11:00 p.m.
By eleven that night, the house had settled into the deep quiet that came after everyone else had gone to bed. A light burned in the passage outside Mumin's room, but beneath his door the strip of yellow looked thin and distant. The fan turned above him with a soft, uneven click. Beyond the curtains, the street had lost its daytime noise; now and then a motorcycle passed, its engine fading into the distance. The rest of the world seemed to have withdrawn and left him alone with the things he could not understand.
Mumin lay on his back, fully awake. The sheet had twisted around his legs. His eyes were fixed on the ceiling, where the fan's shadow revolved in slow, broken circles. His phone glowed beside him, lighting the edge of the pillow with a cold blue sheen. He had read the messages so often that he knew their words by heart. Still, he opened them again.
Four messages. Four interruptions from the same unknown number. The first had spoken of the fire. The second had described the battle in the sand field as though it had been witnessed. The third had known that, for once, Mumin had faced his own fear without Musa taking control. The fourth had promised that the Royal Intelligence Corps would wait until he understood what he and Musa were.
The messages did not read like ordinary threats. They were too specific, too patient. Whoever had written them seemed less interested in frightening him than in guiding him toward a conclusion. That possibility bothered him more than a direct threat would have. A threat could be rejected. A conclusion, once it took root, could begin to shape every thought that followed.
Imollodia. The Royal Intelligence Corps. Project Musa—a label that had not appeared in any public record he had found that morning. The public summaries described Imollodia as a small nation in northeastern Europe, home to roughly five million people, with a military budget far larger than its population seemed to justify. By night, the basic facts were no longer his main concern. He wanted to know why his name had been placed inside their world, and why they had spoken of a weapon that could not be completed without him.
He turned onto his side, reached for the laptop on the small table, and opened it. The screen came alive in the dark, washing his face in pale light. A tangled collection of folders spread across the desktop: old projects, abandoned scripts, saved pages, notes whose purpose he could no longer remember. He had kept everything for years, not because he expected to need it, but because deleting a file had always felt too much like closing a door he might one day need.
Computers had been easier for him than people for as long as he could remember. Machines did not expect him to read a face correctly or answer at the right moment. They presented a problem; he could study it, turn it around, and keep working until a pattern appeared. He was not some all-powerful hacker, and he had learned the hard way that a locked system could be dangerous. But on a screen, uncertainty was at least something he could examine.
He searched his notes for the identifier that had flashed on the screen that morning. Most of the trail had vanished. One fragment remained in a temporary log, a string of characters he had copied before the warning window closed. He followed it through archived records and public documents, then back to a mirror of the protected network. The work took longer than he expected. Twice he stopped, convinced that he was looking at an ordinary error. The third time, the page changed without warning.
A directory opened.
Mumin sat motionless. He had not broken through the final barrier. There had been no clear victory, no triumphant cascade of code. The protected directory had simply become visible, as if someone on the other side had lifted a curtain and stepped away. That was not how secure systems were supposed to behave. He knew enough to recognise the difference between a door forced open and a door deliberately left ajar.
He considered closing it. The warning from that morning returned to him: STOP NOW, OR THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES. But a warning had not answered anything. His name was in their files; they had called him; they had threatened him and then told him to learn what Musa was. If this was a trap, it was already set. He could at least look at what they wanted him to see.
A document appeared, its title stamped in white across a dark field:
PROJECT MUSA
SUBJECT: MUMIN AHMED
AGE: 22
ORIGIN: BANGLADESH
CLASSIFICATION: ALPHA-LEVEL ASSET
Mumin felt a pulse jump in his throat. He scrolled. The next pages were part intelligence assessment, part research proposal. Sections had been redacted, but not enough to hide the central argument. Whoever had prepared the document had been studying him for a long time.
PSYCHOLOGICAL AND COGNITIVE ASSESSMENT
The subject reports an internal presence identified as "Musa," accompanied by episodes of lost time, altered agency, and actions the subject cannot fully recall. Past clinical records describe complex hallucinations and possible dissociative symptoms; those records do not establish the existence of an independent external person. The distinction remains unresolved within this assessment.
A line below had been highlighted in red, as if a hurried reader had marked it for attention:
INTERNAL OPERATIONAL LABEL: "100% PSYCHO."
Mumin stared at the phrase. It was not a medical diagnosis. It was a crude label, typed by someone who had reduced his fear, his missing memories, and the marks on his hands to two brutal words. Yet the words struck harder than the clinical paragraphs around them. He could almost hear the boys from school saying them again, laughing as though a person could be measured by the worst thing that had happened to him.
He scrolled too quickly, then forced himself to return to the start of the next section. The heading was different. The language beneath it was colder, more exact.
COGNITIVE PROFILE: "MUSA"
Musa is not assessed as a conventional subordinate personality or a simple aggressive state. Available observations suggest a level of abstract reasoning that cannot be measured reliably by current psychometric instruments. His reported pattern of thought links disciplines that present-day experts usually study separately, building multiple layers of consequence before a problem has been fully stated.
Predictive modelling based on the limited material available suggests that Musa may reason from technological and scientific premises several centuries beyond the current baseline. This is not merely rapid calculation. The subject appears capable of envisioning systems that do not yet exist, anticipating their failure points, and tracing how their development could alter the strategic environment generations ahead. The data are insufficient to confirm the upper limit of this capacity. No conventional IQ score has been assigned. Within the profiles the Corps has examined, Musa appears to stand beyond every comparable intelligence they have recorded—and even that ranking may be inadequate, because the central distinction is not that he thinks faster, but that he can reason from a technological future hundreds of years beyond the present.
Another sentence appeared in bold:
STANDARD INTELLIGENCE MEASURES ARE INADEQUATE. DO NOT CONFUSE UNUSUAL COGNITION WITH MERE AGGRESSION.
Mumin read it twice. The file was not describing the Musa he thought he knew—the voice that mocked him, challenged him, and sometimes seized the moment when fear became unbearable. It was describing a mind that could look at the present and see structures hundreds of years beyond it. A mind that might recognise a problem before the rest of the world had learned to name it.
He scrolled down to the next heading.
STRATEGIC SIGNIFICANCE: PROJECT WEAPON
The Corps is developing an adaptive weapons platform beyond existing design paradigms. Conventional research teams have reached a theoretical ceiling: each proposed system remains bound by the scientific assumptions of its own era. The programme requires an intelligence capable of deriving new frameworks, not merely optimising known technologies.
Musa is considered the missing intellectual component. The objective is not to impose behavioural control over Musa; coercion is assessed as counterproductive and potentially catastrophic. The objective is to engage his extraordinary predictive intelligence and use it to conceive, refine, and advance a weapon design that current research cannot complete.
The subject, Mumin Ahmed, is equally essential. He is not a disposable container. He provides the living continuity through which the Musa state is reported to emerge, and he possesses independent technical ability, learned through years of self-directed work. The programme hypothesis is that neither component is sufficient alone: Musa may perceive the design, but Mumin may be the only bridge through which that perception can be examined and made real.
Mumin's fingers had gone cold. The report did not call him a spy. It did not offer him a job. It called him a component in a weapon. The Corps wanted to use Musa's mind as a kind of architecture—one that could reach into a future no present-day engineer could map—and wanted Mumin because that mind was inseparable, in their theory, from the person he had spent his life trying to understand.
He could not accept that they knew him so completely. He had never designed a weapon. He had never been invited into a laboratory or studied advanced physics. He had written small programs, learned to work around basic security barriers, and built tools that made sense only because he had spent long nights teaching himself how systems behaved. How could they have turned those fragments into a claim that he could help create something beyond the present age?
Then he remembered a project from ninth grade. He had been fourteen or fifteen, sitting alone at a borrowed computer after midnight, writing a small program that could move through certain network environments without drawing ordinary alerts. He had built it out of curiosity, partly because he wanted to know whether the systems around him were as secure as adults claimed. It had never been a weapon. It had never been used to hurt anyone. He had abandoned it when he realised how easily a clever experiment could become something dangerous in the wrong hands.
Perhaps that was what the Corps had found. Or perhaps they had found something else entirely and were using his old work as a convenient explanation. The document did not give him enough to tell. In fact, the more he read, the more it felt as though the file had been designed to answer just enough questions to produce several new ones.
A pressure began to gather behind his ribs.
Mumin closed his eyes and tried to slow his breathing. His fingers tingled against the keyboard. The familiar distance opened between his thoughts and his hands—the sensation that he was watching his body from somewhere slightly behind it. He knew the warning signs. He had felt them before the wall was struck, before the memories fractured, before the voice inside him seemed to grow larger than his own thoughts.
"Not now," he whispered. "Please. Not tonight."
The laptop screen dimmed, then brightened again. The words on the document seemed to sharpen. Mumin could no longer tell whether his hands were shaking from fear or whether he was losing his grip on them. He tried to recite a dua, but his thoughts stumbled over the first line.
Then the tension loosened.
His shoulders lowered. His breathing steadied. The uncertainty in his gaze cleared, replaced by a stillness so complete it felt unnatural. Mumin remained somewhere inside, aware but unable to reach the controls. The change was not a storm. It was a door closing quietly between him and the world.
Musa was at the surface.
He looked at the laptop first. His eyes moved over the report much faster than Mumin's had, but there was no hurried scanning in it; he seemed to grasp the structure before the details. He returned to the cognitive profile, then to the weapon programme. A small, incredulous smile appeared at the corner of his mouth. Then he laughed—a low breath at first, followed by a clear, unrestrained sound that filled the quiet room and seemed to strike the bare walls. There was no happiness in it; it was the laughter of someone who had finally found proof of what he already suspected.
"So," Musa said softly, "they have finally admitted what the numbers can't measure."
He read the report again, slower now, stopping at the warning about coercion. His smile widened, not with joy but with the satisfaction of seeing a hidden motive laid bare.
"They don't want to control me, Mumin. They want to use what I can see." His voice was calm, almost conversational. "A leash would be useless. You can't force someone to think a thought you haven't imagined. They need answers. They need a mind that can walk through a hundred possible futures before the rest of the world has taken its first step."
From inside, Mumin tried to answer. The words could not reach his mouth. He felt the shame of the phrase on the screen—100% psycho—like an old bruise being pressed.
Musa turned to the next page. "They say centuries," he murmured. "They're being cautious. Centuries are only a convenient unit for people who can't see further." He tilted his head as though listening to a thought arriving from a great distance. "They have the outline of a weapon, but they don't know what the weapon should become. That is why they want me."
"You're not a weapon," Mumin managed to think. He did not know whether Musa could hear him, but he tried anyway.
"Everything can become a weapon in the wrong hands," Musa replied, as if answering aloud. "A theorem. A machine. A discovery. Even a person's fear. The question isn't what they call me. It's what they intend to build—and whether they understand what they're asking for."
He closed the laptop with a measured motion, then reached for the phone. Zara's photograph was still open on the screen. Her face emerged from the dark: the familiar eyes, the quiet smile, the blue door in Fez behind her. For several seconds, Musa did not speak.
Then his expression hardened.
"And you're still waiting for her," he said. "You keep asking whether she left because she discovered what you are. You imagine she knows the name on that report, that she has seen the marks on this wall, that one day she will look at you and see only a diagnosis." He let out a short, humourless breath. "You build an entire future out of a silence, then punish yourself for living in it."
Mumin felt the words cut deep because they touched the thought he had been afraid to name. He wanted Musa to stop. He wanted him to say that Zara might still love him, that a silence was not the same thing as an answer. But Musa offered no comfort.
"If I were the one making your choices," Musa continued, "you would not waste every hour trying to guess what another person thinks. You would ask a question that mattered. You would look for the truth instead of kneeling before the worst possibility." He put the phone down. "But you prefer suffering you can predict to a truth you cannot."
He turned toward the western wall. In the low light, the old punch marks were shallow shadows. Some had darkened with age; others remained pale against the paint, open wounds in the plaster. Musa rose and approached them, his reflection passing over the surface in a long, wavering line.
"These are my marks," he said. "Your hands made them, but the anger was mine—or the part of you that you could not bear to claim. You call me your illness when you hate what happened. You call me your friend when you need someone to stand in front of your fear. You keep trying to decide which name will make the past simpler. It won't."
For a long moment Musa stood without moving. His face had lost its mocking expression. There was something almost distant in his eyes, as though the room were only a small point in a much larger calculation.
"They think they can use me to build a weapon," he said. "They have not understood the first question. What happens when a weapon is designed by a mind that can see the consequences of its use centuries before the people who order it can imagine them?"
Mumin could not tell whether it was a warning, a boast, or an argument Musa had already carried far beyond the present conversation. Then the pressure eased again, and the room seemed to return by degrees: the fan, the curtain, the faint light under the door.
Mumin was himself again.
He sucked in a breath and looked at his hands. They were trembling, but there was no blood, no new swelling, no fresh damage to the wall. He was drenched in sweat. The laptop remained closed, the phone lay on the bed, and the file from that morning was stacked beside the lamp. For a few seconds he could do nothing except name what he could see: desk, wall, curtain, phone, floor. One by one. Here. Now. His room.
He recited Ayat al-Kursi, then Surah Al-Falaq and Surah An-Nas. The words came unevenly at first. He repeated them until his breathing grew less shallow and his heartbeat stopped pounding in his throat. Musa had gone quiet, but Mumin knew quiet was not the same as gone.
He turned the laptop back on and opened the document once more. The label remained there, careless and cruel: 100% PSYCHO. His gaze stayed on it until the letters blurred. Was that what he was to them? A broken mind to be catalogued, an instrument to be extracted, a road to an intelligence they could not reach by any other route?
And what was Musa to them? Not a spy. Not a soldier. Not even a subject to be trained. They wanted his thought—the impossible reach of it, the ability to imagine structures that belonged centuries in the future. They wanted to borrow a mind they could neither build nor fully comprehend and make it the foundation of a weapon.
Mumin wondered whether Musa understood the danger better than he did. He remembered the way the other had looked at the report, how quickly he had noticed the warning against coercion, how he had spoken of consequences before anyone else had thought to mention them. Perhaps Musa was not simply stronger when fear took over. Perhaps there was a part of him that saw too far, too fast, and left Mumin struggling to catch up.
That possibility frightened him in a new way. A brute could be resisted. A mind that could predict the resistance before it happened was something else entirely.
He looked toward the window. Beyond the glass, the night was thick and starless. The neighbouring houses stood as dark shapes. Somewhere far away, a dog barked once, then fell silent. Mumin imagined Fez as he remembered it: narrow streets, sunlit walls, blue doors, the woman who had once smiled as though she were sharing a secret with him.
"Zara," he whispered, pressing the phone lightly against his chest. "Did you know? Is that why you stopped speaking to me?"
There was no answer from the phone, from the night, or from the voice inside his mind. Tears moved quietly into his hairline. He did not try to stop them. His grief was not as dramatic as the fear that had come with the classified report; it was smaller, more ordinary, and perhaps for that reason harder to endure. He could imagine a weapon that did not yet exist. He could imagine an intelligence agency reaching across borders to find him. But he could not imagine what Zara was thinking.
Musa did not interrupt. Usually, Zara's name stirred a quick, sharp anger in him. Tonight, the silence held. Mumin could not tell whether Musa was pitying him, calculating something, or simply letting the pain pass without comment.
At last, Mumin lowered the phone and placed it face down on the mattress. The room seemed colder now. He shut the laptop, checked that the door was locked, and switched off the bedside lamp. He left the tube light on. Darkness still made the corners too deep, and he was too tired to fight another argument with his own mind.
He lay back and looked once more at the western wall. The old marks had become indistinct beneath the pale light, but he knew where every one of them was. Each carried a memory, a gap, an explanation that failed when he tried to hold it too tightly. Now they seemed to carry another question: if the Royal Intelligence Corps believed Musa could design a weapon centuries ahead of its time, what did that make Mumin—the person through whom that mind appeared?
He thought of Imollodia. The Royal Intelligence Corps. The hidden project. The report's cold certainty. The phrase 100% psycho. Zara. Musa. All of it tangled together until he could no longer separate fear from curiosity. He had no plan tonight, no way to confront the people who had contacted him, and no way to demand the truth from the person inside him.
For now, he could only rest. His body was exhausted, and his mind felt even more worn. It was nearly the end of the day, yet the questions had only multiplied.
He wondered what tomorrow would bring. Would Musa come to the surface again? Would Imollodia send another message? Would the Royal Intelligence Corps try to reach him in person—or try to take him before he had time to understand what they wanted? The answers were unknown. He had no plan, no ally he could trust with the truth, and no way to know whether the next warning would arrive as a message or as a knock at the door.
Perhaps the Corps had chosen him not because he was powerful, but because he was the only way to reach something already hidden inside him. He could not tell whether that thought belonged to him or to Musa. He only knew that, if sleep came, it might offer a few hours in which he could forget everything. Perhaps he would see Zara in a dream. Perhaps, for once, Musa would remain quiet.
His eyes closed. The phone slipped from his fingers onto the mattress. In the silence of the night, the fan continued its slow rotation, its faint click the only sound in the room. The marks on the wall remained where they had always been—silent witnesses to his pain, his anger, and the day Musa first emerged. At last, Mumin fell asleep.