POV: Aurora
When I looked up from the screen, the light from the ceiling hurt my eyes.
I had no idea how long I had been reading tables. The numbers were mixed with project names, client codes, dates, amounts. Historical data, Andrade had said. "Just watch." Easy to say.
"You look like you're being digitally kidnapped," said Lina, slumping into her swivel chair. "How long have you been there?"
"Long enough to forget how many coffees I've had," I replied.
She pushed herself forward with her foot, bringing her chair closer to the edge of my cubicle.
"Welcome to the risk floor: where time dies and no one notices," she said. "Any interesting corpses in the databases?"
"So far, just tired numbers," I muttered. "Nothing that screams 'run away.'"
"Give it time," she smiled.
I was about to close the file to take a minute's break when a shadow fell across the edge of the cubicle. Andrade.
He looked more tense than he had a few hours ago. He was carrying a folder in his hand.
"Vega," he said. "Change of plans."
That never sounds reassuring.
"Something wrong?" I asked.
"Depends who you ask," he replied. "We have an internal audit underway."
I want to see how well you read patterns with something more... alive than historical data.
He placed the folder on my desk. The title on the cover caught my attention immediately.
Project: SERAPHIM.
The name of an angel or an expensive perfume.
"Just a sample for now," he explained. "Movements from the last six months. I don't want to contaminate you by telling you what others have already seen. Mark anything that doesn't make sense to you, without thinking about names or positions.
"Is this a big project?" I dared to ask.
"Big enough for management to be watching," he replied.
He didn't say "Dante Noir," but he didn't need to. The strange heat that I had managed to ignore for a while rose another half degree.
"Are there any previous hypotheses?" I insisted.
"Yes," he said. "But I don't want you to start there. I just want what you see. Then we'll compare."
I nodded.
"And one more thing," he added, lowering his voice slightly. "Everything you do with Seraphim, save it. Versions, drafts, notes. Nothing gets deleted, nothing gets rewritten."
"Understood," I replied.
He left as quickly as he had arrived. Lina leaned toward the folder as soon as he was a few steps away.
"Seraphim," she read. "Oops. That sounds like a high-profile problem."
"What do you know about this project?" I asked.
"Officially, nothing," she said. "Unofficially, every time someone mentions it, Andrade's forehead vein twitches."
I opened the folder. Inside were printouts with summary tables and a handwritten username and password to access a specific database.
I typed in the information. A table with hundreds of rows appeared on the screen.
Payments, dates, suppliers, source accounts, comments. At first glance, everything seemed normal: average amounts, nothing scandalous, repetition of certain suppliers as expected.
I started sorting by date, then by supplier, then by time.
And then something caught my eye.
"See that?" asked Lina, who had already settled in to watch.
I was looking at it.
Almost all the "strange" payments were concentrated in the same time slot: between two and four in the morning. It wasn't impossible, but it wasn't normal either. Companies don't sleep, but the people who press buttons do.
"Automatic processes, maybe," I said. "Night batches."
"Yes, but look at this," Lina pointed to the comments column.
Most of the transactions had notes: "partial payment," "adjustment," "rescheduling." In those nighttime movements, however, there was nothing.
"There are always people who love to document everything," she murmured. "If no one wrote anything here, it smells to me like someone didn't want to leave a trace."
My stomach tightened.
It could be a coincidence. It could be an oversight. It could be a thousand things that didn't mean anything serious.
But something about that pattern reminded me of the sloppy arrangements I saw in my neighborhood: cash payments at three in the morning, "just in case," "better not to leave a record."
"I don't have enough information to say that there are irregularities," I said, speaking more to myself than to her. "But I do have enough to say that this doesn't behave like the rest of the project."
"Welcome to the essence of risk analysis," Lina commented. "Things that could be normal and could be a fire with good makeup."
I opened a new document for notes.
I wrote: "Unusual concentration of payments between 2:00 and 4:00. Same type of supplier. No comments. Suggest review of users/terminals that originate them."
No accusations. Just facts and questions.
"Hey," Lina said. "Before you hand anything in, make a copy outside the main route.
Local folder, USB, external cloud... whatever lets you sleep peacefully.
"Do things disappear often around here?" I asked.
"Files, no, officially," she replied. "Comments, notes, summaries... it depends on who they affect. I'm not saying it's on purpose, but I'm also not saying the system is perfect."
I saved the notes file. Then I exported it and saved it in a separate folder, as she had suggested.
I continued down the table. The more I looked, the more the pattern bothered me.
It was as if someone had designed a way for the money to take detours, but not good enough to fool anyone who had time to look.
And I had time. Or at least, I thought I did.
"Do you realize what it means that they gave you this on your first day?" Lina asked quietly.
"That they don't like to waste time," I ventured.
"That someone higher up wants to see how you think," she corrected. "Don't panic, but don't be naive either. What you write here won't just be seen by Andrade.
"Management," he had said. The word had the shape of a surname, even though no one pronounced it.
An image popped into my head without permission: amber eyes reading my notes, going over every comment, every doubt, as if they were an extension of me.
I swallowed hard.
"I'm not going to write anything I can't back up with data," I said.
"That's perfect for the report," Lina replied. "For you, it's still a good idea to be clear about how far you're willing to go if someone doesn't like the data."
I didn't know how to respond.
Instead, I forced myself to focus on the screen. I highlighted the rows that caught my attention with a faint color. I added a couple of auxiliary columns to group by time and user. I put together a neat list of "things that don't add up."
I saved again. I closed and opened the file to make sure everything was still there.
As the system processed, an uncomfortable thought stuck in the back of my mind:
If Dante Noir saw this, what would he see first?
The numbers... or the person who had dared to mark them in his project?