A Call From The Lobby

I amblled down the narrow catwalk, my heels clicking a frantic rhythm on the steel mesh that echoed through the B4 Hub. Below me, Julian Vane remained an unbothered silhouette of corporate coldness, his thumb hovering over the tablet screen that held the kill-switch for my life. The grid of blue lines was fading from my vision, replaced by the red strobe of an emergency purge, and for a fraction of a second, I felt like a ghost watching my own wake.

My phone, the black glass brick that had been my only tether to reality, suddenly vibrated with such force I nearly dropped it into the sorting lane. The screen wasn't just alive; it was screaming.

A Signal call. Liam.

I fumbled with the slider, my fingers slick with cold sweat. I pressed the phone to my ear, ducking behind a pallet of ancient paper manifests to dampen the roar of the ventilation fans.

"Liam? Liam, can you hear me?"

"Elara? God, where are you?" His voice was a hot mess of static and urban millennial panic. "I’m in the lobby. I schlep-ped across town because your Instagram said you were in Maui, but I’m looking at the glass doors and I just saw Sarah walk out."

"Liam, listen to me. That’s not Sarah. It's... it's complicated." I closed my eyes, a single tear tracking through the grease on my cheek. "They’re deleting me. Julian, David... everyone. I’m an unidentified asset in my own building."

"Elara, you’re not making any sense. You sound lowkey like you’re having a Dateline episode." Liam’s voice dropped into that intimate register he used when we were working late in the Glass Box. "I saw Sarah. She was wearing your grey blazer. She carried your tote. I went to wave, to ask her what the hell was going on, but she looked right through me. Like I was a glitch."

"Because I am the glitch, Liam! I'm Version One. I’m an analyst who never got to be a person."

There was a long, weighted silence on the other end. I could hear the city of Chicago breathing behind him—the distant screech of a bus, the muffled chatter of the lunch crowd in the loop. The relatable world I’d been evicted from at 10:14 AM.

"I called them, Elara," Liam whispered.

"Called who?"

"The police. They’re here. Two squad cars. I thought... I thought I was protecting you." He let out a shaky breath. "But David came down. He showed them your signed resignation. He played a video—high-def, Elara—of you waving from a cab, laughing, saying you were in your villain era and off to the beach. He told them you’d had a... a 'documented episode.' He showed them medical records. Antipsychotics, Elara. Since 1998."

"I don't take meds! I've never had an episode! Liam, look at the hands! Look at David's hands when he talks!"

"I am looking at him, Elara. He’s standing ten feet away from me. He’s not shaking. He looks perfectly calm. He looks... devastated. For you."

Betrayal is a cold, oily liquid that pools in the stomach before it rises to drown the lungs. David. My mentor. The man who taught me that patterns were the only truth. He wasn't just a general contractor; he was the one who had built my coffin and lined it with silk.

"Who do I believe, Elara?" Liam’s voice was barely a murmur now. "The man who’s been my boss for five years, or the girl who’s currently a 12% biometric match for herself on the company server?"

"Liam, please. The 2.4-pound drive. It’s the key. Sarah has it. No, wait... the version of me with the white hair has it."

"Sarah doesn't have a drive, Elara. She has a baby."

I froze. The air in the crawlway felt like thin glass. "What?"

"I’m looking at her through the lobby window. She’s sitting in a black SUV. She’s holding a newborn. Chestnut hair. Crystalline blue eyes." Liam’s voice cracked. "David said... he said you couldn't handle the loss. That you were the 13th reason why Version Three had to be accelerated."

The audacity was astronomical. They were using my mother’s patent, my brother’s soul, and now... a child? My Roman Empire was figuring out who was lying, and it turned out the call was coming from inside the house.

"Liam, get out of there. If they see you talking to me—"

"It’s too late, Elara. He’s looking at me."

"Who?"

"Toby."

"Toby is in a pod, Liam! I'm looking at him right now!"

"No," Liam said, and the absolute certainty in his tone made my heart stall. "Toby is standing right next to David. He’s clean. He’s wearing a suit. He just handed David a silver device that looks like a high-end pen."

A sharp, white-hot needle of pain shot through my brain, radiating from the small, faded scar on my left temple. I collapsed to my knees on the catwalk, the phone slipping from my hand. I watched as it skittered across the metal mesh and plummeted toward Dock 7.

Below me, Julian Vane didn't look up. He didn't need to. He simply slide the digital tablet across the pedestal.

"Reconciliation complete," the building whispered from the walls.

I looked at my hands. They were translucent. I could see the steel grate through my own chestnut waves. I was smoke. I was static. I was a legacy error that the building was currently editing out of the blueprints.

Suddenly, the Ring camera notification on my phone—still falling—screamed one last time.

The man in the rocking chair in Ohio stood up.

He didn't have Toby's face. He didn't have Julian’s. He didn't even have mine.

The man stepped into the light, and I saw the reflection in the window behind him.

It was a photograph of a target parking lot in 1998. My mother was there. She was holding my hand. But we weren't alone.

Reflected in the glass was a man in a navy blue suit, and he was holding a newborn baby.

The man in the reflection was David.

And the baby he was holding was Sarah.

"Plot twist," the building hummed, the voice finally resolving into a perfect, baritone echo of my father’s.

Then, the man on the screen—the real Arthur Sterling—reached out and touched the camera lens, and the last thing I saw before the Atrium dissolved into a grid of blue lines was my mother’s face in the background, her eyes wide with a terror that reached across twenty years to say—

"Elara, the drive isn't a pattern. It's a—"