Most people think systems fail loudly.
Alarms blare, lights flash, something explodes on the evening news.
But the really dangerous failures don't make noise. They happen in the quiet margins, in maintenance logs and version numbers. A variable gets flipped from 0 to 1 in a place nobody audits. A report goes to the wrong inbox. A door that was always locked suddenly opens and no one remembers who had the key.
Null is made of those doors.
The day after the pilot session, I woke up to the sound of shoes running.
Not dramatic, not a stampede—just the quick, clipped rhythm of people who were supposed to walk never running unless something was wrong.
I sat up on the cot. The corridor outside my little office-room hummed louder than usual. The overhead strips had shifted from their usual washed-out white to a pale amber, like someone had spilled weak tea over the world.
Echo's head appeared in the doorway, upside down, hanging from the lintel.
"Good morning," they said. "We might be about to get wiped."
"That's one way to say hello," I muttered. "What happened?"
They flipped down into the room, landing lightly.
"Architecture panic," they said. "Mara's people. Something about 'unbounded propagation' and 'unscheduled variance.' Very romantic."
"Speak Null," I said.
Echo pointed at my chest.
"Your little stunt with the quiz," they said. "The fifth answer. It made the building nervous."
I swung my legs off the bed.
"Nervous how?" I asked. "Does a building get sweaty?"
"Kind of," they said. "It starts tightening doors it doesn't remember opening and sniffing around for who's been rearranging its furniture."
I stood, card already in my hand.
"Samira?" I asked.
"In a meeting," Echo said. "The kind where everyone pretends it's not about you."
"Gabriel?" I asked.
"'Unavailable,'" they said, making air quotes. "Which is probably a lie. That leaves the B-team: me and the person the logs say is the problem."
"Flattering," I said. "Where's Mara?"
"Waiting for us," they said. "In the guts."
We took a route I hadn't used before.
Down past the Office, where clerks' screens flickered amber instead of blue. Through a door marked STAFF–FACILITIES in a font that believed in rules. The air shifted as soon as we crossed the threshold—less perfume of paperwork, more dust and hot metal.
The corridor narrowed, pipes running along the ceiling. The lights here were honest strips bolted in, not recessed panels. They buzzed softly, as if arguing with themselves.
We found Mara halfway down, half inside an open wall panel.
They had one arm buried up to the shoulder in cables, the other hand typing on a tablet balanced on a crate. Sweat darkened the collar of their jumpsuit. Their hair had slipped out of its tie entirely, falling over one eye.
"You're late," they said without looking back.
"You sent the message two minutes ago," Echo said.
"In infrastructure time, that's late," Mara replied.
They withdrew their arm from the wall. Fingers smudged with grey dust, faint black smears up to the wrist like they'd been reaching into someone's lungs.
"Explain," I said.
They tapped the panel with their knuckles.
"Engine caught something it didn't like in the Theatre logs," they said. "An 'unauthorized answer vector.'"
E.
"I thought we ghosted the update through your automation queue," I said.
"We did," they said. "The automation queue is fine with it. The architecture layer isn't."
"I thought those were the same thing," I said.
"That's what they tell funding committees," Mara said. "In practice, the building has its own ideas."
They stepped aside so I could see the inside of the wall.
It wasn't wires. Not exactly. Dense bundles of fibre and conduit twined into each other like roots. Some glowed faintly. Others pulsed, slow, like breathing.
"What am I looking at?" I asked.
"Data arteries," Mara said. "High-level. Theatre feeds. Oversight taps. Null's nervous system."
A faint amber ripple ran along one bundle and vanished into the building.
"Every time that module runs," they said, "a little pulse goes through here. Version number, quiz pattern, answer distribution. Usually it fits the template. Yesterday it didn't."
"Because of E," I said.
"Because of E," they agreed. "Also because of the outlier free-text answers. The engine wrote them into a 'risk bucket.' The architecture layer noticed the bucket was fuller than expected. Now it wants to 'reconcile deviations.'"
"Is that as bad as it sounds?" I asked.
"Yes," they said.
"Okay," I said. "What does reconciliation look like?"
They wiped their hand on their jumpsuit, leaving streaks.
"In theory?" they said. "Soft lockdown."
"And in practice?" Echo asked.
"In practice, it depends how fast we move," Mara said.
They picked up the tablet, spun it around. A schematic glowed on the screen: layers of Null stacked like a cross-section of a hive. Some sections were outlined in amber. Little icons blinked in the corridors.
"What's soft lockdown?" I asked.
"Building closes down non-essential routes," they said. "Slows traffic. Buffers weirdness. Flags anything with a high anomaly score for review."
"Like me," I said.
"Like you," they said. "Your override, your module, your handler, the Theatre. It's all connected with a nice thick line labelled 'Potential Cascade.'"
"And hard lockdown?" Echo asked.
"Hard lockdown is when it decides containment requires 'asset reset,'" Mara said. "Roll back to last safe configuration. Delete anything that deviated too far."
"Define 'asset,'" I said.
Mara looked at me.
"You," they said. "The module. The fifth answer. The two trainees who said something they shouldn't have. The parts of Samira's notes that don't match her job description. Anything that looks like a glitch in the story."
"So we stop it," I said.
"Sure," they said. "Do you have a screwdriver big enough to pry intent out of code?"
Echo clapped me lightly on the shoulder.
"Relax," they said. "We have Mara. And your deeply annoying survivorship."
"What can we actually do?" I asked Mara.
They sighed.
"The architecture layer doesn't like deleting things outright," they said. "That makes audit trails messy. What it prefers is relocation. Shove anomalies somewhere quiet and call them 'archived for later review.'"
"Where's 'somewhere quiet'?" I asked.
Mara pointed at a cluster of rectangles near the bottom of the schematic.
"Level -3," they said. "Deep storage. Where modules go when they're replaced but not yet deleted. Where old risk cases live out their retirement as cautionary tales no one opens."
"And this reconciliation process is going to shove us there?" I asked.
"Not you physically," they said. "Your case. Your module. The fifth answer. If it flags you as too noisy, you become 'legacy content.' Harder to access, easier to ignore. Same for your trainees upstairs. Their outlier responses get recategorized as 'data contamination' and filed in a folder no one ever opens unless something catastrophic happens."
"So the dam we chipped just gets walled off," Echo said.
"Exactly," Mara said. "Unless…"
"Unless what?" I asked.
"Unless we move first," they said.
They tapped a point on the schematic where several glowing lines converged.
"This junction feeds Level -3," they said. "If we can get there before the reconciliation daemon completes its pass, we can intercept the reclassification. Relabel your anomaly as… something harmless. A test pattern. A scheduled stress scenario. Anything that makes the building think it meant to do this."
"Daemon," Echo repeated. "You make it sound haunted."
"It kind of is," Mara said. "It's a maintenance process that's been patched so many times no one remembers the original spec. It just roams the architecture, looking for things that don't match the last known good picture."
"How long do we have?" I asked.
They checked the time.
"Soft lockdown initiated eight minutes ago," they said. "Daemon cycles run every thirty. It's on its way down from Oversight now, scanning as it goes. We need to hit the junction before it gets there."
Echo rubbed their hands together.
"A race," they said. "Good. I was getting bored."
I looked at the glowing lines.
"Let me guess," I said. "The junction isn't accessible from the normal floors."
"Of course not," Mara said. "If it were, someone would have put a sign on it and written a policy. We're going through maintenance."
They slapped the panel. It slid aside, revealing a narrow passage beyond.
"After you," they said.
Inside the wall, Null stopped pretending to be a workplace.
The passage was barely wider than my shoulders. Cables and pipes hugged the walls. Some were labelled in neat alphanumeric codes. Others bore handwritten notes in marker: DO NOT TOUCH, SERIOUSLY and STOP LOOPING THIS FEED, IT'S FINE.
The floor was a grated metal walkway. Through the gaps I could see more conduits below, distant glows pulsing like slow heartbeats.
The air was warmer. It smelled faintly of ozone, dust, and the ghost of cleaning fluid.
"Stay close," Mara said. "And don't step off the path. Some of those ducts lead directly into process lines. You get your foot stuck in a routing channel and the system will treat you as an obstruction."
"Obstruction sounds bad," I said.
"Obstruction gets cleared," they said. "And we're short on replacement Noors."
Echo walked ahead of me, hands gliding along the pipe casings as if greeting old friends.
"You ever think about how beautiful this is?" they asked. "All these little veins carrying bits of everyone. Complaints, forms, regrets, approvals…"
"'Beautiful' isn't the first word that comes to mind," I said.
"What's yours?" they asked.
"Hungry," I said.
A soft chime sounded somewhere up ahead. The lights flickered, then steadied.
"What was that?" I asked.
"Lockdown route adjustment," Mara said. "The building's closing doors as the daemon passes. Rerouting traffic. Don't worry. We're below its line of sight."
That didn't sound reassuring.
"Why are you helping us?" I asked, stepping over a cable bundle.
Mara snorted.
"Because if the daemon decides your module is contamination, it might decide my mislabelled debugging scripts are, too," they said. "I like my job. I like my access. I don't like losing tools because some process got zealous."
"You could have just deleted our changes," I said. "Turned off the fifth answer. Let the building calm down."
"I could," they said. "But then we'd be back where we started. And I'd still know it was possible to make it flinch. That would itch."
We reached a metal ladder bolted to the wall, disappearing up and down into shadows.
"Up," Mara said. "Two levels."
Echo began to climb, humming something tuneless. I followed. My hands slipped on a rung slick with dust; I wiped them on my shirt and kept going.
Halfway up, a low vibration rolled through the structure. Not a sound—more like a pressure change, a shift in weight.
"What was that?" I asked.
"Daemon entering Null," Mara said. "Top floor. It'll work its way down. We're fine."
"For now," Echo added cheerfully.
We climbed faster.
The junction was not dramatic.
Just a slightly wider chamber where several conduit bundles converged in a metal box the size of a small fridge. Panels covered most surfaces. Each bore a tiny label: FEED–THEATRE, FEED–ARCHIVE, FEED–OVERSIGHT, FEED–LEGACY.
One panel, in the middle, pulsed amber.
RECONCILIATION QUEUE – PENDING
"That's us," Mara said. "And about two hundred other things the building doesn't like."
"Can we see the queue?" I asked.
"If I open it, the daemon will know we're here," they said.
"So we work blind?" I asked.
They grimaced.
"Partially blind," they said.
They pulled a small tool from a pocket—something between a screwdriver and a wand—and popped the panel.
Inside: more cables, sure, but also a small display, the kind of bare-bones output meant for techs who knew what they were doing.
Lines of text crawled.
ITEM 001: MODULE 7F-19N v2.4 – STATUS: ANOMALOUS
ITEM 002: CASE FILE – OVERRIDE FLAG – SUBJECT: [REDACTED]
ITEM 003: TRAINING RESPONSES – RISK SCORE ELEVATED
ITEM 004: HANDLER NOTES – LANGUAGE DEVIATION
ITEM 005: MAINTENANCE SCRIPT – UNDOCUMENTED MODIFICATIONS
"That last one's mine," Mara said.
"Congratulations," Echo said. "We're all in this queue together."
Mara pulled the tablet, started typing commands.
"Once the daemon reaches this junction," they said, "it'll process the queue. Everything marked ANOMALOUS gets pushed into Deep Legacy. If we can change the labels before it gets here, we might redirect the current."
"How?" I asked.
"By lying to the building," they said.
Echo nodded approvingly.
"Finally," they said. "Someone speaks my language."
Mara highlighted ITEM 001.
MODULE 7F-19N v2.4 – STATUS: ANOMALOUS
They overtyped ANOMALOUS with something else.
SIMULATION – STRESS TEST – AUTHORISED
A small warning flashed.
PERMISSION REQUIRED: LEVEL 3
Mara glanced at me.
"You still have Gabriel's override in your card," they said. "He gave you access to Theatre. This junction reads that as Level 3 if we pretend hard enough."
"How do I pretend?" I asked.
"Press your card here," they said, pointing at a small indentation beside the display, "and think 'I belong.'"
"I don't," I said.
"Fake it," Echo said. "You did it all your life."
I pressed the card to the slot.
The plastic warmed under my fingers.
I thought: I belong. I thought: I am part of this. I thought: you already used me, you might as well admit it.
The display flickered.
PERMISSION ELEVATED – TEMPORARY WINDOW: 00:01:30
SIMULATION – STRESS TEST – AUTHORISED
ITEM 001's label stopped pulsing.
"That buys us a minute and a half," Mara said. "We need to recast the rest just as fast."
ITEM 002: CASE FILE – OVERRIDE FLAG – SUBJECT: [REDACTED]
Mara changed OVERRIDE FLAG to:
EXCEPTION – SUPERVISED PILOT
"This will make the daemon think you're part of an experiment sanctioned by Oversight," they said. "It will stop trying to shove you into storage and start logging you as a test case."
"Isn't that what I already am?" I asked.
"In a way," Gabriel's voice said from behind us.
I flinched, almost dropping the card.
He stood in the mouth of the passage, white shirt smudged with something dark—dust, maybe, or grease. He must have followed us, or been here first.
"Are you following us," Echo asked, "or are we following you?"
"Does it matter?" he said. "We're in the same pipe now."
Mara didn't stop typing.
"You're just in time," they said. "Help me lie to your favourite building."
"Already did," he said. "Years ago."
He stepped closer, eyes scanning the display.
"You'll need to reclassify the trainees' outliers as training assets, not contamination," he said, pointing at ITEM 003.
"Exactly," Mara said.
They overtyped:
TRAINING RESPONSES – RISK SCORE ELEVATED
into:
TRAINING RESPONSES – HIGH-VALUE FEEDBACK – RETAIN
The warning light next to ITEM 003 dimmed.
"Will the daemon buy that?" I asked.
"For now," Gabriel said. "It's not designed to interpret nuance. Just categories."
"The handler notes?" Echo asked, pointing at ITEM 004.
HANDLER NOTES – LANGUAGE DEVIATION
Mara changed it to:
HANDLER NOTES – PROPOSED REVISION – PENDING APPROVAL
"That pushes Samira's inconvenient sentences into a committee," they said. "Which delays deletion by… weeks, if we're lucky."
"Is that better?" I asked.
"It's not oblivion," Mara said. "It's bureaucracy. There's always a chance bureaucracy forgets to finish the job."
A low tremor rolled through the conduits, buzzing against my palms.
"The daemon's close," Gabriel said. "We're almost out of time."
ITEM 005 blinked.
MAINTENANCE SCRIPT – UNDOCUMENTED MODIFICATIONS
"That one's me," Mara said. "If I mark it as approved, I'll get audited. If I mark it as deleted, half my tools go with it."
They chewed their lip for half a second, then typed:
MAINTENANCE SCRIPT – LEGACY – DO NOT MIGRATE
"That makes the daemon think it's already in Deep Legacy," they said. "Old, boring, parked. It won't bother with it. People upstairs never look there unless they're trying to resurrect something for a nostalgia report."
The display updated.
QUEUE RECLASSIFIED – AWAITING RECONCILIATION
"Now we get out," they said.
We didn't.
Because that's when the daemon arrived.
It didn't look like anything.
There was no glowing orb, no spectral administrator. Just a change in the air—a sudden, sharp stillness, like an elevator stopping between floors. The lights along the conduits flickered, then lit in sequence, a wave of pale white moving toward us.
On the display, a new line appeared.
PROCESS: ARCH-RECON/DAEMON-03 – STATUS: ACTIVE – APPROACHING
"Back," Mara said. "Don't touch anything."
We stepped away from the open panel.
The wave of light rolled through the bundles, passed into the junction box, and stopped.
I felt it before I saw it. A pressure behind my eyes, like being stared at by something that didn't have a face. My card warmed and cooled in my pocket, as if being interrogated.
On the display, the items scrolled.
ITEM 001: SIMULATION – STRESS TEST – AUTHORISED – NO ACTION
ITEM 002: EXCEPTION – SUPERVISED PILOT – FLAG FOR MONITORING
ITEM 003: TRAINING RESPONSES – HIGH-VALUE FEEDBACK – RETAIN – FLAG FOR REVIEW
ITEM 004: HANDLER NOTES – PROPOSED REVISION – MOVE TO COMMITTEE QUEUE
ITEM 005: MAINTENANCE SCRIPT – LEGACY – DO NOT MIGRATE – NO ACTION
The daemon chewed on each, comparing labels to templates only it remembered. Our lies held. The labels passed.
Then a new line appeared.
ITEM 006: [UNREGISTERED ANOMALY] – SOURCE: UNKNOWN – PATH: 7F-19N / 0.9%
"What's that?" I whispered.
Mara swore under their breath.
"That wasn't there a second ago," they said.
On the display, ITEM 006 unfolded.
[UNREGISTERED ANOMALY]
– ASSOCIATED WITH: MODULE 7F-19N
– ASSOCIATED WITH: CASE FILE [REDACTED]
– ASSOCIATED WITH: PRIOR CASE: PILOT-03
– CONTENT: REDACTED FOR SAFETY
– HANDLING INSTRUCTIONS: ESCALATE TO EXTERNAL REVIEW
The words "external review" glowed brighter than the rest.
Gabriel's jaw tightened.
"That's your watcher," Echo said softly.
The pressure in the air sharpened, like a question being asked without words.
My head filled with static. For a moment, I wasn't in the narrow chamber. I was at the desk again. In the Theatre. In the train car with the doors and percentages. All at once.
Voices layered.
No one deserves to be turned into content.
No one deserves to be turned into—
Subject now statistically unlikely to be reconstructed.
Override flag: active.
External review requested.
"What does it want?" I asked through my teeth.
"Clarity," Gabriel said. "It's trying to decide which box to put you in. You don't fit any of the ones it has."
"Can we lie to it too?" Echo asked.
"No," Mara said. "This isn't the daemon. This is a tag from above. Something is reaching down through the architecture. The daemon just carries the note."
The note blinked.
ESCALATE TO EXTERNAL REVIEW – ROUTE: [REDACTED]
"Can we at least misroute it?" I asked. "Send it somewhere slower? Somewhere busy?"
Mara's fingers moved instinctively toward the controls, then stopped.
"If I touch that, it will know," they said.
"If you don't," I said, "someone or something outside Null gets a tidy little summary of me tied up with Pilot-03 and our fifth answer. You said you like your tools. I like my autonomy."
The pressure behind my eyes worsened, like my skull was a file being opened.
Gabriel stepped forward.
"Let me try," he said.
He placed his hand on the side of the panel, not on the controls, just flat against the metal.
"Null," he said, quietly. "This is Gabriel Hale. Architecture liaison. Level 3 clearance. You know my signature."
The conduits flickered.
ITEM 006 blinked.
"Directive," he said. "Re-route external escalation via internal audit queue. Label: 'Preliminary.' Defer execution pending human review."
"Is it listening?" Echo whispered.
"I don't know," he said. "But it remembers me. I helped write some of its habits."
On the display, new text appeared beneath ITEM 006.
ROUTE OVERRIDE ATTEMPTED – ORIGIN: INTERNAL – CLEARANCE: LEVEL 3 – STATUS: ACCEPTED (TEMPORARY)
HANDLING INSTRUCTIONS UPDATED:
ESCALATE TO INTERNAL AUDIT FIRST
EXTERNAL REVIEW PENDING OUTCOME
The pressure eased.
The wave of white light moved on, flowing down the conduits toward lower floors. The daemon resumed its route, apparently satisfied that it had poked everything interesting here.
The display returned to its humming scroll.
RECONCILIATION COMPLETE – NEXT PASS: 00:30:00
Mara let out a breath they'd been holding.
"You just asked the building to trust you over whatever's watching from above," they said.
"Yes," Gabriel said.
"That's either brave or stupid," Echo added.
"Those are not mutually exclusive," he said.
The panel dimmed. The words faded to a low, steady glow.
"Is it done?" I asked.
"For now," Mara said. "The queue's reclassified. Your module stays live. The trainees' answers live in a 'high-value feedback' box instead of a shredder. Samira's notes go to a committee instead of a bin. My scripts lurk in the basement. And your mystery anomaly gets to bounce around an internal audit before someone upstairs chews on it."
"And the external review?" I asked.
"Deferred," Gabriel said. "Not cancelled."
"Story of my life," I said.
Echo clapped their hands once.
"Well," they said. "That was almost fun."
"You have a broken definition of fun," I said.
"Tell me you didn't enjoy out-running a building's immune system a little," they said.
I had. I hated that I had.
We closed the panel. Mara wiped their hands again, smearing more dust.
"Next time you decide to make the architecture flinch," they said, "tell me before the daemon wakes up."
"No promises," I said.
"A warning would be nice," they repeated.
We retraced our path through the maintenance passages. The lights above us shifted slowly from amber back toward white. Somewhere overhead, the sound of running shoes had faded into the usual shuffle.
Soft lockdown easing.
As we climbed down the ladder, I looked back along the conduit bundle. For a heartbeat, I thought I saw a faint shape in the glow—a curve of letters, half-formed, then gone.
NO—
Static.
Maybe it was just my brain filling gaps.
"I have a question," I said, as we stepped back into a staff corridor that looked almost normal.
"Only one?" Echo said.
"For now," I said.
I looked at Gabriel.
"When you told the building to defer the external review," I said, "did you mean it? That you'd rather this go through an internal audit first?"
"Yes," he said.
"Why?" I asked. "You don't know who or what is watching from above. Maybe they'd be on your side."
"Maybe," he said. "Or maybe they'd skip all the parts where we still have a say."
He stopped, hand resting on the door back into the main hall.
"The architecture is a machine," he said. "It can be lied to, nudged, confused. Whatever's watching from outside… might not be. I prefer fights I can see."
"So we're staying in the aquarium," I said.
"For now," he said.
Echo glanced at me.
"Cheer up," they said. "We just convinced the tank walls to pretend we're official fish."
"Feels like being upgraded from algae to exhibit," I said.
"Hey," they said. "Progress."
We stepped back into Null proper.
The lights were normal. Clerks moved between desks. Screens glowed blue instead of amber. On the surface, nothing had happened.
In the walls, the labels had changed.
In the junction, ITEM 006 pulsed quietly, waiting for its appointment with an audit committee that wouldn't know what to do with it.
Somewhere above, in a training room being prepped for the next cohort, Module 7F-19N v2.4 sat on a server, ready to run.
With one more answer than it was meant to have.
We'd run through the veins of a dead bureaucracy and come out the other side slightly less erased.
It was a small victory. Narrow. Temporary.
But walking down the corridor, card warm in my pocket, I couldn't shake the feeling that something had shifted that wasn't just code.
The building had tried to tuck us away in a quiet corner.
Instead, for thirty heartbeats in a metal box, we'd made it hesitate.
And in a place like Null, hesitation is the first crack anything ever gets.
Act fourteenth - "to the you i locked, behind the logic doors of space and time".