The rest of the day passed in a blur, but it was a different kind of blur than the nightmare of the previous days. It was the blur of productivity.
Ethan and Sophia fell into a rhythm that felt unnervingly natural. They spoke in the shorthand of advanced physics, finishing each other's equations, correcting each other's assumptions. She was brilliant—sharper than him in topology, perhaps a little more reckless in her hypotheses, but she pushed him. She forced him to defend his logic, to sharpen his own thinking.
It was intoxicating. It was the most stimulating conversation he had had in years.
And yet, the paranoia remained.
Every time she turned her back, Ethan watched her. He looked for the glitch. He looked for the moment her smile would falter and reveal the wireframe beneath. He watched her hands to see if they passed through solid objects.
She was too perfect. Not physically—she had the bitten fingernails and the ink stains and the messy hair—but contextually. She was exactly what he needed. She was the perfect foil, the perfect partner. The universe (or the Architects) had looked at the hole in Ethan's life and designed a plug to fit it exactly.
Around 2:00 PM, Lily entered the lab.
She stopped in the doorway, holding a clipboard. She looked at Ethan and Sophia, who were huddled over a schematic, their heads close together, debating the thermal capacity of the cooling vents.
"Oh," Lily said. Her voice sounded small.
Ethan looked up. "Lily. Hey."
Lily looked at Sophia. Her expression was unreadable for a moment—a flicker of something like confusion, or perhaps jealousy. "I... I didn't know we had company."
"This is Dr. Carter," Ethan said, stepping back from the table. "She's... consulting."
"Sophia," the woman said, walking over and offering her hand to Lily. "You must be Lily. Ethan says you're the only reason this lab hasn't burned down yet."
Lily took the hand. She hesitated. Ethan watched closely. If Sophia was a construct, would Lily—another construct—recognize her? Would they glitch when they touched?
They shook hands. Nothing happened. The world didn't flicker.
"Nice to meet you," Lily said. Her voice was polite, but the warmth was dialled down. "I didn't see a requisition for a new team member on the server."
"Voss fast-tracked it," Sophia said easily. "You know how he is. Once he gets an idea in his head, physics just has to catch up."
Lily laughed, but it sounded scripted. "Yeah. That sounds like Voss."
She looked at Ethan. "I just came to drop off the energy consumption reports. The grid is stable, but we're pushing the limits of the B-line."
"Thanks, Lily," Ethan said. He felt a sudden, sharp pang of guilt. Lily was his friend. Or, she had been his friend in the real world. Here, in this cage, she was... what? A background character?
Lily lingered for a moment, her gaze darting between Ethan and Sophia. "You two seem to be getting along," she said.
"We're arguing about thermal dynamics," Sophia said, grinning. "It's basically a blood sport."
"Right," Lily said. "Well. I'll be in the server room if you need me."
She turned and left. Ethan watched her go. He felt a strange disconnect. Lily felt... dimmed. Compared to the vibrant, high-definition presence of Sophia, Lily felt like a character from an older video game, her textures slightly muddy, her dialogue options limited.
Was that intentional? Was the simulation reallocating resources to the new main character?
"She's protective of you," Sophia said, leaning against the bench.
"She's a good student," Ethan mumbled. He looked at Sophia. "Why are you really here, Sophia?"
Sophia stopped smiling. She looked at him, her green eyes searching his face. "Because I'm looking for the same thing you are, Ethan. I've been studying these anomalies for years. The resonance. The gaps in the data. I thought I was the only one seeing them. And then Voss showed me your work."
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small, folded piece of paper. She unfolded it and placed it on the table.
It was a drawing. A sketch of a waveform.
It was identical to the spike Ethan had seen. But there were notes in the margins. Notes in a handwriting that wasn't his.
The heartbeat of the ghost, the notes read. The world breathing in.
"I drew this six months ago," Sophia said softly. "In a lab in Zurich. I was fired for wasting resources chasing ghosts. When I saw your file... I knew I wasn't crazy."
Ethan stared at the drawing. It was messy. There was a coffee stain on the corner.
He wanted to believe her. God, he wanted to believe her. The loneliness of the void, of the empty apartment, of the fake students—it was a crushing weight. And here was someone who spoke his language, someone who saw the cracks in the world.
"We're going to figure it out," she said. "Together."
That night, Ethan sat at his desk in the apartment.
The rose in the vase had lost another petal. It was decaying at a natural rate.
He had the notebook open. The pen hovered over the page.
He wanted to write about the data. He wanted to write about the resonance theory. But his mind kept drifting back to the smell of jasmine, the static shock when their arms brushed, the crooked smile.
October 28th.
Subject: The Variable.
Sophia Carter introduced today. Highly intelligent. Specializes in entanglement. Claims to have seen the anomalies before.
He paused. He looked at the dying rose.
She fits too well, he wrote. She answers questions I haven't asked. She fills the silence exactly when it becomes uncomfortable. Voss brought her. That means she is part of the design.
He thought about her laugh. He thought about the way she looked at the generator, with the same awe and fear that he felt.
Hypothesis: She is a handler. A monitor. Or...
He swallowed hard.
Or she is the bait.
She is wrong and right at once. She feels more real than Lily. More real than Voss. When she touches things, they don't glitch. When she looks at me, I feel... seen.
He dragged the pen across the page, the line growing heavy and dark.
Danger. High probability of emotional compromise.
He heard a noise. A knock at the door.
Ethan froze. It was 11:00 PM. No one came to his apartment.
He got up, walking silently to the door. He looked through the peephole.
It was Sophia.
She was wearing a heavy coat, a scarf wrapped around her neck. Her hair was wet, plastered to her forehead. It was raining outside.
Ethan unlocked the door and opened it.
The sound of rain filled the apartment—a steady, rhythmic drumming that he hadn't heard since the shift. The smell of wet pavement and ozone rushed in.
"Sophia?"
She stood there, shivering slightly. She held up a paper bag.
"I know it's late," she said, her teeth chattering. "But I was going over the thermal logs, and I realized we missed a variable in the cooling cycle. And... I figured you hadn't eaten."
She smiled, that crooked, imperfect smile.
"I brought dumplings," she said. "From that place on 4th. They're terrible, but they're open."
Ethan looked at her. He looked at the rain falling behind her—rain that wasn't on the forecast, rain that broke the pattern of the perfect weather.
She had brought the rain with her.
"Ethan?" she asked, her smile faltering slightly. "Can I come in? It's freezing."
Ethan stepped back. "Yeah. Come in."
She stepped inside, bringing the storm and the smell of food and the chaos of life into his sterile, perfect prison.
Ethan watched her walk to the kitchen. He felt the wall around his heart crack, just a little.
He knew it was a trap. He knew she was the bait.
But he was starving.
He closed the door, locking the rain outside, and followed her into the light