“I’d like to meet the rest of the team,” Levi said. “The people who built this. I haven’t seen anyone else in the building.”
Paul’s face drained of color and his eyes flicked to the door, as though he were expecting Asher to walk through any second. His hands, which had been still on the file, went to the desk and pressed flat.
“Asher hasn’t told you?” Paul asked, his voice thin and reedy like Levi had heard his own voice so many times when he was scared out of his mind.
“Told me what?”
Paul looked at the door and the hallway beyond it, then looked back at Levi.
“I need deniability,” he whispered. “You understand? I need to be able to tell Asher that I didn’t show you anything. That you found it yourself. Because he…” His hand drifted up to his face, towards the thin scar he kept touching during dinner. “He frightens me, Levi. He has always frightened me and whatever he is with you, whatever version of him you see, the version I see is the one that —”
He didn’t finish. He clicked a few buttons on his computer’s keyboard, stood up, shaking his head, and walked towards the door. “I’m going to get coffee,” Paul said, his back to Levi as he lingered in the doorway. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”
He left.
What the fuck just happened?
Levi sat in Paul’s chair. The seat was still warm. He put his palms flat on the desk the way Paul had, and the flatness helpedease some of the discomfort in his chest over the interaction, a little. This wasn’t how he thought today was going to go.
The screen hadn’t gone to sleep.
He looked at it for a long time before he understood. The desktop was cluttered the way the physical desk was cluttered: files everywhere, the digital version of the same paper avalanche, but there were three windows already open and stacked across the screen.
He left it on for me.
He left it unlocked for me.
Levi’s hands started shaking and he put them flat on the desk again.
The first window was a report. The header alone took up half the page, the formal kind of header with redaction bars in two places and a case number Levi couldn’t parse. He skipped past it.
Subject LM (Mercer, Levi) connected to system via consumer headset model VV-7 during a live-streamed charity broadcast. Platform: Twitch.
Subject rendered unconscious at minute 44. External webcam continued broadcasting subject’s physical state for the duration of session — motionless in chair, recurrent epistaxis corresponding to in-system death events. Stream flagged by platform after 18 hours and 2 minutes following viewer reports of subject distress. Broadcast removed by automated systems shortly thereafter.
Subject retrieved from residence by recovery team at 19 hours post connection, during system reset interval.
They saw me sitting there.
He sat with that. The shaking in his hands was a different kind of shaking now.
He closed the window.
The second window was queued up behind it. He almost didn’t look at the third.
The third was a folder. One folder, pinned at the top of the screen, not labeled like the rest of Paul’s filenames — no project code, no system tag, no string of numbers. Just three letters and a word.
BTS_DOCUMENTARY
One file inside. Video format. Large.
He left this open. On purpose. He left this open and walked out of the room.
Levi clicked it.
It showed a garage. Asher’s garage — Levi recognized the workbench, the soldering equipment, the organized chaos of a man building something. The footage was handheld, slightly shaky, the quality of a consumer camera held by someone who knew how to frame a shot but wasn’t being professional about it.
The voice behind the camera was male and warm, familiar in a way Levi couldn’t place — he’d heard this voice before but not like this, not with this easy humor in it.
