The first thing they don't tell you about being an anomaly is how loud the building gets.
When you're just a case, Null hums in the background like bad air conditioning—steady, ignorable.
Once they start watching you, the hum develops a heartbeat.
Every door hiss feels opinionated.
Every flicker of a screen feels like someone thinking about you.
I was halfway through pretending to read a report in my borrowed office when the lights above my head blinked twice in a pattern I'd started to recognize.
Not a power fluctuation.
A notification.
A second later, Echo burst in without knocking.
"Field trip," they said. "Basement edition."
"Last time you said 'field trip,' I ended up watching a mannequin have a nervous breakdown," I said.
"This is more of a wellness check," they said. "For the building."
"That's worse," I said.
Samira appeared behind them, already in a grey jacket, hair tied up with clinical efficiency.
"Move," she said. "We're on a clock."
"What kind of clock?" I asked, standing.
"The kind that ends with a reconciliation pass," she said.
The word settled in my chest like a cold coin.
"Daemon?" I asked.
She nodded once.
"Full sweep," she said. "Architecture's kicking off a deep clean after the drill incident. Clarke flagged us. Mara wants you downstairs before it hits the junction your case sits on."
"So this is about me," I said.
"This is about everything connected to you," she said. "Which is getting to be more than I like."
The lift didn't go to the floor we needed.
That was new.
Mara met us in a service stairwell instead, leaning against a door marked TECHNICAL PERSONNEL ONLY – NO CASE ACCESS in peeling letters.
They were chewing on a cable tie, which seemed like a good metaphor for their job.
"You brought him," they said, spitting the plastic into their palm. "Good. I thought Audit might decide to keep their pet out of sight for this one."
"Pet prefers 'hostile witness,'" I said.
Mara snorted.
"Hostile's useful," they said. "We're going below the routing layer. I want your… whatever you do… pointed at the daemon when it comes through."
Echo peered at the door.
"I thought the daemon was just a process," they said. "Like… logs and fans and regret."
"It is," Mara said. "But when something runs that deep, it leaves a shape. Today we get to see the shape."
"And if we don't like it?" I asked.
"Then we shut up about it and pretend it looked like a spreadsheet," Mara said. "Come on. Clarke bought us twenty minutes of unsupervised access. I'm not wasting it on small talk."
The door opened onto a sloping corridor that felt older than the rest of Null.
The walls were concrete, sweating in places, lined with cable trunks as thick as my arms. The air was cooler, tinged with metal and chemical chill. It felt less like an office and more like the backstage of a weather system.
As we walked, the hum got louder.
It wasn't noise, exactly. More like the suggestion of a thousand fans and drives, layered until it became almost a tone. Every few seconds, the pitch shifted a fraction, as if the building was clearing its throat.
Echo fell into step beside me, hands in their pockets.
"On a scale of one to 'I regret my continued existence,' how anxious should I be?" they asked.
"Six," Mara said over their shoulder. "Seven if you don't like seeing how sausages are made."
"I don't eat sausages," Echo said.
"You exist inside one," Mara replied.
Samira walked on my other side, eyes scanning the cables and junction boxes like they might attack us.
"What exactly is the daemon reconciling today?" I asked.
"Everything touched by the drill," Mara said. "That includes your module, the Option E fork, the category we slapped on Pilot-03's little foam avatar, and every trainee who picked an answer it didn't like."
"So," Echo said, "the daemon is coming to chew on our homework."
"It's coming to decide which version of reality was 'supposed' to happen," Mara said. "And make the rest match."
"And we're going to… what?" I asked. "Persuade it?"
Mara shrugged.
"We're going to watch," they said. "And if an opportunity appears, we're going to lie to it very convincingly."
The corridor opened into a space that didn't belong in a bureaucracy.
It was a chamber the size of a subway station, but instead of platforms and tracks, there were racks. Floor-to-ceiling frames of hardware, blinking lights in slow patterns, looping cables hanging like roots in a steel forest. Cool air rushed up from vents in the floor, carrying a thin mist that turned the LEDs into distant constellations.
In the center of the room, a circular platform rose knee-high, covered in transparent panels. Under the panels, a three-dimensional map of Null's process tree glowed—branching lines of light, pulsing nodes, labels scrolling in tiny text too fast to read.
Mara hopped up onto the platform and knelt, fingers skidding across the surface, calling up overlays.
"This is the reconciliation heart," they said without looking up. "Every major daemon pass routes through here. Usually I'm not supposed to be in the same postal code when it happens."
"And today?" Samira asked.
"Today we have dispensation," Mara said. "And an anomaly."
They tilted their head toward me.
On the map, one node pulsed a different color from the rest.
CASE 7F-19N – STATUS: ANOMALY TYPE-FIVE – SUPERVISED.
Branches off it glowed fainter: MODULE 7F-19N, OPTION E PATH, TRAINING ANOMALY UNIT, HANDLER NOTES – REVISED.
It looked like the root of a small, stubborn weed in a lawn of identical grass.
"Feels weird seeing it all laid out like that," Echo murmured.
"Better than seeing it in my dreams," I said.
Samira studied the map.
"Where does the daemon come in?" she asked.
Mara tapped a corner of the display.
A new line appeared, descending from somewhere above the map's frame like a meteor trail.
RECONCILIATION PASS: SYSTEMIC – PRIORITY HIGH
EST. ARRIVAL: 00:07:42
"It'll start at the top layers—logs, temps, caches," Mara said. "Then move down through Training, Archive, Theatre, Routing, finally this heart. Anything that doesn't match its idea of 'safe' gets pushed, patched, or purged."
"And your plan is to stand here and hope it doesn't decide my entire existence is a typo," I said.
"My plan," Mara said, "is to watch where it hesitates. Bugs don't hesitate. Bureaucrats do. Daemons are somewhere in between."
Echo tilted their head.
"I thought we wanted to keep this floor as boring as possible," they said. "Isn't bringing your anomaly here like waving a red flag at a very large, very literal bull?"
"Maybe the bull's tired of staring at beige," I said.
Samira shot me a look.
"This is not the time to antagonize an automated process," she said.
"Give it ten minutes," Mara muttered. "He won't be able to help himself."
We waited.
Waiting in a place like that felt wrong, like standing in the middle of someone's brain, eavesdropping on electrical impulses.
The hum climbed, slowly.
On the map, the descending line thickened, forking into tiny filaments that branched into Training, Archive, Theatre. Around the room, the lights on the racks began to synchronize—green blink, pause, green blink—like a thousand eyes closing and opening together.
A faint band of text scrolled along the edge of the platform.
RECONCILIATION PASS IN PROGRESS – DO NOT INTERRUPT
Echo shifted their weight.
"What happens if we interrupt?" they asked.
"Best case, we get yelled at by Audit," Mara said. "Worst case, we desync internal time and everyone vomits."
"Good thing I didn't have breakfast," Echo said.
I watched the map.
When the daemon's path hit Training, the branch for MODULE 7F-19N flashed.
For a second, the label changed.
MODULE 7F-19N – STATUS: TRAINING CONTENT – SAFE
Then it flickered back to:
MODULE 7F-19N – STATUS: CONTENT WITH ANOMALOUS PATHS – REVIEW
The descending line paused there, brightening.
"It's looking at you," Mara said softly.
"Feels like it," I said.
I could feel something in the air—a subtle tightening, like when a conversation turns and everyone in the room suddenly starts picking their words more carefully.
On the racks around us, a handful of indicator lights went from green to amber.
"Is that normal?" Samira asked.
"No," Mara said. "But it's not abnormal enough to panic about. Yet."
The daemon moved on, through Archive, Theatre, Routing.
Every time it passed through a subsystem I'd touched, there was a brief hesitation—a flicker, like someone rereading a line they didn't expect.
Pilot-03's footprint glowed faintly where it had been baked into the training anomaly unit. The daemon's trace brushed it.
The map glitched.
For half a heartbeat, the label read:
PILOT-03 LEXICAL RESIDUE – STATUS: QUARANTINED – REMOVE
Then it rewrote itself to:
ANOMALY – EMERGENT REFUSAL PATTERN – RETAIN FOR TRAINING – SUPERVISE
The descending line quivered.
"See that?" Mara breathed. "It doesn't like that we lied. But it likes having an explanation more than it likes having a gap."
"So it's like middle management," Echo said.
"Exactly," Mara said.
The hum built, layering until my teeth buzzed.
The daemon's trace approached the central heart.
RECONCILIATION PASS – CORE LAYERS – 00:00:59
A subtle current rippled through the racks. The mist on the floor stirred like breath.
"Why are we here, really?" I asked Mara, unable to keep the edge out of my voice. "You could watch this without me. You didn't drag me down here to admire the lights."
Mara stopped typing.
"For once?" they said. "It wasn't my idea."
They nodded upward, toward the theoretical direction of Audit.
"Clarke wants to know what happens when the daemon gets close to you," they said. "It's never had to decide what to do with a Type-Five anomaly whose fingerprints are all over live training content."
"So this is an experiment," I said.
"Everything down here is an experiment," Mara replied. "We're just the ones who know we're in it."
Samira's hand found my arm, fingers tightening.
"If anything feels wrong," she said, "tell us. Do not try to be brave."
"I'm not brave," I said. "I'm curious."
"Same thing at this distance," Echo said.
The daemon hit the heart.
The sound changed.
Up until then, it had been a hum—annoying, ignorable. Now a second tone slid under it, higher, like feedback on a mic turned up a fraction too far. The hairs on my arms lifted.
On the map, the descending line thickened into a knot of light above the core node.
The platform under our feet warmed.
"Stay on the edge," Mara said quickly. "If it routes through the central junction, we don't want you standing directly over it."
We stepped back to the lip of the circle.
In the racks around us, more lights turned amber. A few snapped to red, then back, as if reconsidering.
"You're sure this is safe?" Echo asked.
"No," Mara said. "But it's rare."
The knot of light tightened.
For the first time, the daemon printed something more than generic status.
CORE RECONCILIATION: PATTERN MISMATCH
SOURCE: CASE 7F-19N / PILOT-03 LEXICAL RESIDUE / TRAINING PATH E
ACTION: …
The text hung there, the ellipsis blinking, as if the process were genuinely thinking.
"That… shouldn't happen," Mara whispered. "It doesn't usually… hesitate in words."
"How do you know?" I asked.
"Because I've watched it eat entire subsystems without a comma," they said.
The room grew brighter without any visible change in the lights.
No—it wasn't brightness. It was lack of shadow. Edges softened, contrast bled out, like someone was turning up the exposure on reality.
"What is that?" Echo asked, squinting.
"Signal," Mara said. "Too much of it in one place."
"It feels like snow in my ears," I said.
"White noise," Samira said softly.
The daemon printed anew.
ACTION: ROLL BACK TO LAST CONSISTENT STATE
The knot of light flared.
Somewhere overhead, a vent screamed, then fell abruptly silent.
"No," Mara said. "No, no, no—if it rolls back the heart, we lose the module changes, the anomaly label, half the training data—"
"I thought you said we couldn't interrupt it," Echo said.
"We can't," Mara said. "But we can… offer it alternatives."
They dove back to the console, fingers flying.
On the map, small, desperate branches appeared beneath my node, labelled with things like NON-CRITICAL, LOW RISK, LEGACY.
The daemon ignored them.
ROLLBACK PATH: CORE NARRATIVE ALIGNMENT – TARGET: CASE 7F-19N
It was going to prune me out of the tree.
Not just my file—my shape in the building.
The hum rose until I could feel it in my molars.
The mist on the floor thickened, whirling inward toward the platform.
"Get him out," Samira snapped.
"I can't," Mara said. "Exit doors are locked under recon."
Echo stepped closer to me, their outline already blurring a little in the overexposed air.
"Hey," they said. "Stay with us, okay?"
"It's not like I have other plans," I said, but my voice sounded far away.
On the map, the light knot unfurled.
For a second, I saw it—not on the screen, but in the room.
A long curve of nothingness sweeping between the racks, bleaching detail as it passed. It didn't glow. It erased. Wherever it went, labels blurred, serial numbers vanished, the little scuffs on the floor smoothed out as if someone had polished them out of time.
It moved like a spine, each vertebra a cluster of error messages pulsing in sync. No head, no tail, just a loop of pure correction, coiling tighter around the platform.
"Tell me someone else can see that," I said.
Samira swallowed.
"I see… something," she said. "Like a heat shimmer."
Mara didn't look up.
"I see logs," they said tightly. "And I see our patchwork lies getting pushed to the edge. It's deciding what to keep."
The daemon's presence slid closer.
The sound resolved fully into white noise now—no tone, just dense, full-spectrum static that filled my ears and pushed everything else to the edges. The others' voices turned into shapes with no audio.
The map showed the knot reaching down into my node.
TARGET: CASE 7F-19N – STATUS: ANOMALOUS – INCONSISTENT WITH SAFE TEMPLATE
ACTION: RECONCILE / REMOVE EXCESS
I laughed, or tried to.
Of course I was "excess."
Disturbances always are.
The loop of non-light brushed the edge of the platform.
My vision went grainy, like old film.
Where it touched the transparent panels, text vanished. Not scrolled away—ceased to have ever been. I watched an entire label dissolve into blank glass.
Echo grabbed my sleeve.
"Noor," they said, their voice faint through the static. "Don't let it decide for you."
"What else is it for?" I asked, not sure if I was speaking out loud.
"To make everything else easier," they said. "Not to make you honest."
The white noise swelled, pressing in from all sides, drowning the hum, the fans, the ragged breathing.
Somewhere in that featureless roar, there was intent.
Not anger. Not cruelty.
Just the rigid satisfaction of something that knows exactly what "correct" looks like and is willing to delete anything that doesn't match.
Mara shouted something—my name, maybe. Samira's hand was on my shoulder, solid and small in a world going soft.
On the map, the daemon printed:
RECONCILIATION REQUIRES DIRECT PATTERN CONTACT
An arrow blinked from the knot to my node.
To me.
"Oh," I said.
It wanted to touch.
Not metaphorically. Not in the way policies "touch lives."
Direct pattern contact.
"Don't," Samira said, voice suddenly sharp in my ear, cutting through the static for one bright moment. "Noor, listen to me. You do not have to—"
"Let it take you," Echo finished for her.
I thought about the training module, about Option E, about the mannequin with Pilot-03's ghost in it. Every time we'd cheated, we'd done it from the side, slipping labels under the door, hoping the daemon wouldn't notice.
It had noticed.
And now it was here.
"Maybe I want to see what we're fighting," I said.
Samira's fingers dug in hard enough to hurt.
"Maybe you'll stop existing," she said. "Is that worth a better metaphor?"
"I was supposed to stop existing months ago," I said. "This is all overtime."
Echo stared at me, eyes wide and very, very human.
"Please don't do anything poetic," they said. "Poetic people die."
"Everyone dies," I said. "Poetic people just get quoted."
The loop of white noise tightened around the platform, a ring of erasure with an empty center where we stood.
The air in that center felt thin, like being at the top of a very tall building and opening a window.
On the map, the arrow pulsed.
DIRECT PATTERN CONTACT PENDING – CONFIRM
I stepped forward.
Samira's grip slid off my shoulder, catching my sleeve, then my wrist, then nothing.
For a second, I considered staying.
Letting the daemon do its work from a distance. Letting it roll back the heart, erase my trail, tidy the world the way it wanted.
But then Option E flashed in my mind, in the Theatre, on the trainee's face: early recognition of structural limits in institutional response.
The daemon was a limit, too.
And if it was going to erase me, I wanted to know what its touch felt like.
I reached out toward the white band where detail went to die.
The static surged, filling everything.
My fingers met something that wasn't there.
It felt like pressing my hand into the loudest part of a radio tuned between stations—no surface, just pressure and grain, every frequency at once.
For a single, impossible moment, the world held its breath.
Then the daemon touched back.
Act Seventeenth's End - "I am the city."