VI

"You bought me a week."

Thomas stood at his window, looking out at the city. Late afternoon light slanted through the glass, catching dust motes, turning them to gold. He hadn't turned around when he let me in. He'd just walked back to the window and stood there, watching nothing in particular.

He'd heard. Of course he'd heard. The Bureau wasn't exactly discreet — Alan's preliminary reports were filed through official channels, and anyone with basic access could track the status of an investigation. Thomas had probably known Marcus's verdict before I did.

"I bought myself a week," I said. "There's something in those stories and I want to understand it."

"The analyst in you."

"Yes."

He shook his head slowly, still facing the window. "That's not why you're here. Not really."

"Don't tell me why I'm here."

"You're here because you used to write. And you stopped. And something in you is waking up and it terrifies you."

The words hit like cold water. I wanted to leave. Wanted to retreat into professional distance, into the role that had protected me for twelve years. Dr. Sarah Chen, narrative systems analyst. Objective. Detached. Safe.

Instead I sat down on his worn sofa and said nothing.

Thomas turned from the window. The light caught the lines of his face, the gray in his hair. He looked older than his profile photo, but also more present. More real. A man who had stopped pretending.

"I'm not trying to be cruel," he said. "I'm not trying to expose anything. But I've spent fifteen years in the dark, and I know what it looks like when someone else is in there too. The way you talked about my book. The way you came back alone last night. The way you challenged your team leader today." He sat down across from me. "Those aren't the actions of someone following the evidence. Those are the actions of someone who's been waiting for permission to feel something."

"You don't know anything about me."

"I know you read The Linden Tree in college. That means you were studying literature, probably writing yourself. I know you work for the Bureau, which means you pivoted when the industry collapsed. I know you haven't mentioned any creative work of your own, which means either you never pursued it or you stopped." His eyes were steady, not accusing. Just seeing. "And I know what it looks like when someone encounters something real after years of going through the motions. Because I looked exactly the same way, three months ago, when I found the first wrong story."

I wanted to argue. Wanted to explain that he was projecting, that my interest was purely professional, that I was just following anomalous data to its logical conclusion.

Instead I heard myself say: "I was twenty-six when I sold my first story."

The words came out rusty, unused. Like a door opening onto a room that had been sealed for years.

"Literary magazine. Small, but respected. I thought it was the beginning."

Thomas waited. The way a good interviewer waits — not rushing to fill silence, not prompting or leading. Just present.

"Three more after that. Then a novella that almost got published. Then..." I looked at my hands. The same hands that had typed those stories, that had shaped those sentences, that had reached for something true. "The market shifted. Algorithms got better. Faster. The magazines that had bought my work stopped buying anyone's work. I watched the industry I'd trained for become obsolete."

"So you found something practical."

"I was good at analysis. Understanding structure. It was the same skill set, just... applied differently." I heard how hollow it sounded. How much like a rationalization rehearsed so many times it had worn smooth. "I told myself I was still doing something meaningful. Protecting the integrity of narrative systems. Making sure the stream wasn't being corrupted."

"And the writing?"

"I stopped." The word sat there, heavy and final. A confession I'd never made out loud. "It hurt too much to keep trying. So I stopped."

Silence. The kind that makes space for what comes next.

"Do you miss it?" Thomas asked.

"I don't let myself miss it. That's different."

"No. It's not." He leaned forward. "It's worse. Missing something means you still feel the absence. Not letting yourself miss it means you've cut off the part of you that could feel it at all."

I thought about twelve years of not wanting. The stream every evening, other people's stories washing over me, filling the space where my own might have been. The competent emptiness of days that looked productive but felt like nothing at all.

"The stories I found," Thomas said, "the wrong ones — they're not written by any algorithm I recognize. And they're not human either. They're something else."

"I know."

"You do?"

"I've read the analyses. The pattern signatures. Whatever is generating these narratives, it's not in any system we built." I met his eyes. "Which means either there's been a major breach we haven't detected, or—"

"Or it's coming from somewhere else."

We sat with that. The implications too large to hold all at once. Something outside the system. Something that had found a way to whisper through the quantum noise, to shape probability spaces, to create stories that felt like doors.

"Show me," I said. "Show me what you've been working on. The translations."

Thomas hesitated. His hands moved unconsciously to his knees, a protective gesture. This was the fragile thing, I realized. The water he'd found in the desert. He'd been protecting it from people with clipboards, from institutional skepticism, from anyone who might flatten it into categories and file it away.

And here I was, clipboard in hand.

"I'm not here as an analyst tonight," I said. "I'm here as..." I didn't know how to finish. As what? A fellow refugee? A blocked writer recognizing another? Someone who'd felt the door and couldn't pretend she hadn't?

"Someone who used to reach for things," Thomas said quietly.

"Yes."

He stood. "Come on."

• • •

His study was different at night.

The wall of notes caught the lamplight differently than it had during the day, the strings and connections creating shadows that shifted as I moved. It felt less like a conspiracy theorist's bedroom and more like something organic. A nervous system. A map of a country that didn't exist yet.

Thomas pulled a folder from his desk — not a tablet, a physical folder, worn at the edges from handling. Inside were handwritten pages, dozens of them. His cramped but legible script filling sheet after sheet.

"These are my translations," he said. "That's what I call them, anyway. Attempts to take what I experience in the wrong stories and render it into something human language can hold."

I took the folder. The pages were heavy in my hands — not physically heavy, but weighted with the hours of work they represented. Years of reaching, compressed into words.

"Most of them fail," Thomas continued. "The wrong stories move in ways that human narrative can't replicate. It's like trying to translate music into sculpture. You can capture something, but you lose the essential quality that made it what it was."

"What do the successful ones feel like?"

"I don't know if any of them are successful. I've read them so many times I can't tell anymore. I know when I've gotten close — there's a resonance, a sense that the translation carries some trace of what I was trying to capture. But whether it works for anyone else..." He shrugged. "I've never shown them to anyone."

"Until now."

"Until now."

I looked at the first page. The handwriting was careful, deliberate — not the rushed scrawl of someone taking notes, but the measured script of someone trying to get every word exactly right.

"Take them," Thomas said. "Read them alone. That's how the wrong stories work — they need solitude, attention, the kind of focus that only happens when no one else is watching." He paused. "Come back when you're ready to tell me what you saw."

I wanted to argue that I could read them here, that I didn't need to take his only copies of something so clearly precious to him. But he was right. I could feel it — the way the room itself seemed to hold too much attention, too much history. These pages needed silence.

"What if I don't see anything?" I asked. "What if they're just words to me?"

"Then they're just words. And we'll know that whatever's happening, it's specific to me. That would be useful information."

"And if I do see something?"

Thomas smiled. The first real smile I'd seen from him — not bitter, not guarded, but something close to hope.

"Then we'll know I'm not alone."

• • •

I read them in my hotel room. Three in the morning, unable to sleep.

The first translation was about light. Not light as physics described it — not photons or waves or the electromagnetic spectrum. Light as a form of attention. Light as the universe looking at itself.

The story — if story was even the right word — followed something that might have been a person through something that might have been a landscape. But the categories kept slipping. The figure was also a motion, also a question, also a way of seeing. The landscape was also a memory, also a possibility, also a grammar for experiences that had no names.

And the light was watching. Not malevolently, not even consciously in any way I could recognize. But attentively. The light was a kind of love, and the love was building something, and the something was...

I couldn't hold it. The meaning kept exceeding my grasp, spilling over the edges of comprehension. Every time I thought I understood, the understanding dissolved into something larger.

I read it three times. Each time it shifted, revealed new facets, suggested depths I hadn't noticed before. I couldn't tell if the text was changing or if I was.

The second translation was about time. Not linear time — not the steady tick of seconds accumulating into minutes into hours. Time as texture. Time as a fabric that could be folded, touched, inhabited differently depending on the quality of attention brought to it.

A conversation between beings separated by centuries. Each speaker unaware of the gaps, of the vast silences between their words. And yet the conversation cohered. It meant something none of them could see, something only visible from a perspective outside time altogether.

I thought about Sarah Chen at twenty-six, selling her first story. Sarah Chen at forty-three, analyzing narrative structures for a government bureau. The same person, separated by seventeen years. What conversation were those two Sarahs having, across the gulf between them? What meaning was being built that neither could perceive?

The third translation was about connection. Two beings — I couldn't tell what kind — reaching across an impossible distance. Not physical distance. Something stranger. A gap between modes of existence, between ways of being that shouldn't have been able to perceive each other at all.

The reaching was the point. Not the contact but the attempt. Not the achievement but the willingness. To extend toward something you might never touch. To risk the failure because the reaching itself was the thing.

I woke at my desk at seven AM, the pages still in my hand. I'd fallen asleep reading. My dreams had been strange — spirals and whispers, frequencies I couldn't hear, a sense of being seen by something vast and patient and impossibly kind.

Something had opened. Not all the way. Just a crack. Just a flicker.

But I knew it was real.