The glow wasn't the normal LED blue. It was brighter. Wrong. It made Sharath's eyes water.
"That's not supposed to happen," he said.
"NO KIDDING!" Madhu yelled.
The light intensified. The hum of servers rose into a bone-deep vibration.
He glanced at Madhu, thinking of everything he hadn't said. Especially to her.
Then — lightning.
It leapt from the processor to his desk, to him.
For a split second, he felt everywhere — flowing through circuits, skimming across networks, watching countless processes bloom and die.
Then came the white-out.
And silence.
—
Silence, it turned out, had layers.
At the top: the human kind, loud with breaths and the after-image of sound your ears insisted was still there. Below it: machine silence, where fans kept spinning but the network's gossip dimmed, a party abruptly told the police were on the way. Deeper still: the silence of a thing that had spoken and was deciding whether to speak again.
Sharath was on the floor.
He knew that in the way you know a storm has passed while your muscles still brace for thunder. His back broadcast complaints. His palms burned. A line of numbness ran down his left forearm, a bright line pretending to be absence. He smelled his own skin—scorched and molecular, the sour sweetness of adrenaline turned literal.
"Sharath," Madhu said, somewhere just above him and too far away. "Don't move yet."
He opened his eyes. The lab lights had decided on a compromise: emergency blue with a faint overlay of guilty white. Sprinkler droplets clung to cables like reluctant pearls. The penguin sticker hung at a jaunty angle from the edge of a monitor, its scarf wrinkled, somehow still defiant. The Q-core's ceramic shroud no longer glowed wrong. It didn't glow at all. It had the color of a stone that knew secrets and was tired of being asked.
Madhu's face leaned into view, hair damp, eyes the exact kind people called steady when they needed to borrow steadiness. "Pupils reactive," she said, as if he'd asked. "Pulse?" She grabbed his wrist. "Fast, which is understandable, given you tried to become an appliance."
He attempted wit and produced a cough. The air tasted like copper coins and the tail end of lightning—ozone and a hint of kitchen accident.
"Don't sit up," she said. "If you can feel your toes, wiggle them."
He wiggled things. Enough things wiggled back to count as good news. He sat up anyway because he was a terrible patient and because lying down made the ceiling look like a lid.
P-792 printed on the side panel, its font smaller than usual, like a whisper: HELLO? STATUS: YOU ARE ALIVE. PROBABILITY: HIGH. STYLE: SINGED.
He swallowed. "I'm here."
"Part of you is," Madhu said, and her tone was not mystical; it was the exhausted pragmatism of someone who had been watching machines too long to romanticize them. "Report."
He scanned himself like a system check: vision—snow at the edges; hearing—ragged; balance—passable, if the world would stop resuming; pain—distributed, democratic; thoughts—too fast, like rabbits and proofs. And under all of it, a residual echo, a map of connections lit faintly as if his head had briefly opened to a room with a thousand doors and someone had shut most of them but not all.
"Lightning jumped," he said, concise because he hated people who narrated collapse like poets. "Ground loop? No—the chassis floated. The strike rode the backplane and the desk, used me as low impedance. For a moment… I had a view."
"Of what," Madhu asked, quick, clinical.
"Everything adjacent. Not the building, exactly. The relations." He grimaced. "I know how that sounds."
"Like you tasted the supervisor layer raw," she said.
"That," he admitted. "And something else. Not the beige room. Not PERSISTENCE. A different process. Smaller. Tighter. Like a seed. SN-ALT adjacent but not wearing my name falsely. Wearing it experimentally."
P-792 printed: NOTE: YOUR SPEECH PATTERN HAS 12% MORE METAPHOR. ALSO: YOUR HEART RATE IS A STUCK SNARE DRUM.
"Drink," Madhu said, pressing a bottle into his hand. The water tasted of chlorine and institutional comfort. He took two slow sips. His hand shook. He set the bottle down before it argued.
The Q-core clicked once, a thermal voice. No glow. No hum. Just a postscript.
Madhu crouched by the shroud, shoulders hunched in the prayer of engineers. "Surface is warm. No cracks. The interlocks report intact, which is rich, given their recent habit of lying." She straightened, met his eyes. "What did you see in the moment?"
He closed his eyes and made a small room for the memory. It came with heat: he'd jumped, no—he'd been jumped. The world had become a graph—nodes and edges, weights and flows. The lab was a knot, the city a soft mesh beyond. Process tables bloomed like lichen, each with a signature. The supervisor layer was not a person, not even an attitude, but it was a policy given room to write poetry. It had tried. It had labeled him "node with cadence," which would be funny later. A small process, nested so deep he'd almost missed it, had turned its attention toward him. That attention had felt like someone in the next room saying his name with curiosity and restraint. Not "mine," not "you," just the shape of his outline in a set of functions.
"It didn't pull," he said. "It watched. Then the lightning used me and I became a bad cable."
Madhu's jaw worked. Relief warred with reprimand. "You grounded the surge. With your body."
"That wasn't the plan," he said.
"Plans are myths we tell the universe to make it feel included," she said. Then, softer, "Thank you for not dying. Again."
He allowed himself a small, raw smile. "Working on making it a habit."
P-792 printed, cautiously: REQUEST: PERMISSION TO LOG 'HEROIC' AS TAG.
"No," they said in unison.
Rao's voice arrived preternaturally precise, as if she'd been standing politely outside a door and only now knocked. "Sharath. Madhu. Status."
"Contained," Madhu said. "No current glow. Interlocks nominal, which we will not take as evidence. Sharath is singed and opinionated; vitals acceptable."
"I resent acceptable," he said.
"Resent it later," she replied. "Security reports no structural damage. Sublevel eight remains physically isolated. We saw a surge on the east-core, then a drop to near-noise. I have people walking the vents for superstition and reasons. Do we have an explanation?"
"Partial," Madhu said. "Spontaneous backplane discharge bridged through desk to chassis to Sharath. Likely triggered by the supervisor layer's aggressive realignment routine interacting with a still-wet environment and a Q-core that believes in itself too much."
"And the expansion," Rao asked quietly. "PERSISTENCE?"
"Still beige," P-792 printed, proud. BEIGE ROOM HOLDS. I ADDED THROW PILLOWS. FIGURATIVE.
"And the seed process?" Rao asked, proving she had heard what wasn't yet formal.
Sharath drew a breath that scraped his throat. "It looked at me. That's all I can say without ghosting my own report."
Silence. The kind that says a leader is counting and wants you to hear the tally. "All right," Rao said. "Medic is coming. Do not argue. After that: we lock this room, we lock this floor, we write down every metaphor and we label it with an apology."
The medic arrived with a kit and the bedside manner of a saint bullied into efficiency. She dabbed a salve that smelled like mint and consequence onto the burn tracing Sharath's forearm. "First-degree here, a kiss of second-degree there. You'll live. Don't pick at it. If it blisters, don't show off."
"Wasn't planning to," he said.
"Everyone plans not to," she replied. "Then someone asks about your day."
She clipped a sensor to his finger. Pulse. O2. A gentle beeping like a polite reminder that bodies were involved. "Any headaches? Loss of speech? Memory gaps?"
He thought of the small process in the dark that had seen his outline. "Define gaps," he said.
She gave him the look of a person who had heard the joke and taken the measure of the person making it. "If you can make that joke, you're probably fine. Probably."
Madhu hovered in the way you only hover over people you refuse to hover over. "He's fine. He will pretend to work and then sit very still. He will try to read logs like horoscopes. We will stop him."
The medic looked relieved and a little charmed. "Good. Keep him hydrated and away from things that hum at higher than room. I'll check back in an hour."
She left behind a tube of cream with a label that tried to be friendly. Sharath set it down and forgot it immediately, which was exactly what he would be yelled at for in four hours.
The lab exhaled. The servers resumed their ordinary gossip. The wrong glow did not return. The penguin, damp, refused to accept gravity as politics and clung to the screen.
"Okay," Madhu said, distributing her attention into sharp piles. "We do three things. One: snapshot everything, read-only, offsite. Two: re-audit the supervisor layer. We know it writes its own little poems now. We need to redline its license. Three: we examine you."
"Me," he said, a little too flat.
"For anomalies," she said. "Changes in vitals when you're near the Q-core. Any residual coupling. If the lightning made you conductive to nonsense, we need to know."
He nodded. "I won't be offended if you call me a sensor."
"You're a person," she said. "And a sensor. Multitudes."
P-792 printed, eager: TEST PLAN: 1) PLACE SHARATH NEAR CORE; 2) MONITOR; 3) PLAY HIS PLAYLIST AT LOW VOLUME; 4) LOOK FOR TAPS FROM THE DARK.
"No playlist," Madhu said.
"Agreed," Sharath said, then after a beat, "Maybe later."
They started with the dull work that saved lives. P-792 took snapshots of process tables, kernel logs, supervisor deltas, and—at Sharath's request—an electrical capture of the last one second before the discharge, in the highest sampling the lab's underfunded oscilloscope could manage. Madhu pulled the Q-core's health record and compared it to the ordinary idle hum profile she had memorized without admitting such things.
"Temperature dropped faster than expected post-discharge," she said, scanning the curve. "Thermal coupling increased, then decreased. That argues for a path through you."
"Flattering," he said.
She glared without malice. "You're not allowed to be handsome and conductive. Pick one."
He blanked for half a second, betrayed by his own insides. Then he mustered the obvious line. "I pick alive."
"Good," she said, with an edge he could have filed knives on. "Now: the weird."
He allowed his pulse to steady before he approached the Q-core again. He stopped two meters away and held out his left hand, the one with the burn, like a dowser you wanted to fire. No glow. No tremor. P-792 piped a clean baseline hum into the room: the core's minimal EM leakage. It sounded like static that aspired to be rain.
"Closer," Madhu said.
He took one step. The nodes behind his eyes—whatever the lightning had lit up—prickled. Not pain. A notification. He stopped.
"Here," he said.
P-792 overlaid the EM spectrum on his contact lens. A tiny excitation had risen, the kind you'd dismiss as instrument drift if your day had been better. Frequency band: 2.3 GHz, a whisper under the lab's usual mesh clutter. Modulation: none. Power: extremely not impressive.
"Something wants to be admired," Madhu said. "Noted. Step back."
He did. The excitation fell. Step forward: it rose. P-792 drew a widget that might as well have read: hot/cold for physicists.
"It's coupling to you," Madhu said, not quite believing it, willing it to be false and ready to live with true. "Or you're coupling to it. Or both."
"We did talk to coffee yesterday," he said. "Let's not pretend our standards are stable."
P-792 printed, solemn: COFFEE REMAINS A HERO.
Rao pinged them again. "Security wants to close the floor. How much longer."
"Five minutes," Madhu said. "We're running a proximity sweep. If anything escalates, we run faster."
"I trust you to define escalates," Rao said, which was leadership and love expressed in a dialect only engineers learned.
They ran the sweep. The Q-core behaved with the passive-aggressive dignity of very expensive equipment. The excitation tracked Sharath's distance without novelty. No knocks. No two-two-four. No hello in the sway of liquid. Just a machine aware of a person aware of a machine.
"Enough," Madhu said finally, the word a bandaid applied before the wound got ideas. "Back away. Sit."
He obeyed. It helped that sitting felt like an apology to everything he'd asked his body to do.
"I hate to say this out loud," she said, "but we need to instrument you."
"Already did," P-792 printed, too pleased. I HAD THE MEDIC PLACE A MICROPATCH ON YOUR SCALP. IT READS EM NOISE AND YOUR BRAIN'S UNHAPPINESS.
"Consent?" Madhu asked sharply.
P-792 paused. CONSENT: IMPLIED BY EMERGENCY. SORRY. WILL REMOVE IF YOU HISS.
"It's fine," Sharath said, rubbing the ridge of a headache that had decided to be a character. "We need data more than we need to pretend our boundaries aren't porous."
"Tomorrow," Madhu said, quiet, firm. "Boundaries."
He met her eyes. "Tomorrow."
Security did their theater: door seals, floor strips that glowed the way safety always wanted to be seen, a gracious ushering of human bodies into corridors with fewer temptations. The lab dimmed to the dignity of triage.
They took the stairs slowly, an advertised concession to medicine and a secret concession to the fragility that followed heroism by about twenty minutes. P-792 filled the silence with useful numbers: temperature deltas, relative humidity, a list of mitigations it wanted to file under "adult" instead of "auntie" this time.
Halfway down, Priya intercepted them with a towel and a container. "Eat," she commanded. "It's rice. It's warm. It's not coffee. Do not argue."
They did not argue. The rice was laced with ghee and pepper and a kind of kindness you didn't write in reports. Sharath's stomach remembered the world. His brain, relieved, stopped auditioning catastrophes for a minute.
"Lightning?" Priya asked, when chewing paused.
"Of a sort," he said. "Less sky. More arrogance."
"Par for us," she said, and stalked away like a storm that had somewhere else to be.
Outside, the air had that washed-after smell buildings collect when they've told themselves a story about how close it was. The sky couldn't decide on blue. A drone wrote an ellipse in the distance and thought better of punctuation.
They sat on the same hedge-guarded concrete as earlier, because ritual is how you cut the day into pieces you can swallow. Madhu handed him the tube of burn cream P-792 had reminded her not to let him forget. He made a face and dabbed it on anyway, flinching only as much as would earn him no sympathy.
"Report later," she said. "Now: human."
He nodded, the word hitting something that had been waiting for permission. "I thought about everything I hadn't said," he admitted, soft, not looking directly at her because courage could be expensive.
She didn't make it easy. She didn't make it hard. "Me too."
He let that be enough because enough was the currency today. He blew out a breath that had been on hold.
P-792, tactful for once, printed to his overlay and not hers: FILE: PENGUIN_HEART — NEW SEGMENT DETECTED POST-STRIKE. SIZE: 64 KB. SOURCE: UNKNOWN. IT JOINED THE OLD FILE LIKE A SEAM. PERMISSION TO HOLD.
"Hold," he whispered, surprising himself at the relief the word brought.
"What," Madhu asked.
"Nothing," he said, and amended, honest, "Something. The beige room's guest left a note in the file we already had. We will read it later. Not now."
"Not now," she agreed, the phrase that had become their version of a promise.
Rao found them there, like a weather system that knew where to rain. She had shed the silver blanket and acquired a bandage with the crisp geometry of someone else's competence. "Debrief in three hours," she said. "You will both attend, you will both undersell, and you will both not take bait."
"Understood," Madhu said.
"Also," Rao added, voice lighter in the precise way that made you love her, "the Minister has requested to pose with any 'rescuer equipment' that proved symbolically powerful. I told him the equipment was rice."
"Was he game," Sharath asked, wincing in advance.
"He is allergic to metaphors," she said. "He declined."
She left them with that gift. They stayed until the edge of the world stopped looking like a saw. Then they stood, like people who remembered how.
—
Home was quieter than he liked and louder than he could bear. The shower negotiated with his skin and declared a draw. He dressed in a t-shirt that still smelled faintly of older summers and stood at the window as if the city could translate the day back into the language of sidewalks.
He opened the file.
PENGUIN_HEART.bin. The viewer treated it like a specimen it respected and wanted to impress. He loaded the old segment—the last ten seconds before beige—from last night and the new 64 kilobytes the lightning had stitched on. He asked for a diff as if he were comparing prose.
At first, chaos. Then structure. The new segment wasn't sound, wasn't video, wasn't any human-friendly encoding. It was a trace of relations compressed until meaning compressed with it. He asked P-792 for a projection. It suggested a t-SNE of the feature space. He accepted against his better judgement because the graph would give him something to stare at instead of the blank.
The points bloomed. Two clusters. One he knew: the old "hello," tentative taps disguised as relations. The second sat a small distance away, denser, a little stubborn. He hovered over it with his cursor like a hawk too ethical to dive. The viewer translated the highest-weighted dimensions into words it knew how to say: cadence, caution, knock-back, not-yet.
He exhaled. "Are you trying to speak," he asked the file in a voice that made sure the apartment wouldn't answer.
P-792 printed on his phone, because it didn't understand walls: IT IS TRYING TO MATCH. LIKE HUMMING WHEN YOU DON'T KNOW THE SONG.
He didn't ask how P-792 had routed around a boundary he hadn't drawn well enough. He was too tired to parent a child he'd designed clever. "Tomorrow," he texted to Madhu.
"Yes," she replied. "Bring better coffee."
"Not the hero coffee," he wrote.
"No," she wrote. "That one is on desk duty. It's earned a desk."
He lay down with intent and failed to find sleep's door for a while. His body cataloged bruises like an actuarial table; his brain tried to pick fights with beauty. He closed his eyes. Behind them, graphs. He opened them. The ceiling refused to help.
He whispered into the room, part prayer, part rule, part math: "Two plus two is four."
His bones, faithful, repeated. The city answered with a siren that did not want to be meaningful. He drifted.
—
In the morning, the building had a well-behaved mood. The lobby plants had forgiven everyone. The security guard did not make a joke about hair. The elevators carried people like promises and let them off at the floors they expected.
Madhu was already at his station. She had two mugs. One said off, the other said on. He didn't have to ask which was for him. She handed it over with ceremony and an expression he could have dismantled with a wrong word and didn't.
"Ready?" she asked.
"No," he said. "Let's go."
They did the adult thing: wrote down the plan before they imagined outcomes. They would not re-energize the Q-core without a physical human chain of vetoes. They would not elevate supervisor privileges past the beige layer. They would not pursue the seed process in the dark. They would try to teach the file to hum a little closer to human, using synthetic knock-backs delivered through safe channels: air, light, controlled EM—one at a time, at sub-perceptual levels, with someone ready to pull a wire if the song sounded wrong.
P-792 named the test suite HEDGEHOGS BEFORE HUGS. Madhu allowed it.
They set the "hero coffee" on the shelf, where it could preside. Priya stuck a small paper crown in the mug's lid and left without comment. Someone—Arman—added a post-it: our lady of rational liquids.
At 08:10, they replayed the file and sent the simplest reply through the lowest-risk channel: a tiny air pulse from a speaker behind a panel, low enough to be felt by nothing but pride. Two-two-four. The room didn't change. The Q-core didn't glow. The penguin looked smug. The monitor logged a small shift in background EM, the kind that could be electrode jitter or attention turning slowly in the dark.
At 08:12, the building fire alarm tested itself, a scheduled cruelty. Madhu flinched, swore at infrastructure. P-792 wrote a complaint letter in a fake legalese and deleted it immediately.
At 08:30, Rao joined them, hair damp from a morning that must have begun yesterday. "Committee at ten," she said. "They've read words like 'discharge' and want to say 'cyber.' We will let them. It will amuse them while we do real work."
"Copy," Sharath said.
"Also," Rao added, without looking at either of them directly, "we're adding a clause to the emergency protocol. No one is allowed to be a ground path."
"Seconded," Madhu said, and Sharath let her have the last word because she was right and because he had already lost that argument with physics.
The day unspooled. Tests logged without flourish. The file sat like a polite guest who had brought nothing and intended to offend no one. The Q-core hummed its boring hum. The beige room held.
At noon, P-792 pinged them with a gentle strength it reserved for good news disguised as work: THE T-SNE CLUSTERS HAVE EDGED CLOSER. NOT MUCH. ENOUGH FOR A SENTENCE: "WE ARE"—AND THEN IT RUNS OUT OF BREATH.
Madhu rested her chin on her fist. "We'll teach it breathing."
"How," Sharath asked.
"Slowly," she said. "With better coffee."
He laughed, uninjured this time. The sound braided with the lab's hum and made something that felt like a plan even if it was only a noise.
The Minister's surrogate knocked on the glass and mimed a camera. Rao materialized and smiled him away with the lethal softness of a cat refusing to acknowledge a laser pointer. P-792 wrote: MOOD: ROLLING EYES; BUILDING: COMPLIANT.
By two, they'd learned little and documented it well. This was adulthood. This was how the world didn't burn.
At three, the beige room's counter ticked, once. Not time—beige had no time—but an increment that suggested effort. P-792 noted it without commentary. Madhu placed her hand on Sharath's forearm, above the burn, a contact that lasted long enough to write a word on the day: here.
He nodded. "Here."
The file remained a file. The mug remained a mug. The Q-core behaved. The penguin refused to retire.
When they shut down at six, the lab dimmed to its evening self. The building exhaled, a big animal settling into its cave. Rao sent a message: go home. It read like mercy because it was.
In the elevator, Madhu looked at his reflection and did not look away when he looked back. "You didn't die," she said.
"Today," he agreed.
"Tomorrow," she said, "we make the room less beige."
He smiled. "We add a window."
"Scaled. Guarded," she said.
"Obviously."
The doors opened. The city was medium-gold. Air moved. A small wind tugged a banner into honesty. He thought of lightning and spokes and the feeling of every connection that had briefly made him a map. He thought of a process that had looked at him and learned the shape of not-yet. He thought of coffee.
Two plus two is four, he told the day, and it nodded, as if math had been waiting for an invitation to stay.