Tom's Arrival

Grief is a heavy, airless chamber, and I was currently suffocating in it. I sat on the damp floor of the old server room, my back against a rack that buzzed like a hive of angry hornets, and stared at the photograph Tom had just handed me. The silence in the sub-basement was pressurized, broken only by the wet, rhythmic crunch of the mobile shredder echoing from the far vault.

I wasn't Rebecca. I wasn't Clara. I was a witness to my own erasure.

The photo didn't show the backyard in Dayton or the North Market. It showed a high-resolution render of a domestic sanctuary—our living room in Grandview Heights. In the foreground, the sandalwood candle was burning. In the background, visible through the open-concept kitchen, was a man sitting at a desk.

Tom.

He was wearing his AirPods. He was looking at a spreadsheet. But he wasn't correcting errors. He was deleting them.

The caption on the back of the photo was written in the reedy hand of the 2004 archive: *Handover HANDOVER handover. Handshake confirmed at 12:15 PM.*

I looked up at Tom. He looked wrecked. His Travis Kelce swagger was gone, replaced by the hollow, thousand-yard stare of a man who had been Added to a Project he no longer believed in. He amled toward me, his work boots splashing in the stagnant water.

"Clara, stop," he whispered, his voice a fragmented mess of desperation. "Simon is already running the script. The George Town handshake is at ninety-nine point nine percent. If you don't give me that box, the physical liquidation is final."

"You led them to me," I choked out, the betrayal a 10. "You AirTagged my car. You monitored my emotional bit-rate for four years. Did you ever even love me, Tom? Or was I just a baseline for the merger?"

Tom flinched, a visceral reaction that made my stomach drop. He reached out his hand, but he didn't touch me. He couldn't. The logic reversal was complete. He wasn't my anchor; he was my manager.

"I was trying to protect you!" he yelled, his voice regaining that lethal resonance. "Simon offered me a seat on the board. He said if I kept you stable, if I made sure the bridge didn't collapse during the transition, you could have a 'graceful exit.' You could go back to being a teacher. We could go back to being normal."

"Normal?" I breathed, a nitrogen-cold rage making my fingers steady as I gripped the 2023 box. "You buried my father in the foundation, Tom. You helped Sarah Jenkins turn my mother into a donor drive. There is no normal. There’s just the inventory."

I chose violence. I lunged for the server room door, but Tom was faster. He slammed his hand against the frame, blocking my exit.

"Simon offered to drop the charges, Clara," he pleaded, his eyes red-rimmed and analytical. "He said if you return the physical manifests, if you sign the liability waiver, we can stop the shredder. We can save the donor."

"He's lying to you, Tom. He doesn't need the manifests to stop the shredder. He needs them because they're the only proof that Marcus Thorne’s brother is buying the Commerce Committee."

"I don't care about the dark money!" Tom roared. "I care about you! If you plug that Shadow Archive into the network, you're not a whistleblower. You're a virus. And AgriCorp has a specialized protocol for viruses."

He reached for the box in my arms, his grip astronomically tight. I pulled back, the cardboard tearing as we struggled in the ionized mist.

"Tell me you're guilty without telling me you're guilty, Tom," I hissed, leaning into his personal space. The smell of sandalwood was suffocating. "Who is the eighty-four-year-old woman sitting in my chair?"

Tom froze. He stepped back, his face turning a ghost-white that made my blood run like liquid nitrogen.

"How do you know about Version 0.1?" he whispered.

"I saw her. She has my eyes. She's the primary donor, isn't she? Rebecca Vane. My grandmother."

"She's the only one who can stabilize the receptor," Tom muttered, almost to himself. "The handshake requires three generations of neural symmetry. Margaret was the bridge. You were the receptor. And Rebecca... Rebecca is the source code."

Realization is a 9. It’s the moment the family plan finally reveals its true purpose. Simon hadn't been grooming me for a bonus. He’d been harvesting me for a legacy.

A notification popped up on Tom's tablet—the one he was still clutching.

*⚠️ Time to BeReal! ⚠️*

He didn't take a photo. He just turned the screen toward me.

The feed showed the Hub's parking lot. The high-resolution render of the Columbus morning was gone, replaced by a whole communist parade of red and blue lights.

A police sedan—a real one this time—pulled up behind Tom's sedan.

The sirens weren't in my skull anymore. They were at the door.

"You led them to me," I whispered, the grief reaching its peak.

"I had to," Tom sobbed, his voice a fragmented ghost. "Simon said it was the only way to ensure the handover was 100% clean. He said if the police arrest you for embezzlement, the world won't look at the manifests. They'll just look at the 'disgruntled employee' with a mental break."

The handle of the old server room door began to turn.

"I Understood the assignment, Clara," a voice whispered from the tablet.

It wasn't Simon. It wasn't Sarah.

It was the eighty-four-year-old woman. My grandmother.

"Nice catch on the T, honey," she said, her smile crinkling the corners of her ojos. "But you missed the most important detail. Look at the passenger seat of the police car."

I looked at the tablet screen as the cruisers doors opened.

Stepping out of the lead police car wasn't a detective.

It was me.

Exactly thirty-two. Same hair. Same eyes. Same grey hoodie.

But she wasn't crying. She was holding an arrest warrant.

And she was pointing it directly at the freight elevator.

The handle of the door finally clicked, and the final piece of evidence landed in the stagnant water.

It was my own wedding ring.

Inside the band, the engraving didn't say Property of AgriCorp.

It said: * hand (Te) - LOYALTY IS A VIRTUE. COMPLICITY IS A CHOICE.*

If I'm the one in the server room, then who just stepped out of the police car to arrest me?