Turn 11 of 12

Close the program and wake Saanvi

You stare at the line. *OBSERVED: Reading this field.* The timestamp ticks forward — not frozen, not cached, live. The program is writing you down as you read it, the way a scientist writes down the behaviour of a thing under glass, and the thing under glass is you. You reach for the trackpad and close the window. The X works. The program vanishes. The desktop is bare and ordinary and the power light pulses like nothing happened.

You stand up. The chair creaks. The cold is fully on you now — bare feet on cold lino, pants and a t-shirt that was clean twelve hours ago, the flat's 3 a.m. temperature settling into your calves and forearms. Down the hall, Saanvi's door is shut. You have never woken her at three in the morning. You have never woken anyone at three in the morning. But Saanvi is a QA tester, and QA testers do not let inconsistencies go, and you have an inconsistency in your flat that is 4.2 megabytes and knows your name.

You walk down the hall. The lino is cold and gritty under your feet. You knock on her door — two knocks, soft, the kind of knock that says *this is not an emergency but I need you* rather than the kind that says *fire*. Nothing. You knock again, slightly louder, and you hear the rustle of sheets, the specific sound of someone pulled out of sleep trying to locate the sound. A pause. Then her voice, thick with sleep: *Teo?*

*Yeah. Sorry. I know what time it is.*

The door opens. Saanvi is in an oversized t-shirt and shorts, hair crushed flat on one side, eyes half-shut and already narrowing. She is thirty, she is a QA tester, and she has been awake for four seconds and she is already assessing you — your posture, your bare feet, the way you are standing in the hallway at 3 a.m. with your arms crossed because you cannot get warm. *What's wrong?* she says, and the question is not casual. It is the question of someone who has already noticed that you look like a man who has seen something he cannot explain.

*There's a program on my laptop,' you say. 'It's — I need you to look at it. I need you to tell me what you see, because what I see doesn't make sense, and you're better at this than me.'

She looks at you for a long moment. Her eyes are more open now. She is cataloguing — the way you said *you're better at this*, the way your hands are shaking, not from cold. She does not ask another question. She goes back into her room, pulls on a hoodie, picks up her glasses from the bedside table, and walks past you down the hall toward your bedroom, barefoot, the same way she walks into the office at nine a.m. when a build has failed and nobody can explain why. You follow her. The laptop is closed on the desk. The room smells like stale air and cold electronics. Saanvi sits down in your chair, opens the lid, and looks at the desktop.

*Where?* she says.

You reach past her and open File Explorer, navigate to the Cache folder. The .exe is there, 4.2 megabytes, same timestamp. Saanvi looks at the file path, looks at the date modified, looks at the file size. Her fingers rest on the trackpad without clicking. *What is this, Teo?* she says, and her voice has shifted — not suspicious yet, not angry, but the register of a woman who has found a file where a file should not be, which is the thing she is trained to find, which is the thing she cannot leave alone.