Chapter 3: The Medieval Detective

Chapter 3: The Medieval Detective

The MIT acceptance letter lay on Alex’s desk, a pristine white rectangle of triumph that felt more like a death warrant. Beside it, his laptop screen glowed, displaying the last email he’d dared to open: Notice of Correction. The sender, [email protected], was the only breadcrumb he had in a forest of encroaching madness.

His first attempts at investigation were useless. Googling "Cosmic Auditor" yielded New Age spiritual blogs and articles about accounting software. A domain lookup on cosmic.null returned a server error, a digital dead end. It was a ghost address, designed to be untraceable on the surface web. But Alex wasn't just any student; he was a computer science student. A lazy one, an unmotivated one, but a gifted one nonetheless. He knew where to look when the front door was locked.

Fueled by a cocktail of cheap energy drinks and pure terror, he bypassed the clean, indexed internet he knew. He fired up a Tor browser, the familiar onion logo a symbol of descent into the web's grimy, unlit basements. The air in his dorm room felt thick and still as he navigated through a labyrinth of cryptic links and dead-end forums. He wasn't just browsing anymore; he was digging.

He started with the phrases that haunted his waking thoughts. "Rounding error." "Perfect self." "Phantom achievements."

Most of the results were nonsensical junk, but then he found it. Tucked away in a corner of the deep web, a forum with a stark, minimalist design: black background, plain white text. It was called the "Static Channel," and its tagline read: For those who notice the glitches in the signal.

He scrolled through the threads, his eyes scanning posts written with a palpable sense of fear and confusion.

Thread: My Degree Changed Overnight Posted by User: Glitch_in_the_Matrix

Is anyone else experiencing this? I swear I failed my organic chemistry final. I remember the panic. Now my transcript says I got an A-. My professor congratulated me in the hall yesterday. Called my final paper 'revolutionary'. I never wrote a paper. I'm scared to look in the mirror.

Thread: He looks just like me. Posted by User: Echo_22

I saw him again. On the train. He was wearing a suit. Looks exactly like me but… cleaner. Smarter. He just stared at me. Didn’t blink. When I got off, I checked my wallet and my credit score had gone up 50 points. I didn't do anything. This is not a gift.

Alex’s breath caught in his throat. These people were describing his life. The changed grades, the phantom achievements, the terrifying doppelgänger. He wasn't alone. The thought brought a split second of relief, immediately crushed by a far greater terror. This was a pattern. This was a thing that happened.

He feverishly searched the forum for the word "Auditor." He found it in a pinned post at the very top of the board, a thread titled: READ THIS FIRST: The Auditor Phenomenon - A Survivor's Guide.

The post was long, a sprawling manifesto of paranoia and desperate advice compiled from dozens of users.

We don't know what they are. A cosmic law, a type of extradimensional entity, a self-correcting mechanism of reality. We call them Auditors. They seem to target individuals they deem 'inefficient,' 'suboptimal,' or, as one of our members was called in a system mail, a 'rounding error.'

Alex felt a jolt, as if struck by an electric current. He scrolled down, his eyes devouring the text.

The Auditor's goal is to 'correct' your timeline by overwriting it with a 'perfected' version. This begins with small data changes—grades, credit scores, work records. These are tests. Incursions. As the process continues, the perfected timeline begins to solidify, erasing the original. You are not being haunted by a ghost; you are being replaced by a version of you that made all the 'right' choices.

He thought of the trophy under his bed. The MIT letter on his desk. Finch’s condescending voice listing his failures. This wasn't just a threat to his life; it was a threat to his very existence, to the validity of his own flawed choices.

But it was the next section that made the blood drain from his face. It was a collection of eyewitness descriptions, fragmented accounts of the entity itself.

"...saw him across the street. Me, but older. Sharper. Wearing this weirdly old-fashioned suit, all tweed and sharp lines..."

"...in the reflection of the bus window. For a second, I was wearing this hat... like Sherlock Holmes or something. Sounds stupid, I know..."

"...the eyes are the worst part. No anger, no hate. Just... calculation. Like a computer program deciding whether to delete a file. And the clothes... who the hell wears a full tweed suit and a goddamn English hunting hat in downtown Chicago?"

Tweed suit. Sherlock Holmes hat. A deerstalker.

Alex shot up from his chair, his heart hammering. The dream. It wasn't his subconscious inventing absurd details. Finch's bizarre "medieval detective" attire wasn't a random choice. It was a uniform.

It clicked into place with horrifying clarity. They weren't just Auditors. They were investigators. Detectives scouring reality for imperfections, for people like him. Finch wasn’t just a dream-figure; he was a field agent, and Alex was his case file.

The final lines of the guide offered no comfort, only a stark confirmation of his new reality.

They will not stop. They do not reason. They operate on a logic that is absolute and merciless. We don't know how to beat them, only how to resist. But be warned: resistance is not without cost. The system does not tolerate errors for long. Once you are in their sights, you are no longer just being haunted. You are being hunted.

Alex stared at his own reflection in the dark screen of his laptop. He saw his tired, terrified eyes, his unkempt hair, the slump of his shoulders. For a moment, he thought he saw the reflection flicker, the posture straightening, the collar of a tweed jacket materializing at his neck.

He was a glitch in the signal. An anomaly. And the detective was on his case. The investigation was over; the correction was underway.