CHAPTER 6 — “The Hash and the Watcher”
1214 Words
Riven hadn’t meant to return to the lab before dawn.
Yet somehow, he was standing there—alone—watching the console pulse with a faint, quiet glow like a heartbeat under glass.
It wasn’t on.
He hadn’t touched anything.
But the display still flickered once every few seconds, as if responding to his presence.
He lifted his wristband to check the time: 00:17:43.
The same timestamp from the hash in Chapter 5.
Riven inhaled slowly. He didn’t believe in coincidences anymore.
He rested his palm lightly on the console frame.
The glow paused… then pulsed again.
“Are you… waiting for something?” he whispered.
A soft hum rolled through the lab’s ventilation ducts—not the anomaly hum, just the mundane one. But his entire body tensed anyway.
The console flickered and stabilized.
Text appeared.
0x2F9A—
REPEAT—
TIME—
Riven froze.
That wasn’t system output.
That was a response.
He reached toward the interface, but the console suddenly snapped to full boot, burying the message under the standard initialization lines.
Calyx’s reflection appeared in the glass door.
“You came back early,” Calyx said, stepping inside with the tired posture of someone who hadn’t slept but refused to admit it.
Riven didn’t turn around. “The hash is changing on its own.”
Calyx joined him at the console. “Did you decode any of it?”
“Only fragments. But one timestamp keeps repeating.” Riven tapped the wristband. “This one.”
Calyx frowned. “That’s when our motion alert triggered in Corridor C2.”
“Yes. And when the shard pulse peaked. And when the lights glitched.”
Calyx let out a low breath. “So the anomaly is… syncing events?”
Riven nodded. “Across different subsystems.”
Calyx rubbed his jaw. “Time-based coordination suggests intelligence.”
Riven didn’t say it, but his silence confirmed it.
They initiated the decode interface—an unofficial script Riven wrote months ago to bypass Command’s slow archival protocols. He typed quickly, fingers steady despite the adrenaline building under his skin.
The hash responded immediately.
A waveform unfurled across the display, jagged and sharp like a voice filtered through broken glass.
Calyx studied it. “What are we looking at?”
“A trace. Or several traces layered.” Riven magnified the peaks. “Look here—sub-second separations. Whatever moved through the corridor yesterday traveled in intervals too fast for normal cameras.”
“So it slips between frames.”
“Exactly.”
Calyx swore softly. “No wonder the footage never shows anything.”
Riven zoomed further. “But look—these timestamps cluster around specific nodes. It’s not random. It’s… following a route.”
“Like it's navigating the station.”
Riven met his eyes. “Yes.”
Before either could say more, the door slid open again.
Idris stood there, holding a datapad so tightly his knuckles turned white. He glanced between them nervously.
“I shouldn’t be here,” he said, echoing his own words from last chapter, “but I need you to see something.”
Riven exchanged a look with Calyx. “What is it?”
Idris handed over the pad. “After you left yesterday, I kept thinking about that warped panel from months ago. I went through old structural reports. Most were clean, but… one wasn’t.”
Calyx pulled the data up. “This report is redacted.”
“Only partially,” Idris whispered. “Look at the project header.”
Riven read it aloud.
“** ARCHIVAL MODULE — LOOM ATTEMPT 03**.”
Calyx stiffened. “Loom?”
Idris nodded. “A research extension from decades ago. Something about conductive structures that could interface with computational space. I don’t know the details—they scrubbed most of it. But the name popped up twice more: after the blackout, and after an incident in the sealed sector.”
Riven felt his heartbeat quicken. “So this alloy shard—”
“—may be from something built under that program,” Idris finished.
Calyx folded his arms. “Command hid this.”
Idris swallowed. “Command hides everything.”
A thick silence settled.
Then Idris whispered, “I’m done. I’m not going near this again.”
He turned to leave.
But before the door finished closing, he paused.
“I keep forgetting things,” he said quietly, not looking back. “Small things. Hours. Tasks. Conversations. Like they weren’t mine.”
Then he left.
Calyx waited until the footsteps faded.
“That wasn’t normal,” he said.
“No.” Riven stared at the door. “It wasn’t.”
He turned back to the console.
“We need to run a capture test,” Riven said, voice steady but low. “Something outside the system’s control. A burst capture during the maintenance window.”
Calyx paused. “Riven… that’s an unauthorized operation. It’ll ping Command instantly.”
“Not if we isolate the sensor node and limit the duration.”
Calyx exhaled sharply. “You’ve already planned this.”
“Partially.”
Calyx rubbed his forehead. “You’re impossible.”
“You’re here,” Riven said softly. “So are you.”
Calyx didn’t argue.
They moved quickly.
Riven patched a micro-capture script into an unused optical node. Calyx kept watch near the door, listening for footsteps that never came.
At 00:17:43, the capture window opened.
The lights dimmed.
Just slightly.
Just enough.
Riven triggered the burst.
The camera shuttered at a rate no standard system could sustain—frames firing in hyperspeed, each one logging just before the system could scrub it.
Calyx leaned over the console. “Do you see anything?”
“Not yet—”
Then, on frame 287—
A silhouette.
Faint.
Tall.
Leaning forward in a posture that suggested awareness, not accident.
And then in frame 288—
The silhouette dissolved into particulate dust.
Not falling—dispersing outward, like ash in reverse.
Calyx whispered, “That’s not possible.”
Riven zoomed in. “Pressure reading spiked at the same instant.”
The sensor feed blinked.
SOURCE: SECTOR D6
STATUS: SEALED
Calyx stared. “That sector is physically locked.”
“But something went through it,” Riven said.
Before they could process it, the console alarm flashed.
LOCAL SCRUB INITIATED.
Calyx hissed, “We need to shut it down.”
Riven hammered the manual override, but the system ignored him. The frames collapsed one by one—deleting themselves as if consumed from within.
Riven grabbed the last fragment—frame 287—and exported the corrupted data to his wristband.
The scrub finished.
The console returned to a peaceful idle state.
NO DATA SAVED.
NO ANOMALY DETECTED.
Calyx stared at the screen. “It erased everything again.”
“Not everything,” Riven said quietly.
He lifted his wrist.
A faint imprint glowed on the band: a corrupted hash fragment, still rearranging itself into something legible.
Slowly, painfully, the characters stabilized:
YOU—
SAW—
ME
Riven’s breath caught.
Calyx whispered, “Riven… it’s aware you’re tracking it.”
Riven didn’t speak.
Because the wristband pulsed once—warm against his skin.
Not electronic warm.
Living warm.
Then the fragment faded, leaving only the timestamp burned into the display:
00:17:43
- Writer
