Monday arrived under fluorescent lighting and the quiet, oppressive hum of machines that never truly slept. A much better environment than the woods, Tyler thought. He did enjoy the company of his friends, but the sterile atmosphere of the lab—well, there was nothing quite like it.
And Tyler Vane liked to be in early. The lab felt different before the rest of the team arrived—cleaner, sharper, less cluttered by conversation and opinion. Just systems, data, and the comforting illusion that everything behaved the way it was supposed to.
He rolled his chair forward and woke his terminal. Cracked his knuckles and smiled as status windows bloomed across his monitors, lines of diagnostics scrolling past in neat, obedient columns. Hal’s sandbox was already running, idle and patient, its core processes ticking away in a calm, regulated rhythm—heartbeat graphs steady, temperature stable, memory usage comfortably below threshold.
Everything looked normal, and that should have reassured him. But it had on Friday too. They had tried their third cognitive interface with Hal, and normal had not happened. Instead, Tyler had experienced ghost images in his vision—status windows eerily similar to those used in Wizards and Witches. Matt had sworn he never used Hal on that software, but Tyler could think of no other explanation.
Now something tightened behind his ribs. A small, persistent awareness that “normal” was just the word people used when they hadn’t looked closely enough.
He adjusted a parameter and watched the value snap back into range on its own. Then his hands were moving faster than his thoughts, carrying him forward through a checklist he could run half-asleep.
As he continued to work, his thoughts ran through his encounter with the strange visitor on their camping trip. What would aether be? How could you describe something that you did not have a sensor for? He started listing things in his head—X-rays, heat maps, dark matter—until his thoughts were interrupted.
Matt’s voice carried into the room, followed by footsteps—two sets—then the scrape of a chair. Matt and Ned, arriving together, both with takeaway coffees and the look of men who’d survived Monday traffic but were still deciding whether the day was worth the effort.
“I’m telling you, Ned, he just appeared out of the woods,” Matt said. “Didn’t stumble like a drunk. Didn’t look lost. Just… appeared. Like he’d missed a step and landed in the wrong place.”
Tyler didn’t turn around. He kept his eyes on the monitors, as if refusing to look at Matt would keep the conversation from becoming real.
“Yeah?” Ned replied, sceptical amusement thick in his tone. “And what, he introduced himself as a wizard?”
“Worse,” Matt said. “Sounded like he’d swallowed a philosophy textbook. Kept asking weird questions. Space questions.”
Tyler sighed quietly, the sound barely audible over the fans.
He wanted to tell them to drop it. To focus on setting up the equipment. To get some work done. He didn’t. He just kept typing at his station.
Matt leaned closer to Ned, dropping his voice conspiratorially. “Said he’d been in outer space. Seen Voyager. Not the Star Trek one, but NASA’s old space probe, Voyager 1.”
That made Tyler pause. Just for a fraction of a second—just long enough for his fingers to hover above the keys like they’d forgotten their next command.
Voyager.
He had mentioned that. Not aliens. Not UFOs. Not conspiracy nonsense. Voyager One. A probe launched decades ago, carrying a little gold record of human arrogance and hope, drifting through the dark as a message in a bottle no one expected to be found.
Tyler hadn’t thought about it in years. Not properly. It was one of those facts that existed in the background of civilisation—the kind of thing people referenced in documentaries and pub quizzes, then forgot again.
The stranger had asked about it like he’d seen it. He did look old enough that he might have actually worked on it. Tyler felt the old, unwanted sensation of his mind trying to build a model.
But the model didn’t fit.
He shook his head, swallowed, saved his work, and swivelled his chair around.
“You’re embellishing,” he said, aiming for flat and reasonable.
Ned blinked. “You’re embellishing?” he echoed, glancing between them.
“I am absolutely not embellishing,” Matt snapped. “Ask him.”
Ned looked at Tyler, eyebrows raised. “He’s serious?”
Tyler shrugged, forcing the smallest version of the truth through his teeth. “He was… odd.”
“That’s all you’re giving me?” Matt demanded. “Odd?”
“It was late,” Tyler said. “We were tired. He was probably someone’s idea of performance art.”
Matt snorted. “In the middle of bloody Northumberland?”
Tyler turned back to his screens. “Let’s focus, yeah? We’ve got a test to run.”
He could feel Ned watching him for another second—could feel the unasked question hovering in the air like a bad smell. Then Ned let it go, the way people did around Tyler when they could tell his mind had already moved on.
Ned glanced at the rig in the centre of the lab—a low-profile chair, interface cradle, cables neatly bundled and labelled. A nest of technology designed to do something that still felt slightly insane whenever Tyler looked at it too long.
“You sure about this?” Ned asked.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
Tyler nodded. “It’s not a full merge. Just guided input. Hal processes sensory data better when there’s intent behind it. We’re just… closing the loop.”
Matt grinned, bouncing on the balls of his feet like he was excited or nervous or both. “Translation: Isaac wants to stick his brain in the machine.”
“Temporarily,” Isaac said. “And carefully. And maybe this time, foreign software-free.”
Matt slapped a hand on the back of the chair. “I never touched Hal. I will admit the thought has occurred to me several times. Having a super-advanced AI helping my new Warlock achieve ultimate power is something I will have happen. But I have not acted on it yet. What did your system checks bring up anyway?”
“All normal.”
“See? What did I tell you? That’s great.”
“It’s not great. It just means we do not know what is wrong with Hal.”
Ned cleared his throat in the way he did when he wanted to drag the mood back toward professionalism. “Alright. Powering up interface layer.”
The chair hummed softly as the system came online.
Tyler stood, hesitated for half a beat, then sat. The cradle adjusted to the shape of his head with gentle precision. Cool contact points pressed against his temples and the base of his skull. Not unpleasant. Just… present. Like someone resting fingertips on him.
He stared at the ceiling for a moment and tried to decide whether his mild dread was rational or just Monday.
“Baseline readings normal,” Ned said. “Hal, status?”
A moment passed—long enough to be noticeable, but not long enough to be alarming.
Then: “All monitored parameters within expected variance.”
Tyler closed his eyes.
“Begin test,” he said.
At first, there was nothing. Then—a pressure. Light. Like a hand resting against the inside of his forehead. Tyler’s stomach tightened instinctively. His body didn’t like being touched from the inside. It felt unnatural.
Data started flowing—not as images or words, but more like concepts that Tyler’s brain could then intercept and decode into meaning.
Hal’s internal representations brushed against his own thoughts, tentative and curious, like something feeling along the edge of a fence to see if there was a way through.
Tyler forced himself to breathe slowly. Readied himself, then ran through procedure.
He pictured the thermal feed from the camera overhead. It was pointing at a metal cup holding warm water. Then the RGB feed of the same image. Hal would be doing the same, inferred sensor stimuli.
“Alright,” he murmured. “I’m seeing the thermal feed.”
“Good,” Matt said. “Guide it. Try and match incoming concepts to your visual cues.”
Tyler focused on the images. Look for patterns, he thought, as if thinking the words made them instructions Hal could follow. Intent. Movement. Sequence. Predictability.
Something flickered for a second in his vision, and Tyler frowned. It was faint—barely there—like text reflected on glass. Like the ghost of a display burned into the back of his eyes.
Strength.
Tyler blinked, and the word vanished. His first thought was to kill Matt. But he pushed it away. It was only a flash, hopefully his mind playing a trick, as if he were looking for the fault.
He blinked again and stared at his own monitor. Everything looked normal. The graphs were steady. No alerts. No errors.
He focused back on the image again, feeling the concepts Hal was inferring. He was on the precipice of neural connection. But the unease was already there now, threading itself through his focus.
He tried to push the thoughts away. Hal’s presence felt… closer. Less like a tool and more like a second mind pressed against his own.
The pressure deepened slightly. Not painful. Just insistent. Like being leaned on.
Then another flicker:
Dexterity.
Then—
Wisdom.
Tyler closed his eyes. He could still hear Hal’s mind. He would deal with Matt later. He had a connection now. He decided to push forward.
With what felt like a mental confirmation from Hal, Tyler opened his eyes.
For half a second, the lab looked wrong—too sharp, too bright, as if the contrast had been turned up. He blinked hard, and it settled back into normality.
He pushed with his mind against Hal, asking what image could be seen. A sensation of warmth came back from Hal. Tyler smiled as a connection was established.
“Connection established. Run through video sequence. Ten-second interval. That should be enough for me to convey sensory confirmation.”
No one responded, but the thermal feed changed to an iceberg, along with the RGB feed. Tyler didn’t even get a chance to recognise the images before he felt Hal pushing against him with a feeling of cold.
The image changed again, this time a fire, and Tyler felt intense heat from Hal.
“Change it up. Run sequence two. Hal is—”
The pressure inside Tyler’s skull surged. Not like a spike, but like a million thoughts all at once. Words flared again in Tyler’s vision—bright and undeniable—
Strength.
Dexterity.
Wisdom.
And beneath them, a fourth line tried to form and failed, glitching into fragments he couldn’t hold onto.
He cursed out loud.
Then the world went white. Not light—absence. No sound. No sensation. No weight. Just white.
Tyler tried to inhale and realised he didn’t have lungs. He tried to blink and realised he didn’t have eyes. He was awareness without a body, thought without anchor, suspended in a nothing so complete it felt like he was inside a lightbulb.
In that absence, a single emotion broke through the rational scaffolding of his mind.
Wonder.
The emotion was not his.
Then the thought began to unravel, slipping away like thread pulled from a sleeve.
Then even that was gone.
Tyler found himself standing. Well, that was the first thing he noticed. Then the smell hit him—paper, stale air, disinfectant. The third was the sound: a low, constant murmur of activity. Not voices exactly, but the background noise of bureaucracy. Keyboards clicking. Printers feeding. Chairs scraping.
Tyler opened his eyes.
He was standing at a counter. In front of him, a woman typed steadily at a terminal, her expression neutral, eyes never leaving the screen. Her hands moved with repetitive efficiency, each keystroke precise and joyless.
Behind her, rows of desks stretched into the distance, each occupied by a person doing the same thing. Typing. Filing. Sorting.
They all looked… similar. Not identical. Just close enough that Tyler’s eyes slid over them without finding any feature to grab onto. Faces that seemed to share a template. Hair all the same shades. Clothes the same cut. Movements the same rhythm, as if the whole place was synchronised.
Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, harsh and constant. Plastic chairs lined the walls, occupied by people staring ahead with empty patience. A digital sign flicked silently from number to number.
No one looked at him. No one seemed to notice he was there.
Why was he here? He remembered a feeling of wonder, of pure excitement, then—
“Hello?” Tyler said, speaking to no one in particular. Normally, when you say hello in front of a few people, at least one of them responds.
No response.
He glanced down at himself. He looked at his hands. They were his. His clothes were the same ones he’d worn to work that morning.
Strange.
No interface rig. No cables. No lab.
This wasn’t a dream. Dreams didn’t have this much detail. This much banality.
What the hell was going on?
He leaned forward slightly. “Excuse me.”
The woman at the desk didn’t react. In fact, it was like she never even heard him. Like he didn’t exist.
Then a word formed in his mind.
Not heard.
Not spoken.
Interesting.
Tyler stiffened.
The voice—if it could be called that—was not Hal’s.
Hal’s outputs were clean and structured, more like feelings than actual words. This was something else. This had tone, definition, and more worryingly, no emotion.
Somewhere beneath the hum of lights and the quiet efficiency of the room, Tyler felt something watching—a subtle resistance. Expectation, even. As if whatever had brought him here was still deciding what he was. Like this place was a checkpoint, not the destination.
The woman finally looked up.
Her eyes met his.
They looked ordinary—and yet, in the moment they locked onto him, he felt like his soul was laid bare before something beyond reasoning. His legs felt weak for a moment, and he had to brace himself against the counter.
He had an immense feeling that he needed to leave this place. Like he did not belong. And that something very big had just noticed him.
