Evelyn Harlow's fingers danced across the keyboard, her screen a cascade of encrypted text. It was supposed to be another routine audit—analyzing a corporate client's firewall logs. But then she saw it: a line of code that shouldn't exist.
A low hum of the server room filled her ears, but her focus was absolute. The code was a subtle anomaly, a fragment that vanished upon a second scan, like a ghost in the system.
"Could be a glitch," she muttered, but Evelyn knew better. Glitches didn't leave behind fragments of data that resisted standard tracing tools.
Over the next few hours, she chased it—through security protocols, network logs, and buried databases. Each trace led to another encrypted layer, each layer resisting her with increasing complexity.
Her heart raced. She leaned back, eyes fixed on the screen. "Who are you?" she whispered.
A notification popped up—INCOMING MESSAGE. Her heart skipped. No sender, no subject. Just one line:
"STOP LOOKING."