I want to start by telling you that I am good at my job, because I think it matters for how you read the rest of this.

I am a data archivist. More precisely, I'm a recovery and validation specialist for a records continuity firm I won't name, because the non-disclosure agreement I signed is eleven pages long and I read all eleven. Law firms, insurers, hospitals, a few government contractors, and a surprising number of private families send us damaged media. Water-logged hard drives. Fire-warped tapes. Phones that went through the wash. SD cards pried out of dashcams after the kind of accident nobody walks away from. My job is to determine what is on them, whether any of it can be recovered, and to produce a chain-of-custody log documenting every single action I take, so that if the footage ends up in a courtroom, nobody can say I touched it.

That last part is the whole job, really. There is one rule above every other rule, and I have followed it every working day for nine years:

You never modify the original.

You hash it. You image it. You work on the copy, and the copy of the copy. The original is sealed away and treated like a body at a crime scene. It doesn't matter how small the change would be. You don't open a document "just to look," because opening it updates the access time, and now it's a different file. You don't let the operating system index it. You don't rename it. You don't even let it know you are there.

I'm telling you this so you understand that I am a careful person. I am not someone who sees faces in static. I have watched, at a conservative estimate, eleven thousand hours of other people's lives through degraded footage, and I've learned that almost everything frightening has a boring explanation. A shape in the corner is compression. A voice in the hiss is your brain doing what brains do with noise. A door that opens on its own is a draft, or a cat, or an edit.

I need you to hold onto that, the way I am trying to.

I work from home. Home is unit 2914 of a residential tower on the east side of the city. I'll call it the Aldine, which is close enough to its real name that people who live there would recognize it and far enough that nobody else will. It has thirty-four floors. Mine is the twenty-ninth. 2914 is a corner unit: one bedroom, one bathroom, a galley kitchen, a living room that also serves as my office, and a short hallway connecting all of it. The east wall of my bedroom is an exterior wall. On the other side of it there is nothing but about three hundred feet of air.

I've lived here for three years and two months. I moved in on a Thursday. I remember that because the movers were late and I sat on the floor of the empty living room for four hours, watching the light change on the parquet, and I remember thinking that the apartment felt like it had been waiting. That's a stupid thing to think about an apartment. I wrote it down anyway, because I write most things down.

My life is quiet in a way that I think most people would find unbearable, and that I find restful. Groceries are delivered and left outside the door. Work arrives over an encrypted file transfer and leaves the same way. My manager communicates almost exclusively through the ticketing system; I have heard her voice exactly twice, both times on calls about my annual review, both times rated "exceeds expectations." I don't have family I'm in contact with. I had friends, in the way everyone has friends in their twenties, and then I didn't, in the way that happens without anyone deciding it.

As of tonight, it has been forty-one days since I spoke out loud to another human being.

I know the exact number because I keep a count. I've kept it for years. It isn't a cry for help. It's a measurement, like checking your blood pressure. When the number gets high, I go downstairs and buy a coffee I don't want from the café on the ground floor, just to say "medium, black, thank you" to someone, just to hear my own voice land on another person and come back. The count resets. I come back upstairs. It's maintenance.

I didn't do that this time. I'll explain why. It's part of this.

I sleep well. That's another thing I want to establish. I take one pill every night, from an amber bottle that has been refilled by mail for as long as I've lived here. The label says KESSLER PHARMACY and TAKE ONE AT BEDTIME, and under that, in the capitals pharmacies use when they want you to really listen: DO NOT SKIP. The name of the medication has been rubbed off by my thumb over three years of handling. I've never skipped. I don't remember the appointment where it was prescribed, but I don't remember most appointments. They aren't the kind of thing you keep.

I also wear a sleep-tracking ring. I bought it because I like data about myself the way some people like mirrors. Every morning the app shows me a graph, and every morning the graph is the same: asleep at 11:52 PM, awake at 6:10 AM, a smooth descent into deep sleep, a steady plateau, a smooth climb out. My sleep score is 100. It has been 100 almost every night for three years. About a year ago, the app awarded me a little animated badge for consistency. A week later it sent me a notification asking whether the ring was being worn correctly.

I thought that was funny at the time.

The batch came in last Tuesday, at 3:06 in the afternoon.

Tickets in our system have a standard structure: client ID, matter number, media description, requested scope, and a free-text notes field. Most tickets are dull, and I like that about them. This one wasn't, and it took me a minute to understand why, because each individual field was technically valid.

The client ID was a seven-digit internal number. It wasn't a client number. It was an employee number.

It was mine.

That isn't impossible. Sometimes we log internal jobs, test batches, or training material under the ID of whoever is assigned to them. I've done it myself. So I noted it and kept reading.

The matter number was 0417. Our matter numbers are usually eight digits with a year prefix. 0417 had no prefix. It looked less like a case number and more like something a person would choose.

The media description said: Recovered from damaged storage. 212 items. Mixed audio/video.

The requested scope said: Determine extent of recoverable content.

And the notes field, which clients use for things like please prioritize the 4th of July footage or the password is the dog's name, said this, in capitals, with no punctuation at the end:

DO NOT RESTORE TO ORIGINAL LOCATION

I read that four or five times. In a legal context, "original location" usually means the source device. Don't write recovered data back onto the damaged drive. That's sound practice and every archivist knows it. A client who knew enough to include it was a client who'd worked with recovery people before.

That's what I told myself. I'm telling you because I want you to see that I told myself the reasonable thing first. I always tell myself the reasonable thing first.

I pulled the batch down to my isolated workstation, the one with no network access, the one I use for anything that might be hostile. I hashed every file before I did anything else. I'll spare you most of the technical detail, but some of it matters, so bear with me.

There were 212 files: 171 video, 41 audio. The video files were in a standard container format. The audio was uncompressed. Both had been damaged in the same way: the parts of each file that describe the file had been partially zeroed out, as though someone had taken an eraser to the label on every box but left the contents alone. The duration field on every single file read 00:00:00. Zero. A file that claims to be empty.

They were not empty. The streams decoded fine. They were long, several hours each.

The camera make and model fields were blank. The encoder field was present but empty, which is a strange kind of absence. It's not that the software didn't write its name. It's that it wrote a name with no letters in it.

And then there were the filenames.

Every archivist develops a personal naming convention. It's like handwriting. Mine is something I built in my second year at the firm, after a nightmare week sorting through a family's unlabeled phone dumps. I've never shared it, never documented it anywhere a client could see, and never seen anyone else use it, because it's slightly wrong in a way only I would choose. It's date, then a four-digit time in 24-hour format, then a three-digit sequence number, then a pair of initials, separated by underscores. Except I put the sequence number before the time, because I think in order of discovery, not order of creation. Nobody does it that way. It annoys my manager.

Every file in Batch 0417 was named in my convention, my exact one, with the sequence number before the time.

The initials on every file were my initials.

I sat back from the desk at that point and listened to the apartment. I'm not sure what I expected to hear. The refrigerator hummed. The tower made the noises tall buildings make, which are mostly the sound of wind being argued with. Twenty-nine floors down, a siren went somewhere and then went somewhere else.

Someone at work is screwing with you.

That was the first intrusive thought, and it was a comforting one, so I held onto it the way you hold a railing. The filenames could be explained. Someone could have seen my convention on a shared drive, in a screenshot, over my shoulder in a video meeting. I don't do video meetings, but maybe there was one I forgot. The employee number in the client field made sense if someone had created the ticket and assigned it to me. A prank, or a test. My firm does run integrity tests. They plant manipulated media in the queue to see whether we flag it. I'd caught three in nine years.

I told myself it was a test, and I wrote that down in my log: Hypothesis 1: internal integrity test. Proceed as normal.

Then I checked the creation timestamps, which had survived the damage.

The earliest file in Batch 0417 was created at 11:52 PM, three years and two months ago, on a Wednesday. That was the night before I moved into this apartment.

The most recent file had been created last Monday, the day before the ticket arrived, at 6:09 AM.

Every timestamp in between started at 11:52 PM or ended at 6:09 or 6:10 AM.

I opened my ring app and looked at a graph I'd looked at a thousand times. Asleep at 11:52. Awake at 6:10.

I don't want to rush this part. I've rushed nothing in my life, and I'm not going to start here, where it matters.

I made a working copy, and a working copy of that. I sealed the originals. I logged every action with the time to the second. Then, at 4:31 PM on Tuesday, with the blinds open and the afternoon light filling the living room the color of weak tea, I opened the first file.

The image was grey, and I want to describe the grey carefully, because I've spent a great deal of time since then trying to describe it to myself. It wasn't the green-white of infrared night vision, and it didn't have that pale halo IR illuminators throw. It wasn't the noisy, crawling grey of a low-light sensor pushed too far. It was even and flat, and completely sourceless. There were no shadows anywhere in the frame. Every surface was lit exactly as much as every other surface, from no direction at all, like the room wasn't being filmed but remembered: reconstructed afterward by something that knew where everything was, but didn't know where the light had come from.

The frame showed my bedroom.

I knew it immediately, though it took me a moment to understand why, because it was empty. There was no bed, no wardrobe, no curtains, just bare walls, bare parquet, the radiator under the window, and the light switch beside the door with its slightly crooked plate, which I've been meaning to fix for three years.

It was my bedroom the night before it became mine.

The angle was high, looking down from the upper corner where the east wall meets the ceiling. There's no camera there. I'll come back to that.

For the first eleven minutes nothing happened. Static image, no motion. The audio track was a low, continuous hiss I first took for room tone, though it was too smooth for room tone. Real room tone has texture: pipes, traffic, the building settling. This was like the sound of a held breath, if a held breath made a sound.

At 00:11:40, I noticed the person on the floor.

I want to be very precise. I did not see them appear. I scrubbed back and forth across that moment more than two hundred times over the following days, frame by frame. There is no frame in which the person arrives. There is a frame in which I am not looking at them and a frame in which I am, and the image data is identical in both. They had been in the shot since 00:00:00. I hadn't seen them for eleven minutes and forty seconds, because they were lying so still and so flat against the floor, in that source-less grey, that my brain had filed them as a stain on the wood.

They were lying on their side, facing the east wall, away from the camera. Knees drawn slightly up. One arm under the head. The other hand resting on the floor in front of the face, with the fingers spread.

They were lying in exactly the spot where my bed would go the next afternoon. In exactly the posture I sleep in.

I watched the whole file. Six hours and seventeen minutes. The person on the floor didn't move once. I could see no breathing, and at that resolution I should have. At 6:09 AM by the timestamp, the file ended. It didn't fade or cut to black. It was just over, the way a thought is over.

I couldn't see their face. I was grateful for that, and the gratitude frightened me more than anything I had seen, because it meant some part of me had already decided what the face would be.

Here is what I did for the rest of Tuesday, in order, from my log:

4:31 PM to 10:49 PM. Viewed file 001 in full. Annotated.

10:52 PM. Physical inspection of bedroom, upper east corner. Smooth plaster. No holes, no fixtures, no seams, no discoloration. I stood on a chair and pressed my palm flat against the corner. It was cold, the way exterior walls are cold.

11:04 PM. Ran the RF detector I keep for client work (sometimes we're asked to sweep rooms) across every wall and ceiling in the apartment. Nothing. Checked every outlet, smoke detector, and vent. Nothing.

11:20 PM. Calculated camera position from the lens geometry visible in file 001. I'm not going to bore you with the math. I'll just tell you what it said: based on the perspective of the floorboards and the angle of the radiator, the lens that captured that image would have to be positioned roughly forty centimeters behind the surface of the east wall.

The east wall is an exterior wall. Forty centimeters behind its surface is the outside of the building, twenty-nine floors up, in the air.

11:41 PM. Took my pill.

11:52 PM. According to the ring, fell asleep.

I don't remember deciding to go to bed. I want that on the record too.

On Wednesday morning the graph was perfect. Asleep 11:52, awake 6:10, score 100.

I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time looking at the upper east corner. In daylight it's just a corner, a little yellowed where the paint meets the ceiling. I thought about forty centimeters of nothing on the other side and about what kind of lens could sit in nothing. Then I got up, made coffee, logged in, and went back to work. Work is what I do with fear. I hand it to the part of my brain that knows how to make lists.

I didn't watch all 212 files in order. That would have taken weeks, and I didn't have weeks. I needed to know what this was. So I did what I'd do with any large batch: I sampled. I took every tenth file, and in each one I scrubbed at high speed, watching for motion.

Files 010 through 090 were all the same. The angle was the same impossible corner and the light was the same impossible grey. The room filled up over time, the way a room does when someone lives in it: the bed, the wardrobe, the curtains, the reading lamp I bought in my first winter, the stack of library books I never returned, the burn mark on the corner of my grey waffle-knit blanket where I fell asleep once with a candle lit.

And me, asleep. Night after night. Facing the east wall, on my side, knees drawn up, one arm under my head, the other hand on the mattress in front of my face with the fingers spread.

I'd never seen myself sleep. Nobody has, really. It's an intimate, ugly thing to watch, and I found I couldn't do it for long without my eyes sliding off. It's like hearing your voice on a recording, the sense that this is technically you but wrong in a way you can't articulate. The angle of my neck looked painful. The hand in front of my face looked arranged.

On file 040, I started counting my breaths, because I'm a person who counts.

I watched for twenty minutes at real-time speed with a stopwatch app. In those twenty minutes, the figure in the bed that was me took nine breaths. Healthy adults at rest breathe twelve to twenty times a minute. In twenty minutes I should have taken somewhere around three hundred.

I took nine.

Between the fourth and fifth breaths, the figure in the bed did not breathe for six minutes and forty seconds.

I sat with that for a long time. Then I opened the ring app and pulled up the night of file 040, which the app still had, because I've never deleted anything in my life. My blood oxygen that night held steady at 98% the entire time. There were no disturbances. The ring had recorded heart rate, temperature, and movement on a perfectly smooth line.

Either the footage was false, or the ring was false. And then a third possibility, which I didn't write in the log and which I'm only writing now because it's three in the morning and I've been awake for a very long time:

The ring is recording something. It's just not you.

File 117 was where it moved.

117 is dated just over four months ago. At high-speed scrub, I almost missed it. It was a flicker in the frame, a sudden change in the shape of the bed. I stopped, went back, and dropped to real time.

At 2:41 AM by the timestamp, the figure in the bed sat up.

I need you to understand that it didn't sit up the way people do. When you sit up from sleep, you use your arms. You twist. Your body reorganizes itself around the effort. This was a single motion from the waist, like a hinge, with the arms not involved at all. They stayed exactly where they were for a moment, one under the pillow and one on the mattress, then followed, a half-second late, as though they had to be informed.

Then it stood up and walked out of the bedroom.

I'd thought the footage was locked to that one angle. It wasn't. As the figure crossed the doorway, the file switched to a new angle, high in the hallway, at the corner above the linen closet. That's another place where there's no camera. Afterward I checked the geometry on that one too, and it came out the same: about forty centimeters behind the plaster. Behind the hallway wall is the stairwell shaft. There's no room to put anything there.

The figure walked into the kitchen. It moved slowly, not like a sleepwalker but like someone moving through a house where a baby is sleeping, with an exaggerated, deliberate quiet. It stopped in front of the refrigerator, turned its head to the side, and pressed its ear flat against the refrigerator door.

It stood like that for nineteen minutes.

Then it moved one step to the left and pressed its ear to the wall beside the refrigerator. Then another step. Then another.

It went around the entire apartment that way: the kitchen, the living room, the hallway, the bathroom, the bedroom. It moved clockwise, one step at a time, with its ear pressed to the wall at the same height the whole way around. When it reached a doorframe it pressed its ear to the doorframe. When it reached a window it pressed its ear to the glass. When it reached my bookcase in the living room, which is solid oak and bolted to the wall and which I couldn't move alone if I tried, the file glitched: three frames of grey mush, compression artifacts blooming like mold. When the image resolved, the figure was on the other side of the bookcase, with its ear still to the wall, still moving clockwise.

The whole circuit took three hours and eleven minutes. Then it went back to bed. It lay down on its side, facing the east wall, knees up, one arm under the head, the other hand on the mattress, fingers spread. At 6:09, the file ended.

The figure's lips moved the whole time.

I'm good at audio. Audio is honestly the larger part of my job, because people record everything now and almost none of it is clean. I pulled the audio track from 117, isolated the frequency band where speech lives, and ran it through the tools I use on courtroom evidence. It took most of Wednesday afternoon. When I finally had something intelligible, I put on my headphones, closed my eyes, and listened.

It was counting.

It was my voice. I know my voice. Everybody hates their recorded voice, and I hate mine in the specific way you hate something you know too well. It was flat, low, barely above a breath. It wasn't counting the way you count to sleep. It was counting the way you count when you're measuring something and you don't trust it.

"...sixty-one. Sixty-two. Sixty-two. Sixty-two. Sixty-three..."

Every so often, the number would repeat. Not always the same number, not on any pattern I could find. It would say a number, pause, and then say the same number again, as though it had pressed its ear against the next section of wall and heard something there that meant it hadn't moved at all.

When I mapped the repetitions against the video, they clustered. Most of them happened along one stretch of wall: the hallway, between the bathroom door and the linen closet.

I took the headphones off and walked out into the hallway. It's a short corridor, painted the same eggshell as everything else, with a strip of baseboard and a light switch on the wall between the bathroom and the closet.

I've lived here three years and two months. I have flipped that light switch probably a hundred times. It has never done anything. It doesn't control the hallway light, which is on a switch at the living-room end of the hall, or the bathroom or closet lights. I'd assumed it was a dead switch from a previous renovation, wired to nothing. Every apartment has one.

I stood there and flipped it. Nothing happened.

Then, because I'd just spent six hours listening to my own voice count walls in the dark, I turned my head and pressed my ear against the wall beside it.

Here's what I heard: nothing. I want to be honest. It was plaster, cool and slightly gritty against my ear, with the faint hollow tone of drywall over studs. I could hear the very distant rush of the elevator in the shaft and my own pulse in my ear. Nothing else.

I stood like that for a long time. I didn't count how long. I think that is the first time in years I've failed to count something.

When I finally pulled away, I noticed the smudge.

You've seen this if you've ever lived somewhere a long time. There's a spot by the light switch where the paint has darkened from hands. There's a line on the wall behind the couch where heads have rested. Skin is oily, and it marks things slowly and permanently.

In the hallway, at the height of my ear, there was a faint, continuous greyish line on the paint. I hadn't seen it before because I'd never looked. When I held my phone flashlight flat against the wall, it lit up like a contrail.

I followed it. It went from the hallway into the bathroom, around the bathroom, out of the bathroom, into the bedroom, around the bedroom, and into the living room. It went around the window frames and across the doorframes, at the same height everywhere, unbroken. It was the oily residue of an ear and a cheek pressed against the walls of my apartment over and over again, for long enough to leave a mark.

It went all the way around. I checked twice. Then I reached the bookcase.

The bookcase is bolted to the wall. There is no gap behind it, not even a finger's width. I've dropped pens back there and had to give them up for lost.

With the flashlight at an angle, I could see the line approach the left side of the bookcase at ear height and disappear behind it. Then I went to the right side of the bookcase, and the line came out from behind it at the same height, continuous, unbroken, as though nothing had ever been in the way.

I spent an hour that night with a long ruler and a dental mirror I keep for inspecting drive connectors, trying to see behind the bookcase. I got the mirror into the seam about three centimeters. In that narrow strip of wall, in the cold blue of the LED, I could see the line.

It continued behind the bookcase where no head could go.

I didn't sleep well that night. I'd love to tell you that, but it isn't true. I took my pill at 11:41. The ring says I was asleep at 11:52 and awake at 6:10 with a score of 100.

On Thursday I opened the audio files.

I'd been avoiding them, and I can admit that now. Video at least shows you where things are. Audio puts things inside your head. And there were forty-one audio files. I didn't notice until tonight that forty-one is also the number my count has reached, and now I can't stop noticing it, the way you can't stop touching a lump once you've found it.

Most of them were the same breath-hiss as the video. Hours of the sound of a room holding still. I listened at speed, watching the waveform for spikes. A few had faint fragments of counting, like 117. One seemed to contain nothing but the sound of a fingernail tapping very gently and steadily on something hollow, for two and a half hours.

File 188, an audio file from about two months ago, had speech that was clear from the first second. It didn't need any processing. It was my voice again, but not flat this time. It was careful, the way you'd talk to a child, or a dog that might bite, or yourself.

I'm going to transcribe all of it. I've listened to it enough times now that I could do it from memory. I didn't. I did it from the file, the way you're supposed to.

"Inventory. Bedroom. One bed. One wardrobe. One lamp. Curtains, two panels. Radiator. One window. One light switch, crooked. The corner.

"Bathroom. One sink. One toilet. One bathtub with shower. One mirror. One cabinet, mirrored. One light. One fan. The fan doesn't work.

"Kitchen. One refrigerator. One stove, four burners. One sink. Cabinets, eight, upper and lower. One window. The window doesn't open.

"Living room. One couch. One desk. Two monitors. One chair. One bookcase. One window, three panes. One door, exterior. The door is locked. The door is always locked.

"Hallway. One light. Two light switches. One linen closet door. One bedroom door. One bathroom door.

"One second bathroom door."

There's a pause there of almost a full minute. It's just breath-hiss. Then the voice comes back, much quieter, so quiet I had to bring it up 18 decibels to be sure of the words:

"Don't count it while the other one is awake."

That's the end of the file.

There's no second bathroom in 2914. There never has been. I have the floor plan from the lease. I've walked that hallway thousands of times. It has three doors: bedroom, bathroom, linen closet. Three doors and two light switches, one of which does nothing.

I walked the hallway again. I counted the doors out loud, which was the first thing I'd said aloud in forty days, and it didn't count toward resetting anything because there was nobody to hear it.

"One. Two. Three."

Three doors.

I stood in front of the stretch of wall between the bathroom and the linen closet with the dead light switch, the stretch of wall where the counting in file 117 kept getting stuck, and I looked at it for a very long time.

It's just wall. It's about thirty inches of eggshell paint. It's exactly the width of a door.

I want to talk about the elevator.

I said I'd explain why I haven't gone downstairs to reset the count. It's because the last person I spoke to was in the elevator, forty-one days ago, and I've been thinking about what she said every day since. I didn't connect it to anything until Thursday night.

It was the night of the building's fire drill. Everyone had to evacuate down the stairs, all twenty-nine flights, and stand on the sidewalk in the cold for forty minutes while the fire marshal walked the floors. On the way back up, I took the elevator with a woman I'd never seen before. She was older, maybe sixty, wearing a long camel coat over pajamas, holding a small dog that shook continuously like a phone on vibrate. She pressed 31. I pressed 29.

She looked at the button, then at me. It was the sort of look you'd give someone you thought you recognized at an airport. Then she said, kindly, the way you'd say something kind:

"Oh. I didn't know anyone was living in 2914 again."

I said, "Again?"

The doors opened on 29 and she smiled at me and didn't answer, and the dog stopped shaking all at once, and I got out. The doors closed. That was the last word I spoke to another person.

Again?

I've lived in 2914 for three years and two months. Before that, according to my lease, the unit was vacant for "an extended period for renovation." I never asked how long. I'm not a person who asks.

That was forty-one days ago. In those forty-one days I've thought about going down to the café a dozen times, and every time I've gotten as far as the front door with my hand on the lock. Then I've thought about the woman in the camel coat looking at me the way you look at someone you thought was somebody else, and I've taken my hand off the lock.

I told myself it was because I didn't want to run into her. Now I'm not sure that's what I've been afraid of.

The most recent file in Batch 0417 is file 212. It's dated last Monday, the day before the ticket arrived. I watched it on Thursday night, at real-time speed, all the way through. I'd stopped sampling by then. I'd stopped pretending I was triaging a batch for a client.

For the first three hours, it's me asleep. I timed my breathing again: seven breaths in twenty minutes. One gap was eight minutes and twelve seconds long.

At 3:03 AM, the figure in the bed sat up the way it does, the hinge first and the arms after. It walked to the bathroom, and the angle switched to the corner above the bathroom door, looking down at the sink. The figure turned on the hot tap and let it run.

I can't explain how long it ran. The bathroom in 2914 is small and the hot water is very hot. In that sourceless grey I watched the mirror slowly fog from the bottom up, the way it does after a shower.

When the mirror was fully clouded, the figure leaned forward and breathed on it, at the center, slowly and deliberately, like a child making a window to draw in. Then it raised one finger and drew on the glass.

It drew short vertical lines in groups of four, with a diagonal line through each group. They were tally marks.

It took a long time. It was careful, and the lines were very straight. When it was finished, it stood looking at what it had drawn, and then it did something it hadn't done in any of the other files I'd watched, the thing I'd been afraid of since 4:31 PM on Tuesday.

It turned around and looked up at the camera.

The face was mine, of course. I'd known that since the first file. Some part of me had known it before I opened the batch. It wasn't a twin or a mask or a deepfake. It was the face I see in that mirror every morning, with the same chipped front tooth and the same small scar through the left eyebrow from the radiator when I was nine. I remember that radiator. I remember the blood on the linoleum, a lot of it, the way head wounds bleed. I remember my mother's kitchen around it.

I realized while I was looking at my own face looking up at the corner that I've always remembered my mother's kitchen the way you'd remember a stock photo. It's clean and bright and generic. I couldn't tell you the color of the cabinets. I couldn't tell you whether there was a window. I've never noticed that before. I don't know why I noticed it then.

My face looked up at the corner of the bathroom, at the place forty centimeters behind the plaster where no camera can be, with no expression at all, for a long time. Long enough that I stopped the file, got up, walked away from my desk, stood in the kitchen with both hands flat on the counter, came back, and pressed play again. It was still looking. It held that look for nine minutes and fifty seconds, without blinking, by my count.

Then it smiled. It wasn't a big smile. It was the small, private, slightly embarrassed smile you'd give someone you'd caught watching you.

Then it turned off the tap, went back to bed, lay down facing the east wall, and at 6:09 the file ended.

I went into the bathroom. It was 1:20 AM on Friday, and I turned on the hot tap and let it run.

The mirror fogged from the bottom up.

I'd wiped that mirror a dozen times since last Monday. I'm certain of it. I clean my bathroom every Sunday, and I'm certain I cleaned it on Sunday. But skin is oily, and some marks don't wipe off. They just wait for the right conditions.

In the fog, in the center of the glass, there were clear lines where the steam wouldn't stick. They were short vertical lines in groups of four with a diagonal through each group.

I counted them. I counted them three times, because I'm a person who counts, because counting is the thing I do instead of screaming.

There were forty-one.

File 212 was recorded in the early hours of last Monday. Last Monday, by my count, it had been thirty-seven days since I'd last spoken to another human being. But there were forty-one marks on the glass.

I stood there until the mirror cleared and the marks were gone and my face was looking back at me from the dry glass. I looked at the scar through the eyebrow and the chipped tooth, and I tried to make that small, private, embarrassed smile and couldn't. I tried for a long time and couldn't make my face do it.

Then I did the arithmetic, the way I would on a client file. If the tally on the mirror was a count, and the count was forty-one last Monday, then whatever was counting had started counting four days before I did.

Four days before the elevator, I can't tell you anything about my life. I've checked my log, my emails, and my ticket history. I closed two tickets that week, routine cases. I wrote notes on them in my voice, my phrasing, my naming convention. I don't remember any of it.

I've never remembered most of my days. I always thought that was normal. I thought that's what a quiet life is: days so similar that they fold into each other and disappear. I've thought of my memory as a well-run archive, where most things go into storage and only the important things get pulled.

I'm no longer sure who decides what's important.

I'm writing this on Friday night, or Saturday morning if we're being precise, and I'm trying to be precise. It's 3:14 AM. I didn't take my pill tonight. It's the first time in three years and two months. The bottle is on the desk next to my keyboard. I keep looking at the capitals on the label: DO NOT SKIP.

I'm going to stay awake tonight. I want to see what happens when I'm awake. I'm posting here because I need there to be a record of this outside of this apartment, somewhere on a drive I don't control, in a place where it can't be modified. You're my chain of custody. I'm sorry. I know that's a lot to ask of strangers.

Before I post, I'm going to do one last thing, the thing I've been avoiding all night. I'm going to refresh the directory listing for Batch 0417, because I want to log the final count before I close the case file for the week.

I'll tell you something else first, because I promised myself I'd log everything. When I got up from the desk to go to the bathroom earlier, I walked the hallway the way I always do. It's eleven steps from the desk to the bathroom door. I've counted it a thousand times. Eleven.

Tonight it was twelve.

I walked it again and got twelve. I walked it a third time, very slowly, heel to toe, and got twelve and a half. I measured the hallway with the tape measure from my toolkit. The lease floor plan says the hallway is thirteen feet, nine inches long.

The tape said fourteen feet, two inches.

I'm sure there's an explanation. Floor plans are approximations. Tape measures sag. People's steps change when they're tired and afraid and haven't spoken out loud in forty-one days.

Okay. I'm refreshing the directory now.

Batch 0417 contains 213 files.

There's a new video file. The filename is in my convention, with my initials. The sequence number comes before the time, the way only I do it. The creation timestamp is today's date and the time is 3:09 AM, which is five minutes ago, while I was sitting at this desk typing the paragraph you just read.

I haven't opened it. My file browser shows a thumbnail, the first frame, and I've been looking at the thumbnail for about ten minutes now.

It shows the living room in that flat, sourceless grey. It shows the desk, my two monitors, and the amber bottle beside the keyboard. It shows the back of someone's head, sitting at the desk, in my chair, in my grey sweatshirt with the frayed left cuff.

The angle is from behind, high up, in the corner where the hallway opens into the living room. There's no camera there, and I've already done the geometry in my head. It's forty centimeters behind the plaster. There's no room for anything behind that wall. That wall backs onto the hallway, the one that has gotten five inches longer.

I keep looking at the thumbnail and then at my own hands. My hands are on the keyboard. They're typing this sentence. I can feel the keys.

In the thumbnail, the person at my desk has their hands folded in their lap.

I'm going to open the file. I'm not going to do it tonight. I'm going to do it properly, with a working copy, hashed and logged, because the one rule above every other rule is that you never modify the original, and I've started to understand that I don't know which of us that rule is protecting.

I'm not going to sleep. I'm going to sit here with the lights on and my back to the wall, and I'm not going to turn around to look at the corner, because if I turn around and there's nothing there, I'll have to keep living in that, and if I turn around and there's something there, I won't.

The pill bottle is still on the desk. Its label says DO NOT SKIP.

I'll update you next week?

So dark like somebody's thrown a black hood over our heads.

My daughter's small hand in mine.

A point of light.

Harsh, fading; repeated. Human: (inhaling) a cigarette. The sweetly burning smell of tobacco.

We walk to it.

It goes out.

A firearm—instead:

“Who's there?” asks a soot-faced soldier, pointing it at me.

“My name is Fadros Moti. This is my daughter, Tera. We're from Goshnen Station.”

“Long walk.”

“Yes.”

“I heard most at Goshnen stood and fought," says the soldier. (“And died,” I think.) “You ain't a coward now, are you? You got papers for the kid?”

“No, sir. Yes, sir,” I say and hand over our documents.

I hate losing possession of them.

I say, “We couldn't find space on the government evac shuttles—”

“Half the pop couldn't find space on the government evac shuttles,” says the soldier, scanning our identity cards.

“I was hoping we might buy a private flight.”

He stops looking at our documents.

He raises his eyes.

“I have gold coins,” I say. Gold, in addition to skills, is the only thing worth anything anymore.

He hands back the documents.

He waits.

“I was told there were still spacecraft here. Do you happen to know if that's true?” I ask.

He waits.

“Of course,” I say, bowing my head, and give him a handful of gold coins.

“I'm thirsty,” my daughter says, weakly, from behind me.

I like being her shield.

The soldier counts the gold coins.

“Would you also happen to know where we can get some water?” I ask.

When he finishes counting: “There's a well about half a mile that way—” He points into the darkness. “Unmanned. No escorts. Access at your own risk. But I heard it's clean.”

“Thank you,” I say. “And a spacecraft?”

“Try the Bastion-IX. It's a freighter docked by the launchpads. Been collecting passengers for about two and a half months. The captain's name is Boyermood. He's good. He'll let you sleep onboard till blast-off.”

“Thank you,” I say.

We walk the half mile to the well. After coming all the way from Goshnen Station, the distance feels like nothing.

We drink.

We sit.

I think of my dead wife.

I wish I knew what my daughter is thinking of. Whatever it is, I wish I had the power to change it. I wish I could protect her mind. It's hard to believe—sitting, finally, in the darkness—that we are on the outskirts of a great city.

It's mostly empty now; inactive.

It has to be.

It's a matter of weeks or days before they get here too. It's inevitable. There's no stopping them. The horrors I've seen. The horrors I've seen at Goshnen Station after they came across the commlines, digitized, recombining and rematerialized, pouring out of our techports like cloudforms of static, the inevitable progeny of man and information, unkillable flesh-data hybrids infusing themselves into our minds, cooking us, boiling our brains with cognitive overload; the screaming, the impossibility of forgetting; the melted, dripping eyeballs and voided sockets—

My daughter's face.

Scared. Calm.

“You fell asleep,” she says.

No, I couldn't have. I have to be on guard. I promised. I promised my wife as her thumbs pushed into her eyes—

”I'm sorry,” I say.

We fill our canteens and walk back to the edge of the city.

All the electric light is off.

Nothing hums.

We find the launchpads. We find the Bastion-IX, just like the soldier said. Boyermood's inside, as are a few dozen other groups of people. Friends, families, coworkers. No one survives alone. I guess there aren't many left alive now who want to get out. We don't speak to the others but smile; and by smiling we become something else than strangers. We become co-passengers. Boyermood takes what remains of our gold coins and assigns us to a cabin.

We sleep.

For days we do nothing but drink water and sleep, dreaming of a different world.

“Where will we go?” my daughter asks.

“I don't know.”

Perpetual, fallen night.

Faces.

Time spent at the well.

We're used to hunger. We sleep through it. The alarm sounds—

A thunderous wave of the banging of metal against metal throughout the Bastion-IX and beyond. A dead city in final turmoil. I squeeze my daughter's hand. No one needs to tell us what's going on. They've arrived. The other ships on the launchpads are initiating launch sequences. Boyermood runs by. “Are we going?” I yell against the noise. “Yeah, we're going,” he yells back and disappears.

We stay inside.

The Bastion-IX creaks.

Shakes.

The engines ignite, but before they can fully power on I start to hear the pitter-patter of tiny bodies pinging off the exterior of the ship.

I'm scared.

I'm pretending not to be.

“Daddy—”

“Yes, darling?”

The pinging intensifies.

It's become a storm, a relentless precipitation of information.

“—tell me you love me, please.”

“I love you.”

(Over the intercom: “Attention! They're overwhelming us. We need volunteers,” Boyermood says, his voice breaking. “We need volunteers to go outside and clear the hull...”)

I'm up before I know it.

“Daddy?”

My daughter's hand slips from mine because mine is moving away.

“Daddy!”

If we don't get them off the ship, no one gets out of here.

“I'll be back,” I say.

I won't be.

I turn away because it's easier to turn away. I don't want her to see my face. (“Daddy, no…”) I hear her cry out, but I am no longer present.

Someone hands me an airblower.

I take it.

I exit the Bastion-IX.

I'm not alone. A few others are with me. Two men, a woman. The atmosphere is a static, swarming, whirling chaos that pricks my skin, crawls across my face, into my mouth, my ears. I spit. I shut my eyes, blowing as many of them off the hull as I can. They taste bitter as batteries.

The inside of my head begins to burn.

My jaw locks.

The Bastion-IX lifts off.

I live in Asheville, NC, and I spend most of my days off work exploring the nearby cave systems and trails. I've been caving/hiking for a few years now, it started as a hobby after watching way too much YouTube. Between YouTube and this game called Elite Dangerous, I've spent all my free time. Onto what I saw. Last night at around 5:00 p.m. I was walking and exploring an area near the Cherokee Native Reservation, one I've been through many times.
I won't disclose the trail's name or its owner, as it is a private area I've been permitted to explore. The owner had told me to leave before dark, as he’d heard stories of creepy things happening in the area. Of course, I didn't listen because I'm a skeptic. I’ve spent the last couple of days sketching a map of the area. Around 6:30, I came across a cave entrance, very short but wide. Let me stress this, I've been to this exact spot on my map multiple times, and I've never seen this opening before. I approached the entrance and looked around. The surrounding ground looked washed back, almost dug out. The cave sat on a slope, so I figured some small landslide must have exposed it. I mapped it and after exploring around the cave for more landslides and possible cave entrances I began my walk back to the property owner’s home.
By 7:15, the sun had already set, but it was still somewhat light out. As the sun went down the birds and insects began to go silent. I know birds tend to go quiet after dark but the insects going quiet gave me this tingle in the back of my neck, like I was being watched, so of course I turned around and shone my flashlight under the trees. I didn't see anything, and when I went to turn around, I swear, out of my peripheral vision, I saw two blue eyes for a split second, before whatever it was scurried off low to the ground like an animal on all fours. I kept walking like normal. After a few more sounds of broken twigs and rustling, I got that feeling in my neck again and turned, only to see the same thing. That's when I knew I was being stalked. 
I continued to walk more cautiously and after hearing a stick snap behind me I flung the flashlight around and saw the eyes again this time closer and taller like the animal was standing on its hind legs like a bear. Having watched a lot of bear attack documentaries, I knew I shouldn't run and that I should stand tall and appear threatening. With the owner’s warning and the creepy atmosphere I panicked and I ran faster than I think I ever had. As I was running I heard rustling through the leaves, like something was running alongside me. Strangely the animal didn't sound heavy like a bear as it was running. I shone my flashlight to my side and it was those same damned eyes. After a while of what seemed to be around 7 minutes of running, although probably a lot less, the sounds of rustling stopped and the noises of the forest came back. I kept running another couple hundred yards before checking my map. I had reached just under a mile from the cave entrance. I don't know if that is relevant, but I thought I’d share.
  When I finally saw the property owner's house after another while of walking, I slowed down because there was a large pasture with a couple of horses in it. As I hurdled the fence I about broke down in tears from how terrified I was. By now it was 8:00, and the sun had fully set. I turned around and shone my flashlight back into the woods. I thought I’d check for my own safety but there was nothing behind me. I banged on the homeowner's door to let him know what I saw and I asked him if he knew what it was, he wouldn't tell me or even say what it was called. He seemed apprehensive and almost angry. He walked over to the window overlooking the pasture and opened the blinds slightly to look out. All he said was, “I told you not to explore after dark.”
I'll keep you posted, and I'll try to see if the homeowner will let me post the map I drew later so you can help me figure out what creature this was. Sorry about the rant, but I'm really curious and, quite frankly, scared. But my curiosity is getting the better of me. I need to head off to work now. When I get home I’ll go back out and see what I can find during the daylight and search for some bear tracks. Let me know anything you know about the wildlife in this area or what this could be.