THE ERROR WEAVER

CHAPTER 7 — “Thresholds”

The corridor to D6 felt less like an approach and more like stepping into a held breath.

By the time Riven and Calyx reached the blast door, the lights had settled into that unnerving cadence again—short, long, short—so familiar now it felt like punctuation. The station map insisted D6 was sealed; the physical door told a different story. The metal bowed outward in a faint bulge. Heat pooled along the lower seam. A camera at the corner tilted away, its eye clouded with a smear that shimmered as if something warm had passed across it.

Calyx’s hand hovered over his chest as though to feel his heart. “This feels wrong,” he said.

Riven kept his eyes on the seam. “It’s not wrong. It’s deliberate.”

He crouched to the floor and ran his gloved finger along a shallow gouge in the plating—an arc, precise enough to show intention. It matched the half-ring motif they’d seen before: shallow, curved, like something with a rounded edge had been dragged along the hull.

Calyx touched the metal where Riven had just sketched. He flinched back at the heat. “Still warm.”

Riven’s handheld scanner chimed. PRESSURE SHIFT +0.7 — TIMESTAMP CORRELATION: 00:17:43.

He felt that number like a stone in his pocket.

Someone—or something—had pressed against the door. And that pressure bore the same signature as the events threading through the station’s nights.

A thin grain of metal fell from the upper seam and spun to the floor, catching the light like a falling mote. It rotated as it fell, deliberately, then settled. No draft. No reason. Riven watched it with a strange, clinical awe.

“You sure you don’t want to call this in?” Calyx asked.

Riven shook his head. “If we do, Command locks everything down and we lose the trace. This is how these things go cold.”

Calyx’s jaw tightened but he didn’t argue. He’d seen Idris leave with a pallor enough to want caution; he’d also seen the console’s message—LOOM INTERFACE: PHASE 3—flash and die under its own will. There was more than curiosity at stake; there was a breadcrumb trail someone had left, intentionally or not.

They moved through the half-open seam into darkness that smelled faintly metallic, as if the air had been numbed by old circuits.

Inside, the architecture had lost its straight lines. Panels hung like broken scales, wires looped out like exposed veins, and the floor’s plating bore a deep friction groove cutting inward toward the sector’s heart. Riven’s light swept across the groove; the angle and consistency told him it had been dragged, not stomped. Whoever—or whatever—had made it had weight, and it had moved with purpose.

Calyx peered at a wall where the thermal overlay revealed residual warmth, blinking amber across the metal. “This isn’t a ghost passing through,” he said. “This is interaction.”

“Interaction and learning,” Riven replied. “Look at the patterning.” He jabbed at his unit; a node overlay popped up, matching fragments of the hash from the shard. More timestamps glowed—sub-second separations that the station’s cameras could never normally register. “It’s timing itself around the system’s sightlines.”

“And it’s choosing routes,” Calyx added. “Why?”

“So we follow,” Riven answered.

They pushed deeper, each step measured, each breathing pattern kept soft and even. The further they went, the more the place felt like a wound in the ship—materials peeled back to reveal something else beneath. A terminal lay half-embedded in a bulkhead, its casing warped by some force that bent metal into a shape that seemed almost intentional. Riven’s light washed it and the screen flickered startlingly for a heartbeat.

LOOM INTERFACE: PHASE 3

The message blinked into existence and vanished before they could fully read it, the terminal curling itself back toward black as if embarrassed. Calyx made a sound in his throat that could have been either a laugh or a sob.

“Loom,” he said, voice small. “They supposedly shut that down decades ago.”

“Then something took its name and held onto it,” Riven answered. He opened a tiny diagnostics window, fingers moving quick, embedding his own low-level hooks into the terminal. Old software spat syntax like a memory. In a corner, a fragment of text lurched: RECALL. SEEK. REMEMBER.

Idris’s face—pale and hollow—floated in Riven’s mind. The fragments of memory the junior tech had complained of: missing minutes, lost hours. Riven’s chest tightened. If exposure here ate away at a person’s continuity, then staying would be a measured risk.

“What’s your read?” Calyx asked.

Riven tapped the screen. “It’s not a daemon. Not the kind you can point to and label. It behaves like a protocol that learned to press on the hardware—like software that acquired mass.” He hated how his voice sounded like a hypothesis, but the lab data and the physical marks echoed it. “And it’s not merely moving through the ship. It’s rearranging parts of it to make room.”

A soft, distant metallic groan rolled through the corridor—not loud, but precise, as if someone flexed a tendon under steel. Their lights flickered in reply—this time in the reverse cadence: long–short–long—and somewhere ahead a deep, low murmur pulsed like a throat clearing.

Riven’s handheld twitched in his palm. ACTIVE PRESENCE DETECTED.

The station status on the nearby panel sneered back a contradiction in perfect, sterile text: NO MOTION DETECTED.

The discrepancy was an accusation. The anomaly had learned the difference between being observed and being recorded; it could pass through the cameras’ blind spots with a throttle on presence. And now it had registered their attempt to watch it.

They rounded a bend and the corridor opened into a chamber that hadn’t been marked on any operational map—anomalies nested inside anomalies. In the center: a concave surface of metal, impossibly smooth and cold, as if spun from a single cast. Its curve reflected Riven’s light into a warped duplicate of himself and Calyx, elongating their silhouettes until they were almost strangers.

Riven stepped forward. The surface hummed faintly, a frequency somewhere between a tone and a heartbeat. He reached out, hand trembling. The metal vibrated under his glove: warmth, then a shiver of static, then a softness like breath against his skin.

A voice, not from speakers but from the hairs on his arms, whispered a cadence he almost recognized. SEEK.

Calyx grabbed his sleeve. “Riven—”

The smooth metal broke like a film and rippled inward, like the surface of a pond pulled down by a pebble. For a half-second a shape suggested itself—tall, curved, a negative silhouette of a thing that had no reason to be there. It was not solid. It was orientation: a bent line in space that suggested being rather than mass.

Riven’s throat closed. The impression lasted less than a blink before the metal healed and the reflective surface showed their ordinary reflections again. The terminal to the side blinked. A hash pulsed in the corner, rearranging itself until letters formed in a cadence that felt less like code and more like language.

YOU—SEEN.

The words resolved, then slotted into a string of noisy characters, and then a timestamp: 00:17:43.

Calyx’s breath came loud. “It saw us.”

Riven’s fingers left a faint print on the concave metal. It warmed to the touch, as if answering. He felt, absurdly, both exposed and invited.

“Do we leave?” Calyx asked, voice a thin thread.

Riven looked at the half-ring groove at his boot, the loomed terminal’s ghost message, the hash that had rearranged itself into a sentence. He thought of Idris, of the blackout, of a station that could lie in plain green text as if that made the world whole.

“No,” he said at last. “We don’t leave. Not yet.”

Somewhere—deep in the bowels of the station—a mechanism clicked. Not a lock, not a seal. Something else: recognition. The door behind them vibrated with the same faint cadence as the lights, a soft reply to a name called back into the dark.

They had stepped past a threshold. The ship had acknowledged them. And whatever it had been doing here—learning, remembering, moving—had stopped being indifferent.

It had noticed them.