Chapter 6
The laptop screen cast a harsh blue glow against the peeling wallpaper of the cellar stairwell. Mark stared at the device, recognizing the brushed-aluminum chassis instantly—it was the exact model assigned to him during his final quarter at the firm, a machine he had personally surrendered to corporate security on the day of his termination. Yet here it sat, ice-cold to the touch, humming with a low, steady fan speed as if it had been running in the dark for hours.
"Don't touch the keyboard," Sarah warned from the base of the upstairs steps, her breath coming in shallow gasps as she clutched a dusty cardboard box against her chest. "Mark, look at the screen. There's text appearing."
Mark stepped closer, his shadow falling over the illuminated display. A line of green code was typing itself across the dark background without any human input: ASSET RETRIEVAL PENDING. SUBJECT LEO IDENTIFIED AS VERIFICATION KEY.
Mark’s heart hammered against his ribs. He spun around to look at his son. Leo was sitting calmly on the living room sofa again, playing with the black TV remote as if nothing had happened, his green sweatshirt dusted with gray ash that seemed to have fallen from thin air.
"What did you just call him?" Mark shouted toward the empty stairwell, his voice cracking with rising panic. "What does Leo have to do with the files?"
A tinny, distorted voice suddenly crackled through the laptop’s internal speakers, sounding as if it were being transmitted from a great distance through a cheap intercom. "Good afternoon, Mark. Did you really think an NDA could bury three million dollars in missing offshore revenue? We just needed to confirm the biological lineage. The boy has your memory retention markers. He remembers everything you saw that night."
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Sarah dropped the cardboard box, documents spilling across the floorboards. "They're talking about our son. They've been monitoring his cognitive development through the nursery monitors, haven't they?"
Mark slammed the laptop shut, cutting off the audio mid-sentence, but the green light on the side of the casing remained stubbornly on. Before he could pick the machine up to smash it against the concrete, the living room television—which had been unplugged for three weeks—suddenly flickered to life, broadcasting a live, high-definition feed of the inside of their own master bedroom.
