Version 1.02.0

  Security was a large man named Marcus Banks who I'd always liked. He had a kind face and kept succulents on his desk and once told me his daughter was going to art school. Now he was walking me to my desk to watch me pack my things, and he couldn't quite meet my eyes.

  "I'm sorry about this, Sam," he said quietly. "I know it's not my place, but I never imagined having to do this for you. I don't believe you deserve this."

  "Thanks, Marcus." I meant it. Even if it didn't matter. Even if believing me wasn't going to save my job or restore my reputation or undo whatever the hell Daniel had done. "That means a lot."

  I kept my head down as we crossed the open floor. I could feel eyes on me, coworkers who'd heard something, or guessed something, or were just rubbernecking at the spectacle of someone's career imploding in real time. I didn't look at any of them. Especially not at Daniel, who I could sense watching from his desk like a spider who'd just caught a particularly satisfying fly.

  My desk was exactly as I'd left it that morning. Monitor displaying my login screen. Mug with "World's Okayest Designer" on it, a gag gift from Kate two Christmases ago. The single personal item I'd allowed myself in seven years, a photo of me and my college roommate at graduation, both of us sunburned and grinning and completely ignorant of what came next.

  I found a cardboard box somewhere and started filling it. The mug. The photo. A spare phone charger. Some granola bars I'd forgotten about. Probably expired.

  That was it. Seven years, and my personal effects fit in a box small enough to carry one-handed.

  "You can leave the company laptop," Marcus said. "They'll send someone to wipe it."

  "Right." Of course they would. Couldn't have me keeping evidence, or, more likely, couldn't have me planting evidence that might contradict their narrative. "Is there... do I need to sign anything?"

  "Rebecca said she'd email you the paperwork."

  "Great."

  I picked up the box. It weighed almost nothing.

  "I'll walk you out," Marcus said, and I nodded, because that was the procedure, and I was too numb to do anything but follow the procedure.

  We were halfway to the elevator when I heard someone call my name.

  "Samantha! Sam, wait..."

  Kate was hurrying toward me, her face stricken. She'd been in a meeting, I realized. She hadn't known. She was only finding out now, watching me walk past with a cardboard box and a security escort, putting the pieces together.

  "What's happening?" She reached me, slightly out of breath. "What's going on? Someone said you were... that there was some kind of..."

  "They're saying I stole designs." The words came out flat. Dead. "From another company. They announced my designs yesterday."

  "That's insane."

  "I know. They also claim the rest of my designs are AI.”

  "You would never..."

  "I know." I managed something that might have been a smile if smiles could be made of broken glass. "But they don't know that. And someone went to a lot of trouble to make it look convincing."

  Kate's eyes widened. "Who could do that?"

  My eyes beelined for Daniel's now empty desk and Kate mouthed, "Daniel?"

  "Can't prove it. But I'd bet on it."

  "That fucking..." She cut herself off, glancing at Marcus. He was pretending very hard not to listen. "What can I do? There has to be something I can..."

  "Just... I don't know." The elevator dinged. The doors opened. Marcus was gesturing politely for me to step inside. "I need to figure out what's going on. I'll call you tonight, okay?"

  "Samantha..."

  "Tonight. I promise."

  The doors closed between us.

  * * *

  The parking garage was dim and cool and smelled like concrete, exhaust, and old cigarettes. I walked to my car on autopilot, loaded the box into the back seat, and sat behind the wheel without starting the engine.

  I sat there for a long time. Marcus watching me from the doorway. Arms crossed and a forlorn expression on his face.

  The numbness was wearing off now, replaced by something else. Anger, maybe. Or fear. Or just the dawning recognition that my entire life had just been demolished in the span of an hour, and I had no idea how to put it back together.

  Daniel had done this. Daniel, who I'd mentored. Who I'd gone to bat for when others questioned whether he was ready for bigger projects. Who I'd trusted with access to my files, my workflows, my professional reputation.

  Why?

  That was the part I couldn't understand. We'd never had a conflict. Never even had a disagreement, as far as I could remember. What could possibly motivate someone to destroy a colleague's career like this?

  But that wasn't the only thing bothering me.

  Level up.

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  I looked at the blank concrete wall of the parking garage. Gray. Uniform. Completely devoid of mysterious static or hidden patterns. Although that crack over there does look kind of like a duck. No. Stop. Focus.

  I'd hallucinated. Obviously. The stress of the situation, the shock of the accusation, some kind of psychological break triggered by...

  Except it hadn't felt like a hallucination. It had felt real. More real, in some ways, than the conversation with Greg and Rebecca. Like I'd been looking at something that had always been there, something I'd just never had the eyes to see before.

  And the voice. So clear. So certain. Like a notification sound in a video game, except instead of coming from speakers it had come from inside my own head.

  Level up.

  Level up to what? From what? What the hell kind of delusion was this?

  My nose began to drip again as my head throbbed and I could feel my heartbeat behind my eyes. I shoved the tissue up my nose and tore open my center console. I took out two over the counter migraine pills from their green bottle and threw them back without an ounce to drink. Swallowing hard, I rubbed my eyes until I saw spots. Then I took a deep breath, started the car and drove home. My tissue tampon hanging elegantly from my left nostril.

  * * *

  The apartment was exactly as I'd left it. Traitorous coffee maker still flashing E7. West Elm furniture still looking like it belonged in a catalog. Gray walls, gray carpet, gray life.

  I dumped the box on the kitchen counter and stood there, unsure what to do next. It was barely noon. I'd been employed eight hours ago. Now I was... what? Suspended? Fired in all but name? A suspected intellectual property thief?

  I should call a lawyer. That was the smart thing to do. Find someone who specialized in wrongful termination, start building a case, get ahead of whatever Daniel was planning next.

  But I couldn't make myself pick up the phone. Couldn't make myself do anything except stand in my kitchen and stare at the wall.

  The wall.

  It was grey here. Not beige like the conference room. ‘Snowbound’ semi-gloss, if I was to believe the can of paint left behind from when I moved in. I'd never paid attention to it before. It was just a wall. Background. Scenery. But now, I was staring at it, and I couldn't stop.

  "Okay," I said out loud, because apparently I was the kind of person who talked to herself now. "Okay, Sam. You're going to prove that you're not having a psychotic break. You're going to look at this wall, and you're going to see nothing, and then you're going to call a lawyer and start dealing with your actual problems like an actual adult."

  I focused on the wall. Waiting for the static. Nothing happened.

  "See?" I said. "Nothing. Totally normal. Just a wall."

  The wall continued to be a wall. I laughed, a slightly hysterical sound that I didn't love, and turned away. And that's when I saw it. Not on the wall. On my couch. In my peripheral vision, just at the edge of my sight, there was... something. A shimmer. I looked directly at my couch. Nothing. I looked away. There it was again.

  "What the fuck."

  I spent the next twenty minutes trying to see it directly. Looking at my couch, then quickly away. Catching glimpses in mirrors. Holding my neck at weird angles to try to see the shimmer head-on. It was like trying to look at one of those Magic Eye posters: the harder I tried, the more it slipped away.

  But it was there. I wasn't imagining it. Something was wrong.

  Level up.

  * * *

  I didn't call a lawyer. I didn't call anyone. Instead, I sat on the right side of my attractive cardboard couch and tried to figure out what was happening to me.

  The rational explanations were obvious. Stress-induced hallucination. Early onset schizophrenia. Brain tumor. Some kind of neurological event triggered by the shock of losing my job. I should go to a doctor. I should go to a hospital. I should do literally anything except sit here and stare at my hands, waiting for the shimmer to come back.

  But I didn't do any of those things.

  Because somewhere deep down, in a part of my brain that didn't believe in rational explanations, I knew this wasn't a hallucination. I knew the static had been real. I knew the voice had been real. And I knew, somehow, impossibly, that something had fundamentally shifted in the way I could perceive the world.

  I just had to figure out how to access it again. I thought about the conference room. What had I been doing when it happened? Staring at the wall. But I'd been staring at this wall for an hour and nothing had happened. So it wasn't just about staring.

  What else? I'd been stressed. Shocked. My brain had been short-circuiting, trying to process too much information at once. And I'd sort of... checked out. Disassociated. Let my focus soften. Stopped trying to understand what was happening and just... observed.

  I looked at the wall again. Tried to relax. Tried to unfocus my eyes like I was looking at one of those Magic Eye posters.

  Nothing.

  "Come on," I muttered. "I literally got fired today and had a psychotic episode and started bleeding all over HR like I was possessed. The least you could do is give me an encore."

  The wall remained stubbornly wall-like.

  I closed my eyes. Took a deep breath. Tried to recreate the mental state I'd been in during the meeting. That feeling of disconnect. Of watching from outside myself. Of letting go. I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth on four counts like I practiced with meditation. My thoughts stilled and when I opened my eyes, the wall was different.

  The static was back.

  It was faint, fainter than it had been in the conference room, but it was there. A layer of visual noise over the Snowbound paint, like a TV tuned to a dead channel. And as I watched, letting my focus stay soft, it started to organize.

  Patterns. Lines. Structure hidden in the chaos.

  Then it stopped being just visual.

  A hum rose from somewhere beneath my hearing. Not from the apartment. Not from the building. From everywhere at once, like a frequency that had always been running and I'd only just found the tuner. It vibrated in my teeth, in the soft tissue behind my eyes, in the spaces between my ribs where breathing usually lived.

  The air changed. Sharp. Metallic. The smell of ozone, of pennies left in the rain, of the charged air right before lightning finds the ground. My apartment smelled like a storm that existed nowhere except inside my skull.

  The pressure built behind my eyes. The hum deepened. And something spread across my tongue. Copper. Electricity. The taste of biting into a battery, or licking a nine-volt on a dare, which for the record I had done exactly once in seventh grade and would not recommend.

  I leaned into it. Pushed toward the pattern, trying to see what was underneath.

  My skin erupted. Every hair on my arms, my neck, the back of my hands, all of it standing at attention like it had somewhere very important to be. A tingling rolled through me in waves, starting at the crown of my head and cascading down. Not painful. Not pleasant. The feeling of being submerged in water that wasn't wet. Of being surrounded by something dense and alive that pressed against every inch of me.

  And for just a second, just a fraction of a second, I saw it. Heard it. Felt it. Tasted it.

  The wall wasn't a wall. It was code. Symbols I didn't recognize, characters from no alphabet I'd ever seen, scrolling and shifting in three dimensions. The wall was just a surface, a skin, and underneath it was something else. Something that looked almost like a program running. The hum became a chorus, thousands of processes singing at frequencies my brain wasn't built to process. The ozone taste flooded my mouth until I couldn't tell if I was breathing air or swallowing current. My skin burned cold, every nerve lit up and screaming that something fundamental had changed, that the body I'd been living in for thirty years had just been plugged into a socket I never knew existed.

  Then the pressure spiked, sharp pain lancing through my skull, and I jerked back with a gasp. The static vanished. The hum cut to silence. The smell receded. The taste lingered, copper and lightning, fading slowly from my tongue. The wall was just a wall again. My skin was just skin. The apartment was just an apartment.

  But I'd felt it. All of it. Not just seen. Felt.

  I sat there, breathing hard, heart pounding, every nerve ending still buzzing with the memory of whatever had just happened, and said the only thing that seemed appropriate as blood began dripping down my chin and landed in an ever growing puddle on the floor with a drip drip drip.

  "Well. Shit. I'm dying."