A thin crack ran across the wall, like static crawling over metal.
All three ARC monitoring officers looked up at the same moment—every screen in the room dimmed by exactly three percent within a single millisecond.
A lowered his headset volume."Server response latency… something's covering it."
B: "Source?"
A paused."…There is no source. The signal didn't come in. It appeared directly at the interface."
The wall trembled again.
This time it felt less like vibration and more like the equipment itself being forced under load—pushed into a range it should never reach.
A line appeared in the lower-right corner of the main screen:
DO NOT REPLY
Pitch-black text, incompatible with ARC's interface format.As if another language had seized output authority from behind the display.
C frowned. "Which unit? Test signal?"
A shook his head."It's not ARC format. It didn't go through any process. It was generated here."
The next instant, every speaker in the room let out a sharp hiss—like a piece of sound being violently pulled inside.
Then a voice came through.
"…The signal you're hearing is a few seconds behind me."
It sounded like Jeff—but not entirely.
As if it had been processed by some temporal algorithm.The ending of each phrase carried an unnatural delay and rollback.
B's face went pale."…That's not latency. That's time residue after processing."
A stared at the timestamps."Our time markers… none of them are reliable anymore."
The main screen flashed red.
WRITE — 99.9%
The progress bar advanced slowly.
Not like computation—more like something being dragged forward.
C lowered his voice."It's not writing into the front layer… it's issuing commands beneath the control layer."
A watched the data jitter."This isn't hacking. This is… the lake projecting its own logic directly into our servers."
The red frame flickered once. Then went dark.
The entire monitoring room blacked out for half a second.
When the screens came back on, they did so in a way ARC's interface had never displayed before—
A single line appeared, handwritten in style,its edges reconstructed by algorithmic smoothing:
Thank you for your cooperation.
B clenched his jaw."…Whose handwriting is that? There's no matching sample in the ARC archive."
A spoke quietly."It's not someone's handwriting…it's the handwriting produced while a person is being formatted."
C looked up sharply."You mean… B-39?"
A didn't answer.
The text didn't fade.It became clearer.
The monitoring room fell silent.
Then they noticed—
The sound wasn't coming from the server fans.
It was a low-frequency, steady pulse.
Regular. Stable.
Like a new core process breathing somewhere deep inside the facility,using a method that wasn't ARC's.
No one spoke.
They all understood the same thing:
The intrusion was complete.The front layer had only been the final notification.
[Observation Log – Lake Core Intervention]
File Code: B-39 / LAKE NODE BREACH – CONTROL LAYER OVERRIDEClassification: CRITICALAccess Level: L4 (Post-Review)
Event Summary (Partial):• The write process was not interrupted. Front-layer "interruption" was a false presentation.• Control layer access was overwritten by unidentified logic.• Timestamp synchronization compromised. Estimated delay variance: 3–5 seconds.• Non-ARC command string detected: DO NOT REPLY.• WRITE—99.9% initiated without ARC authorization.• Handwriting-style message appeared at event termination (source unknown).• Server fan noise replaced by low-frequency core pulse (suspected non-physical origin).
Inferred Logic (58% Redacted):• … [REDACTED] … lake-core logic acquired partial control-layer access …• … [REDACTED] … B-39 consciousness possibly partially formatted …• … [REDACTED] … 99.9% represents non-ARC write execution …• … [REDACTED] … handwriting linked to residual identity during formatting …• … [REDACTED] … event nature is not attack, but interface displacement …
ARC Internal Recommendations:• Drastically reduce publicly available information.• B-39 is not to be approached under standard executor clearance after entering unobservable state.• All LAKE NODE activity to be handled via remote logging only.• Monitor for secondary write-wave signatures.
Note (73% Redacted):… [REDACTED] …The write process shows irreversible tendencies.The "Thank you" message is likely a post-write courtesy residue.
The gate remains open.