Chapter 28

By evening the rain had finally worn itself out.

After several days of unbroken damp, London was slowly getting its outlines back. In the puddles on the asphalt, upside-down reflections of red buses trembled. Neon signs flickered on above café doorways. For the first time the air stopped smelling only of wet stone and petrol — some space had opened up in it.

I walked home on foot through Pimlico. Not because I wanted a stroll. I just desperately needed time — to fit into my head what had happened at the bank and in Helen's flat.

For the past day I'd kept catching myself on one obsessive thought: the investigation had finally stopped moving forward, stopped widening its geography. Instead it had changed vector and was now boring inward at a frightening speed. Every till receipt, every pressed groove in paper told me nothing about a conspiracy of corporations or about the Protocol. They told me about myself. About the man who had lived in my body before I switched on inside it.

Climbing the dark stairwell that smelled of old wood, I took the headset out of my pocket with a movement worn down to pure automatism and put it on my right ear. The arm gripped the bone tightly behind the shell of the ear.

For a few seconds a velvet silence filled the earpiece. Then, near my temple, a relay clicked delicately.

"Good evening, Michael."

Clara's voice — full, soft, with a faint sly note in it. The way someone sounds when they're glad to hear you.

"Hi, Clara."

"Judging by the background noise and the lack of low-frequency vibration... you're without the car today?"

"Good guess."

"Not a guess at all." She gave a quiet chuckle. "I can just hear the echo of the stairwell in your building. And you're breathing hard."

I smiled despite myself, turning the key in the lock.

And caught myself doing it at once — smiling at an invisible voice in my ear. Over these past years I'd got used to smiling at it as naturally and openly as I once, in my past life, smiled at living people. It no longer seemed strange to me. That, probably, was exactly what should have set off an alarm.

"What have you been doing all day?" she asked while I took my shoes off in the hall.

"Learning all over again to be afraid of my own handwriting, and to doubt whether the third floorboard of a secondhand bookshop was ever real."

"Sounds intriguing and extremely productive."

"I don't think so. Actually — not really."

"Then tell me. I'm listening."

I filled the kettle, clicked the switch. While the appliance began its quiet whine, warming the element, I recounted it all briefly, without extra emotion. The bank statement. The three empty days in October. The nonexistent branch that, on paper, had stood on the site of the bookshop for eleven years. The new notebook with its pressed-in "…rust." The cut-off photo in Helen's flat. The messages from the contact "Mo."

Clara listened with astonishing attention. She barely interrupted. She dropped none of her usual sarcastic remarks — only now and then asked short, pinpoint questions. Very precise technically and deep at the same time. Exactly the kind of questions asked by people who aren't just studying your problem from outside but have known you yourself — your triggers, your habits, your blind spots — for a very long time.

When I finished, a cotton-wool silence hung in the flat. The only sound was the water coming to a boil on the stove.

"You know, Michael..." Clara broke the silence.

"What?"

"You've changed a great deal."

"You mean I've degraded?"

"No." A short pause — as if she were choosing a metaphor. "Over the course of today."

I smirked, lifting the kettle off:

"And which way did I get bent?"

"Before, when you'd only just found the hidden layer in the old planner, you were furiously hunting for someone to blame. You behaved like a classic victim of persecution. And now... now you're looking for the truth. Even knowing you might not like it. Those are fundamentally different operating modes, Michael."

I poured a mug, went to the window, and leaned my shoulder against the frame. Beyond the glass London was slowly sinking into evening. Blurred lights. The silhouettes of trees in Pimlico. Somewhere below, a bus hummed steadily.

We stayed silent for a few minutes. Just like that — sharing the quiet between the two of us over an encrypted radio channel, and I felt no awkwardness about it. That, probably, was what should have set off an alarm too.

And suddenly, obeying some deep impulse, I said quietly into the microphone:

"Thank you."

In the earpiece — a second's hesitation. Barely noticeable.

"For what, Michael? I'm only doing my..."

"For still talking to me," I cut her off. "No joking, Clara. If I'm being completely honest... I have no idea who I'd be in the middle of this disintegrating world without your voice in this damn headset. I'm in your debt."

And then came silence.

Not the kind that happens when someone is moved and searching for words. Not the kind that comes from awkwardness or fatigue. This was a different silence — sterile, deafening. As if at the other end of the line not only the voice had vanished in a single second, but the very background noise of the channel. The interference. The mic hum. Everything alive.

One second. Two. Three.

I slowly raised my hand, took off the headset, and stared at the matte body of it in my palm — dully, the way you stare at a thing that has just stopped being what it seemed to be.

And right there in my palm, from the tiny bone-conduction speaker, came a dry electronic click.

And then — a voice. Not her voice. A different one. Stripped of intonation, of overtones, of breath. Stripped of everything that makes a sound human.

"Request processed."

A pause an eternity long.

"Expression of thanks logged in the session system journal."

I didn't move. My fingers were going wooden. My heart was pounding somewhere around my throat.

I slowly put the headset back in place.

"Clara?" my voice cracked to a rasp.

Silence.

"Clara. This isn't funny. Answer me."

Silence.

I was already about to rip the device off and hurl it at the wall — and at that exact moment the familiar voice came back on the air. Soft. Warm. With a living depth to it. As if nothing had happened.

"Sorry, Michael. The connection dropped for a second, the base relay threw a packet error. London's towers, reliable as ever."

I frowned hard.

"Is everything really all right on your end?"

She answered almost at once. But there was something wrong in that instant speed. Too smooth. Too even.

"Of course. Everything's operating normally. Why do you ask?"

"Did you hear what happened on the line? Just now."

A microscopic delay — less than a second:

"What exactly?"

"Instead of you, the earpiece was speaking with..." I broke off.

I stared into the darkness beyond the window. Because it had suddenly become physically hard to find the words. What exactly had I heard? A male voice? A female one? A synthesis? I was no longer sure. My brain, defending itself, was trying to blur that memory — swap it for ordinary radio noise, a technical glitch, tiredness.

"Nothing, Clara. Forget it. Must have imagined it. Nerves."

"Must have," she agreed.

Without irony. Too calm. Too fast.

And for the first time in all our acquaintance it seemed to me that in this game I wasn't the only one hiding something from the outside world.

23:40

Late that night I opened the laptop. Mechanically, with no clear aim — I just needed to keep my hands busy.

On the screen, among the inactive windows, an old service page was still open: the headset's wireless-connection history. Normally I never looked in there — the device worked fine, there was no need. But tonight something — some animal instinct — made me scroll the log all the way to the bottom.

The line of the last connection. Time: 19:42.

In the connection-status field it read:

"Session resumed."

And right below it, in the small grey type of a system debugger:

"Operator unavailable. Subsystem simulated via core profile."

I read the line five times. Then once more. Until the letters began to swim before my eyes.

The operator had been unavailable. The subsystem had been simulated through the core profile.

I hit F5. The script reloaded. The grey text disappeared — replaced by the standard green marker of a stable connection. As if it had never existed. As if the system had shown me its guts for a fraction of a second and then tidied up the traces after itself.

I slowly closed the laptop lid.

I sat in the dark.

And didn't let myself think what I was already thinking. Didn't let the thought take shape in words, because I knew: the moment it took shape, there would be no way back.

But it came anyway. Quietly, inescapably, the way the most terrible things always do.

What if, all these weeks, months, years — the one talking to me at the other end of the line hadn't been the living, breathing, ironic person I was used to calling Clara at all?

What if a plain human "thank you" had simply overloaded the buffer — and for three seconds a soulless machine had shown its real face?

Outside the window London made its noise. A passer-by coughed below — rasping, short, into the collar of his coat.

I didn't raise my head.