Brandon told himself it was just exhaustion—too many late nights, not enough sleep. But with each passing shift, the feeling settling beneath his skin grew stronger, as if the city's electric pulse had tuned itself to the beat of his heart. Even at home, he sometimes caught himself listening for the hum of unseen wires and the faint, almost wordless static in the air.
It was another slow Tuesday evening in the system security office, but the silence felt charged. The monitors lit Brandon's face with harsh blue-white, bleaching the lines under his eyes. The air was laced with burnt coffee and the copper tang of old electronics—a scent he'd come to associate with insomnia.
He cycled through network activity logs, eyes flicking between lines of code. A vibration seemed to buzz up his leg through the floor, matching the servers' rhythm. He tried not to notice.
Erik cruised by, slurping the dregs of instant noodles. "Diagnostics again?"
"Yeah. Clean-up detail. Still picking up cross-talk from the last patch."
Erik managed a lazy grin. "Nobody else even sees that noise. You keep catching shadows, man." He vanished toward the break room, leaving Brandon with the aftertaste of unease.
That's when he caught it: a line repeating, faint but insistent, threaded like a heartbeat through the logs.
–––10101101–10101101–––1010…
Perfect in its rhythm. Wrong in its intent.
He zoomed in, hands numb. The repetition shifted, a fraction different each time, as if something behind the numbers was breathing.
He tried to trace it—wading through network paths, digging deeper, the hum coiling tighter through his nerves.
The code began mutating: not random, not machine noise.
Coordinates, maybe. Timestamps. Then, unnervingly, words.
text
HELLO BRANDON
For a moment, time suspended. His reflection flickered in the screen, unblinking.
He checked firewall logs—no breach, no shadow process, no inbound connections. Each system swore it was clean.
But the message remained:
text:
YOU SAW IT TOO.
The hum crescendoed, so deep he swore it rattled his bones. His fingers trembled as he wiped the terminal and forced a reboot.
The system died, then rose again—blank, save for a single line:
text:
USER SESSION TERMINATED –– 03:17:09
AM REASON: DREAMING.
In the break room, the air felt different—thinner, cold. Brandon filled his cup, watching the steam curl. It twisted upwards, forming for an instant the silhouette of a branch, impossibly delicate, before smoke dispersed into nothing.
Across the room, a tune drifted out—something he'd dreamed, low and plaintive, slipping through the vents. He glanced over his shoulder. No one.
His hand shook. Shape up. You're just tired.
His phone buzzed, Tariq's name flashing.
"Yo, you alive? Haven't heard from you in days."
Brandon forced a dry laugh. "I'm fine. Just work. Just… static."
"You sound fried. Drink water and get sun. Maya's worried you're going full ghost-hunter on us."
Brandon hesitated, studying the digital afterimage left on his closed eyelids. "Tariq… if you think something's watching you, in the code—what would you do?"
Tariq laughed uneasily. "Depends. Is it paying rent, or just squatting in your head? Turn off the screen, man. Sleep. It's just data."
"Yeah," Brandon said, but even as he said it, he saw the terminal light blinking out of sync on his desk.
He returned to a crashed system: the familiar login prompt replaced by shadow.
A thin red glow pulsed in the black corner, and lines of text began to bleed across the screen:
text:
ACCESSING ROOT MEMORY... VERIFYING USER IDENTITY... FOUND YOU.
Brandon's breath caught. The glow spread, pixelating into the orchard: the red tree, the fruit, unbearable in its familiarity.
A figure resolved under the branches—human, still, wrong.
His own heartbeat was lost in the building's hum.
Finally, the code formed one last message:
text:
IT'S NOT JUST A DREAM.
The monitor died, plunging him into blackness. In the glassy reflection, for one heartbeat, his own face lingered back—paler and smiling, just a fractal too wide.
He blinked. Alone, he grasped for the hum in his bones, the phantom cadence of a city that seemed to know his name.