CHAPTER ONE – ORDINARY LIFE, UNSEEN CRACKS
Sarah Whitmore, 37, considered herself to be an ordinary woman. She’d married her childhood sweetheart, given him his son and heir. She held a steady job. Ordinary. The kettle clicked off, but Sarah didn’t move. Steam curled in lazy ribbons above the spout, fading into the morning light slanting through the half shut blinds. She sat at the kitchen table, hands wrapped around a cold mug she’d made an hour ago, watching the sunlight stripe the wood.
The boiler in the loft made two settling pops, the fridge hummed, a steady bass note she could almost settle into, but the TV in the living room was too loud. Today was meant to be a normal day: work, school run, dinner, bed, but already the world felt wrong. Too many noises on top of each other, like different radio stations bleeding into one another.
“Toast’s burning,” Mark called from the hall, but his voice was already moving away.
She didn’t answer. If she did, he’d hear the tension in her voice and ask what was wrong, and if she said nothing, he’d sigh. Either way, the toast would still be burnt.
She slid her thumbnail along the rim of her mug, feeling the fine chip she’d discovered last week. Smooth, then jagged, then smooth again, avoiding the sharp edge.
Mark was already at the door, car keys in one hand, and Josh’s rucksack in the other. Josh stood beside him, dinosaur hoodie zip half up, because he’d done it himself. His hair stuck up, he was just a smaller version of his father.
“You’re on collection?” Mark asked, though he knew the answer.
“Always,” she said. Her voice came out flat, but not unkind.
He gave her that half-smile, the one that she never quite knew how to interpret, he left ushering Josh out in front of him.
“Bye guys.” she called.
The front door clicked shut, and the house settled into the quieter space that Sarah liked. Her mind was never quiet, so she needed quiet everywhere else. When she finally moved, it was only to fetch her laptop. The weight of it on her knees was familiar, grounding. Work would begin soon. Officially, she was “data processing” for GCHQ, which sounded important enough to stop further questions, but dull enough to keep anyone from asking any more.
In reality, her work involved combing through sheets of data, cleaning errors, spotting anomalies, finding patterns. Some colleagues groaned about it, but Sarah found it… neat. Numbers made more sense than people. They followed the rules.
She was lucky that she could work from home, but that wasn’t until 10am. Now it was her time. Often she’d indulge her love of reading sci-fi or Fantasy novels, but today the conspiracy theories beckoned. She opened her browser and, almost without thinking, clicked the link she’d bookmarked last night, when she couldn’t sleep.
Try our out-of-this-world AI, AskMi – Beta: Your questions, answered.
Ask me anything…
She’d found the AI on an obscure forum thread, with a request for testers. A harmless distraction. Just something to quiet the noise, block it all out. The AskMi logo pulsed once, as if breathing. A cursor blinked in the centre of the black screen. Sarah hesitated, fingers hovering over the keys. She could feel the slight ridges on the F and J, little homing beacons for her fingertips. She pressed them, just to feel the click, then she began to type.
What year did they really land on the moon?
It wasn’t even a serious question, more muscle memory from late night forum scrolling. The answer popped up before she’d finished straightening in her chair.
AskMi: 20th July, 1969, but you already know that’s not the whole story.
She frowned. “What?” she said aloud, though no one was there.
Below the text, a faint grey link appeared: (See unreleased transcript)
The hum from the fridge blurred into the background. She clicked the link. A transcript scrolled up the screen, a conversation between two men, one marked “Commander” and the other “Control”. Their words were grainy, filled with long pauses and odd instructions about “objects” and “visual contact maintained”. Her heartbeat was loud in her ears. This had to be fake. Obviously fake. And yet… the wording. The timestamps. The small, bureaucratic tone of the whole thing, not dramatic, not cinematic, just ordinary people noting down extraordinary things.
The alarm on her phone buzzed loudly, time to work. The spell broke. She closed the laptop, the heat of it pressing against her palms. Her mug was still on the table, tea now stone cold. She drank it anyway. A benefit of green tea. She made another. Just a harmless distraction, she told herself. But she already knew she’d open AskMi again tonight, when the house was finally quiet.
She carried her mug to the small room they called her office. The desk top PC was GCHQ issue, she turned it on, the secure portal loaded slowly; she tapped her fingers on the desk in sets of four. When it finally appeared, she scanned the day’s queue. The first file was ordinary, or would have been if the metadata hadn’t jumped out at her. It wasn’t part of the job to notice something like that, but she always did. Little threads most people stepped over without seeing. She wrote it down in her notebook, under the neat column headed ‘Irregulars’.
By 10:30am thoughts of AskMi were forgotten, the spreadsheet had stopped being a grid and become a texture. Sarah’s eyes slid over it the way fingertips read braille, not for the numbers themselves, but for the places where the pattern snagged. There. A date two days older than the rest, buried in the middle like a loose stitch.
She pulled the thread: opened the cell history, copied the hash, and checked it against the server cache. The correction looked legitimate. The timing didn’t. She logged it under ‘Irregulars’ with the kind of neatness that made her stand out. IRR-041: no corresponding ticket. She drew a small dot next to the line. She liked how the dot anchored it, an endpoint to keep the thought from drifting.
When she flipped to the metadata, something else pricked. A familiar suffix, not the usual internal tags, not the IT department’s inconsistent labelling, but .phi at the end of a string. She had seen it yesterday, and last week. In different files that had nothing to do with each other. It could’ve been nothing.
She wrote .phi in the margin and circled it, then circled the circle, spiralling inward once, twice, until the pencil line made that pleasing tightness she liked. The spiral was old, older than any of this, seashells and sunflowers and the way galaxies bent light. It didn’t belong.
Her tea had gone cold again. She drank it anyway. The afternoon queue looked ordinary on the surface. She let it wash across her screen while she cleaned the first two files, feeling for the catch points. She could always tell when a dataset had been handled by someone in a rush, the way the errors clumped, the way the rows stuttered.
This one had been handled with care. That was worse. Care meant intention. She paused and listened: the hum of the fridge, the far-off drill from the neighbour’s, the boiler’s pop. She breathed in for four, held for four, out for four, the way she taught Josh when the world got loud. The breath clicked her focus back into place.
Not curiosity, she told herself. Hygiene. You cleaned what you found. Soon she was deep into her third file, cross-referencing codes with last year’s manifest. The rhythm was comforting: find the pattern, lock it in, move on.
Her focus now fixed, she worked right through until the alarm buzzed telling her it was time to go and collect Josh from pre-school.
At 1:45 p.m. she saved everything, backed up her notes, twice, closed the secure portal, and let the regular internet bloom back into colour. The browser suggested she might enjoy an article about “ten signs you’re over-organised.” She closed the tab with a small, amused exhale.
She realised she hadn’t eaten, but no time for that now. She grabbed her phone and then the small rucksack she preferred to a handbag, knowing that her keys and purse would be safe inside. Outside, clouds pressed low and heavy. Something in her chest told her the day wasn’t finished with her yet.
