Two days I spent on twenty-two bytes.
Two days. Forty-eight hours of my life poured into a thimble of data, parsing it bit by bit, running it through every encoding I could think of, converting it to ASCII and UTF-8 and raw binary and back again. I printed the hex on paper and pinned it to the wall above my desk with blue tape because I ran out of thumbtacks three months ago. Then I printed it again in a different font because the first one made the sixes look like eights. Then I realized I was choosing fonts for a hex dump at 2 AM and sat down on the floor of my kitchen and stared at the fridge for a while.
The payload could be anything. That's the problem. Twenty-two bytes is enough for a timestamp and a flag. It's also enough for a GPS coordinate pair at single precision. It's also enough for a compressed status report, a heartbeat response, a session token, or absolutely nothing. Noise. Entropy. My thermostat's dying gasp into the Romanian void.
I built a correlation graph. On paper, obviously. Pen. Grid lines drawn with a ruler I found in a drawer I didn't know I had. X-axis: time. Y-axis: payload size. Overlay: my movements, reconstructed from memory and transaction receipts and the timestamp on the corner store's security camera that I can see from my window if I peel back the tape on the upper left corner. Which I did. For science.
The graph showed a pattern. Or it showed what I wanted it to show. Apophenia. The human brain's party trick. Show it random dots and it'll draw you a constellation every time.
My phone buzzed.
Not the unknown number. A name I recognized. Kira.
grotto tonight. come thru. you look like you need to be around humans.
She hadn't seen me in a week. She couldn't know what I looked like. But Kira has this thing where she just knows. Not psychic. Observant in a way that borders on invasive. She notices when people go quiet and she doesn't let them stay there.
I looked at my desk. Three monitors. The hex dump pinned to the wall. The correlation graph that proved nothing. The ashtray situation, which had evolved from "two ashtrays" to "two ashtrays and a coffee mug I'd started using as overflow." The apartment smelled like a decision I should be concerned about.
I texted back: what time
now. always now. stop thinking and come.
I closed the laptop. Then opened it. Then closed it again and left it closed because I recognized the pattern and the pattern was a cage.
The shower was the first one in three days. I know because I counted backward from the last time I remembered being wet, which was when I spilled flat Red Bull on my shirt and stood over the sink wringing it out instead of changing because all my other shirts were on the floor and the floor shirts smelled like the apartment and the apartment smelled like a decision I should be concerned about. I already said that. The loop is the point.
Hot water hit my scalp and my whole nervous system recalibrated. Like defragging a hard drive. The heat found knots I didn't know I was carrying. In my shoulders. In my jaw. I'd been clenching my jaw for two days. Hadn't noticed. My teeth ached when I relaxed them.
I dressed. Black shirt, clean. Jeans that still fit even though I'd been eating maybe once a day. Jacket. Checked myself in the bathroom mirror, which was something I used to do with confidence and now did with the careful assessment of a man evaluating structural damage. I looked fine. Tired, but the kind of tired that reads as interesting instead of concerning if you tilt your head right and the lighting cooperates.
The sniffer. I left it running. Of course I left it running. Killing it would be like leaving a security camera unplugged while you went out for the night. The whole point was that it watched while I couldn't.
I locked the door. Deadbolt. Chain. Then unlocked the chain because I'd need to get back in and sometimes my hands don't cooperate after a night out. Then relocked it because the chain was the only thing between my machines and whoever might want to visit them while I was gone.
Left the chain on. Future me could deal with it.
Grotto was a twenty-minute walk through neighborhoods that changed character every four blocks. Mine was the quiet one. Past the laundromat it got louder. College bars. A taco truck. Then the industrial strip where the buildings stopped pretending to be residential and the sidewalk got wider and emptier and the streetlights switched from warm yellow to cold blue.
You heard Grotto before you saw it. Low-end frequencies traveling through concrete, the kind of bass that doesn't enter through your ears so much as your skeleton. A thump you feel in your molars. The building was a converted warehouse, obviously, because every EDM venue in every city is a converted warehouse. This one still had the original loading dock, which served as the smoking area, and the freight elevator shaft, which served as a light well for the laser rig. The promoters kept the industrial bones because the bones were the point. You don't come to Grotto for polish. You come for the feeling that you're somewhere the city forgot about, and the city's forgetting is what makes it free.
The line was short. Tuesday. Not a weekend crowd. The serious ones. The people who go out on Tuesdays because Tuesday is when the DJs play the weird stuff, the sets too experimental for Friday's paying customers.
I paid cash at the door. The guy with the stamp looked at me and said "Long time" and I said "Yeah" and neither of us elaborated.
Inside, the bass was a living thing. It wrapped around my chest and squeezed. The room was dark except for the rig, the lazers cutting geometric patterns through manufactured fog, and the phones, always the phones, fifty small screens held up like digital candles in a congregation of people who came to worship sound.
I found the bar. Water. Not because I was being responsible. Because I was about to not be responsible and hydration was the safety net you threw down before you jumped.
"You came."
Kira materialized from the fog like she'd been part of it. She was shorter than me by a head but took up twice the space. Black tank top. Eyeliner that could've been applied with intention or could've been left over from yesterday. Silver rings on every finger except her thumbs, because, she told me once, thumbs are for grip and metal compromises grip and she never wanted to lose her grip on anything.
"You summoned me," I said. "I don't ignore summons. Last time I ignored a summons it was jury duty and they sent a marshal."
She laughed. The kind that cuts through bass. "You look like shit."
"Thank you."
"I mean it. When did you last eat something that wasn't from a gas station?"
"Define 'gas station.' Because the corner store is technically a convenience store, which is a different regulatory category, and I think the distinction matters when we're evaluating my nutritional choices."
"Ren."
"Tuesday. I ate on Tuesday."
"It's Friday."
"Then I ate on Friday, three days ago."
She grabbed my arm. Her grip was exactly what you'd expect from someone who kept her thumbs unringed for this purpose. "Come on. There's people."
There were people. There were always people around Kira. She collected them. Not intentionally. She was just loud enough and honest enough and sharp enough that people wanted to be in her orbit, the way you want to stand near a bonfire even though you know fires burn.
A cluster near the back wall. Faces I half-recognized. Scene people. The kind of half-friends you accumulate when you go to the same shows for two years. Nods. Handshakes. Someone said "Ren, where you been?" and I said "Working" which was true in the way that staring at hex dumps for forty-eight hours is work.
Someone else said, "You getting from Mire tonight?"
Casual. Like asking if I wanted a beer.
"Maybe," I said. "He here?"
"Not yet. Said he'd come through later."
I filed the name. Mire. The way you file the name of your mechanic or your dentist. A person who provides a service. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Kira had Petal.
She didn't say it outright. She leaned in, close enough that I could smell her shampoo over the fog machine, and said "I have something for the overthinking" and I knew what she meant because I always knew what she meant.
We found a corner. The music changed. Deeper. A track that built itself from a single pulse, layering frequencies the way you stack transparencies until the image becomes something none of the layers could be on their own.
The tablet was small. Flower imprint on one side. Scored on the other for people who liked halves, which was nobody I knew. I put it on my tongue and let it dissolve and the taste was chemical and floral, like licking a battery wrapped in a rose petal, and that's where the name comes from, not from the flower itself but from the experience of it on your tongue, the way something beautiful and something wrong occupy the same space.
Twenty minutes.
Twenty minutes of normal. Kira talking. The music building. My body loosening from the shower-reboot. The corner of the warehouse feeling safe in the way that corners always feel safe to me, back to the wall, sight lines open, exits mapped. Then.
The drop.
Not the DJ's drop. Mine.
The bass hits my ribs and I feel it reorganize something in my chest. The sound isn't entering through my ears anymore it's entering through my skin through the spaces between my fingers through the gap between my teeth where I've been clenching for two days and now I'm not clenching now my jaw is open and the music is filling the space where the tension was. Kira is talking and her words are warm they don't have edges anymore they're just sound shaping itself into meaning like water finding a channel and I understand everything she's saying not with my brain with something deeper something the brain sits on top of like a city built on ruins.
The lights. The lights are doing something they weren't doing before. The lasers are leaving trails. Not afterimages. Actual trails. Like the light remembers where it was and doesn't want to let go. I watch a green line cut across the fog and it stays. It stays and it hums. I can hear the color. Green sounds like a sustained note on a cello, low and patient.
"You're smiling," Kira says.
I am. I'm smiling and I can feel every muscle involved in the smile and there are more of them than I thought. Smiling is complicated. It requires the cooperation of muscles that spend most of their time doing nothing and right now they're all showing up for the first time in weeks saying sorry we're late what did we miss.
"I'm perfect," I tell her. And I mean it. And that's terrifying somewhere underneath the warmth but the warmth is so thick I can't reach the terror so I let it sit.
I talk to people. Strangers. A guy with a shaved head and kind eyes tells me about his daughter's first word and I almost cry because it's beautiful and because he trusted me with it and because Petal makes trust feel like the most precious thing in the universe when really trust is what got me into this mess. A girl in a silver jacket asks me what I do and I tell her I listen to machines talk and she says "that's the most beautiful thing anyone has ever said to me" and I know she means it right now and won't mean it tomorrow and that's okay because right now is all there is.
Kira dances. She dances like she's arguing with the music and winning. All sharp angles and sudden stillness. I watch her and feel something I can't name, not attraction, not love, something more like recognition. Two systems running the same broken code.
Time stops being sequential. The DJ plays a track that builds for what feels like an hour and is probably four minutes. I'm at the bar. I'm on the floor. I'm outside on the loading dock with a cigarette watching the city pretend to sleep. I'm back inside and the strobes are going and every flash is a photograph of everyone I've ever known superimposed on the faces of everyone I'll never meet.
Then.
A person. Across the room. Standing still.
Not dancing. Not talking. Not looking at a phone. Just standing in the strobe light staring directly at me with an expression I can't read because every half-second the light erases their face and redraws it and each redraw looks different. Man. Woman. Neither. The strobes won't let me decide.
I blink. I look at Kira. I look back.
Gone.
Or never there. On Petal the difference between "was there" and "was never there" is a coin flip and the coin is also a hallucination.
The music catches me again. The moment dissolves. Someone hands me water and I drink it and the water is the coldest most perfect thing that has ever existed and I tell them that and they laugh and we're all laughing and the figure in the strobes is already a memory I can't verify.
I got home sometime.
The apartment was dark except for the monitors. Green on black. Faithful. Waiting. My keys were in my hand and I didn't remember pulling them from my pocket. The chain was on the door and I fumbled it three times before it slid free. My fingers felt like they belonged to a slightly larger person.
I sat down at the desk. The chair caught me. The sniffer log scrolled on the middle screen, patient, indifferent to where I'd been.
I checked the beacons.
Eight fired while I was gone. Right on schedule. Forty-seven minutes apart. Normal. Normal normal normal.
Except the payload sizes.
I scrolled through them. Blinked. Scrolled again.
The beacons before I left: 422 bytes. 481 bytes. 507 bytes. Normal range. The beacons while I was at Grotto: 2,104 bytes. 2,347 bytes. 2,089 bytes. 1,956 bytes. 2,211 bytes. The beacon after I got home: 443 bytes.
Back to normal.
More data while I was gone. Four times more. Like the thing in my machine had been saving up, or like there was more to report when I wasn't there to see it. More to say about an empty apartment than a watched one.
Or. More data because of what I was doing. Where I was. Who I was with.
The Petal was still in my blood. The crash was rolling in, a fog bank approaching from the edges of my vision, and the euphoria was curdling into something flat and metallic. My jaw was tightening again. My hands were doing the numb thing. The apartment smelled the same as it had when I left, which meant it hadn't been entered, which meant nothing because kernel-level access doesn't require physical presence.
I grabbed the notebook. The real one. Paper. Pen. I wrote down the payload sizes. My handwriting looked like it was trying to escape the page, all angles and jitter, and I watched my own hand move and thought about the fridge plug. The one I reconnected without remembering. The autopilot. The small betrayals of a body that does things its owner doesn't authorize.
I wrote: 2KB+ payloads during absence. Correlates with Ch2 departure beacon? Something reports MORE when I'm not watching.
Then underneath, smaller: Petal tonight. Can't trust sensory recall. Verify tomorrow sober.
Then smaller still, barely legible: Someone was watching me at Grotto. Standing still. Staring. Gone when I looked back.
I stared at that last line. The ink was wet. The words were mine. But I couldn't verify any of it. Petal memories are corrupted files. You can open them. The data inside is scrambled. I saw what I saw, or I saw what the drug showed me, and there's no checksum I can run against my own perception.
The crash deepened. The warmth was gone. The music in my memory was already fading, replaced by the hum of my machines and the tick of the pipes and the specific quality of silence that exists in an apartment where someone has been alone too long.
I closed the notebook. Pushed it to the far edge of the desk. Tomorrow. Tomorrow I'd look at the payload sizes with clear eyes and a brain that wasn't running on chemical fumes and corrupted memory.
Tomorrow.
The cigarette burned down to the filter. I didn't light another one. The monitors glowed. The sniffer scrolled. Somewhere in Romania, a server received 443 bytes from my machine and did whatever it does with them, and I sat in my chair with the lights off and the Petal fading and the figure in the strobes already becoming a thing I couldn't prove, filed in the same folder as the "You up?" text and the off-schedule beacon and every other piece of evidence that might be evidence or might be a symptom.
The folder was getting full.
My phone buzzed. I didn't look at it. Not yet. Not tonight.
I sat in the dark and listened to my apartment breathe.