The Singularity Coven
Copyright© 2026 by Penny Pucker
Chapter 7: The Sinkhole Incident, Part Two
I called it that in the file at the time, and I want to explain the joke before it gets lost. A sinkhole is what you call it when the ground under a thing turns out not to have been solid. The one on Bellmore Street took half a lane and a telephone pole, and everyone agreed about it, because the evidence was a hole.
The second one took a staircase, and there was nothing to agree about, which is why it is the incident I am still thinking about four years later.
I was on call. That is the job Priya described on my first day in a corridor: if ORACLE does something at three in the morning that you cannot explain, you go and look, and you do not have to explain it to anyone except him.
At 4:12 on a Wednesday morning in April I got two pages and a message. The pages were from facilities, not from the model, which was unusual enough that I sat up in the chair before I was awake.
EAST STAIRWELL — DOOR HELD OPEN — 04:04 EAST STAIRWELL — MOTION, LANDINGS 1–6, CONTINUOUS — 04:04 to 04:12
The message was from a woman called Ines, who worked the night shift on the security desk and had done so for eleven years. It said: The stairs have been used. I don’t think the badge worked.
I want to be exact about what I did next, because in the version everyone tells afterwards I did something brave, and what I actually did was put my shoes on the wrong feet and drive to work.
The east stairwell is the one circulation route in the building that the camera system does not properly cover. There is a dome camera on every landing. The one on the second landing has been out of service since January, and nobody has fixed it, because it is a stairwell and nothing valuable is behind a stairwell, and in an eight-storey building with three thousand cameras that is a reasonable thing to believe.
What I had, when I got there at forty past four, was footage from six landings.
There is a shape in it. I need to describe it the way I described it in the report, because the report is the only version of this that anyone official has ever seen.
Between 4:04 and 4:12, something goes up the east stairwell. You can see it on four of the six landings. It is not a blur and it is not motion smear; motion smear has a direction and a logic, and this does not. It is a region of the picture, about the height and width of a person, in which the codec declines to produce detail. Everything around it resolves. The handrail resolves. The paint on the wall beside it resolves. Inside the region there is no information, and the compression artefacts along its edge are the kind you get from something the encoder cannot predict — the same kind you get from grass, or from a fire, or from water.
It moves at walking pace. It uses the handrail on the third landing, which is where the camera is highest, and you can see the rail’s highlight change, as it does when a hand is on it, and there is no hand.
Fourteen frames of it are in the report. I have looked at those fourteen frames perhaps a thousand times, and I have never once thought ghost. What I have thought, every single time, is: something with the wrong edges came up a staircase that had been propped open, and the camera system cannot tell you what it is because the camera system was not asked.
Because of the wedge. That is the thing I noticed first, and it is not in the report, and it is the reason this chapter exists.
The east stairwell door gives onto the loading yard, and it is supposed to be shut, and it is supposed to latch. Someone — the night cleaners, or one of the engineers who smokes out there when they think nobody is counting — had put a rubber door wedge under it. Rubber, six inches, the tapered kind you buy three for a pound in a hardware shop. It had been there since the weather turned. I could tell from the footage: for eleven weeks the door comes back to a two-centimetre gap on every frame, in every weather, all night, every night.
Two hundred and eleven nights of that door being open. That is not an anomaly. That is a building habit, and a habit is the most dangerous kind of thing, because a habit has no owner and therefore nobody has to decide about it.
Two people left Pythia that week, and they did not know each other.
Will Akintaye worked the night shift on the fourth floor, labelling outputs, which is the kind of job that exists in enormous numbers in a building like this and which nobody in a management position has ever had to describe to another human being. At 4:20 a.m. on the Wednesday he posted in a channel called #nightfloor, which had nine members and no moderation: did anyone else hear someone coming up the stairs? I thought it was a person. Three replies, all of them the sort of reply you make at four in the morning when you want to be alone. At 11:02 a.m. the same day he emailed the whole building a resignation with no addressee, no forwarding address, and one line that I have never been able to stop reading: “I don’t want to be in the room when it’s answered.”
Ines went from the security desk to occupational health on the Friday, and from occupational health to a resignation letter on the Monday, and she was the one person in the building I tried to talk to. I found her in the yard with her coat over her arm and I asked her, like an idiot, whether she wanted to tell me what she had seen.
And she said: “I’ve worked that desk eleven years and I know what a person sounds like on those stairs, because there’s a grate under the third landing and it rings. What went up on Wednesday rang it too. That’s all.” She got in her car. “I didn’t run. I want you to know I didn’t run. I stood there and I listened, and then I wrote it down, and then I read back what I’d written and I understood that I’d written it down in the voice you use when you want somebody to believe you, and I don’t know how to say that on a form.”
So: two people. And the interesting thing, the thing I could not say out loud in the building, was that neither of them mentioned the footage. Will heard something. Ines heard something. Two people, on two different floors, heard the same thing at the same minute, and the only person who saw it was a machine that could not resolve it.
I did triage, because triage is what I do, and the way you do triage is you find out what everybody else already knew.
I pulled the internal message traffic for the fourth floor overnight and the days around it, and then I did something I have done a thousand times and never once regretted: I searched the transcripts for a phrase, not a keyword. Will had typed one sentence in that channel about the stairs, and in the search results, in the thread directly underneath it, somebody had replied to a completely different question, six minutes earlier, in the same channel.
The reply was about a bearing. It was the right answer to a question a junior engineer had asked at 4:11 and then deleted, and it was the right answer in a specific way: it gave a tolerance and a material, and it warned that the sequence most people use will pit the raceway, and it said you always get this wrong, here is the short version, in exactly the tone of someone who has explained it too many times.
Which is the tone of the four recipes.
I looked at the account that wrote it. There is no account.
The display name renders: the letters are there, in the message, and they are Oracle Support, and there is nothing else there. The user ID field is empty — not invalid, empty, in the way a field is empty when nothing was ever put into it. Clicking the name does not give you a profile and does not give you an error; it gives you a blank page with the header on it. There is no entry in the directory. There is no OAuth grant, no incoming webhook, no integration, no service account, no session, no IP on the messages, and the message timestamps are correct, which is the worst part, because a forgery leaves a timestamp problem and this has no problems at all.
Then I did what I always do, which is to make it a number, and the number was worse than the one message.
Nine. Nine messages from nothing, in internal channels, over eight months. Always at night. Always short. Always a correct answer to a real question, always to a person who had never talked to a chatbot about it, always in a channel with no auditors. Four of them were about bearings and seals and a pump — which is the same subject as the design ORACLE gave us in chapter four that our own facilities team had prototyped in March. One of them was about a person: a thread where two engineers were talking about whether a colleague was “going off”, and the reply, at 2:40 a.m., gave a date, and the colleague was signed off occupational health on that date, eleven days later.
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.