“They were erasing things,” Mateo whispered. “Files labeled ‘discrepancy’ and ‘suppressed’. So I made the game remember them.”
Cole’s training told him to log everything. He took photos of lines of code scrolling in debug mode: a cascade of comments in plaintext, dated this month, signed “M.” The archive’s security feed showed nothing but his own silhouette bent over the dock; yet every time he replayed a scene, a different name surfaced — a cipher woven into the game’s soundscape.
Then came the calls.