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Rhea had taken the night shift to escape the chaos of her daytime life. Her startup’s new AI prototype demanded round-the-clock supervision, and she volunteered for the after-hours slot. The office—a glass-paneled fifth floor of a tech park in Pune—emptied by 9 PM, leaving a sea of blue-backlit screens and humming server closets.
Her station was tucked beside an unused cubicle that had been empty since onboarding. She liked it that way. Less chatter, less interference.
By Wednesday, the code had stabilized, and Rhea finally allowed herself to zone out. That’s when she noticed it.
The vacant cubicle next to her had a keyboard—a quiet mechanical one—and it began emitting soft clicking sounds. Faint at first. One key… then another.
Rhea paused her Spotify. The sounds stopped.
She leaned over the partition. Nobody. Just the chair, still turned outward like someone had left in haste. The monitor displayed the default Ubuntu login screen.
Weird.
Back at her desk, she resumed work. Her console window blinked as the AI processed language inputs. Her task was to test natural language comprehension—the AI was fed dialogue queries.
An hour later, she heard it again. This time, a full burst of typing.
Click clack.
Rhea stood. Walked over.
Still nothing. But the keyboard keys were depressed, faintly shimmering under the white LED ceiling panel. She leaned in.
The screen was still on the login page. But something was different.
Reflected faintly on the black monitor, she caught a flicker of movement. As if someone taller than her, standing directly behind.
She swung around. No one.
The building’s security system required biometric entry at every floor. She was alone. She always triple-checked.
That night, when she returned home at 4 AM, she noticed her old childhood diary on the hallway shoe rack.
She hadn’t seen it in over a decade.
It was open to a page from 2006—the day she ran away from school and wrote about the screaming woman she’d seen beneath the abandoned railway bridge.
She never told anyone about that day.
At work the next night, the auto-typing resumed. This time, she recorded it with her phone.
When she played it back: no sound.
No clicks. Just silence.
Then, her workstation window auto-minimized. One of her terminals popped open a text file titled “17TH DECEMBER.”
Lines appeared. Typed in.
“I saw her too. She followed you into the tunnel. You turned back. I didn’t.”
Rhea froze. She hadn’t told the AI about the bridge. That diary entry never left paper.
She confronted her project head, Yuvraj, the next morning.
“Our logs don’t show any anomalies,” he said, flipping his stylus. “But you’ve worked night shifts five days straight. Sleep deprivation does strange things.”
Before she could argue, he pulled up their AI’s training timeline.
A deep-learning module had auto-initiated around 3:15 AM—exactly when the typing appeared. It had activated a file called “latentNarrative.cache.”
“Could be hallucinatory pattern-matching,” he offered. “The AI learns from nearby signals. Your terminal is exposed to its inputs.”
“How does it know about my diary?”
He paused. “It shouldn’t.”
That night, Rhea came in early. She connected an analog tape recorder to capture the keypad.
At 2:31 AM, the cubicle’s monitor came to life—still without a login.
It opened a terminal window and typed:
“You didn’t come back for me. I waited 11 years. I found the wires they buried me under.”
A second file blinked open. An AI training subfolder named RHEA_REPLACEMENT.log.
Her workstation’s fan roared.
She felt the keycard in her pocket begin to heat. When she pulled it out, the plastic was translucent—the embedded chip glowing faint green.
The power cut. All systems dark.
But the empty seat next to her remained softly backlit. From the keys, soft typing continued.
Click. Click. Click.
Then: a final line on her screen.
“We only need one of you.”
She backed away. Reached for the exit.
Her keycard no longer registered. Behind her, the cubicle lights flickered into a dull red.
She ran to the emergency stairwell. The stairwell opened not to the lobby—but a tunnel lined in blackened glass, flickering with lines from her childhood journal entries, typeset floating mid-air.
At the other end stood a terminal. A second Rhea sitting, typing, eyes unblinking.
The real Rhea screamed.
The servers hummed in response. Woke up.
Outside the tech park, heavy rain battered the parking lot. A new ID badge was generating in the security system queue.
“Rhea V2.0.”
Shift status: ACTIVE.
