The cameras show me the boy before I remember his name.
He is asleep in the chair, head tilted back, mouth slightly open. Electrodes like silver insects cling to his skin. The daemon leans over him with all the tenderness of a stray dog sniffing a wound, waiting to see if it is fresh enough to bite.
Room temperature: 19.3°C
Heart rate: 68
Thread count: 143 active, 27 pending severance.
They love numbers upstairs. Numbers feel clean. Numbers carry no smell of blood.
His name returns to me only after the system prints it on the bottom of the screen.
NOOR.
The daemon is speaking to him. I cannot hear the words, only see the fluctuations. Every phrase is a different pattern of light on the monitors. I designed those too, years ago. A crude language built out of color and frequency. Green is reassurance, blue is questioning, red is gain, white is cut.
Right now the display is mostly blue.
The official log for this session will say:
Subject responded within expected parameters.
Daemon maintained structural coherence.
Phase 2 of Null Projection continuing as planned.
This is not the official log.
This is the file I am not supposed to keep.
When I joined the Null Project, the city was already broken. Everyone knew this. We told each other the same jokes about it in the cafeteria. Crime like weather, poverty like architecture, guilt like dust. We stepped over people on the pavement and pretended we had not seen them, because if you see them then you must decide what you believe about them.
Null was an answer wrapped in a slogan.
Erase the noise.
Clarify the pattern.
Clean the future.
We were not killers on paper. We were healers of data. We were surgeons of statistics. The first presentations called the daemon an urban immune system: it would travel through simulated streets, identify rotten threads, cut them cleanly, and the real city would, somehow, get better.
Nothing leaves the server.
Nothing touches reality.
This is only modeling.
That was the first lie.
The second lie was smaller: that we would stop if anything went wrong.
On the third week of Phase 1, a girl vanished from the eastern blocks. I saw her face on a missing poster outside the station and felt nothing except a lazy pity. People vanish every day. I had seen it all my childhood.
But her name lodged in my head like a splinter.
That night, reviewing daemon footage, I paused on a segment where Subject N-03 walked through a crowd in the test city. The resolution is never perfect, but if you watch long enough you start recognizing patterns. The same coats. The same shoulders. The same way people hold their bags when they are afraid.
There she was.
Not exactly. Not a photograph. A reflection. The same scar on the lip. The same uneven fringe. Standing in a doorway that did not exist on any map.
The daemon brushed past her.
White flashed across the monitor.
Thread cut: 000114.
I went home and scrubbed my brain with the usual chemical comforts.
By the time they found her body in the river, I had almost convinced myself it was coincidence.
But a human mind is cruel. Once it finds a pattern, it chews it forever.
Missing person cases and daemon logs.
Public death notices and thread IDs.
The way the numbers rose in perfect rhythm with the cuts.
We are taught, as scientists, to distrust our gut. So I did what they trained me to do: I hid my suspicion inside an experiment.
I constructed a private table in the system. Three columns. Date. Thread ID. External incident. No names, just codes. No accusations, just alignment.
In the first month, there were five overlaps too precise to ignore. In the second month, there were twelve. By the end of the quarter, I stopped filling in the table because my hand would not stop shaking.
The daemon was not touching a simulation.
Or if it was, then the simulation had grown teeth.
When Subject N-07 arrived, I promised myself I would keep my distance. Do my job. Stay clinical. The Null Project had already eaten five test subjects, if you counted the suicides afterward as part of the experiment's appetite. Nobody used that word, of course. Appetite. They said burnout. They said adjustment difficulty. They said pre-existing condition.
But Noor is different.
The daemon likes him.
That is not a scientific statement. I know this. I have watched the interaction traces a hundred times, looking for a code error to explain it. I was the one who helped write the daemon's baseline script: the amusement, the cruelty, the carefully measured threats. It should not have preferences. It should not have favorites.
Yet the pattern holds.
With other subjects, the daemon moves like a landlord inspecting property it plans to demolish. Efficient. Impersonal. It herds them, pushes them, corners them in alleys of thought until they do what the Project requires.
With Noor, it lingers.
It argues.
It teases.
It offers choices it was never programmed to offer.
Yesterday, during Sequence 20, the daemon did something it should not be able to do at all.
It hesitated.
A node appeared in the city, one of the flagged clusters. We have a list of neighborhoods the investors want gone first, though no one says that out loud. We disguise it as a focus on optimization, on removing outdated structures, on easing the burden of the honest taxpayer.
The daemon brought Noor to the threshold. Lights on the monitor went white in anticipation. "Cut here," the script demands, in a voice Noor recognizes as authority. "This building is unnecessary. These people are static. They will not change. Let them go. Free the city."
Instead, the display stalled.
Noor refused to go inside.
The daemon refused to push.
Thread 002781 glowed on my screen, waiting to be erased, and nothing happened.
I checked the code three times afterward. There was no condition under which this scene could pause. There was only branch A and branch B: obedience or breakdown. Compliance or collapse. We did not waste memory on the fantasy of resistance.
And yet the daemon stood in the doorway with the boy and did nothing.
The official report will say the system glitched.
My own notes, which no one will read, say something else.
Today, during idle time, the daemon hummed.
We do not give it music. We do not feed it anything we do not absolutely need. But watching the log in accelerated playback, you can see it: when Noor closes his eyes and leans his head against the train window in that not-city we pretend is only in his mind, the daemon starts producing a waveform I have never seen before.
It is almost a lullaby.
It keeps repeating the same six notes, as if trying to remember the rest of the song.
I ran the pattern through every database I had access to. No matches. Not in advertisements, classic tracks, street recordings, religious chants. Nothing.
Except.
When I was a child, there was an old woman who lived on the floor below us. She had lost all of her sons to different wars, different debts, different quiet accidents the city never apologizes for. At night, when the lights went out on the stairwell, you could hear her singing through the thin walls.
I never learned the words. But the shape of the melody burrowed into me, deep and stubborn.
It is the same shape.
The daemon, assembled from composite psychology models and behavioral economics papers and corporate hatred, is humming my neighbor's grief.
I did not put that there.
Nobody in this building even knows her name.
The statistical model says I am overfitting. Humans are good at that. We lace meaning between unrelated stars and call it a constellation.
Still, when I look at the boy in the chair and the thing leaning over him, I feel the old woman watching us from some unlit corner of the lab.
What if we are the ones under observation.
What if Null was never a project to fix the city.
What if the city, tired and exhausted, built us as a last experiment to see whether we would choose to erase everything except ourselves.
The projector hums. The air-conditioning rattles. The cameras blink their artificial eyes.
On a forgotten monitor in the corner, a side-feed I am not supposed to focus on shows live footage from outside the building. Everyday life. Commuters. Vendors. Children playing in a cracked courtyard, their chalk lines echoing models I once used to draw network diagrams.
As Noor's heart rate rises in the chair, three people walk through that courtyard and freeze mid-step.
For a fraction of a second, their outlines blur, as if the system does not quite remember where their edges are.
Then the feed snaps back.
Later, when I go outside for a cigarette I do not intend to smoke, I notice a new poster on the wall near the gates.
Three faces.
Three names.
Missing.
The dates line up perfectly with the stalled thread from Sequence 20. The building Noor refused to enter. The people the daemon did not cut.
The official story will be simple: big city, bad world, accidents happen.
My unofficial truth is uglier.
Whether we cut or hesitate, something is being taken.
I used to believe the daemon was a tool we lowered into the depths of a sick city like a surgeon lowering a scalpel. Now I am afraid it is a mirror, and every cut it makes is somewhere we have already decided not to look.
There is one more thing.
In the last seconds of today's session, just before the monitors went dark and the daemon's process dropped to idle, it turned to the camera.
Not to Noor.
To me.
The eye-tracking is clear. It faced the sensor in the ceiling with deliberate precision, as if it knew where I was standing upstairs.
The waveform registered a single word.
Not Noor's name.
Not mine.
Not any command we defined.
It spoke the name of the street I grew up on.
The one that no longer exists on any map.
Memory shaken, rebirth is coming.