Alice hovered the cursor over the file:
ARCHIVE-RED: /RESTRICTED/ADAM-LOG/
"Let's see what's in it " She said
"Are you sure?" I asked, voice low.
She didn't answer.
Just clicked.
The terminal blinked. The loading icon spun.
And then—
Clatter.
A sound. Sharp. Behind us.
Alice spun around. I turned too, heart suddenly punching faster.
From behind one of the tall shelving units in the rear of the lab, someone stumbled out—hair tousled, legs bare, wearing an oversized club-issue shirt that reached just past her thighs, sleeves half-rolled like she'd thrown it on in a rush.
Sophie.
Her eyes were wide. A flush rose to her cheeks—not embarrassment. Shock.
Alice's voice sliced through the silence:
"What the hell?"
Sophie looked between the two of us, then at the glowing terminal.
"What are you doing?" she snapped, voice sharp and defensive.
Alice stepped slightly in front of the screen.
"The better question is—what are you doing hiding in here?"
Sophie crossed her arms tightly across her chest.
"I fell asleep. I—" Her eyes flicked toward the file on the screen.
"That folder wasn't there earlier."
"You've seen it?" I asked, stepping forward.
"I've seen the name," she said. "But I never opened it. It just showed up last week. Locked. Kai said to leave it alone."
Alice narrowed her eyes. "Why didn't you tell me?"
Sophie shot back, "Because I didn't think you'd listen. And I didn't think it had anything to do with him."
She pointed at me like I was the glitch in the system.
Alice didn't move.
And neither did I.
Then Sophie's voice dropped—quieter. Less sure.
"What is that file?"
"I don't know," Alice admitted.
Alice hovered near the terminal, fingers inches from the touchpad, still uncertain.
Sophie stepped back slowly, but she didn't leave—not this time. Her arms were still folded, but her eyes were fixed on the screen, as if it might burst into flames.
Then the cursor froze.
Alice frowned.
"That's weird."
She moved the mouse again.
Nothing.
The screen went black.
I took a step forward. "Did it crash?"
"No," Alice muttered, already typing something. "This system doesn't crash. It's—"
The screen flickered.
White.
Then green.
Then a flashing line of text appeared in the corner:
> REMOTE ACCESS OVERRIDE: 6C.ENG.RK
"What is that?" I asked.
"I don't know," Alice whispered. Her voice had gone flat. Controlled.
Another line of code scrolled down the screen:
> REVOKING ACCESS: /ARCHIVE-RED/ADAM-LOG/
DELETING CONTENTS…
Alice's hands flew across the keys.
"No no no—what the hell—"
She tried to kill the process, open the file, lock the terminal down. Nothing worked.
Sophie backed up, her expression twisted with something between awe and fear.
The screen flooded with static—lines of corrupted glyphs flashing like it was bleeding code.
Then one final message, stark and centered:
> YOU WEREN'T SUPPOSED TO SEE THIS.
And then—
The file vanished.
The folder vanished.
The entire directory: gone.
The terminal beeped once—like a heartbeat flatlining—then returned to the regular club dashboard, calm as if nothing had ever happened.
Silence held us.
Alice's hands dropped from the keys.
Sophie looked pale now.
"Who did that?" I asked.
Alice didn't answer right away.
She just sat there, staring at the screen like it had betrayed her.
Finally, she whispered,
"Someone who knew we were watching."
The screen sat still now, blank and humming like nothing had happened.
But something had.
The kind of something that didn't want to be found. The kind that deleted itself the second someone got too close.
Alice didn't move. Her hand was still on the desk, fingers curled into the metal like she needed to hold onto something solid. She wasn't looking at the screen anymore.
She was looking at me.
"…What aren't you telling me?" she said, voice low. Careful.
I blinked. "What?"
Her eyes didn't soften.
"Don't play dumb, Adam."
"I'm not," I said. "I don't know what that file was."
"You think I believe that?"
"Yes," I said, and even I was surprised by how steady I sounded. "Because it's the truth."
Sophie stood off to the side, silent now, arms wrapped tight around herself like she was watching the beginning of a storm she didn't want to be part of.
Alice took a breath through her nose, sharp and controlled.
"First the signal spikes the second you walk in. Then the system generates a file with your name on it, locks it from everyone. Now it gets wiped while we're trying to open it—and not just deleted. Erased. Overwritten. Someone out there knew we were watching."
I didn't respond.
Her voice dipped lower.
"So I'll ask again, and this time I need something more than shoulder shrugs and blank stares—"
She stepped closer.
"Who are you, Adam?"
The question hit harder than it should have.
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out at first.
Because she wasn't asking out of anger. She wasn't accusing.
She was afraid.
Of me.
Of the answer.
Of what it might mean if I didn't know either.
"I don't know," I said finally.
It came out too quiet. Like the words hurt to say.
And they did.
Alice stared at me for a long moment—searching, reading. Like she wanted to find something underneath my skin that would explain everything the file had almost shown.
"Then we find out," she said.
"Together?"
She didn't blink.
"Not for your sake," she replied. "For mine."
The silence after her words lingered like smoke.
Not for your sake. For mine.
Alice turned back to the terminal, her jaw tight. She moved with purpose now, pulling up diagnostics, background logs, cached echoes of the deleted file—anything the system might have failed to wipe in the rush.
Sophie stayed quiet, but I could feel her eyes flicking between us like she was waiting for something else to explode.
I finally broke the silence. "Can you recover anything?"
Alice didn't answer.
Lines of code spilled across the screen—traces of command sequences, metadata fragments, empty file paths.
Then, a faint pulse. A single corrupted line.
She zoomed in, tried to isolate it, enhance it.
The characters were half-garbled, but part of it was legible:
/PROJECT-RKHN/
SUBJECT: Δ–A13
Then it corrupted itself again, the characters folding into static.
Alice leaned back in her chair, blinking slowly. Her expression was unreadable.
"Does that mean anything to you?" she asked, her voice lower now. Calmer, but colder.
"No," I said. "But…"
"But?" Sophie pressed.
"But it feels like it should."
Alice stared at the garbled fragment still flickering on-screen:
/PROJECT-RKHN/
SUBJECT: Δ–A13
It blinked once. Then again.
The system issued a low beep—one that didn't belong to any standard error tone.
"Hold on," she whispered, reaching for the keyboard.
Before she could touch it—
The lights flickered.
Not just in the lab—all down the east wing corridor, through the reinforced windows. The entire floor stuttered like something had drawn too much power all at once.
A warning siren chirped once—not loud. Not the kind meant for students. Just a quiet internal systems alert.
"Power reroute in progress," a mechanical voice murmured overhead.
Then a small screen near the entrance—usually displaying basic lab safety codes—changed to:
> SYSTEM ALERT:
UNAUTHORIZED TRACE ATTEMPT
REMOTE LOCKDOWN INITIATED
COUNTDOWN: 90s
Alice stepped back.
"What the hell is this?" Sophie's voice trembled.
"We triggered something," Alice muttered, eyes scanning the alert. "Not just surveillance. A trap."
"A failsafe," I said. The word came out on instinct, not reason.
Alice's eyes snapped to me. "How do you know that?"
I didn't answer.
The lab lights dimmed another level.
Count: 72 seconds.
"We have to go," Alice said. "Now."
Sophie didn't need convincing. She was already backing toward the door.
Alice grabbed a flash drive, jammed it into the port, yanked what little residual cache she could—even if it was all junk. Then she turned to me.
"Move."
We bolted.
The hallway outside had gone half-dark. Emergency strips flickered faint blue along the floor. The whole building groaned under the shift—like the infrastructure itself was reacting.
57 seconds.
Alice led us through a back stairwell, not the main hall. She seemed to know every blind spot in the cameras. Every shortcut.
Sophie kept looking back, as if the lab might explode.
We didn't stop moving until we'd slipped through the old maintenance exit and out into the open night air behind the engineering block. The cool wind hit like a gasp.
The countdown was still going.
From this distance, we watched the lab lights shut off completely—floor by floor.
Blackout.
Alice finally spoke. "That wasn't just a data purge. That was a lockdown. Someone or something didn't just want us out of that file. It wanted us away from the system."
Sophie sat down hard on the curb, breathing like she'd run a marathon.
I looked back toward the silent east wing.
There were no alarms now. No lights.
Just stillness.
Like the building itself had shut its eyes.
Alice turned to me.
"That file didn't just react to you, Adam. It protected itself from you."