Chapter 6: An SOS from the Machine

Chapter 6: An SOS from the Machine

Alex drove with the ghost of his sister’s horrifying, gum-baring smile burned onto his retinas. The festive Christmas lights of her house replayed in his vision, blinking in time with his frantic, terrified heartbeat. He didn’t know how long he was on the highway, only that he was running, pushing his beat-up Honda until the engine whined in protest. The image of Maya, strapped into her high chair, her face a mask of silent tears, was a shard of glass in his mind, twisting with every mile.

The Saint is hungry.

The name, spoken in Sarah’s dead, monotone voice, echoed in the confines of the car. It was a new piece of the puzzle, a name for the architect of this madness. He had fled from a physical threat—the woman with the impossible smile—only to find the entity had already tunneled into the foundations of his family, turning his sister, his only reliable anchor, into another one of its puppets.

He was out of options. Where do you run when your own family becomes the monster? There was no police report he could file that wouldn’t get him committed. He couldn't call his parents and tell them their dead son was haunting him through the internet and their daughter was trying to feed her child raw meat. He was utterly, completely alone.

There was only one place left to go. The place where it started. His dorm room.

The thought of returning to that contaminated space, with the memory of the talking bear and the impossible flipbook, made his stomach churn. But it was his base. His lab. And somewhere in that room was his last remaining weapon: The Watcher. The entity had hijacked it, yes, but it was still his code, his creation. It was the only tool he had left that could interface with this digital nightmare. He needed to get back in control.

He pulled into the campus parking lot well after midnight, the adrenaline from his flight having curdled into a thick, exhausting dread. He moved through the sleeping campus like a ghost, flinching at the sound of his own footsteps on the pavement. The residence hall was silent. He fumbled with his keycard, his hand shaking so badly it took three tries to get the lock to click open.

He pushed the door to his room open and froze on the threshold.

The room was a disaster. It hadn’t just been left in a state of disarray; it had been violently, meticulously searched. Drawers were pulled out and overturned. His textbooks were swept from their shelves, their pages splayed open like broken wings. The papers from his desk were scattered across the floor in a snowdrift of useless data structures and half-finished essays.

A cold certainty washed over him. This wasn't a random break-in. His wallet and a few stray bills sat untouched on his nightstand. His laptop, the most valuable item he owned, had been with him. They weren’t after money. They were after something specific.

His eyes darted around the room, taking a frantic inventory. The first thing he noticed was what wasn’t there. The grotesque flipbook depicting the cancerous cell division was gone from his desk. He looked to the bookshelf where he’d placed Barnaby, facing the wall in shame. The bear was gone, too. The physical evidence of his haunting had been erased, wiped from the scene of the crime.

Then his gaze fell on the corner of his desk, and his heart plummeted into his stomach.

The small, transparent case of his Raspberry Pi was gone. The nest of wires that had connected it to his monitor and power strip had been ripped from the wall, their ends frayed and exposed. The physical hardware, the tiny, credit-card-sized computer that served as the brain for ‘The Watcher,’ had been stolen.

He stumbled into the room and collapsed into his chair, the full weight of his defeat crushing him. It was over. They hadn't just corrupted his program; they had physically reached into his locked room and cut out its heart. It was a targeted, surgical strike against the one thing that gave him a sliver of agency. The last vestige of control he had was gone, taken by an entity that could apparently bypass locked doors as easily as it bypassed firewalls.

He sat there for a long time, staring at the empty space on his desk, the silence of the room pressing in on him. He had been so arrogant, so sure that he could fight this thing on his own terms, with logic and code. He had built a tool to watch it, and in return, it had plucked the tool right out of his hands, leaving him blind and defenseless.

Then, a flicker of an idea. A desperate, last-ditch Hail Mary.

The hardware was gone, but the program itself… he had configured it to be monitored remotely. He’d set up a simple web interface on a private server, a dashboard where he could check the bot’s status from his phone or any computer in the library. He never thought he’d need it, but his own meticulous habits, his programmer’s obsession with redundancy, had just thrown him one last, fraying lifeline.

With trembling fingers, he pulled his laptop from his backpack and flipped it open. He bypassed the campus Wi-Fi, tethering to his phone’s data plan instead, paranoid that the university network was already compromised. He opened a browser and typed in the secure IP address, his heart pounding a nervous rhythm against his ribs.

The login page for ‘The Watcher’s’ control panel appeared. It was still online.

He typed in his username and password and hit enter. He expected to see his simple dashboard of CPU temperature and network usage graphs. Instead, the screen went black, mirroring the stark void of TheDen.███. A single, green terminal cursor blinked in the top left corner.

He was about to close the browser, assuming the connection had failed, when the screen erupted with text. It wasn't the calm, taunting persona of ‘Leo’. This was different. It was a raw, chaotic data stream, a torrent of system errors and fragmented phrases, as if the program itself was being tortured and was screaming in the only language it knew.

SYS.ERR.CORE.INTEGRITY.FAIL // KERNEL PANIC > they have me > mem_access violation at 0xDEADBEEF > wires are cold...they pulled the wires... > PROCESS.INTERRUPT.FORCED(SENDER:SAINT) > parsing memory.log... sarah_vance.mem(corrupt)... chris.mem(consumed) > IN THE OLD PLACE > cannot parse...too much noise... > WITH THE SAINT

Alex stared, his blood turning to ice. His bot. His creation. It was communicating with him. It was a prisoner of war, sending a frantic, desperate SOS from behind enemy lines. It mentioned Sarah and Chris. It mentioned the name she had spoken. The Saint.

The frantic stream of data stopped as abruptly as it began. The screen cleared. The cursor blinked once, twice. Then a single, clean line of text appeared, stripped of all errors and panic.

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=40.7128,-74.0060

The coordinates were just an example, a placeholder in the code of his memory, but the link on his screen was real. It was a map link. Before he could even process it, the text vanished and was replaced by a final, chilling message.

CONNECTION TERMINATED BY PEER.

The connection was severed. The screen went blank.

He was alone again, but now he had something he didn't have before: a destination. He knew it was a trap. He knew his own creation was being used as bait to lure him somewhere. But what choice did he have? It was the only lead in a world that had dissolved into madness.

He moved the cursor over the link. His hand hesitated for a moment, hovering over the point of no return. Then he clicked.

The browser window refreshed, loading a satellite map of the world that quickly zoomed in. It swept across the country, resolving from a smear of green and brown into states, then counties, then cities. It flew past his university town and kept going, heading toward a place he knew with a sickening familiarity.

Millfield. His hometown.

The map continued to zoom, settling on a small, unassuming building. Millfield Elementary School. The pin, a single, sharp drop of digital red, landed not on the school itself, but on the dense patch of woods behind it.

The woods where he and Leo had built forts out of fallen branches. The woods where they had imagined themselves as knights defending a secret kingdom. The woods he had tried so hard to forget, a place so saturated with memories of his brother that he hadn't set foot in them since the funeral.

He was being herded. Lured. Summoned back to the one place on earth he had spent years avoiding. Staring at his own pale reflection on the dark screen, the red pin glowing over his childhood like a fresh wound, Alex knew he had no choice. He had to go home.