The Puppeteer's Game

Chapter 16

The Analyst's Silence

The morning came without sunlight.

Just the dim, steady pulse of emergency lights casting everything in that tired blue haze. The server hum had become background noise—so familiar now, it felt almost comforting. The main Ops floor was too quiet. No alarms, no orders flying back and forth. Just silence dressed up as routine. Motions that looked normal, but weren't.

Emily sat with her back to the room, poring over printouts beneath a flickering halogen lamp. The bulb buzzed, like it couldn't stop thinking. She didn't move much, didn't speak. Her eyes tracked the lines of code and timestamps like they might shift if she blinked. Something was wrong—too many blanks where there should've been red flags. And too much silence in the places they used to trust.

A few feet away, Ramos crouched over the floor panels, sliding sensors into the gaps with a kind of careful intensity that made his shoulders stiff. No cameras, no microphones—just motion sensors now. They weren't tracking who, just where, and when. And maybe why. His eyes still moved like a soldier's, but he wasn't looking for enemies outside anymore.

Miguel hadn't moved from his station in hours. The emergency lights sharpened the shadows under his eyes. His fingers hovered over a worn-out map of Facility 47, twitching like he couldn't decide what to look at next—the red pin on the board, the half-folded drawing in his drawer, or the terminal that had restarted itself while no one was watching.

Monteverde was still a no-show. No ping. No excuse. No one even asked.

Coffee on the burner. Ink-filled timecards. Messages by foot. No screens. No internal comms.

Trust had gone analog.

Finally, Miguel broke the quiet. Didn't even glance up.

"Everyone's on a watchlist now. Ours."

No one answered.

Emily turned another page. Ramos moved to the next tile. And two floors above, Javi del Rosario typed in silence.

Javi had always liked the quiet.

The comms wing on the third floor was long, narrow, and barely lit—more like a storage hall than a command center. That suited him. Fewer voices. Fewer eyes. Just the blink of old monitors and the steady rhythm of his fingers on the keys. Some people called it isolating. Javi called it honest.

But today, something was... off.

He leaned closer to the screen, adjusting his glasses while his other hand scrolled deep into the system's back end. The access logs didn't make sense. They weren't just corrupted—they were mirrored, as if deliberately repeated.

Three user IDs showed up within minutes of each other, all unlocking the same secured files—his, Emily's, and Monteverde's. But Javi knew exactly where he'd been. Emily had checked into the cafeteria on the manual logs. And Monteverde? Still missing in action.

"Not just reused credentials," Javi muttered, eyes narrowing. "These are... mirrored."

He ran a checksum against the movement logs.

And waited.

Overwritten.

The signatures weren't just glitches—they were disguises. Identity-mirroring scripts, subtle enough to slip past routine audits. Like someone had slipped inside their systems wearing someone else's skin.

Javi's fingers flew across the keyboard. Deep in an old permissions folder, a hidden directory surfaced. No name. Just a string of characters:

MirrorScript_07