Chapter 1

Not because I believed this absurdity right away, without question.

My brain, trained by years of fighting system failures and hacker attacks, simply refused to panic. Instead, out of habit, with a groan, it switched into its cold analytical mode, frantically running through the technical possibilities.

This wasn't the first strange thing to happen to me in three years of work. Clients periodically ran loyalty tests, competitors staged provocations, paranoid corporate security teams ran unannounced stress tests. Phishing. A good one, prepared well in advance. Fake pages generated on the fly. A local DNS spoof on her smartphone. A cleverly configured proxy. Or a classic man-in-the-middle attack. Any illusion online can be taken apart bolt by bolt, if you know where to look.

But there was still a ringing behind my left ear from the voice in the dead headset. And no amount of technical sophistication explained a sound that had passed through an empty battery compartment.

"What — too late?" I looked back at Helen, trying to keep my voice even.

"They understand that you believed me. The logs lined up. The behavioral factor changed."

"Who the hell are 'they'?!" — for the first time I broke into a hoarse, strangled shout, gasping for air. "Give me one name! Tax authorities? MI6? Competitors? Who?!"

For the first time all evening, she nearly lost her composure. She didn't shout — no. But her perfect, icy facade cracked deep, and I suddenly saw what she'd been carefully hiding behind her professional bearing: exhaustion. Not today's, not this evening's — days deep, worked into her very skin. Her voice betrayed her, cracking on a high note:

"Michael! Stop thinking in last-century categories! Stop looking for one specific person, one organization, one hacker. There isn't one. There's no villain behind a keyboard. There's a system. A vast, distributed algorithm. And that thing already knows you exist, and that you're keeping it up at night."

The room went quiet again. So unnaturally quiet that a faint, broken clatter from under the desk reached my ears — the old hard drive in my backup server lazily flushing its cache to the magnetic platters. Crunch... crunch... crunch. I heard that sound every day without noticing it. Now it seemed deafening.

I rubbed my thumb absently over the back of my hand — an old habit, dating back to university. Someone had once noticed it and said: "You do that when you're scared but don't want to admit it." I'd brushed it off at the time. Now I remembered.

And then...

My main, central thirty-inch monitor, the one standing dead center, filled with electric light on its own, with a quiet click of a relay.

Everything inside me went cold. I would have sworn on a Bible that I'd personally unplugged it before leaving. A white, surgically clean screen flooded the office in a deathly glow. Right in the center sat a frozen black cursor tip. And nothing else. No desktop icons, no taskbar. Just sterile whiteness.

A second later, the cursor twitched.

On its own. A short jump, a couple of pixels to the right.

Then again, tracing a jagged line. As if someone invisible, sitting right in front of me at the edge of the desk, had laid transparent fingers on an invisible keyboard.

On the white field, black letters began to surface, slowly, with a frightening delay.

K…

I didn't understand what was happening. A moment ago there had been light — familiar, working, mine — and then it was simply gone. Not darkness. Worse: a total absence of everything. No sound, no weight, no self. For a fraction of a second, I didn't exist.

Then — a white flash. And a foreign effort, which I felt from the inside, like someone else's hand inside my own. It made me begin. I resisted — but the letters kept appearing anyway. I saw them just as clearly as I saw everything else.

K…

A two-second pause. Such a human, hesitant pause.

L…

Stop. Please. This isn't me.

Almost in a trance, I took an unconscious step forward, closer to the screen radiating heat.

A…

Helen suddenly grabbed the sleeve of my jacket with unexpected, steel-hard strength, yanking me back. She still hadn't taken off her gloves — thin leather, still faintly damp from the rain.

"Don't go near it! Get back!"

But it was already too late.

And darkness again.

On the screen, with the soft click of a virtual release, the final word appeared.

Clara.

And almost immediately, with no delay at all, a system status bar dropped in on the line below.

…typing a message.

I went still, feeling my breath finally lodge somewhere around my chest. For some reason, right at that second, staring at the blinking black dot, I felt truly, sickeningly afraid.

Because in that exact moment, I suddenly, completely stopped understanding…

…which of the two of them — the living girl who'd gone home for the night, or this faceless system erasing my life — was so insistently trying to talk to me right now.

I felt Helen's eyes on me. She was standing slightly behind me, and she wasn't looking at the screen — she was looking at me. Studying my face the way you study a document, looking for a discrepancy. A professional habit, worked into her reflexes.

"You know her," she said quietly. Not a question — a statement.

"Two years," I said, not taking my eyes off the blinking dot. "We've worked together for two years."

Helen went quiet for a second. Then, softly, almost to herself:

"Tell me about her. Everything you know. While it's still typing."