IX
I wrote through the night.
Not the report Marcus wanted. Something else. A document that would never be filed, never be read by anyone at the Bureau, never enter the official record. I wrote what I actually believed — about the interference patterns, about Thomas, about what I'd felt when I read the translations. I wrote it for myself. To know that I'd put it into words, even if those words never reached anyone.
By dawn, I had twelve pages. They weren't good. They were raw and unpolished, full of qualifications and uncertainties. But they were true.
I saved the file. Then I opened a new document and wrote my resignation.
That one was shorter. Two paragraphs. Effective immediately. No explanation beyond "personal reasons." The Bureau didn't deserve an explanation. The Bureau had never deserved anything from me except competent analysis, and I'd given them twelve years of that. Whatever I did next was mine.
I sent both documents — the resignation to HR, the unofficial report to my personal archive — and then I sat in my hotel room and watched the sun come up over the city. Somewhere out there, Thomas was waking in his small apartment, surrounded by his wall of notes, waiting to hear what the Bureau had decided. He didn't know yet that the Bureau's decision didn't matter anymore. That I'd made my own.
My phone started ringing at 7:15. Marcus. I let it go to voicemail. He called again at 7:22. Again at 7:31. The messages piled up — first confused, then angry, then coldly professional. Dr. Chen, we need to discuss your submission. Dr. Chen, this is highly irregular. Dr. Chen, I'm going to have to escalate this if you don't respond.
I didn't respond.
Alan's emails started arriving around 8:00. Formal documentation — liability releases, non-disclosure agreements, exit interview requests. The institutional machinery grinding into motion, processing my departure the way it processed everything: efficiently, impersonally, with forms for every contingency. I signed what needed signing without reading the fine print. None of it mattered. I was already somewhere else in my mind.
• • •
I checked out of the hotel at 9:00. The woman at the front desk smiled the same professional smile she'd given me when I arrived a week ago. Nothing in her face suggested she knew my life had changed completely in the days between. Why would it? I was just another business traveler, passing through, leaving no trace.
I put my bag in the car and sat behind the wheel for a long time without starting the engine.
Twelve years. That's how long I'd worked at the Bureau. Twelve years of careful analysis, of professional distance, of not reaching for anything beyond what was expected. I'd built a life on that foundation — stable, respectable, empty in ways I'd trained myself not to notice. And now I was walking away from all of it because a blocked writer in a small apartment had shown me something I couldn't unsee.
It should have felt terrifying. Instead it felt like the first honest thing I'd done in over a decade.
I started the car and drove to Thomas's building.
• • •
The lobby was the same as before — clean but worn, the security desk unstaffed, mailboxes with missing nameplates. I'd been here three times now: first with the team, then alone that evening when I'd read the translations and felt the door opening, and now this. Each visit had stripped away another layer of professional armor. I wasn't sure what was left underneath.
I took the elevator to the seventh floor. Walked the familiar hallway. Knocked on his door.
Thomas opened it unsurprised. As if he'd been waiting. As if he'd known I would come.
"I quit."
He studied my face for a moment — the sleepless shadows under my eyes, the set of my jaw, whatever else was visible there. Then he stepped back and let me in.
"I know," he said.
"How?"
"You wouldn't have come here otherwise. Not like this." He gestured at me — my rumpled clothes, my overnight bag still clutched in one hand, my whole disheveled presence. "Without your tablet. Without your team. In the middle of the morning when you should be filing reports."
I almost laughed. "There won't be any reports. Not from me."
"What happened?"
I set down my bag. Looked around his apartment — the books, the wall of notes visible through the study door, the morning light falling across surfaces that had become familiar. A week ago this had been a subject's residence, a location to be documented and analyzed. Now it felt like the only place I wanted to be.
"Marcus wanted me to write that you were delusional. That the patterns I found were noise, the translations were fantasy, everything I'd discovered was just a lonely man's need to believe in something." I met his eyes. "I couldn't do it."
"So you resigned instead."
"Yes."
"Sarah." He said my name carefully, as if it were fragile. "You didn't have to do that. You could have written their report. Kept your job. Believed whatever you believed privately."
"No." The word came out harder than I intended. "I couldn't. Maybe I could have, before. Before I read what you wrote. Before I felt—" I stopped, not sure how to finish.
"Before you felt what?"
"The door. The wrongness that isn't wrong. Whatever's on the other side of the translations." I pressed my palms against my eyes. "I don't know how to describe it. I don't have your gift. But I felt something. And I can't pretend I didn't."
Thomas was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, "Sit down. I'll make tea."
• • •
The ritual was the same as before — water heated in an electric kettle, loose leaves measured into a ceramic pot, the careful attention to each step. I watched him move through the familiar motions and felt something in my chest unclench. There was comfort in the deliberateness. In the refusal to rush.
"I read your translations again last night," I said. "Before I wrote the resignation. The one about light. The one about time folding."
"And?"
"They're not translations, are they? Not exactly. They're... approximations. You're trying to render something that doesn't fit into human categories."
He poured the tea. Handed me a cup. Sat down across from me.
"That's the best word I've found for it. Approximations." He wrapped his hands around his own cup, not drinking yet, just holding the warmth. "The things I see — the structures, the patterns — they don't map onto our concepts. It's like trying to describe a color to someone who's never seen it. You can use analogies. You can talk about wavelengths. But the experience itself doesn't transfer."
"And yet something transfers. When I read what you wrote, I felt... shifted. Like the furniture in my mind had been rearranged."
"That's the best I can hope for. Not understanding — I don't think human minds can fully understand what's out there. But recognition. A sense that there's something to understand, even if we can't grasp it directly."
I sipped my tea. It was good — some kind of oolong, complex and slightly sweet. The taste anchored me in the present moment, in this small apartment, in this conversation that was rewriting everything I thought I knew.
"What are you going to do now?" Thomas asked.
"I don't know." The words came out more honestly than I'd intended. "I have savings. Not forever, but for a while. I don't have a plan beyond getting here."
"And after here?"
I looked at him. This man who'd found something impossible and held onto it. Who'd spent years reaching toward things he couldn't fully see. Who'd welcomed me into his world without asking for anything in return.
"I want to help you."
"Help me how?"
"I don't know yet. But the translations — they need to reach people. The right people. And you can't do that alone." I set down my cup. "You're too close to it. Too inside the experience. You need someone who can see the shape from outside. Who can recognize what's real even without perceiving it directly."
"That sounds like analysis."
"Maybe analysis was always about recognition. Maybe that's what I was doing all those years at the Bureau — not just measuring patterns, but recognizing which patterns mattered." I met his eyes. "You reach for things. I recognize them. That could be useful."
Thomas was quiet for a long time. Steam rose from our cups. The morning light shifted imperceptibly across the floor.
"This isn't going to be simple," he said finally. "The things I've found, the things I'm trying to share — they're not comfortable. Some people will think I'm insane. Some will think I'm dangerous. Others will want to use it, control it, make it into something it isn't."
"I know."
"And you're still—"
"I'm not going anywhere."
Another silence. But this one felt different — not empty, but full. A pause that contained something.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay."
We finished our tea. Then we started to plan.
• • •
The planning took all day.
Thomas showed me everything — not just the wall of notes I'd already seen, but the files on his computer, the physical notebooks stacked in his closet, the years of accumulated reaching. It was more organized than I'd expected. He had a system, developed over months of solitary work: the stories he'd flagged, the patterns he'd identified, the translations he'd attempted at different stages of his understanding.
"These early ones are clumsy," he said, pulling up files from two years ago. "I was still trying to force it into conventional narrative structure. It took me a long time to realize that was the problem. The structure is the meaning. You can't separate them."
I read through his archives. Watched his craft evolve — from those early awkward attempts to the translations I'd encountered during the investigation. The progression was remarkable. He'd learned a new language, essentially. A way of rendering the unrenderable.
"You're a better writer than you think," I said.
He looked surprised. "I was a mediocre novelist. The critics were clear about that."
"The critics were measuring the wrong things. What you're doing now — this is harder than writing novels. You're translating between incompatible systems of meaning. The fact that anything comes through at all is extraordinary."
"Nothing comes through. Not really. Just shadows. Echoes."
"Shadows and echoes are more than most people ever see."
He was quiet for a moment. Something moved across his face — not quite hope, but something adjacent to it. The recognition of being recognized.
"What's your plan?" I asked. "For sharing these?"
"I don't have one. I've been too focused on the work itself. The reaching."
"That's where I can help." I pulled up a chair beside him, looked at his files, started thinking out loud. "These can't go through normal channels. Traditional publishing is dead for work like this — the algorithms would never surface it, the readers wouldn't know how to find it. We need something more targeted. Direct distribution to people who are ready."
"Ready for what?"
"For having their furniture rearranged." I smiled slightly. "We find the readers first. Build a network. People who've encountered the wrongness themselves, even if they don't have your gift. People who'll recognize what they're reading."
"How do we find them?"
"That's the hard part. They're scattered. Hidden. Probably think they're alone." I thought about the Bureau's databases, all the flagged users, all the anomalous engagement patterns I'd analyzed over the years. "But there are more of them than you'd think. I've seen the data."
"You're talking about building something."
"I'm talking about letting something build itself. We provide the seeds. The translations. And we trust that the ones who need to find them will find them."
Thomas leaned back in his chair. Looked at me with an expression I couldn't quite read.
"A week ago you were investigating me for possible psychological dysfunction."
"A week ago I was asleep. I didn't know it, but I was." I held his gaze. "I'm awake now. Whatever that costs, I'm awake."
The afternoon light was fading. We'd talked for hours without noticing the time pass. My tea had long gone cold. My bag was still by the door where I'd dropped it that morning, in another life.
"You should stay," Thomas said. "It's late. The couch isn't comfortable, but—"
"The couch is fine."
"Tomorrow we can—"
"Tomorrow we can start."
He nodded. Something had settled between us. Not romantic — not yet, maybe not ever, that wasn't what this was about. But something. A partnership. A recognition.
Two blocked writers who'd lost their careers to algorithms, finding something worth reaching for together.
It wasn't much of a beginning. But it was ours.