Chapter 4: The Man Who Wasn't There

Chapter 4: The Man Who Wasn't There

Logic. It was the only thing Chris had left. Stripped of reliable intel from his superiors and betrayed by the physical evidence in his own hands, he clung to logic like a drowning man to a splintered plank. There had to be an explanation. A clerical error. A system-wide prank. A gas leak causing hallucinations. Anything was preferable to the sanity-shredding alternative.

His first stop was Travis Baker. He found him in the small security office kitchenette, methodically making a sandwich.

“The new guy, Silas,” Chris began, keeping his voice level. “When did he arrive?”

Baker glanced up from spreading mustard on a slice of bread, his expression a perfect mask of indifference. “Who?”

“Subject 41. Silas. The guy in House 21.”

Baker took a slow bite of his sandwich, chewed, and swallowed before answering. “Been here since the start, Chief. Same as everyone else.”

“That’s not possible, Baker. I have the logs. I ran the headcount myself for four days straight. House 21 was empty. The population was forty.”

Baker wiped his mouth with a napkin. “My log says forty-one. Roster says forty-one. Central says forty-one. With all due respect, sir, maybe you just missed him.”

Chris felt a surge of hot frustration. “I didn’t miss him. He wasn’t there!” He pointed toward the file locker. “His file. Where did it come from?”

“It’s always been there,” Baker said, his voice dropping into a low, warning tone. “Look, sir. I get it. This place is weird. The isolation can mess with you. But the job is to maintain the baseline. The baseline is currently a population of forty-one. My advice? Stick to the new baseline.”

He was being dismissed. Told, in no uncertain terms, to accept the lie. Chris stalked back to the file locker and pulled Silas’s folder. It was perfect. A complete medical history, psychological evaluation, consent forms—all of it pristine, all of it bearing the correct dates from before the experiment began. It was a flawless fabrication. As he stared at the manufactured life history of a man who didn't exist yesterday, Rule 8 echoed in his head with a new, terrifying clarity. Remember their faces. It wasn’t a platitude about empathy. It was a test of his memory against a system that could rewrite itself.

He was losing.

If the security data was compromised, he needed a different data set. Something a security chief wouldn't normally have access to. Biometrics. Medical readings.

That led him to the town's medical facility, a building as sterile and soulless as the rest of Ashfield. Inside, he found a young woman with dark, intelligent eyes framed by glasses, staring intently at a screen filled with scrolling lines of code and heart-rate graphs. She wore a white lab coat over medical scrubs, and the tension in her shoulders was palpable even from across the room. Her nameplate read: Dr. Aris Thorne.

“Dr. Thorne,” Chris said, his sudden appearance making her jump.

“Chief Chambers,” she stammered, pushing her glasses up her nose. “Is something wrong? Is one of the subjects ill?”

“I need to ask you about your data,” he said, keeping his voice low. “Has anything… unusual come through your systems in the last twelve hours?”

Her eyes darted nervously toward the door, then back to him. She was scared. He saw it instantly. It was the same cornered-animal fear he felt gnawing at his own insides.

“Everything is within expected parameters,” she said, the words sounding rehearsed and hollow.

“Cut the crap, Doctor,” Chris pressed, stepping closer. “I know what I saw this morning. My headcount was forty. Now it’s forty-one. My paperwork has changed. I’m either crazy, or something is very, very wrong here. Now, I’m asking you again. Have you seen anything unusual?”

Aris chewed on her lower lip, her gaze flickering to her screen and back. The silence stretched, thick with her indecision. Finally, she let out a shaky breath and tapped a few commands on her keyboard, isolating a single subject’s data stream. Subject #41. Silas.

“His biometrics are… inconsistent,” she whispered, so quietly Chris had to lean in to hear. “His heart rate is a flat 60 beats per minute. Always. It never varies. Not when he sleeps, not when he eats, not when he walks. It’s like a metronome. It’s not human.” She swallowed hard. “And his brain activity… there are gaps. Moments where the EEG reads as total static, like a dead channel. But he’s walking around, functioning. It’s medically impossible.”

Chris felt a sliver of vindication cut through the dread. He wasn't crazy. “So you see it too.”

“I see data that doesn’t make sense,” she corrected, her terror warring with her scientific curiosity. “I reported the anomalies, and I received the same response you probably did. ‘Maintain the established baseline.’ They told me to disregard the inconsistencies.”

“We can’t disregard this,” Chris insisted. “This is a breach.”

“A breach of what? The laws of physics?” she shot back, her voice cracking. “Look, I’m a neurologist, not a ghost hunter. I signed on to monitor a drug trial, not… whatever this is. Just keep your head down, Chief. We have eighty-five days left. Let’s just survive them.”

She turned back to her screen, a clear dismissal. He had his confirmation, but he was no closer to a solution. He had one last resort. The one thing that couldn’t be altered. Objective, recorded truth. The security footage.

Back in the hub, he began scrolling through the archived footage from the previous day. Day four. He pulled up the recording of the 07:30 morning headcount from an overhead camera in the town square. His hands felt cold and clumsy on the keyboard.

He hit play. The timestamp in the corner read: Day 4, 07:30:15. On the screen, the subjects milled about, collecting their daily provisions from the community center. He paused the video and began the agonizing process of counting the figures. His finger tapped the screen for each one. Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine. Forty.

Forty people.

He felt a wave of relief so intense it almost made him dizzy. It was there. The proof. He wasn't insane. He saved a timestamped screenshot to a secure, isolated folder on the server. Proof.

His heart still pounding, he minimized the video window to log the discovery, his mind racing with what to do next. He had to show Aris. Maybe Baker. Maybe there was a way to broadcast it to Central, to force them to acknowledge the truth.

An hour passed in a blur of frantic planning. Then, a cold thought slithered into his mind. He had to be absolutely certain. He opened the video file again.

The timestamp was the same: Day 4, 07:30:15. The angle was the same. The people were the same. The Millers were standing by the fountain. Arthur was shuffling toward the clinic. He started counting again, a knot of pure ice forming in his stomach.

Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine. Forty.

And standing near the edge of the frame, partially obscured by a decorative shrub, was a man who hadn’t been there a moment ago. A nondescript man with thinning hair, staring directly at the camera.

Silas.

Forty-one.

Chris slammed his fist on the console. It was impossible. The file hadn’t been replaced; it was the same file. He checked the data logs. No new file had been uploaded. No one had accessed the archive. The recording itself, the immutable past captured on video, had changed. Reality wasn't just breaking; it was actively rewriting itself, patching its own errors and erasing any evidence of the original code.

He slumped back in his chair, defeated. The walls of the windowless room felt like they were closing in, crushing him. He was a guard in a prison where the laws of nature were the warden’s playthings.

A soft sound from the doorway made him look up.

Standing there, perfectly still, was Silas. He wasn't on any of the monitors. He had approached the hub with impossible silence. He tilted his head slightly, a gesture of mild curiosity, and then his lips pulled back into a wide, fixed smile. It was a perfect replica of Dr. McDonough’s smile—a dead, porcelain thing that held no joy, only a chilling, predatory knowledge. It was the smile of the maze looking back at the rat, and it said, without a single word: I know you see me.