport
ran a half hearted safety campaign, new posters warning travelers
to never leave bags unattended. The irony didn't escape me.
The real forrit wasn't what you brought into terminal for,
but what it might take from you when no one
was looking asterisk. I could have let that be my ending.
The world had made it easy not to care, not
to dig further, not to draw attention. All training, stubborn pride,
or maybe just the reflex to not leave mysteries and
solveded me looking for workerund's ways to slip back inside
the thing that had nearly eaten me. One gray afternoon,
the urge of road caution. If I couldn't bet off,
maybe I could be a passenger. I used to throw
away email to buy the cheapest ticket available for next
day stand by flight. I shaved the stubble from my jaw,
donned an old navy windbreaker and jeans, and tucked the
woman's phone, the frostpit and artifact into my backpack, along
side notebad, an analog watch, and a disposable camera. I
couldn't bear to bring my own phone, too many unpredictable
ghost living inside. When I boarded a city bus headed
for the airport, I watched the city recede into a
non scriptsmuch behind rain lush glass. There was a twinge
in mile low back from sitting, a reminder of the
old injury, nagging and stubborn. My hand ran absently along
my knee, as if to sure myself I was still solid.
A terminal for the world had already moved on. The
winter wind battered the automatic doors to patches and arrival screens,
scrolled through lists of cities in sterile light, regular January business,
the perfume of disinfectant, the churn of rolling luggage. A
security officer, a new face, hardly glanced at me as
I passed through the check win ticket in hand, keeping
my head down for the first time since I had
worked the concourse I felt what true invisibility was, oh badge,
no uniform, no expectation. I was just another veiled memory
in the system. I started wandering, keeping too high traffic
areas at first, letting my eyes adjust. At Gate fifty one,
little had changed, launch shares, fending machines, the same flickering
strips of overhead lighting. I drifted to dead zone corridors,
the gap behind the locked bank ATM, the alcove by
the old information counter, the now marked staff entrants near
the bathrooms. Details I had once logged every night, now
baked for a new significance. The cleaning cut left in
the wrong place, the scent of industrial soap overlaid with
a sharper bitterness, a faint chemical note I didn't recognize.
I sat at a free court table and watched the
pattern of staff members, No familiar faces from my time,
only new hires, faces I didn't know and wasn't sure
even existed before this week. I waited for a glimmer,
as a napse of movement that would refuse to fit.
Eyes ticked by, and the world remained stubbornly mundane. For
a moment, I began to doubt it all. Was I
simply and not a broken man chasing ghosts manufactured by
insomnia and guilt. At two nine teen a m. The
spell ruptured a child, perhaps sevenoid, dark curls, coat buttoned uptight,
ran across the concourse, and stopped cold at the edge
of the service elevator. She looked through the glass into
the unmoving shaft, then pressed her nose to the panel.
Her mother trailed after harry, apologetic, dragging their wheelback. You
can't go there. It's for workers only, she said, the words,
catching strangely as if she had used them many times.
The girl turned stared at me, not quite at me,
just over my shoulder, then pointed, that's where the sea
through people are. She announce loud as a song. Her
mother flush glanced over, shook her head, and hustled her away.
I waited for the echo of that statement to die
before I dared approach the elevator doors. Inside, A dull
red glow flickered high above a maintenance over a light
rarely seen signal for none but the old timers. I
rode the escalator down to baggage, blending them with a
crowd of exhausted passengers. Id the oversized luggish carousel, a
janitor s feat humming, a dry cadence with a tune
too familiar. He was older, beard, thick eyes, careful, but
his id badge flipped upside down, read Esmarin. I debated approaching,
but something in the stoop of his shoulder suggested layers
of silence. I wasn't ready to peel back the airport
for print up of ground was a labyrinth, but the
real otteries I'd always believed ran out of sight. My
thoughtsnotted around the idea, if I could find some one
who remembered terminal force lost levels, maybe the story would
break free of my own fraying recal asterisk. It started
with the families of the missing, those whose names I'd
found in the back end locks. I worked my way
through attainable less old emergency contacts, emils left behind him,
forgotten corners. Most didn't answer. Those who did had nothing
new to add. Grief, exhausted and still howminy air. During
those calls, most had already accepted the quiet erasure, the slow,
bureaucratic sinking of a love one's memory. One woman wife
to a lost ramp worker. As directly was there an accident,
any security incident. She wanted closure, not theory. But sometimes
in the pauses a detail would slip. He called before
his shift, said something strange about losing time. His voice
sounded like a recording, hollow, distant, like the signal was
passing through some kind of static. A sister of a
vanished air line agent recalled how her last text wasn't
quite right. It said see you soon, but if not
looking the room with too much light. They chalked it
up to fatigue, nerves, flights delayed by snow. I heard
a pattern, or thought, I did language that looked like
my own dreams. The more I dark, the less I trusted,
the boundaries between explanation and suggestion, the edges between witness
and victim, more echo blurred. One night, waiting out a
thunderstorm in the airport's arrivals hall, I sat beside a
tired woman in a cleaning uniform. She was drawing on
a paper napkin with a stub of pencil, listening to
music on tinney headphones. I asked, careful not to sound mad,
if she'd heard of any one stuck between shifts. She
raised one heavy eyebrow, then slid the napkin toward me.
On it a cru sketch, a tangle of looping corridors,
a stick figure with blank eyes, and behind it, row
after row of faces failing to transparency. That's the night
cart's route, she offered quietly. They say, if you follow
the lines, you forget who you are before the end.
Then she squeezed the napkin into a ball, stuffed it
in her pocket, and walked away. Plues fluttered up an
official record, only to collapse under the weight of non answers.
Sta foign perstings referencing the echo wing old media room
deleted minutes after going up. All maintenance logs of times
and dates overlapping as the two people had caught the
same badge on the same night. It wasn't only about
the people lost physically, but those flowered as acta von
systems despite no one remembering their faces. I saw my
own name rendered in review, then purred, reinstated, then scrub
all over again, each cycle a little less real. A
plain black notebook found in a trap bin contained a
handful of cryptic entries. Monidad's own sweep twos fifty six silent,
but would a sound not sam his handwriting swung wildly
between blocky capitals and a neat herid kosev. On the
last page, the words if you get to the heart,
listen for the breathing, don't write your own name. I
pocketed it, the thin stack of pages, a flapping dead
leaf of memory, with every missing piece my desire to
become whole, to become myself, and nothing but hardened. The
next step became painfully clear. If I wanted truth, I
would have to clare it from the broken bones of
the terminal itself. That meant finding someone willing to tell
me what the boarders were. At least their shadows were
hidden osterers. My best leave was a name whispered in conversation,
barely registered by passing flight attendant refilling her thermos a
side counter. He should talk to gussold engineer knows everything
about the guts of this place. She scribbled the phone
number on my palm. Two dozen calls later and a
meeting was set. Gus agreed to see me. A stipulation clear,
keep it brief, keep it quiet, and no recordings. He
lived in a Krumlin du blex, two train stops out,
surrounded by towers of empty beer cans and boxes of
file folders. He wore cardigan, whittled with holes, and regarded
me with the shop skeptical eyes of some one long
used to corpriate lies in the limits of healthy self preservation.
As soon as I mentioned the echo rooms, he poured
scotch into a chip mark. You don't belong in that
place anymore, son, he muttered, never did, but you sure
as hell don't now. He produced a sheaf of blueprints,
yellowed and wrinkled with age. Medeior room subo vossis underneath
baggage should have been bricked up in eighty nine. After
the incident, his hands trembles, voice thickening. There was a spill,
power leap, data surge. Two guys never came out. Official
line was a wiring fire. We patched over and swore silence.
Once a year. You check for leaks, low fake repairs,
nod and move on. What about the rooms? Are they
visible anywhere? He wiped his brow. There's one window left
faces an old concourse unused. Now you'd have to be
looking right angle at the right eyre and they'd already
walled up the hallway. All cameras were outed, feed set
to look you can't trust anything down there. Elevator has
got permanently locked. He drew a line in the blueprint.
Here's a hatch service stow when nobody's used in decades
only way in. If you can stand what's beneath, don't
stay long. Place remembers you. I pressed further, but he
shook his head. I can't lose more. Promise me one thing.
If you see something that looks like someone you know,
don't follow, not even if it uses your own damn voice.
I left, carrying photo copies of the blueprints and a
head tumbling with impossible visions. I'm app to secrets. I'd
half wish I never found parking the rental cars far
from the CCTV. As I could, I spiraled back toward
terminal for the blueprints, folded under my jacket, disposable camus
slung up my hip. The minute I pushed through the
sliding glow us doors, the sense of being watch sharpened.
I was the only one carrying nothing, a man without purpose,
a face no longer matching any database I kept. At
the concourse, edges were neither staff nor security lingered. Time
was counted by my analog watch, save fifteen minutes slow
to throw off any automated tracker. My hot hammered each
StepN echo of that all consuming static I remembered from
the feeds. I entered bathroom to change shirts, then retreated
into the terminal shadows as the traffic died down, waiting
for night to hollow out the spaces between the walls
and let the secrets leak in asterisk. My plan was simple,
map bo loops using the blueprints, hit dead zones atknown
anomally windows, gather proof, and never let myself answer a
call in my name or any one else's. I started
the circuit near Gate fifty three, dazzlingly ordinary under fluorescent
Claire as the airport thinned a trail behind the maintenance crew.
No one looked at me, no one asked what I
was doing. I moved through half locked doors, always keeping
a near for approaching boots or the shift of air.
I found the window thus mentioned recessed griy me, half
concealed behind a column glass swart with age beyond it
utter blackness. I left at my disposable camera and snapped
two photos. Uncertain if anything would register, I set up
a sequence pass through each dead zone at fifteen minute intervals.
Listen for sound and omalies, count the temperature drops, and
jot down anything out of place. The old watch's hands
jok slightly, as if the second hand stuttered. Announcements ran
out of sinc a pre boarding coal for a flight
that departed the day before. Voices laid over one another
in languages I didn't know. Overhead, the light's flickered, a parade,
a static ticking, like the heart of something vast and
sick beneath the flooring. By two thirty, a m almost empty,
the building began to softly disassemble its boundaries. A janitor passed,
humming the two night come to dread the mock clattering softly.
I moved after, careful not to overtake. He turned a
blank corner, then was gone, No exit, no door where
he vanished. A thin patch of condensation lingered on the
tile inside the terminal's heart. Time grew viscous. My watch
was sad, itsself, dragging from two forty one to two
nine In a single sweep. I heard a from far away.
The woman's voice from the bathroom video muted, glitching. Come
find me, a boarding call for a council of flight rasped,
warped in fidelity. I stopped at a row of lockstaff lockers,
then ducked my head forward. A printed schedule for next week,
posted inside a glass panel listed names and you had
vanished each interview except for Sam. His roe simply read assigned.
My own, once presented, was gone entirely. In the mirror,
I barely recognized myself, thin hunched, eyes blackened with fatigue.
For one flicker, my mouth moved independently, tracing words a
beat behind my thoughts. I snapped a photo. The flash
burst and faded. Space returned to shadow the lock on.
My sense of self loosened. I hurried on A night
or later. Hovering in the food court stead zone, a
small boy may be five, wandered up as wide and wet.
He looked past me toward the empty staff wing. I
saw the lady in the red coat. He whispered, she's
not happy. His mother emerged and pulled him away, her
apology automatic. The child dissolved a breath faster than my
senses could confirm, as if the building kept heating the
details before I could act am in them. The disposable
camera became heady in my hand. I snapped photos of
anything unusual in nice s sign a looping reflection, even
my own outstretched arm. After the film ran out, I
jotted time stamps three well announcement from last week A
three eighteen soreen as reflection not possible confirm. Later the
watch advanced denver treated as six clock ride. In the
wave of the building's disorientation, my attention turned next to
the systems themselves, the security cameras, the badge readers, the
elevators that never ran. I ran tests in the public terminal,
swiping a board pass, I watched the lights blink green,
then red, then black. Everything SNCD with a slight twinged
behind my ear, the echo of static racing out the
bones of my skull. At four one, the maintenance p
a blowed alive. All staff report to LEVELB Sector media room.
The voice was a mistakable mind bow Tenney, digitized, raspy
with the static I had never heard outside the worst
moments of the job. I froze, thence were into down
the concourse, my mind thundering with dread. Security never responded
to my frantic calls from the emergency phone. It'spot white static.
Back then, Patracord all is normal at terminal four. Thank
you for your service. The loop had overtaken the system.
I'd been written out before I'd even reached the door Aserusk.
It became undeniable to building itself, its systems, its wiring,
its schedule eight. Not only bodies, but their memory, their perception.
It was a hunger I could chart, if not halt.
The evidence grew every time a person disappeared from the system.
The cameras rebuwed it automatically, the logs cleared, a block
of ros, replaced by lutfeed or reversed time stamps. It
felt as though the airport had learned to delete not
only its own errors, but the witnesses too. What frightened
me wasn't the supernatural, It was a mechanical. The certainty
that some one years ago had facilitated this run. Cable
sealed walls programmed the system to raise conflict, not by phixiate,
but by excizing it. Gases blueprints shaded in crimson pencil
traced the spiral circuit, a loop heading from the food
court storage closet, twisting deep under baggage, reclaim ending in
the doomed media room. The more I tried to record incidents.
The more my tools rebelled, my notebook pages began to
curl and strip, as if the ink was being slowly digested.
My watch stopped at two thirteen hands welded. I persisted,
knowing that proof was fleeting, unreliable. But if I simply
believed it long enough, maybe one detail would stick. Maybe
someone else some day would notice the outline of the
spiral and understand what I'd seen. For a brief, mad moment,
the wall's logic seemed to collapse. I saw a flight
attendant checking an empty desk, heard when passing her in
the reflection out of time, I saw Yeena at the
gatecoat collar drawn up, had turned away. I screamed her name.
She didn't react, only the flicker of an eye recognition,
too frail to mean anything. I followed the spiral to
its end point, The old service stairwell wedge shut by
cracked orange cones and silent sensors. My breath crystallized in
the air. I priscuss as faded key into the lock.
It clicked, ancient and damp. The way snapped opened just
wide enough to let my body through. Downward, the air thickened,
the stairwell wind on itself, pitch black, windowless. I snapped
a glow stick, light slashing greenish against broken tile. Plumbing
sneaked the ceiling. My footsteps, muted dns, made no echo.
The memory of those voices sam rhena, my own hissed
at the edge of hearing. Sometimes cacophony, sometimes logic. Turn
back leave, you're already gone. I pushed on, Thus is
blueprint's map. To turn each landing, I matched shapes, half
expecting the walls themselves to cove away. The buildings seemed
to resist, squeezing my chest with every step. Then came
the first breach in the logic of space, a section
where my shadow blurred, not cross one, but two walls
at once. My hand, when held up, duplicated itself colorless trumbing.
On the threshold of the media room, appaused chest pounding
the door, now gray with a right of overlapping padlocks
and caution tape bore hand painted warning do not enter
shifting ground. But at the hinge had decayed, revealing a
sliver of darkness. As I pressed it, my mind seemed
to split, one part, certain of shuttering disaster, the other
resigned to whatever the old winds of terminal forward reveal
I stepped in asterisk. Inside the media room, time reversed,
machines blinked, some battered, some archaic, all cabled into a
humming snarl. Ruined fluorescent bulbs glares barely giving the room
the edge of an old photograph, bleached by mold and panic.
Shelves overfowed with decades of magnetic tips, hastily box reels
labeled inergent looping scroll ink nineteen eighty eight, three fourteen,
and do not erase the red coat. The samtes lock
my heart race every disappearance cataloged and preserved by the
very architecture meant to hide it. A row of plastic chairs,
almost matched faces exploring, cathered monitors, looping, grainy footage. The
image is played at a step, a baggage clock reaching
for a cup, a pilote entering a lounge, a janitor,
some pushing him up over floor tiles that dissolve mid frame,
and the snowy static. The six screen rotated through security
feeds and at the center of its stab white pixel snow.
I recognized my own profile, hunch clutching the woman's phone.
The stillness was predatory in a decrepit locket along the
back wall, a sheaf of red corner Journal's listed page
after page of shift logs, each entry hastily blotted in
the depths of one. A clip photo of Rhena's badge,
her last wipe time, circled in blue underneath a loose
cassette tape. Feller labeled in her handwriting, if found a ghettout,
I jammed it into a battered player, dunder the button,
her voice trembling close to breaking. I saw the lights flicker,
and I knew it was my turn. There's a hummernaut
quite a sound, more like pressure. I tried to leave,
but the cameras just looped me walking. I can't remember
my mother's face any more. If you're here, it means
you're trapped to the dick, crackled, muffled crying. Don't don't
answer if they call your name. I pressed a hand
to the table, starting the room as it reeled, the
air simmered, skin crawling with the weight of presents. I
leafed through the stack of logs, regular desperate handwriting, sometimes
breaking into confession, sometimes devolving into Taler's twenty nine gone
no going back. Beside that a battered stack of staff.
I d sam Bryce, others lost sight under invisible weight
in a corner. A maintenance laptop blinked. The cursor spiraled
through an open document, shift notes, log wipes cod strings
for camera resets. It was as if someone or something
had tried again and again to rewrite the program that
kept the terminal. Scars neatly bandaged on the wall faded
with dust. A last warning, the terminal remembers out he
does not forgive coal. Sweat broke over my brow as
I moved toward the central bank of monitors. Light outside
the media room faded, replaced by a rubed, indistinct tum
like a thousand televisions tuned to nothing, ready to eat.
Whatever moved, my own reflection shimmered in every black screen.
On monitor four. The image flickered and corrected, revealing a
grin neer version of myself sitting at the media desk,
mouths slightly open, endlessly mouthing the beginning of the confession
I recorded weeks before. I never wanted to seidose security
feeds again. I reached out, my hand passed through the
cold arab of the keyboard, trembling violently. The room wavered
with possibility, a hundred alternate hellos, each a ghost in
the rigid system. The speakers murmured their voices of laying
not here, not now, not yet, Come home, Josh, come home.
The rest faces flickering across the static green atlits corked
into half smiled, halfly, Sam forever pushing his mop into
the black. Others, hundreds of others, some with features slipping loose.
Others recognized a human for a fleeting beat before dissolving,
each one greeting me, mouths forming familiar syllables, voices stuttering
out the lost gasp of remembered existence. The tear, when
it came, was abstract and absolute. I was no longer alone,
the building, its wounded systems, its gnawing appetite, craven new lock,
a new goost to join the living propetuity deep in
its sealed hard. I lunged at the circuit panel labeled
primary surveillance of varied hand shaking. If I could force
a rbut to kill enough power, force the system to
release its hold, it might end the cycle, if only
for a moment. Ween As words from the tape rang
in my skull, don't answer it. If they call your name.
The room plunged toward the threshold of blackout, monitors blooming
with final light in one My own eyes met mine,
void and full the direct accusation of some one who
no longer belonged on either side of the screen. The
machinery sputtered. My body felt split, vibrating between existent and erasure.
As I tugged free the final master breaker, every electronic sound,
and the world seemed to scream, harmonizing with every voice
I had ever known. In the terminal asterisk, blackness served
raw and total. Limb's numbed body gone weightless with terror.
For a timeless pulse. I curled at the edge of presence, sensus,
battered by static, name speared out of the world. Only
pain needs bruising. The tile and the chow biting deep
into bone brought me back. It was security who found me,
dragged me bodily up half a stairwell, then to the open,
white lit corridor beside an UNEWS staff check in. My
jacket was torn, the phone still in my hand. They
huddled radio's chattering when reading my ID Tagaladdin in that
no longer registered in the system. Unidentified person found some
one said frowning. My features seemed foreign to them. Are
you with a contractor you can't be here? You know?
The air, though heavy with disinfectant and distant engines, now
felt less charged. A ring of background noise noticeably hushed
the static, at least the kind I had come to expect,
was subdued, still as ice. They walked me out, spish
and replaced by polite detachment, and I accepted their cold
regard as payment for survival. The last thing I saw
as they opened the doors was the flicker of my
own reflection, now steadier, less doubled to the suspicion in
my expression replaced by exhausted relief asterisk. My body moved
on not a pilot. As I reached the outside, skin
prickling in the night air. For the first time, I
felt the lock on my memory loosen, the boundaries, self religning,
if only barely. I allowed myself a moment of rest,
just outside the sweeping glass facade, breathing in air that
didn't throb with the threat of erasure. I could still
fill the hum under my skin, the echo of my
name trailing across some mutte holes. But I'd build enough
distance to resist the reach of the sleeping, predatory circuits,
if only for a while. I pocketed the woman's foam,
dropped my badge, and melted into the city's anonymous night
walking as far as making knees and empty streets would lyle.
I wondered how long any since a peace would last,
how easily the worlds could revert to its casual hungry forgetting.
But the weight in my chest was undineirble. Survival for
now was enough. A taxi idol to the coroner, silent
and remarked, I got in, gave the driver an address
I barely remembered, leaned back against the coal glass, and
let the city close behind its terminal force it out
of view, all light and glass and seekers best left shadowed.
I sat in dusk light, jacket's sleeves, rolled hands, trembling,
but still my own listening to the city's living pulse
overpowered the last few static wines in my skull. I knew,
even sir, the building's shadow would linger in me, that
my story would remain only half truth. Before a time,
as the cap trace to looping on certain route home,
the world as side belonged to some unreal and that
was all the certainty ECO claim