Inhabited - chapter 26 (with images) (Patreon)

The bamboo blinds clatter lightly against the window frame. A thin freezing draft finds its way through a gap in the caulking and pools in the space between the mattress and the wall.

She wakes up before the alarm.

The ceiling is flat white. The room is still holding the dim bruised color of early morning.

She lies there a few minutes. Nothing hurts and nothing is pulling against anything else. She pushes the duvet off and swings her legs over and her feet land where she expected them to. Thirty-three years old, no pain. It should be what a body is. Mostly it isn't.

She goes to the kitchen. The hardwood is freezing under her bare feet.

She finds a French press on the counter next to a bag of whole-bean coffee. Fills an electric kettle, hits the switch. While the water heats she opens the refrigerator. A carton of oat milk. Half a loaf of bread. A jar of expensive mustard. Three apples shriveling in the crisper drawer. She takes the bread out and puts a slice in the toaster.

She doesn't want it. She is going to need it.

She pours boiling water over the grounds. The kitchen smells like wet earth and roasted beans. The toaster pops. She eats the bread dry, standing at the counter, staring out the window at the brick facade across the alley. A pigeon lands on the rusted iron of the fire escape opposite, pecks at something invisible, and flies away.

At nine, she goes back to the bedroom to dress.

Dark denim jeans from a hanger, high on the waist, the thick fabric holding its shape. A black turtleneck, dense tightly woven cotton that pulls down over her hips and stays there. She bypasses the dressier shoes at the bottom of the closet and finds a pair of scuffed Blundstones, the elastic on the sides slightly frayed. She steps into them.

She walks into the living room and stops. The rig is still on the low wooden table in the corner. The visor. The halo array. The thick braided cable coiled neatly on the floorboards.

She turns away. Goes to the hall closet, pulls down the long olive coat, wraps the gray scarf tightly around her neck and buries her chin in the wool. Sofia's keys from the credenza.

She locks the door behind her and walks down the three flights.

The cold bites immediately. The sky is the color of old lead. Bare branches rake against the brownstone facades as the wind comes off the East River and funnels down the avenues.

She walks toward Vanderbilt. Before she has decided anything, her path adjusts around a man coming out of a building ahead. A half-step toward the curb, the shoulder angling away, gaze going past him. He doesn't look up. She keeps walking. She did not choose any of that.

She reaches the corner of Vanderbilt and Myrtle at ten minutes to ten.

Brigid is already there.

Standing near a green metal trash can, holding a paper cup of coffee she isn't drinking. The dark structured coat is buttoned all the way up. Her shoulders are hunched against the wind. When she sees the olive coat approaching, Brigid's posture straightens slightly. The guarded, exhausted mask slides back into place.

"You're early."

"So are you."

Brigid looks at Sofia's face. The dark curly hair tucked under the collar of the coat, the straight nose. She looks a fraction of a second too long, the way she always does, trying to locate the stranger operating the machinery. Then she looks down the avenue.

"Four blocks," Brigid says.

They walk. They don't speak. The silence between them is its own country by now, built from weeks of impossible logistics, of strangers arriving in familiar bodies, of information passed in low voices across café tables in a language only the two of them understand. Two women moving through a freezing Brooklyn morning to find a man who has been gone about a month.

The building is on the east side of the street.

A massive anonymous block of 1970s brick. Six stories. Fire escapes zigzagging down the front facade. The ground floor has a dry cleaner with a faded yellow awning and a shuttered storefront with brown paper taped over the glass.

They stop on the sidewalk in front of the double glass doors.

"Okay," Brigid says. She pulls her gloves off and stuffs them into her coat pockets.

They walk into the small vestibule. Dirty white tile underfoot. A bank of brass mailboxes lines the right wall. The names are typed on slips of paper, some faded by sun, others written over in smudged blue ink.

She runs her finger down the rows.

4F. Osei.

The name sits there behind a scratched piece of plastic. He is a real person who receives mail at a physical address. The reality of it makes her heart stumble.

"We buzz," Brigid says.

She presses the small brass button next to 4F.

A harsh electronic rasp echoes in the vestibule. They wait.

Nothing.

She holds it down for three seconds. The sound grinds against the tile.

Silence.

"He is not going to answer," Brigid says.

"We need to get past this door."

They stand in the vestibule for ten minutes. Cold seeps in through the gaps in the glass doors. Finally a woman with a canvas tote bag full of groceries approaches from the street, shifts the bag to her hip, and pulls a key ring from her pocket.

She and Brigid step back to make room. The woman unlocks the door and pushes it open.

"Hold it, please?" Brigid says smoothly, stepping forward and catching the heavy metal frame.

The woman glances at them, nods once, keeps walking toward the elevator bank.

They are in.

The lobby smells like boiled cabbage and cheap pine cleaner. The fluorescent lights overhead hum with a persistent low vibration. The elevator doors are scratched stainless steel. A handwritten sign taped over the call button says OUT OF ORDER.

They find the stairwell at the back of the lobby.

They climb. The concrete stairs echo with their boots. Sofia's legs take the ascent without complaint, breathing easy, while Brigid pauses on the third floor landing with her hand on the railing.

Fourth floor.

The hallway is narrow. The walls are painted a glossy institutional beige. The carpet is a dark indeterminate brown, worn thin in the center.

They walk down it. 4A. 4B. 4C. 4D on one side, 4E across from it.

4F is at the far end, next to a dirty window looking out into the alley.

The door is painted dark brown. The paint is peeling in long brittle strips near the bottom edge. No welcome mat.

They stand in front of it.

She presses her ear against the cold metal. Holds her breath.

Nothing. Just the muffled sound of a television playing somewhere down the hall.

Brigid reaches out and tries the brass knob. It does not turn.

"Locked," Brigid whispers.

She reaches into her coat pocket and pulls out a thin rigid piece of clear plastic, cut from a packaging clamshell.

"I looked it up. If the deadbolt isn't thrown, sometimes you can compress the latch. Push the bevel back into the door."

Brigid wedges the plastic between the door and the jamb just above the latch and angles it downward. She pushes, wiggles, trying to bend the plastic around the beveled side of the latch bolt and force it back into the door. She grunts softly with the effort.

The plastic bends. It snaps with a sharp crack.

Brigid drops the broken piece onto the carpet.

"Frame is too tight. And he probably threw the deadbolt anyway."

She looks at the door. A solid steel-core slab. Not happening.

She looks down the hallway.

Ten feet away, at the very end, is the window. Through the dirty wire-mesh glass she can see the rusted iron slats of a fire escape landing.

"The fire escape," she says.

Brigid follows her gaze. They walk over. There is a heavy metal latch at the top of the sash. Brigid reaches up, grips it, and turns. Stiff, crusted with years of grime and old paint. The metal bites into Brigid's palm. It gives with a grinding squeak.

She pushes the window up. It shrieks in the tracks, protesting, but slides open wide enough to fit through.

Freezing wind rushes in immediately, smelling of exhaust and river water.

She climbs through first. One booted foot on the windowsill, ducking her head, stepping out onto the iron grating.

The cold is absolute. Four stories up. The alley below is a narrow trench of concrete and dumpsters. The wind whips her hair across her face. She reaches up and tucks it back under the collar of the coat before it can blow again.

Brigid climbs through behind her, slower, hands gripping the window frame until both feet are on the rusted iron.

"Okay," Brigid says, her voice tight. She does not look down.

The fire escape runs horizontally along the back of the building, connecting the end-of-hall window to the rear windows of the corner apartments.

4F.

They edge along the grating. The metal flakes away in powdery orange rust under their boots. Sofia's body holds its balance against the wind without being asked to, hands gripping the freezing iron railing. She doesn't think about it.

They reach the window for 4F.

A double-hung window. The blinds inside are pulled down but crooked, leaving a two-inch gap at the bottom.

She pushes against the glass. It does not move.

"Locked," she says over the wind.

Brigid steps closer. She unwraps the thick gray scarf from her neck and winds it tightly around her right hand, looping the wool several times over her knuckles. From her other pocket: a small heavy metal flashlight.

She does not hesitate. Brigid swings the butt of it hard against the corner of the lower pane, right near the locking mechanism.

The glass shatters inward with a loud sharp crash.

They both freeze.

Wind howls. A car honks on Vanderbilt. Nobody shouts. No alarm.

Brigid reaches her padded hand carefully through the jagged hole. Fumbles blindly for a few seconds. A sharp click as she flips the latch open.

She withdraws her hand. Grabs the bottom of the window frame and heaves upward.

The window slides open.

They climb inside. A narrow hallway, a closed door at the end. Brigid pushes it open.

The bedroom. The air is immediately different. Freezing, the radiator under the window stone cold to the touch, but utterly still, a sealed stillness, like air that has been sitting in a jar. Dust motes turn in the gray light slicing through the broken glass.

The bed is unmade. A pile of clothes on a wooden chair in the corner.

And then the smell.

It coats the back of the tongue before it registers as anything else. Old meat, and something underneath the old meat she has no word for. The body knows this smell is wrong before the brain does. Her stomach moves without asking her.

Brigid gags. She pulls the unwrapped end of her scarf up over her nose and mouth, eyes watering.

She presses her own hand over her mouth. Swallows down what is rising. The smell is in the walls, the carpet, the fibers of the air.

"Jesus," Brigid chokes out.

They walk out of the bedroom into the short hallway. Scuffed hardwood underfoot.

The living room is at the end of the hall.

The blinds are tightly drawn. The only light is the ambient gray filtering through the edges. A stack of mail on a small table near the front door. A dying pothos plant dropping brown leaves onto the floorboards.

In the corner of the room, facing away from the windows, is a large overstuffed armchair.

A cable runs across the rug to a wall outlet near the baseboard, then up the back of the chair.

She stops at the edge of the living room. Brigid stops beside her, one hand on the doorframe.

The room is completely silent.

She takes a step forward. Her boots make no sound on the rug. She walks around to the front of the chair.

The figure sitting there is wearing a faded gray t-shirt and dark sweatpants. The body is slumped heavily to the left, the head tipped back against the upholstery. The skin on the forearms is the wrong color and the wrong texture, more like leather than skin, pulled tight against the bone. The hands rest in the lap. The fingers have curled inward.

A NovaSphere visor is strapped over the eyes and the bridge of the nose. The halo array is clamped around the temples. The green indicator light on the side of the visor is dead.

The mouth hangs open. The lips have pulled back from the teeth. The whole lower face has tightened around the skull.

The smell radiating out of the chair is something you could draw a circle around.

She looks at the hands. The length of the fingers. The shape of the shoulders under the gray t-shirt. The face she cannot see behind the visor. There is something in her ears that is not a sound, a loudness, a rushing.

If this is Michael Osei.

If this is the journalist who mapped the vulnerability and got too close, the man whose byline she had read in Nadia's apartment and whose questions had sounded so much like hers that she had stepped into them and not bothered to step back out.

If this is him, then he has been dead the whole time she has been telling herself she was him.

She has been telling a story that fit the shape of what she was doing, and the man whose name she borrowed has been sitting in this chair the entire time.

She goes looking in her own head for a face to attach to the question. Anyone's face. The one she had before she was Cara. There is no face. There has not been one for almost a month, and she has not stopped to look at what that meant because there was nowhere to put the thought.

Then the second thing.

Did she fall into the network? Did the rig short out and throw her into the servers, leaving her body behind in a freezing room to slowly collapse while she bounced from woman to woman? Is she standing here looking at her own corpse?

She takes a stumbling step back.

If she isn't Osei, she is not anyone yet.

"We need to find the local drive," Brigid says.

The voice comes from far away.

She turns her head slowly. Brigid is standing near a small desk against the far wall, scarf pulled tight over her nose. She is looking at a closed laptop sitting next to a pile of notebooks. Brigid has not looked closely at the body. Brigid is focused on what comes next.

She looks back at the dead man in the chair.

The blank black plastic of the visor stares back. It gives nothing away.

She crosses her arms over her chest, digging her fingers into the wool of Sofia's shirt. She stands there inside the body of an environmental lawyer, looking at a dead man who might be a stranger, or might be the only physical home she has ever had.

She cannot answer the question.

She just stands there and lets the weight of the room press down.

Brigid moves first.

She does not look at the armchair again. She grabs the silver laptop off the desk, yanks the power cord from the wall outlet, shoves the heavy plastic brick into her coat pocket. Grabs two spiral-bound notebooks from the pile. Then turns and walks straight back down the hallway.

She follows Brigid out.

The air in the bedroom is marginally less thick, although the smell is in her clothes now, in the wool of the olive coat, in the fibers of the turtleneck. She climbs out the broken window. The iron grating is freezing. The wind off the avenue hits her face and it feels like breathing clean broken glass, but it is air. It does not smell like the other thing.

They edge back along the rusted iron to the hallway window. They climb inside.

They walk down the institutional beige hallway. They do not run. They take the concrete stairs down four flights to the lobby, push through the double glass doors, and walk out onto Vanderbilt.

They make it a block and a half before Brigid stops.

Brigid leans heavily against a brick retaining wall next to a dry cleaner. Bends at the waist, resting her hands on her knees. Throws up onto the pavement.

She stands next to Brigid and waits. Her own stomach is a hard tight knot, threatening to flip. It doesn't. Behind her eyes something is happening that she does not have the equipment to name right now.

The dead man in the chair. The hands. The darkened desiccated skin. The blank plastic visor strapped over the face she could not see.

She has no memory of her own face. She has spent a month inside other people's apartments, learning their centers of gravity, using their voices. She does not know what she looked like before any of this.

If that was her body in the chair.

She stares at the gray concrete of the sidewalk. The cracks in the pavement. A crumpled pharmacy receipt blowing past her boot. If she is dead, there is no return. No original shape to go back to. Just a ghost haunting the platform, a glitch in the server architecture.

Brigid spits onto the curb. Wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. Straightens up.

"Okay," Brigid says. Her voice is ragged. "Okay."

They walk the rest of the way to Sofia's apartment in silence.

The door unlocks as she left it. The snake plant on the windowsill. The rig in the corner. It feels impossible that the room hasn't altered.

Brigid walks into the kitchen, drops the laptop and the notebooks on the small dining table, strips off the dark coat and drops it on a chair. The gray scarf on top of it.

She takes off the olive coat. The smell of the dead apartment is in the wool. She shoves the coat into a plastic garbage bag from under the kitchen sink, ties the top in a hard knot, and leaves it by the front door.

She goes to the bathroom. Washes her hands with the cedar soap, scrubbing her forearms and her neck, splashing cold water on her face. She dries off with the gray towel. The water does not do anything for what is happening behind her eyes.

When she comes back to the living room, Brigid is at the dining table with the dead man's laptop open in front of her.

"No password," Brigid says. Her voice is flat. "He disabled the login protocols."

The desktop is a mess of folders. Brigid clicks one labeled Nova_Root.

A directory tree populates the screen. Massive. Thousands of files. Spreadsheets, PDFs, raw text logs.

"He didn't just find a backdoor," Brigid mutters, hand hovering over the trackpad. "He backed up an entire server partition."

She leans over Brigid's shoulder, who points at a subfolder labeled Incident_Reports.

Brigid clicks it.

The screen fills with thousands of rows of text. Auto-generated internal tickets.

User experienced complete cognitive separation from physical environment. Duration: 14 minutes. Vital signs elevated. Session terminated by hard manual override. Then below it: User 884-A reported memory loss following transition sequence. Null bucket routing applied.

"Null bucket," she says. It takes her a moment to find the word. She had seen the syntax on Ruth's work monitor in Jersey City, weeks ago. "The intake servers caught any ticket with the words dissociation or memory loss and buried it before a human ever saw it."

Brigid opens another PDF.

The product brief. The document she had heard about in Elena's office from the former engineer. Dense legal boilerplate, but the diagrams are clear. It maps the vulnerability in the headset buffer, the high-load transitions that trap the user in the white-out. And below the diagrams: the proposed application. A method for sustaining the transition state deliberately.Brigid’s voice is even. "They figured out they could hold people in the vacuum and tried to monetize the duration."

She stares at the page. The diagram is clean, a corporate engineer's rendering of the exact mechanism she has been living inside for a month. The user held in suspension. A method for doing it on purpose, to someone, for as long as you wanted.

"Look at the signature."

Brigid scrolls to the bottom.

Approved: Halston. Board of Directors. The name Diane found on the encrypted drive.

"We have it," Brigid says. She sits back. "The suppression directives. The product brief. The auto-routing scripts."

"What about him?" She looks at the silver casing of the laptop. "Is there anything about what happened in that room?"

Brigid opens a text editor file on the desktop. Log_Final.

A raw code dump. A sequence of commands executing rapidly. The timestamps show them firing milliseconds apart.

She reads the code.

"He was inside the archive," she says, tracing the lines on the screen. "He spoofed the legacy token, the same way we were going to. But he didn't just read the files. He initiated a mass download to this local drive."

"And they caught him."

"The automated security sweep flagged the unauthorized transfer." She points to a line of red text near the bottom. "The system didn't just kick him out. It executed a localized feedback loop. Flooded the headset with a targeted data surge while he was in the transition state."

Brigid stares at the screen. "They fried him."

"Spiked the hardware. The rig couldn't handle the load. Probably caused a massive neurological event, seizure, heart failure, and the rig just lost power."

They stand in the quiet kitchen. A radiator knocks somewhere in the building. Neither of them says anything for a moment.

"I'll take it to Meg," Brigid says finally. She pulls a silver flash drive from her coat pocket and starts copying the files. "She has the contact in the tech press. A source who already knows about the forum suppression. We hand this over, they verify the internal signatures, and they publish."

"You are going to talk to Meg."

"Yes." Brigid looks at the blank wall above the sink. "I guess I am."