CHAPTER 15.1 — “Echoes in the Logs”
965 Words
The station felt almost too normal.
Eli walked the length of the main corridor, the overhead lights humming with their usual steady rhythm. Not flickering. Not dimming. Just… normal. A manufactured normalcy that wrapped itself around the walls like a blanket meant to calm a child after a nightmare.
But he knew better now.
The sealed lab still pressed against the back of his thoughts—the cold, the light, the room that had awakened like a creature startled from sleep.
And the line:
THE FIRST ERROR WAS NOT A MALFUNCTION.
He wasn’t sure which unsettled him more: the message itself, or the fact that someone had erased everything else.
Maren met him at the terminal hub, a tablet tucked under her arm. “The system finished reconstructing the logs,” she said. “Or… whatever it thinks reconstruction means.”
Eli’s brow lifted. “Meaning?”
“Meaning there are zero traces of our access to the sealed lab. None. No environmental readings. No electrical variance. No security timestamp.” She exhaled sharply. “It’s like the system is pretending the entire hour didn’t exist.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Apparently it is.”
She handed him the tablet.
He scanned through the logs—clean to the point of being unnatural. The system had never been this tidy, this precise. Data always left fragments, echoes, residues. But not today.
“Someone wiped this manually,” he murmured.
Maren shook her head. “No manual wipe is this perfect. Even Command couldn’t make it look this seamless.”
Which meant…
“It wiped itself,” Eli said.
Neither of them liked the sound of that.
The List of Names
“Come with me,” Eli said, motioning to the auxiliary database in the side wing.
They entered a quiet room lined with narrow data towers humming in cold synchronization. He keyed in an authorization sequence, then pulled up the access eligibility register—a list of personnel historically cleared for sealed lab entry.
Three names flickered onto the display.
Maren frowned. “These can’t be right.”
Eli read them carefully:
Dr. Paxton Rohe — reassigned off-station three months ago.
Eira Halden — currently in a medical wing on the opposite side of the station.
Luthen Cade — classified as inactive personnel…
status: removed from duty one year prior.
None of them matched the timeline.
None of them should have been anywhere near the sealed lab.
But the timestamps had been scrubbed so aggressively that the system couldn’t distinguish whether any of these people had accessed the door recently.
“Look at this,” Maren said, pointing to the access metadata. “The user ID field isn’t just missing. It’s overwritten with a null designation.”
Eli looked up at her. “Meaning someone didn’t want to be identified.”
“Or,” Maren said slowly, “meaning whatever accessed the lab… didn’t have an identity.”
The quiet that followed felt heavier than the silence in the sealed lab itself.
Echoes of the Past
Eli leaned against the console, a slow breath filling his lungs. “The blackout event,” he said softly. “Remember what the reports said?”
“That it was a grid collapse. Electromagnetic surge. Random failure.” She paused. “Why?”
“Because the energy signature we felt yesterday… it felt familiar. Not identical, but close. Like the echo of an echo.”
She didn’t dismiss him this time.
Her voice softened. “If this is connected… then whatever caused the blackout never really went dormant.”
“Or never really left.”
The Second Manifold Clue
Maren’s tablet chimed.
A new reconstruction file appeared—a fragment salvaged from one of the peripheral storage nodes. Not a full module. Not even a working backup.
Just forty-two seconds of encoded signal.
The waveform pulsed irregularly—like a mechanical heartbeat trying to mimic something alive.
“Should we decode it?” Maren asked.
Eli hesitated. “Play it at low volume.”
She tapped the screen.
A soft sound filled the room—distant, rhythmic, not quite mechanical, not quite organic. A breathing pattern that did not belong to any known machine. Or any known human.
The hairs at the back of Eli’s neck rose.
“What is that?” Maren whispered.
“I think…” He swallowed. “I think it’s something we weren’t supposed to hear.”
Halfway through the sample, the audio distorted. A harsh scrape. A rising pitch. Something like static trying to form a word.
Then silence.
The file ended abruptly.
Eli let the room settle before speaking. “Someone left this behind.”
“Left it behind for who?” Maren asked.
He didn’t answer.
The False Explanation
A notification pinged across every terminal in the room.
SYSTEM ALERT: ENERGY DISTURBANCE LOGGED.
CAUSE: EXTERNAL MAGNETIC FIELD FLUCTUATION.
STATUS: RESOLVED.
Maren scoffed. “That’s their explanation?”
Eli stared at the message, jaw tightening. “It’s a lie. And not even a good one.”
Another message blinked onto the corner of the screen—tiny, almost invisible:
Data integrity compromised.
1 process active without designation.
Maren frowned. “What process? There’s nothing running.”
Eli stepped closer to the terminal. His fingers hovered over the keys.
“Something is running,” he said quietly. “It just doesn’t want us to know its name.”
The screen flickered once—brief, subtle.
A ripple of static rolled across the monitors, vanishing as quickly as it appeared.
Maren looked at him, eyes tense. “Eli… what if the system isn’t just malfunctioning?”
Eli inhaled slowly, letting the breath anchor him before the next step.
“What if,” he said, “it’s trying to talk to us?”
- Writer
