The apartment still smelled faintly of rain and boiled osmanthus tea. Li An stood frozen, staring at the security tablet screen that had just flickered back to life. Static buzzed in her ears like a warning.
And there it was.
Just for a seccond.A figure tall, still, dressed in a lab coat standing on her balcony.Looking at the camera.
Then gone.
She backed away from the screen, heart slamming in her chest. She glanced at the torn file still on the floor, its words burned into her mind:
"Subject 0491... Speech retention compromised... Fragmented cognition... Reflections watching…"
And the page handwritten scrawl:"You're not supposed to see this. But you already knew that, didn't you?"
Li An stayed off the balcony.
Not out of fear, but more like instinct. Something about that footage, that lab coat, that tilted head… it had cut into her. Not sharply. Slowly. Like cold water soaking through fabric.
She hadn't touched the paper since.
Instead, she sat in the corner of her living room, the tablet face down on the floor, her thoughts looping in silence.
The knock.The message.That word: contamination.
Li An didn't sleep.
Instead,She sat on the corner of her living room, staring at the door. The security footage replaying again and again it hadn't changed.It still show the same thing. The figure in the lab coat was still there. Then gone in a blink.
She tried to trace the motion logs from earlier that day. Nothing registered between 11:02 and 11:41. A blackout. The system had simply stopped recording.
Not a malfunction.A command.Someone had accessed her feed.
And whoever had slipped that file under her door… they knew.
Her phone chimed. This time, it wasn't a message from Nanjing Sanyu.
It was a message from the old university forum.
User: LATCHKEY89 You saw the 0491 doc? You're not the only one. If you're in Nanjing, get off grid. The loop's started in Sector 6.
"Check the transit feeds from Zhonghua. Filter by abnormal delays. They're quarantining without telling anyone.
Li An's pulse kicked up. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard.
She typed:"What's the loop?"
No response.
She switched windows and accessed the public transit logs, her hands moving on instinct.
Lines 2, 4, and 7—all with "maintenance delays" across Zhonghua and Baixia.
She narrowed it further.
Video logs. Commuter feeds.
At 7:23 a.m., one camera caught a man standing still on a train platform motionless for twelve full minutes. Passengers walked past him. No one spoke to him. At 7:35, he collapsed. No staff moved to help.
Feed ended. She stared at the screen
Li An sat back, the glow from the screen casting pale light across her face. The silence in the apartment had changed deeper now. Weighted. As if the walls were listening.
The man on the platform hadn't moved. No one had helped him. Not even when he dropped.
Something about it felt rehearsed.
She replayed the footage again.
At 7:23, the man stood. At 7:35, he dropped. She paused, zoomed in.His eyes.
They were open. Even while falling and afterwards.
The loop wasn't just data it was people. Stuck. Repeating. Until collapse.
She pulled up Sector 6 charts. Zhonghua Metro ran straight through it, with branches toward a now-decommissioned logistics center one she'd passed by years ago, sealed since the early days of national bio-defense restructuring. A Sanyu blacksite, some said. Just rumors then.
Now… it didn't feel like rumor.
A soft clink pulled her attention to the floor.
The teacup she'd left by the wall had tipped over, as if nudged. She stared. Nothing around it had moved.
The air felt dense, pressing at the edges of her skin.
She stood and crossed to the door, flipping the deadbolt again for the third time that hour.
Outside, silence.
Except.Down the corridor, the soft mechanical whir of the lift doors opening.
No footsteps.
No voices.
She didn't breathe.
The lift closed again.
And that was somehow worse.
Back at the screen, a new message flashed.
User: LATCHKEY89"They've started transit extractions. Sector 6 is already in sweep phase.""If you're seeing signal bleed or footage lag, it means they're nearby."
Li An's fingers hesitated over the keyboard.
Then:"What do they want?"
Typing…
Then nothing.
Instead, her phone buzzed once more.
But it wasn't from Latchkey.
A system notice.
Unauthorized network bridge request detected. Source: external terminal — IP masked.
"Connection blocked," it said.
She stared at it.
The message blinked, then changed:
"You can't block what's already inside."
She shut her phone.
Not out of fear but control. She had to move. Think. Not spiral.
Whatever was happening Virex, the lab coat, the disappearing people it wasn't waiting for her to catch up.
This loop it had already begun.
She grabbed the torn file from the floor, tucked it into her bag, and moved toward the emergency stairwell.
Because if the loop had started in Sector 6, then there was only one thing to do.
Get to the source.
Before it reached her door again.