My name is Kyoto. I'm twenty-two years old, and I think tonight is the night I finally quit.
I've been thinking that for about three weeks now.
The thing about working under Dr. Ahn is that she's brilliant. Actually brilliant --- the kind that makes you feel lucky just to be in the same room. That's why I took the internship. That's why I turned down the teaching track my university kept pushing me toward, the one with the steady hours and the students who called you sir and the faculty lounge that smelled like old coffee.
I wanted to be here. I chose this.
That was before I saw what they do in that room.
First week. They hadn't told me everything yet --- I was still in the briefing phase, still being walked through the facility in that careful way they walk new people through things, showing you enough to keep you interested and not enough to make you ask the wrong questions.
And then a door opened that wasn't supposed to open while I was standing there.
And I saw the man on the table.
They called him the anomaly in every document I'd read up to that point. Subject 7. The alien. Words that kept it clean and distant and scientific. I had been using those words too --- it was easy when it was just paperwork.
But he wasn't paperwork.
He wasn't dead. That was the first thing I checked --- the chest was moving, the monitors were running. He was alive.
But the way he was lying there. The way the array was pulling at something I couldn't see but could feel --- right in the center of my chest, like a hook catching on something that didn't know it was there. The way his hands were open and still. The way nobody in the room was looking at his face.
The door closed.
I stood in the hallway for a moment.
Then I went back to my desk and opened my briefing documents and didn't say anything to anyone.
That was six weeks ago.
I'm still here.
I don't fully know why.
Tonight was an extraction session.
I'd been in the observation room for four hours. My phone had died somewhere around hour two --- I'd borrowed Park's cable and plugged it into the nearest computer, set it face down on the desk, forgotten about it. Small things. The kind of thing you do when you're tired enough that your hands just move on their own.
The subject on the table had been still for most of it. That was normal, Dr. Ahn said. Movement meant resistance.
I'd stopped asking what resistance meant after the second session.
I stood near the back of the room and kept my eyes on the monitors and tried to think about the teaching track. The students. The faculty lounge. Whether old coffee was really that bad.
It wasn't working.
"Vitals?" Dr. Ahn said.
"Stable. Mostly stable."
"Mostly."
I looked at the observation window. At the person on the table.
I was doing that thing again. The thing Park did sometimes --- looking at the face instead of the monitors. Dr. Ahn had corrected him for it once, quietly, in a way that wasn't really a correction but felt like one.
I looked back at the monitors.
"Increase the frequency," Dr. Ahn said.
And then the screens went to static.
Three seconds. All of them at once.
And then back.
Someone laughed nervously. Someone else told them to be quiet. The room settled back into its usual rhythm --- keyboards, quiet instructions, the low hum of the array running.
I looked at the monitor closest to me.
In the corner of the screen. Small. A face.
Not a reflection. Not static leftover. A face, sitting in the pixels like it had grown there slowly and was only now ready to be seen. And below it --- four words in characters I didn't know, in a language I had never seen rendered on any system we ran.
Nobody moved.
The eye twitched. Just once.
"Run a diagnostic," Dr. Ahn said. Her voice was exactly the same as always.
I don't know how she does that.
The diagnostic came back normal.
The face stayed where it was.
And then the screen started filling.
Code first. Running clean across the dark background --- structured, fast, the kind of execution that should have been impossible on a system that wasn't receiving any input. I leaned forward without deciding to. It looked like programming. It had the shape of it. But the syntax was wrong --- not wrong like a bug, wrong like something that followed different rules entirely.
Then it started changing.
Slowly. The straight lines curved. The characters bent into arcs and circles and patterns that branched and reconnected and built on themselves, layer over layer, spreading outward from the center of the screen like they had somewhere to go and enough time to get there.
I had seen patterns like that twice before. Once in the field report photos from the early Tepelcorp surveys --- classified, redacted in most places, but the images were still there. Once on the arm of the anomaly they'd brought in last month before he was moved to the extraction program. They called them energy markers in the briefings. Nobody explained what that meant.
"Cut the connection," Dr. Ahn said.
They cut it. Every external line. Internet, network, everything.
The patterns kept spreading.
"Hard shutdown."
In the extraction room, through the observation window, the anomaly's back arched once --- sharp and sudden and wrong --- and went completely still.
Everything powered down.
The hum stopped. Emergency lights came on. The monitor went black.
The room breathed.
"Vitals," Dr. Ahn said.
"Feed's offline. Sending someone in manually."
Park was looking at the floor. I watched him for a second. In six weeks I had learned to read him a little --- the notepad that stopped moving was always a bad sign. The floor-looking was worse.
Someone said rendering artifact.
I looked at the dark monitor.
I thought about the man on the table from six weeks ago. His open hands. The way nobody looked at his face.
I thought about handing in my resignation.
I thought about the teaching track.
My hand found my phone on the desk the way hands find things without being told to.
Muscle memory. I picked it up. Turned it over.
The screen was on.
I stared at it.
Dead when I plugged it in. Completely drained --- I'd watched the battery icon disappear before I'd even set it down. That was almost two hours ago. It should have been at maybe thirty percent by now, locked screen, the normal charging display.
It wasn't.
The screen was fully lit. Not the lock screen. Not the charging screen.
Covered in patterns.
The same ones from the monitor --- concentric rings, branching lines, patterns layered over patterns --- except smaller, more precise, like they had found a smaller space and taken their time finishing. Every centimeter of the screen from edge to edge. Detailed. Patient. Like something that had transferred itself carefully and completely and was now exactly where it wanted to be.
My brain did something strange. It went very quiet.
Around me the room was still moving. Dr. Ahn giving instructions. Footsteps. The sound of the extraction room door opening. Park still looking at the floor.
Nobody looked at me.
The patterns shifted once. Just slightly. Rearranging. Like settling into place.
And then --- slowly, from the center of the screen, the way something comes up from deep water ---
The smile.
I didn't move.
I just stood there holding my phone in the emergency lighting, the room going on around me, and looked at the smile on the screen.
It looked back.
Patient. Small. Like it had been waiting for exactly this --- not the observation room, not the monitors, not Dr. Ahn. Just this. A quiet moment when nobody else was looking.
My thumb found the power button.
The smile watched me do it. Didn't move. Didn't change.
I pressed it.
The screen went dark.
I stood there for a moment. The phone in my hand. The room around me. Dr. Ahn's voice somewhere to my left, steady and clinical and exactly the same as always.
I put the phone in my pocket.
I picked up my bag from the floor.
I looked at the observation window one last time. At the figure on the table that wasn't moving.
Then I walked to the door.
Park looked up when I passed him. He didn't say anything. I didn't say anything.
I think he understood.
The hallway was quiet.
I took out my phone again.
Dark screen. Normal. Just my reflection in the black glass, looking back at me.
I opened my email.
Started a new message.
To: Faculty Placement Office, Westview University.
Subject: Teaching Track --- Re-application.
I stood in the hallway for a moment, cursor blinking.
Then I started typing.