He pressed YES.
The touch wasn't a click so much as a commitment. Something thin and tensile moved through his fingertip, and the light that pretended to be matter admitted it had been waiting for him all along.
[SELECTION CONFIRMED]
The words stood where air should have been. They were not superimposed on the room; they made the room a background.
Detective Stone jolted forward, one hand out, his other already halfway to his belt without admitting it. "Hands!" he snapped, not loud, but engineered to cut.
Caleb kept the card flat on his left palm. His right hand hovered where the button had been, skin tingling as if a cold ring had been pressed there and removed.
[LIFE-RISK ACCEPTED]
Officer Brooks's pupils flared, her weight easing onto the balls of her feet. "Caleb—what did you just do?"
"Pressed a word," he said, and felt how useless that sounded.
Ms. Parker's breath tripped. "Detective, please—he's a student. He's—"
"Alive," Stone said, eyes locked on the rectangle. "We'll keep him that way by not doing anything cute." He extended a palm. "Card."
Caleb didn't give it to him.
[GENERATING REINCARNATOR ID…]
The ellipsis behaved like a held breath. The ring on the card shrank to a pinpoint, then dilated. The light over the desk forgot to buzz for half a second.
Stone made a choice and closed his fingers around Caleb's wrist—firm, not cruel. "Whatever this is, you're stepping away from it."
The grip registered as information, not offense. Caleb didn't pull back. "If I step away, it follows."
Brooks angled, notching herself into his line of sight. "Say what you see. Out loud."
"Typography," he said, because that was easiest. "White. Crisp. Sans serif. It's… confident."
[ERROR: NO SOURCE REGISTRY][APPLYING PROVISIONAL STATUS]
Stone felt the small twitch run through Caleb's tendons where his fingers held them. He didn't pretend not to. "Kid," he said, not unkind. "Work with me."
Brooks lifted a hand, palm up, kept her voice low enough that it made a smaller target in the room. "Caleb. Give me the card. We'll all breathe."
[PROVISIONAL ID: P—] — the last character blurred, then resolved — [P-0] — flickered once — [P-01]
The numbers weren't numbers. They were commitments to being one thing and not another. They settled on [P-01] with a quiet, satisfied authority.
Stone's jaw altered by one degree. He didn't like when reality chose fonts. "All right," he said to himself more than anyone. "New plan."
Ms. Parker had flattened herself to the door, as if exit were a moral stance. "Caleb," she said, "you can say no."
"He did," Stone said. "And then he said yes."
Brooks's eyes kept bouncing between Caleb's face and the space where nothing should be. "Is there a cancel?"
Caleb wanted to say no. He also didn't want to test the ecosystem's patience.
The card's matte surface was cold enough to feel considered. The ring was a white pupil watching a decision it had already witnessed.
[INITIALIZING SIN SEQUENCE][STANDBY]
"Standby for what?" Stone asked, the way you ask a kettle why it whistles as if you expect it to answer.
Caleb swallowed. "Me."
"Okay." Stone's voice filed itself smooth. "We're going to make some boring choices. Boring keeps people alive. Put the card back on the desk. Step away. Hands on your head."
Brooks tipped her hand a millimeter toward calm. "Detective."
"Officer," Stone said, "when something starts printing on air, I get conservative."
Caleb nodded, because the logic was clean even if the geometry wasn't. He set the rectangle back on the blotter, aligning it with the corner as if someone would be grading.
The text stayed with him, not with the card.
It hovered at his eye line, faithful to the act of his choosing rather than the object that hosted it. He blinked. It stayed.
[RISK ACKNOWLEDGED][CONSENT LOGGED]
Brooks didn't flinch, but he could see the idea land on her—consent as a thing a machine could notarize. "Does it want you to do anything?"
"Exist," he said.
Stone's grip hadn't left his wrist. The detective eased it back without making a ceremony. "I'm going to be very clear," he said. "You don't touch anything invisible without telling me first."
Caleb didn't say that he already had.
The radiator's tick arranged itself into smaller ticks, as if the room's atoms were paying attention. The edges of things felt very honest: the desk's cheap veneer, the microfiber of Brooks's uniform seam, the dry skin ridge on Stone's knuckle where a wedding ring had stopped being a habit.
[WARNING][NEARBY ENTITIES: NON-PARTICIPANTS][OBSERVER SHIELD: PASSIVE]
The words stacked like cards dealt with perfect wrists. The shield didn't change anything obvious. The room remained exactly what it had been, except for the feeling of it having been approved.
Stone studied Caleb's face the way men study weather. "You reading me your fortune cookie, or is that your own poetry?"
Caleb exhaled. "It thinks you're not invited."
"Story of my life," Stone said.
Ms. Parker tried again. "Caleb, you can hand it over. It's an object. You're a person."
He looked down at the black rectangle he'd just put on the desk. It lay there unremarkable and enormous. He could smell the faintest metallic thread in the air now, a taste at the back of the throat like a battery you shouldn't have licked. He could hear his own pulse admitting it lived here, too.
[FIRST CONDITION][MAINTAIN OPERATIONAL CONTROL OVER SPECIAL ITEM]
Brooks's pen had rolled to the edge of the bed and stopped like it respected gravity. "Operational control," she repeated. "Meaning…?"
"Don't let it be taken," Caleb said.
Stone gave a humorless little smile. "Then we've got a disagreement."
Before anyone could turn that into action, the light above the desk compressed again—no flicker, just a narrowing, as if the bulb wanted to be a dot. Caleb had the sudden, clear thought that the room wasn't going to ask his permission to change.
[ENTRY SCHEDULED][PREPARING TRANSFER ENVIRONMENT]
Stone's hand returned to Caleb's wrist, firmer. "Define 'transfer' for me."
Caleb didn't. The word sat in his head with a gravity it didn't need to earn.
Brooks stepped closer, one palm out, fingers spread like she could catch light. "You don't have to go anywhere."
"I'm in my room," he said.
"Good," Stone said. "Stay there."
The air acquired texture—subtle, like the difference between dry and humid, but with intent. The ring on the card pulsed once, twice—breaths from something without lungs.
[T—00:30]
"Thirty," Caleb said before he decided to.
Stone didn't look at the blank where the clock should be. "Thirty what."
"Seconds," Caleb said.
"Are we doing another countdown?" Brooks asked, gentler than sarcasm, sharper than comfort.
Caleb's mouth was dry. "Apparently."
Stone's voice chose firmness over volume. "We're not going anywhere in thirty seconds. That's a promise, not a request. Counselor, open the door."
Ms. Parker turned the knob with more force than necessary, as if doors respected enthusiasm. The hallway's warm light cut a line across the floor. The corridor was empty, like a set before actors arrive.
"Twenty-six," Caleb said.
"Keep counting," Stone ordered. "Officer Brooks, call it in. Quietly. Ask for—hell, ask for a tech and a priest."
Brooks had her radio halfway out before she pushed it back in. She shook her head a fraction, spoke without moving her mouth. "If this is… perception-bound, we pull more people into a room we don't understand."
Stone hesitated and put the radio away, too. "Fine. We make do with the idiots we brought."
"Twenty," Caleb said.
Stone edged himself between Caleb and the door without shoving. "Talk to me, kid. What's the mechanism?"
"Mechanism suggests cause we can diagram," Caleb said. He tasted the metal again, a whisper. "This is more like… an instruction that doesn't need a machine."
"Poetry again," Stone said. He didn't disguise how much he hated poetry in emergencies. "Do you feel pain?"
"No."
"Heat? Cold?"
"Attention," Caleb said. "Like it's thinking about where I am."
Brooks met his gaze and held it. "Do you want this?"
He took too long not to answer. "Want is the wrong verb."
"What's the right one?" she asked.
"Admit," he said.
The floor under the desk—the cheap gray tile—felt minutely untrue for a second, like a picture that had been drawn convincingly and then erased too cleanly in one corner.
[T—00:12]
"Stone," Brooks said, and no other word had so much freight in it.
"Yeah," he answered. His stance widened by an inch. "Caleb. You stay standing. You don't jerk. You don't faint. If you feel something, you say 'now.'"
"Now," Caleb said, because he felt the edge arrive—the same way a storm arranges itself a mile away and then decides your block is interesting.
The ring on the card brightened into an insistence of white and then—without drama—stopped being a ring. It became a hole.
Not a hole in the card. A hole in the idea of where the desk ended and the air began, a coin-sized absence that didn't reveal anything behind it because behind it didn't exist.
Ms. Parker made a noise like someone stepping into a cold pool without warning. She flattened against the jamb. "No, no, no—"
"Caleb." Stone's hand tightened. "Back up."
Caleb tried. His shoes found purchase and then didn't. The hole didn't pull like a vacuum; it invited like a slope hidden under carpet. The mug on the desk crept a millimeter and then reconsidered, as if pride had been built into its ceramic.
[T—00:06]
Brooks reached for the card, changed her mind, and grabbed Caleb's elbow instead. Her fingers were strong. "With me," she said.
"I am," he said, and was surprised to find he meant it.
The hole widened a fraction, perfectly round, perfectly disinterested in their feelings. The faint smell of ozone sharpened—clean, unpleasant, inevitable. The plant on the sill didn't care. The clock remembered to tick.
[OBSERVER SHIELD: ACTIVE]
The letters flashed once, acknowledgment rather than achievement. Stone's face did not see them, or pretended not to, and Caleb couldn't tell which annoyed him more.
"Detective," Ms. Parker whispered, like the word could carry instructions. "Do something."
"I am," Stone said. His voice ran calm over iron. "I'm not letting him go."
[T—00:03]
There was no wind. There was a suggestion of direction that his body understood without physics. The card lay on the blotter, harmless as a library card, and yet the absence yawned over it like a camera iris deciding on an exposure no one had asked for.
Brooks leaned in, bracing. "Eyes on me."
Caleb looked. For a sliver of second, they made a small, quiet agreement to tell the truth later about what they'd seen together.
[T—00:02]
Stone's hand was a cuff he hadn't closed yet. "If you can stop it," he said, "do it."
"I don't see a button for 'undo,'" Caleb said, and found that he had a pulse he respected.
[T—00:01]
The hole sharpened to an edge so exact it hurt to notice. The white around it trimmed itself like a barber finishing a hard line. The room's sound bent—not louder or quieter, just aligned, like the world had been slightly out of tune and someone fixed it.
The absence reached a hair farther across the blotter and the corner of a paper lifted, turned toward it, and vanished as if it had found a better idea of being paper somewhere else.
Stone hauled, Brooks braced, Ms. Parker prayed to a god of institutional liability, and the thing that had wanted a decision announced it had gotten one.
[TRANSFER]