III
We met him in person. My recommendation.
"You can't read someone through a screen," I told Marcus during the planning session. "Not really. And whatever's happening here, it requires presence."
Marcus agreed, though for different reasons. He wanted to watch for tells — the micro-expressions that betrayed deception, the body language that contradicted spoken words. He'd caught two hoaxers that way, people whose stories had been technically consistent but whose physical presence had radiated something off. He believed in the legibility of liars.
I wasn't sure what I believed anymore. But I knew that screens flattened things. Reduced them. And this case already felt like it was slipping through the gaps in our usual frameworks.
• • •
Thomas Ashworth lived in a mid-rise apartment building in what used to be called the arts district — back when there were enough working artists to justify the name. Now it was just another neighborhood of converted lofts and subsidized housing, populated by people who'd been displaced by one economic transition or another. The creative class, we'd been called once. Now we were just another demographic cohort, aging out of relevance.
The lobby was clean but worn. A security desk that hadn't been staffed in years. Mailboxes with half the nameplates missing. The elevator smelled like someone had recently used it to move furniture, or possibly to live in.
"Charming," Alan muttered, documenting everything with his glasses. The Bureau required full records of all field investigations. Liability, he'd explained once. As if liability were a god that demanded constant sacrifice.
Thomas's apartment was on the seventh floor. I knocked. We waited.
The man who opened the door wasn't what I'd expected.
I'd pictured someone fragile. Unwell, perhaps. His profile suggested isolation bordering on dysfunction — two months of heavy stream usage, minimal outside contact, the pattern we saw in people who were losing their grip on physical reality. I'd prepared myself for someone who wouldn't quite meet my eyes, who would speak in the rambling cadences of the chronically immersed.
The man in front of me was tired, yes. Deep lines around his eyes, the pallor of someone who didn't get outside much. But his gaze was clear and steady. He looked at the four of us standing in his hallway, took our measure with a writer's attention to detail, and I watched him understand exactly what we were before anyone said a word.
He looked at us the way a fox looks at hounds — calculating distance, assessing threat, preparing to run.
"Dr. Chen," I said. "We spoke on the phone."
"You said it was routine." His voice was quiet. Controlled. The voice of someone who'd learned to keep his reactions close. "Four people isn't routine."
Marcus stepped forward, already extending his hand, already performing confidence and authority. He was good at this part — the reassurance, the professional warmth that was supposed to put subjects at ease. "Mr. Ashworth, I'm Dr. Webb. We're simply here to understand your experiences better. Nothing you've done wrong. The Bureau monitors the stream for anomalies, and your usage patterns flagged some interesting data. We'd like to learn more."
Thomas looked at Marcus's hand. Took it. Let it go.
"You're here because of what I found."
Not a question. Marcus's smile didn't waver, but I saw him recalibrate. This wasn't a fragile man who'd lost touch with reality. This was someone who'd been waiting for us, who'd known we would come eventually, who'd had time to prepare.
"Why don't we come in," I said, trying to soften the institutional weight of our presence. "And you can tell us what you think you found."
• • •
His apartment was small but not neglected. That surprised me too. The profile had suggested someone retreating from life, but this space showed signs of active habitation. A kitchen with dishes drying by the sink. A coffee maker with fresh grounds. Books — physical books — lining one wall, their spines cracked and worn from actual reading.
I found myself cataloging the titles as we entered. Asimov. Clarke. Le Guin. Lem. The classics of science fiction, the writers who'd asked big questions and followed them to their logical conclusions. Mixed in with them were newer volumes — philosophy of mind, quantum mechanics for lay readers, books about consciousness and its discontents.
He'd been researching. Trying to understand.
"Please, sit," Thomas said, gesturing toward a worn sofa and two chairs arranged around a coffee table. The furniture had the look of pieces that had been chosen for comfort rather than style, that had been lived in for years. "Can I get anyone water? Tea?"
"We're fine," Marcus said, already taking the dominant chair, positioning himself to control the conversation. Alan settled beside him, glasses recording. Yuki perched on the edge of the sofa, her body language radiating barely contained anticipation.
I remained standing. Something had caught my attention.
Through an open door, I glimpsed his study. And the wall.
Marcus saw it too. His eyebrows rose slightly — the closest he came to showing surprise. He glanced at me, then back at the doorway, making a decision.
"Mr. Ashworth. What's in that room?"
Thomas's expression didn't change, but something shifted behind his eyes. A door closing. A decision being made about how much to reveal.
"My notes," he said. "About what I found in the stream."
"May we see them?"
Yuki was already moving toward the study, drawn like a magnet finding north. Thomas watched her go, and I saw something in his face that looked almost like relief. As if he'd been carrying something alone for too long, and even skeptical attention was better than isolation.
"Yes," he said. "I think you'd better."
• • •
The wall was overwhelming up close.
Hundreds of pages, printed and handwritten, connected by string and tape in patterns that seemed random at first glance but revealed structure the longer you looked. Fragments of text — passages from the stories he'd flagged, I realized, transcribed by hand. Diagrams that looked almost mathematical, circles and spirals and branching trees. Photographs of his screen, capturing moments he'd found significant. And everywhere, notes in a cramped but legible hand, questions and observations and theories layered over each other like geological strata.
It looked like madness. It also looked like method. The two weren't always distinguishable.
"This is your analysis," Marcus said. Not asking.
"Such as it is." Thomas stood in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest. Defensive, but not apologetic. "I'm not a scientist. I don't have your training or your tools. I'm just trying to understand what I'm seeing."
"And what are you seeing, Mr. Ashworth?"
The question was a trap. I'd watched Marcus do this before — invite the subject to overreach, to make claims that could be dismantled. Give them enough rope to hang themselves with their own grandiosity.
Thomas didn't take the bait.
"I don't know." He met Marcus's eyes steadily. "That's why I kept notes. That's why I kept going back. I'm trying to find language for something that doesn't fit any language I have."
"You're a writer," I said. The words came out before I could stop them. "You have more language than most."
He looked at me then. Really looked. And something shifted in his face — surprise, maybe, or recognition. The sense of being seen by someone who understood what that word meant. Writer. What it cost to claim it. What it cost to lose it.
"I was a writer," he said. "A long time ago."
"I know." I shouldn't have said it. I was breaking protocol, introducing personal connection into what was supposed to be clinical assessment. I could feel Marcus's disapproval radiating from beside me. But I couldn't stop. "I read The Linden Tree in college. Before everything changed."
Silence. The kind of silence that has weight.
Thomas's face did something complicated — pain and gratitude and loss, all flickering through in the space of a breath. The Linden Tree. His second novel. The one that had won a small award, that had been reviewed in places that mattered, that had seemed like the foundation of a career. I'd read it in a contemporary fiction seminar, back when I still believed I would build something similar. Back when we both believed the future would have room for us.
"That was another life," he said finally.
"Yes." I understood more than I should have. More than was professional. "Those can feel very far away."
Marcus cleared his throat. "Mr. Ashworth, we're here to discuss anomalies in your stream usage, not to reminisce about publishing history. Dr. Chen, perhaps you could maintain focus on the investigation."
The rebuke was gentle but clear. I stepped back, physically and professionally. Remembered my role. Analyst. Investigator. Not a fellow refugee from a world that no longer existed.
"Of course," I said. "Mr. Ashworth, can you walk us through what you've documented here? Start from the beginning."
• • •
He told us about the first wrong story.
The woman returning to the inherited house, secrets in the walls. How he'd felt the wrongness before he could name it — the structure that didn't follow human narrative logic, the emotional beats that landed in spaces between recognizable feelings. How he'd gone back the next day, and the next, hunting for others like it.
He told us about the patterns he'd found. The way the wrong stories moved in spirals rather than lines. The nested meanings. The sense that they existed in multiple states until his attention collapsed them into one.
He told us about his attempts to write about what he'd experienced, and how language kept failing him. How the act of description seemed to kill the thing he was trying to describe.
He spoke carefully, precisely, without embellishment. He didn't claim to understand what was happening. He didn't offer theories about aliens or gods or simulation architects. He simply described what he'd observed, and acknowledged what he didn't know.
It was, I realized, exactly how a good writer would approach an impossible subject. With humility. With attention. With the discipline to stay close to observable truth even when that truth defied explanation.
Marcus asked probing questions, looking for inconsistencies. He didn't find any. Alan documented everything, his glasses capturing the wall, Thomas's words, our reactions. Yuki asked questions that were too leading, trying to get Thomas to confirm her own frameworks. He kept disappointing her by insisting he didn't know what he'd found.
I stayed mostly quiet. Watched. Let my analyst's mind catalog the details while another part of me — a part I'd thought was dead — stirred in its long sleep.
The stories Thomas described. The wrongness. The sense of meaning that exceeded human frameworks.
I'd seen the probability distributions. I'd seen the interference patterns in the quantum substrate. I knew there was something technically anomalous about the content he'd flagged.
But listening to him describe the experience of it — the feeling of being shown something rather than told, of his mind being rearranged like furniture in a dark room — I felt something I hadn't felt in twelve years.
Recognition.
I didn't say anything. I wasn't ready to say anything. But something had woken up, and I wasn't sure I could put it back to sleep.