V
Marcus delivered his preliminary assessment on day four.
We'd gathered in the hotel conference room — the same beige box where we'd held our planning sessions, with its fluorescent lights and institutional carpet and the faint smell of coffee that had been reheated too many times. Outside, the city carried on its business, millions of people suspended in their quantum dreams or shuffling through the diminished routines of physical existence. In here, we were about to decide whether Thomas Ashworth had found something real or simply lost his mind.
I already knew which way Marcus was leaning. I'd seen it in his body language over the past three days, the growing confidence as he accumulated evidence for his preferred conclusion. He'd found no inconsistencies in Thomas's account. No signs of deception. No technical malfunction to explain the anomalies. But absence of evidence wasn't going to stop him. Marcus had built his career on finding rational explanations for irrational-seeming phenomena, and he wasn't about to let this case be the exception.
"Psychological fixation with elements of apophenia," he announced, pulling up his slides on the conference room screen. Charts and graphs and clinical terminology, the apparatus of institutional authority. "The subject has constructed an elaborate interpretive framework around standard content variations. His background as a writer predisposes him to pattern recognition and narrative construction. The 'wrongness' he perceives is a projection of his own need to find meaning in a world that no longer values his particular skills."
Alan nodded along, already drafting the report that would close the file. His fingers moved across his tablet with the practiced efficiency of someone who'd written dozens of similar conclusions. Case closed. Anomaly explained. Liability contained.
Yuki sat rigid in her chair, her face a mask of controlled disappointment. Another dead end. Another case that had promised transcendence and delivered nothing but the usual institutional skepticism. I watched her swallow whatever she wanted to say, retreat into professional silence. She'd learned that arguing with Marcus was pointless. He had the authority and the certainty, and she had nothing but intuition and hope.
I should have stayed silent too. That was the smart move. File my technical findings, note the statistical anomalies, recommend continued monitoring. Cover myself without committing to anything. Let Marcus have his explanation and move on to the next case.
"The structural deviations are real."
The words came out before I'd decided to speak them. Everyone turned to look at me.
"Excuse me?" Marcus's voice carried a warning. Don't do this. Don't challenge me in front of the team.
"I've run the analysis four times." I pulled up my own data on the screen, replacing his neat conclusions with the messy reality of the probability distributions. "These are the pre-collapse quantum states for the narratives Ashworth flagged. Every single one shows the same interference pattern. Structured deviation in the probability space, consistent across multiple content instances, absent from control samples."
The ripples spread across the screen — that strange signature I'd found in my initial analysis, now confirmed across the entire dataset. It looked like water disturbed by something moving beneath the surface. It looked like evidence.
"Whatever Thomas is responding to isn't apophenia," I continued. "There's something actually there. Something in the quantum substrate that shouldn't exist."
Marcus studied the data for a long moment. I could see him processing, recalculating, looking for the angle that would let him dismiss what I was showing him.
"Glitches in the system," he said finally. "Quantum decoherence. Environmental noise. Calibration drift in the monitoring equipment."
"I checked. The systems are functioning within normal parameters. The monitoring equipment was calibrated last month. And quantum decoherence doesn't produce structured patterns — it produces randomness. This isn't random."
"Then it's a new variant we haven't catalogued yet. Some emergent behavior in the content generation algorithms. Chen, you know how complex these systems are. We're talking about billions of qubits in superposition, collapsing into concrete experience based on user attention patterns. Strange correlations are inevitable in a system that large."
"Strange correlations are inevitable. Strange correlations that precisely match a single user's subjective experience of 'wrongness' are not."
The room went quiet. I'd crossed a line. I was no longer just presenting data — I was arguing for an interpretation. Taking a position. Siding with the subject against my team lead.
Marcus's expression hardened. "What exactly are you suggesting, Dr. Chen?"
"I'm suggesting we need more time. The data doesn't fit any of our existing categories. Malfunction, manipulation, user error — none of those explain what I'm seeing. We need to understand what's actually happening before we close the file."
"And what do you think is actually happening?"
I hesitated. This was the moment. I could retreat, qualify, couch everything in careful academic hedging. Or I could say what I actually believed.
"I don't know," I said. "But the interference patterns suggest something is influencing the quantum states before user observation collapses them. Something external to the system. Something that's... communicating. Or trying to."
Yuki's head snapped up. Her eyes met mine, bright with sudden hope. I looked away. I wasn't doing this for her. I wasn't doing this because I wanted to believe in transcendence or cosmic contact or any of the things she'd been chasing her whole career.
I was doing this because the data demanded it. Because Thomas deserved better than a dismissive label. Because I'd felt the wrongness myself, and I couldn't pretend I hadn't.
"Communicating," Marcus repeated. His voice was flat. "You're suggesting the quantum VR system is being used for... what? Alien contact? Divine intervention?"
"I'm not suggesting anything about the source. I'm saying the patterns exist, they're structured, and they correlate with subjective human experience in ways that shouldn't be possible. That's worth investigating. That's worth more than four days and a pat explanation."
Alan had stopped typing. He was watching the exchange with the wary attention of someone calculating liability exposure in real time. This was going in a direction the Bureau wouldn't like. Uncertainty was bad for institutions. Unexplained phenomena were bad for budgets. Open questions were bad for careers.
"We have budget constraints," he said carefully. "Other cases in the queue. If there's no actionable finding—"
"There is something here." My voice came out harder than I intended. I was losing my professional composure, letting the thing I'd felt in Thomas's apartment bleed through into the institutional space. "I don't know what it is yet. But closing this file would be premature. It would be irresponsible."
Marcus studied me for a long moment. Something calculating in his expression — not just professional disagreement, but something more personal. He was reassessing me. Wondering if I'd become unreliable. Wondering if whatever had happened during my private visit to Thomas's apartment had compromised my judgment.
He wasn't entirely wrong to wonder.
"One week," he said finally. "Document everything. Full technical workup on the quantum signatures, cross-referenced with Ashworth's subjective reports. If you can't produce concrete evidence of external manipulation or system compromise — something actionable, something that fits our protocols — we close the file and move on."
"And if I can produce evidence?"
"Then we'll revisit. But Chen—" He leaned forward, making sure I understood. "Evidence means evidence. Not intuition. Not correlation. Not feelings. Hard data that proves something outside the system is affecting the quantum states. Can you deliver that?"
I thought about the interference patterns. The structured ripples in probability space. The way the wrongness tracked perfectly with Thomas's subjective experience.
I thought about the door that wasn't a flaw.
"I can try."
"Trying isn't good enough. I need results or I need closure. Those are the only options."
He stood, signaling the meeting was over. Alan gathered his things, already composing the interim report that would protect the Bureau's interests regardless of what I found. Yuki lingered, wanting to say something, but Marcus's presence kept her silent.
I stayed in my chair, staring at the probability distributions still displayed on the screen. The ripples that shouldn't exist. The evidence of something moving in the deep.
• • •
Yuki caught me in the hallway.
"You felt something." Not a question. Her eyes were too bright, too hungry, the way they always got when she thought she was close to the thing she'd spent her career chasing. "In the stories. When you read them. You felt it too."
"I don't know what I felt."
"But you defended him. You pushed back against Marcus. You've never done that before."
She was right. In twelve years of working together, I'd never openly challenged Marcus's conclusions. I'd filed dissenting notes in my technical reports, buried qualifications in footnotes, done the quiet bureaucratic work of preserving uncertainty without making waves. That was how you survived in institutional spaces. That was how you kept your job and your sanity and your carefully maintained distance from the things you studied.
Something had changed. I didn't want to examine what.
"The data is anomalous," I said. "That's all. I'm following the evidence."
"The evidence." Yuki smiled, but there was something sad in it. "I've been chasing evidence my whole career. Do you know how many times I've thought I found something real? How many times I've presented data that I was sure would convince people, only to watch it get explained away?"
"This is different."
"They're all different. Until they're not." She put her hand on my arm — a rare gesture from someone who usually maintained careful physical boundaries. "I'm not saying you're wrong. I hope you're not wrong. I've spent twenty years hoping someone would find something that couldn't be explained away. But be careful. Marcus isn't just skeptical — he's invested in skepticism. His whole reputation is built on debunking. If you threaten that, he'll find a way to discredit you. The data won't protect you. Nothing will."
"What are you saying?"
"I'm saying that wanting something to be true doesn't make it true. But neither does wanting it to be false." She released my arm. "I've made the first mistake too many times. Marcus makes the second one every single day. Try not to make either."
She walked away, leaving me alone in the fluorescent hallway with its institutional carpet and its faint smell of recycled air. The same hallway I'd walked a thousand times before, going to meetings and filing reports and doing the quiet work of monitoring a world I'd stopped believing in.
Something was different now. I could feel it — a shift in the ground beneath my feet, subtle but unmistakable. The professional distance I'd maintained for twelve years was eroding. The careful separation between analyst and subject, between observer and participant, was breaking down.
I told myself it was just the data. Just the evidence. Just the intellectual puzzle of an anomaly that didn't fit the usual categories.
But that night, alone in my hotel room, I pulled up the stories Thomas had flagged and read them again. Not as analyst. Not as investigator. As something I hadn't been in twelve years.
As a reader.
As a writer.
As someone who still remembered what it felt like to reach for things that exceeded her grasp.
The wrongness was there. The door that wasn't a flaw. And somewhere on the other side of it, something was waiting.