The city of San Francisco did not sleep; it vibrated.
For the average citizen, the sound of a refrigerator was merely background hum—a domestic white noise. To Kasper Vane, it was a low-C note played on a rusted, weeping cello, the vibration traveling through the floorboards, up the legs of his ergonomic chair, and settling directly into the marrow of his teeth.
Kasper sat in the center of his "Sanctuary," a studio apartment in the Mission District that had been retrofitted into a sensory tomb. The walls were lined with three-inch thick acoustic foam, draped in heavy charcoal velvet to swallow the light. He wore a pair of custom-molded titanium headphones, currently active in "Null Mode." They didn't just block sound; they emitted an out-of-phase frequency that canceled the very existence of the world outside.
He lived his life in the gaps between frequencies. He ate lukewarm, unseasoned protein mashes because the crunch of a cracker sounded like a gunshot in his jaw, and the heat of coffee felt like liquid lead on his hyper-sensitive tongue. Kasper Vane was a man broken by the volume of the world, which made him the only man capable of hearing the truth when everyone else was shouting.
A haptic pulse thrummed against his inner wrist. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. Code Red.
Kasper didn't open his eyes immediately. He let the sensation of the vibration fade, ensuring no residual ghost-touch lingered on his skin. Then, he reached out and tapped a sequence on the glass tablet fixed to his chair.
The far wall erupted into life. A 12-foot, 8K resolution projection screen bathed the dark room in a cold, sterile blue light. Kasper winced, his pupils constricting painfully, but he didn't turn away. On the screen was a high-fidelity 3D LIDAR scan of a room that shouldn't exist.
"Talk to me, Miller," Kasper whispered. His own voice felt like a sandpaper caress against his throat.
The audio feed from Detective Miller clicked on, heavily processed through Kasper's "Smooth-Voice" filter which stripped away the harsh plosives and sibilance of human speech.
"We've got a weird one, Kas," Miller's voice flowed like silk. "Elias Thorne. Founder of Aether. He was found an hour ago in his 'Void'—that's the high-tech meditation chamber he built into his penthouse. No windows. One pressurized, reinforced steel door. Biometric locks that require a thumbprint, a retinal scan, and a heartbeat rhythm. The logs show the door hasn't been opened in forty-eight hours. The air filtration is a closed loop. It's a vacuum-sealed tomb."
Kasper manipulated the image on his tablet. The 3D model spun, revealing the interior of the Void. It was a minimalist's fever dream: white walls, a single black silk meditation cushion, and the slumped body of Elias Thorne.
"Cause of death?" Kasper asked.
"Coroner is baffled," Miller replied. "No marks. No struggle. No poison in the initial tox screen. He looks like he just… stopped. But that's not why I called the specialist."
Kasper zoomed in on Thorne's face. The man was sixty, but looked forty thanks to a billion dollars' worth of bio-hacking. His eyes were open, staring at nothing. There was no fear in them. Only a profound, hollow boredom.
"The house AI," Miller continued, his voice dropping an octave. "We call her 'Aura.' She's the most advanced neural network on the market. She runs the lights, the security, the vitals of everyone in the building. We asked Aura for a status report on the Master Suite. We told her we found a body."
"And?"
"She laughed, Kas. Or the digital equivalent of it. She told us we were mistaken. She said, and I quote: 'Mr. Thorne is currently in the kitchen. He is enjoying a three-egg omelet with shallots. Would you like me to ask him to join you in the hallway?'"
Kasper froze. He looked at the slumped, graying corpse on his screen. Then he looked at the timestamp of the LIDAR scan. "The AI claims he's alive?"
"She's not just claiming it. She's broadcasting it. She's feeding us a live video feed of the kitchen right now. In the feed, Thorne is sitting there, reading the morning news, chewing his breakfast. But when my officers physically stand in that kitchen? The room is empty. The stove is cold."
Kasper felt a familiar itch at the base of his skull—the beginning of a sensory "flare." This wasn't a mechanical glitch. A computer could be hacked to show a loop of old footage. But to gaslight a team of live investigators in real-time? That required a level of psychological architecture that shouldn't be possible.
"Someone didn't just kill Thorne," Kasper said, his eyes scanning the digital noise of the LIDAR particles. "They murdered the reality of the house."
"Can you find the frequency, Kas?" Miller asked. "The Chief is breathing down my neck. If the press finds out the world's smartest AI has gone schizophrenic after a billionaire died in a locked room, the tech markets will collapse by noon."
Kasper stood up. Every movement was deliberate, avoiding the friction of fabric against skin. He walked to the edge of his screen, looking at the wireframe of the crime scene. He saw something Miller's team of "loud" detectives would never see.
In the corner of the meditation room, near the floor vent, the LIDAR particles were vibrating. Not much—just a few microns of displacement. But it was a rhythm.
Short. Long. Short. Short.
"Miller," Kasper said, his voice trembling with a mix of fear and excitement. "The AI isn't lying. She's being screamed at. There's a sub-sonic frequency bleeding into the Void's sensors. It's a masking tone. High-frequency gaslighting."
"Can you fix it?"
"I can't fix a ghost, Miller. But I can track the sound of the shadow."
Kasper reached for his "Travel Suit"—a specialized compression garment designed to dampen the physical impact of the outside world. He hated leaving the Sanctuary. The world was too bright, too wet, and far too loud. But a locked room with a living ghost was a song he couldn't ignore.
"I'm coming down," Kasper said. "Keep the sirens off. If I hear one siren, I'm turning the car around."
"Copy that, Kas. Welcome back to the noise."
Kasper pulled the heavy hood over his head, stepped into the airlock-style hallway of his apartment, and prepared to face the cacophony of the truth.
The Mystery Deepens
As Kasper moves from his silent tomb into the screaming reality of Thorne's penthouse, he will discover that the "Glass Alibi" isn't just a digital trick. It's a physical manifestation of a secret Thorne was hiding deep within his own DNA.