Entry 00 — Prologue

Prologue — written after the last rotation

The morning after, early enough that the light hadn't picked a side, I drew a line down the middle of a legal pad. Two columns. Two headers.

What I saw. What I supplied.

The first column took longer. It always does. I kept trying to smuggle feelings into it: the certainty that somebody had been inside the apartment, the conviction that a pause on the wire belonged to her, the way one word of goodbye could close my throat before I knew whose mouth it came from. Moving them to the second column didn't make them less real. It made them harder to aim at somebody else.

That's the whole method. I don't delete the feeling; I file it where it can't testify.

Florida was already cooking the blinds. My work account still existed, mostly. One door in it had stopped recognizing me. On the desk sat a receipt from an archive I didn't administer. It acknowledged a package. It did not say whether anyone believed the people inside it.

Receipt of delivery. Not receipt of faith.

I checked for a message from her. Nothing. I checked again, slower, the way you re-run a scan you already know came back clean. Still nothing.

In the drawer, the metal M had taken on the temperature of the room. I left it there. I can account for finding it, for the cut it opened across my thumb, for carrying it through apartments and corridors as though weight were the same thing as evidence. What I can't account for is the hand that set it on my passenger seat. The old sensor explains a callback. It does not explain a car door.

That distinction arrived late, and it cost more than the machine.

For a long time I called the beginning a trespass. It was the easier word. Trespass means somebody came in. The harder truth is that I left something open: an engineer, an old image on a personal laptop, a callback I was sure had died years ago. No payload. Just a return path, a porch light left on for anyone who knew the house.

She knew the house.

She was looking for that light. For me, through a thing I had left capable of answering. I learned that later. At the desk, all I had was the line, and every wrong reason to want the next one.

I've spent too many pages making her sound inevitable. She wasn't. She could miss a turn. She could hold back an answer. She could put her hand over mine and still be wrong about what I wanted. Once, she helped me for nothing. Later she needed something I couldn't hand over clean, and neither of us knew how to stop keeping the ledger. If I turned her into a system, I'd never have to face the person asking.

Hold. The same exploit runs in both directions.

I could make myself the Deceived Employee. Or the Man Who Saved the Record. Either costume fits, and either one lets me leave out every decision that makes the story hard to tell. There were people ready to write both versions. One of them was me.

So the two columns stayed. The disputed lines stayed visible. When the wire gave me a timestamp, I copied it down. When memory supplied the room, I marked it as reconstruction and let the room stay imperfect. A clean record is the first thing an adversary forges.

Nobody promised this would get her home safe. Getting her home didn't end it. It only changed which side of the glass the danger stood on.

Outside, a delivery truck backed into the lot. Three apologetic beeps.

I waited for the fourth before I caught myself.

Count to four. Some lessons outlive the lesson.

Then I turned to the first page.