IV
The interviews took three days.
We set up in Thomas's living room, transforming his private space into something that felt halfway between a therapist's office and an interrogation room. Alan arranged recording equipment on the coffee table. Marcus claimed the dominant chair again, establishing the power dynamic he preferred. Yuki and I rotated between the sofa and a wooden chair Thomas brought from his kitchen, depending on who was leading which session.
Thomas endured it with patience that surprised me. He answered the same questions multiple times, from multiple angles, as Marcus probed for inconsistencies that never materialized. He walked us through his experience again and again — the first wrong story, the hunting, the patterns, the wall of notes — and each retelling was consistent with the last. Not word-for-word identical, which would have suggested rehearsal, but structurally sound. The way true memories hold their shape even when the language shifts.
Marcus didn't like it. I could see his frustration building as the hours accumulated. He was used to finding cracks. People who were lying or deluded eventually contradicted themselves, revealed the seams in their constructed narratives. Thomas gave him nothing to work with.
"Let's go back to the interference patterns you described," Marcus said on the second afternoon. "You claim the stories behave differently when you pay attention. That they exist in multiple states until you observe them. How exactly do you perceive this?"
"I don't perceive it directly," Thomas said. He'd explained this before, but he didn't show impatience. "It's more like... an aftertaste. I read a passage, and it lands a certain way. Then I read it again, and the words are the same, but the weight is different. As if the text remembers being read and adjusts itself."
"That's not how the stream works. Content is fixed once it's generated."
"I know. That's what makes it strange."
"Or it's a subjective experience. Pattern recognition applied to random variation. The human mind finding meaning where none exists."
"That's possible," Thomas agreed. "I've considered it. But the patterns are consistent across different stories. Different sessions. Different days. If it were just my mind imposing structure on noise, wouldn't the structure vary?"
Marcus didn't have an answer for that. He moved on to other questions, but I could see Thomas's point had landed. It was a good point. It was the kind of point a rigorous thinker would make.
Alan documented everything, his glasses capturing hours of footage that would be transcribed and analyzed and filed in databases no one would ever search. That was what we did. We accumulated data. Whether we understood it was another question.
Yuki conducted her own interviews, focused on phenomenology — the subjective texture of Thomas's experiences. She asked about emotions, physical sensations, the quality of his attention when he encountered the wrong stories. Her questions were better than Marcus's, more attuned to the thing Thomas was actually describing. But she kept trying to lead him toward conclusions he wasn't willing to draw.
"When you experience this wrongness," she asked on the third day, "do you feel like you're in contact with something? A presence? An intelligence?"
Thomas considered the question carefully. "I don't know. There's a sense of... being shown. Like the stories are trying to communicate something. But I can't tell if that's real or if it's just how my brain makes sense of something it doesn't understand."
"The great mystics described similar experiences. The sense of being addressed by something beyond ordinary comprehension. Of receiving knowledge that exceeds rational categories."
"I'm not a mystic. I'm just a blocked writer who found something strange in the stream."
"But the experience itself—"
"The experience itself is exactly what I've described. I'm not going to interpret it for you. I don't have that right. I don't know enough."
Yuki's disappointment was visible. She wanted him to be a prophet. He insisted on being a witness.
I found myself respecting him more with each passing hour.
• • •
I stayed mostly quiet during the formal interviews. Watched. Took notes. Ran technical analysis on the narratives Thomas had flagged, cross-referencing his subjective reports with the quantum-level data I'd pulled before we arrived.
The correlations were troubling.
Every story Thomas identified as "wrong" showed the same interference patterns in its pre-collapse probability distributions. The signature I'd found in my initial analysis — that structured rippling in the quantum substrate — was present in all of them. And it was absent from the control samples, the ordinary stories Thomas had engaged with but hadn't flagged as anomalous.
He was detecting something real. Whatever mechanism he was using — intuition, pattern recognition, some quality of attention I didn't have a name for — it was tracking with the technical data. He wasn't imagining the wrongness. It was there, encoded in the probability space, and somehow he could feel it.
I didn't tell the team. Not yet. I wasn't sure what it meant, and I didn't want Marcus dismissing it as coincidence before I'd had a chance to think it through.
But more than the technical findings, something else was keeping me quiet. Something harder to quantify.
When I read the flagged stories — really read them, not as analyst but as reader — I felt it too.
The door that wasn't a flaw. The sense of something moving beneath the surface. The way the narratives seemed to hold multiple meanings simultaneously, refusing to collapse into simple interpretation.
I felt it, and it terrified me.
Because feeling it meant Thomas wasn't crazy. And if Thomas wasn't crazy, then something was actually happening. Something outside all our categories. Something that couldn't be filed away as malfunction or manipulation or the pattern-seeking desperation of a lonely man.
I wasn't ready to follow that thought to its conclusion. So I kept quiet, and I kept watching, and I told myself I was just being thorough.
• • •
On the third night, I went back alone.
The formal sessions had ended for the day. Marcus and Alan had returned to the hotel to compile their preliminary notes. Yuki had gone for a walk, processing her disappointment that Thomas refused to be the visionary she wanted him to be.
I told myself I needed to follow up on a few technical questions. Clarify some details about the timeline of his experiences. The kind of due diligence that would look good in my section of the final report.
I told myself that all the way to his door.
Thomas opened it unsurprised. As if he'd been waiting.
"Dr. Chen."
"I wanted to—" I stopped. The professional script felt absurd, standing in his doorway in the evening light. We both knew I wasn't here for the report. "I wanted to read them again. The stories you flagged. Without the team watching. Without Marcus looking for holes in everything."
Something shifted in his expression. Not quite a smile, but a softening. An acknowledgment.
"Come in."
• • •
We didn't speak much at first.
He made tea — real tea, loose leaves in a ceramic pot, the ritual of it deliberate and calming. An anachronism, like his physical books, like his handwritten notes. A man holding onto older ways of being in a world that had moved on.
I sat with his tablet, scrolling through the stories he'd flagged. One by one. Taking my time. Letting myself read them the way I used to read, before analysis became armor. Before I learned to keep my distance from the things I studied.
The wrongness was clearer without Marcus's skepticism filling the room. Without Yuki's desperate hope. Without Alan's recorder documenting every reaction. In the quiet of Thomas's apartment, with the smell of tea and old paper and dust, I let the stories in.
The one about the woman and the house. I read it slowly, feeling the spiral structure pull me inward. The way the narrative circled back on itself, each pass revealing something new. The emotional beats that landed in places I couldn't name — not quite grief, not quite longing, but something adjacent to both. Something that felt like a color I'd never seen trying to describe itself in terms of colors I knew.
I lost track of time. When I surfaced, an hour had passed. Thomas was sitting across from me, a cup of tea cooling in his hands, watching.
"You feel it," he said. Not a question.
"I don't know what I feel."
"That's how it starts."
I set the tablet down. My hands were trembling slightly. I hadn't noticed until now.
"The technical data supports you," I said. "The stories you flagged — they all show the same quantum signatures. Interference patterns in the probability space. Something is influencing the content before observation collapses it. You're not imagining things."
Thomas nodded slowly. Not triumphant. Not validated. Just... confirmed in something he already knew.
"That's not why you came back tonight."
"No."
"Why did you?"
I should have maintained professional distance. Should have kept the conversation focused on data, on evidence, on things that could be measured and reported. Instead I heard myself say:
"Because I felt it too. When I read the analysis. When I looked at the pre-collapse distributions. There was something there. Not just statistical anomaly. Something that felt like... like being looked at. Like the data knew I was reading it."
Silence. The kind that has texture.
"Does it get clearer?" I asked. "The more you engage with it?"
"No." Thomas almost smiled. "It gets deeper. Clearer isn't the right word. It's like..." He paused, reaching for language. "Learning to see in the dark. You don't get more light. Your eyes just change."
"That sounds terrifying."
"It is." He held my gaze. "It's also the first real thing that's happened to me in fifteen years."
I understood what he meant. The deadness of the years between — the competent emptiness, the days that passed without meaning, the slow erosion of everything that had once made life feel vivid. And then something that cut through all of it. Something that demanded attention. Something real.
"I should go," I said. "Early start tomorrow."
"Of course."
But I didn't move. Not immediately. I sat in the quiet of his apartment, feeling the weight of what had passed between us. Not personal, exactly. Not romantic. Something else. Two people who had recognized something in each other. Two people who had spent years in the dark, and were maybe starting to see.
"Dr. Chen," Thomas said as I finally stood to leave.
"Sarah," I said. I don't know why. "My name is Sarah."
He nodded. As if that meant something. As if names mattered in ways that titles didn't.
"Sarah. Be careful. With Marcus. With the report. What you felt tonight — he won't understand it. He'll find a way to explain it away. That's what he does."
"I know."
"I'm not asking you to lie for me. I'm not asking for anything. I just..." He paused. "It matters. What you felt. It matters that someone else can feel it."
I left without answering. Drove back to the hotel. Sat in the parking lot for a long time, engine off, staring at nothing.
Twelve years. Twelve years since I'd written anything. Twelve years of telling myself the practical choice was the right choice. The industry changed. The algorithms won. What I wanted didn't exist anymore.
And now a blocked writer in a small apartment was telling me he'd found something real. Something that had woken him up. And I'd felt it too — felt the edge of it, the first faint pressure of something vast trying to make itself known.
I wanted to dismiss it. Delusion, pattern-matching, the desperate hope of people who'd lost their purpose and needed to believe they'd found a new one. That's what Marcus would say. That's what the report would conclude.
But I'd read the stories. I'd seen the data. I'd felt the door that wasn't a flaw.
And something in me — something I'd kept carefully buried for twelve years — was remembering what it felt like to reach for things that exceeded my grasp.