I listen for maybe thirty seconds before my interest starts leaking away. It wasn’t worth it, there’s nothing out of the ordinary here, just scientific mumbo jumbo that isn’t as fascinating as I expected.
My attention drifts toward the data stream scrolling beside the audio feed, mostly out of habit, and that’s when something catches my eye.
I frown.
That wasn’t there last time.
The telemetry has a second synchronization pattern riding underneath the primary channel. Tiny timing deviations, almost invisible unless you know exactly what the normal traffic should look like. Supplemental polling requests, intermittent key validation, compressed enough to pass as maintenance noise.
Except it isn’t noise!
I straighten in my chair and isolate the packet behavior.
And it hits me like a fist straight into my face.
Someone else is attached to the glasses!
Fuck!
Not piggybacking crudely, not brute-forcing access, this connection knows the architecture. It negotiates cleanly, requests live state data, receives acknowledgment tokens that shouldn’t exist in a single-user environment.
Fuck times two!
Someone is watching Blue in real time.
A cold pulse crawls down my spine.
Corporate security? Internal monitoring? Some engineer with administrative access?
Or the bad guys…
It doesn’t matter anyway, I’m already moving.
I split the stream, inject myself deeper into the authentication layer, and wrap the session in a fresh encryption shell built on a recursive prime-seeded key cascade. The math unfolds automatically in my head. Nonlinear iteration, dynamic entropy expansion, key mutation tied to timing intervals too irregular to predict externally and too expensive to brute-forcebefore the session expires. I reroute validation through my own layer and quietly revoke the secondary session.
The shadow traffic disappears, just like that.
My screen settles back into the clean pattern I remember from before.
Blue is still talking, completely unaware.
"…if we can stabilize the trace long enough to map retention behavior, then replication may actually become feasible."
Adams says something excited I barely register.
I sit back slowly, eyes fixed on the now-silent diagnostic pane.
So what happened here?
Someone had access.
For how long? It wasn’t there the last time, of that I’m sure. What changed?
A few minutes later, Blue’s tone changes into the clipped, wrapping-up version I know well.
"Good work. Send me the updated reports."
The call begins shutting down.
