VII

I didn't tell Marcus. Didn't tell anyone.

For the next three days, I went through the motions of the investigation. Attended meetings. Filed preliminary reports. Documented the technical anomalies in language careful enough to be defensible but vague enough to avoid conclusions. I was good at this — the bureaucratic dance of appearing productive while actually waiting. Twelve years at the Bureau had taught me how to look busy while my mind was elsewhere.

My mind was very much elsewhere.

At night, I went to Thomas.

We developed a routine without discussing it. I'd arrive after dark, when the city had settled into its evening rhythms — half the population jacked into the stream, the other half going through the motions of physical existence. Thomas would make tea. We'd sit in his study, surrounded by his wall of notes, and we'd read.

He showed me more of his translations. Dozens of them, accumulated over months of work. Some were fragments — a paragraph, a page — attempts that had captured something but couldn't sustain it. Others were longer, more developed, explorations of territory he'd mapped over repeated visits to the wrong stories.

I showed him my technical analysis. The probability distributions, the interference patterns, the quantum signatures that proved something anomalous was happening. Two languages describing the same elephant from different angles. His translations rendered the subjective experience; my data rendered the objective evidence. Neither was complete without the other.

"It's like having a map and a traveler's journal," Thomas said one night, paging through my printouts. "The map shows the terrain. The journal shows what it feels like to walk through it. You need both to understand the country."

"Except we don't know what country this is."

"No. We don't." He set the printouts aside. "But we know it exists. That's something. That's more than I had three months ago, when I was alone with this."

Slowly, he started to trust me. And slowly, I started to tell him things I hadn't told anyone.

The stories I'd written in my twenties. Not just that they existed, but what they'd meant to me. The way writing had felt like the only authentic thing I did — the only time I was fully present, fully engaged, fully myself. The particular agony of revision, when the gap between what I'd imagined and what I'd achieved became undeniable. The particular joy when a sentence finally worked, when the words aligned and something true emerged.

I told him about my novella. The one that had almost been published. Two presses had held it for months, sent encouraging notes, requested revisions. I'd allowed myself to hope. Then the rejections came, within a week of each other, both citing "market conditions." Six months later, the first quantum content systems went live, and market conditions became permanently hostile to anyone trying to do what I'd spent my life learning to do.

"I never finished another piece after that," I said. We were on his small balcony, the city glittering below us, both pretending the stars were visible through the light pollution. "I started things. Fragments. But I could never push through to the end. It was like the muscle had atrophied. Or like I'd lost the faith that pushing through mattered."

"What did the novella feel like?" Thomas asked. "When you were writing it?"

"Like excavation. Like there was something buried and I was carefully brushing away the dirt to reveal it. The story existed already — I just had to find it, uncover it, not damage it in the process." I laughed, but there was no humor in it. "That sounds mystical. Unprofessional."

"It sounds like writing."

"It sounds like something I used to do. A long time ago."

Thomas was quiet for a moment. Below us, the city hummed with its diminished nightlife — a few pedestrians, a few cars, the soft glow of windows where people sat alone with their screens or their rigs.

"Why did you really stop?" he asked. "Not the practical reasons. Not the market conditions. Why did you stop?"

"I told you. It hurt too much—"

"That's the answer you've practiced. The one you tell yourself so you don't have to look at the real one."

I wanted to push back. Wanted to maintain the story I'd told myself for twelve years. But something about the dark, about the quiet, about the way Thomas waited without judgment — it loosened something in me.

"I was afraid," I said finally. "Afraid I wasn't good enough. The rejection got harder instead of easier. Every 'no' felt like confirmation of something I'd always suspected — that I didn't have what it took. That I was pretending to be something I wasn't." I looked at my hands, wrapped around a cup of tea that had gone cold. "And when the algorithms came, it was... permission. To stop trying. To say it wasn't my fault, it was the market, it was technology, it was forces beyond my control. But the truth is I was relieved. I wouldn't have to find out. I wouldn't have to keep reaching and falling short."

"And now?"

"Now I don't know. Something's woken up. Something I thought was dead."

Thomas nodded slowly. The light from the city caught his face, made him look younger for a moment. Or maybe not younger — just more alive.

"Fifteen years ago, I told myself the same thing," he said. "Different reasons, same lie. The fourth book died because I killed it. I was afraid of what would happen if I finished it and it wasn't good. Afraid that my first three books were flukes, that I'd used up whatever I had, that continuing would only prove I'd never really been a writer at all." He set down his own cup. "So I retreated into the stream. Told myself I was looking for inspiration. New forms, new inputs. But really I was just hiding. Finding more elaborate ways to not write."

"And then you found them. The wrong stories."

"Yes." He looked up at the sky, at the light pollution that hid the stars. "And suddenly hiding wasn't possible anymore. There was something there. Something real. Something that demanded I pay attention, that I try to understand, that I reach for it even though I knew I'd probably fail." He turned to look at me. "It's not comfortable. It's not safe. But it's the first time in fifteen years that I've felt like myself."

"You reached."

"I didn't have anything left to lose."

The words hung between us. I thought about my apartment, my clean reports, my well-organized life. I thought about twelve years of not reaching, not risking, not allowing myself to want anything that might be denied.

"I don't know how to do this," I said. "I've been analyzing for so long. Keeping my distance. I don't know if I can still..."

"You don't have to translate. That's not your gift."

"Then what is?"

Thomas turned to look at me fully. In the half-light, his face was hard to read, but his voice was certain.

"You know what's real. You recognized the truth in my translations before you could explain it. That's not analysis — that's something else. Something rarer."

"What?"

"Recognition. The ability to see something true and know it's true, even when you can't prove it, even when it doesn't fit your categories." He paused. "The world doesn't just need people who can see new things. It needs people who can say this is worth seeing. Who can help others trust what they're looking at."

I thought about Marcus, his careful skepticism, his need to debunk. About Alan, his institutional caution, his worship of liability. About Yuki, her desperate hope, her tendency to see transcendence everywhere and therefore nowhere.

And about Thomas, alone with his wall of notes, reaching for something incomprehensible. Needing someone to believe him. Needing someone to recognize what he'd found.

"The team is going to shut this down," I said. "Marcus won't accept anything I show him. It doesn't fit his framework. He's already decided what the answer is."

"I know."

"The report will say you're experiencing psychological fixation. Apophenia. They'll recommend monitoring and move on. Your file will sit in a database somewhere, and no one will ever look at it again."

"I know."

"Doesn't that frighten you?"

Thomas smiled. It was the first unguarded smile I'd seen from him — not bitter, not resigned, but something close to peaceful.

"Dr. Chen. Sarah." My name in his voice sounded different than it did in my own head. More real. "The thing I found — it's already inside me. They can close the file, take away my stream access, put me on a watch list. It won't matter. You can't un-see what I've seen. You can't unfeel what I've felt."

"And the translations?"

"They'll get out. Somehow. These things do, when they need to." He held my gaze. "The question isn't whether the Bureau accepts what I've found. The question is what you're going to do with what you've found."

I didn't have an answer. Not yet. But something had shifted in the darkness between us — a recognition, a connection, the beginning of something I couldn't name.

I left soon after. Drove back to my hotel through empty streets. Sat in my room until dawn, reading his translations again, feeling the wrongness open inside me like a flower blooming in the dark.