Authentication denied. The terminal screen spat out its third red error in as many attempts. The moment it appeared, Ray withdrew his fingers from the keyboard. The records room on sublevel three was a space that seemed to have solidified the silence of pre-dawn into physical form. Fluorescent lights flickered dimly overhead. The spines of case files crammed into the shelves rose and fell alternately between light and shadow. Only the low hum of the air conditioning and the whir of the terminal's cooling fan broke the stillness. Nothing else. Nothing at all. Ray leaned back in his chair and stared at the screen. He'd been working on this since last night. He was trying to locate the original data storage location for the autopsy report he'd copied onto a data stick—S-VII-0091—and gain access to the cybercrime division's administrative domain connected to it. He was attempting to breach the system from outside official channels using fragmented authentication codes from a Neural Link—the information terminal embedded in the occipital lobe that ninety-four percent of Mars citizens wore. Back when he'd been a detective in the field, he would have thought of at least three workarounds. But the techniques that had sunk beyond the fog of memory had lost their substance, leaving only the shell behind. Third denial. That wasn't the problem. Ray had kept staring at the screen because of the character string that appeared at the end of the error code. A normal access denial would show only a string of numbers, but for just an instant—right before the terminal's log scrolled to the next line—this fragment had flashed: S-VII. The same prefix as the administrative number. The possibility of coincidence couldn't be ruled out. But it was too neat to be coincidence. Ray severed the connection. He'd only realized three attempts in that access logs were being recorded. If he moved now, the logs would remain. If logs remained, someone would see them. Why would a records clerk be attempting to access the cybercrime division's administrative domain?—that was a question he couldn't answer. The screen went dark. Ray didn't move. There was no sign of morning in this windowless underground space. Yet the building's air conditioning switched from low to high speed, and he knew shift time was approaching. The eastern sky would be turning white by now, outside. In Alicia—the domed city sprawling across the Utopia Planitia in Mars's northern hemisphere, eighty-five kilometers in diameter—the artificial light sources were probably shifting from night colors to morning colors. That change never reached sublevel three. Time moved differently here, in the depths. S-VII. Those two characters seemed to show through on the dark screen like a watermark. --- Mira Valentina opened the records room door just after nine in the morning. More precisely—she stopped for just a moment before opening it. Her feet halted at the threshold. Her gaze swept across the shelves, the windowless walls, the work terminal. Then she entered. There was almost no gap between these movements. It might have been a confirmation gesture that had become habitual, something she did without conscious thought. Ray watched the motion without lifting his eyes from the terminal screen. Blue-silver hair caught his attention. Illuminated by the dome's fluorescent lights, it held a faintly metallic sheen. Straight and long, loosely braided on one side. A small silver ear cuff on her left ear. Pale ice-blue eyes swept the room and came to rest on Ray. She was young. The security bureau uniform—a thin gray jacket—bore an identification badge reading "Cybercrime Division, Trainee." "Are you Ray Carter, the records clerk?" Her voice was composed. Not emotionless so much as carefully chosen before each utterance, with a deliberate pause before speaking. "I am." Mira walked to the work terminal. She stopped deliberately about a meter and a half away from Ray, maintaining conscious distance. She tucked the terminal she'd been holding into her jacket's inner pocket and withdrew a thin document folder instead. "During an investigation into an unrelated matter, I traced it back to this administrative number. I found three years of systematic data tampering in the sensor logs from Sector 7 of the mining tunnels. The origin point traces back to a specific administrative number in this records room." Her tone was administrative. Neither cautious nor friendly—simply conveying information. Ray said nothing. He opened a drawer and retrieved the autopsy report he'd left on the desk's edge since last night, sliding it across the work terminal toward Mira, close enough for her to reach. Mira picked up the report. She began turning pages—and stopped on the fourth. The line with the DNA match values. Her expression didn't change. Her mouth, her eyebrows—nothing shifted. But her hand that wasn't holding the terminal—the one holding the document folder—tightened slightly. Ray caught that change from the corner of his eye. (She understands.) What those values meant. Why the report had arrived during hours when no one was in this room. Mira had come here already understanding. "Last night, three attempts to access this division's administrative domain were recorded." Mira spoke without looking up from the report. Ray didn't respond. "The access point was this terminal." Silence. The sound of air conditioning. "If you continue acting alone," Mira continued, "you'll exceed the authority granted to a records clerk. If the records accumulate, the procedure for authority revocation will begin." Ray finally lifted his face from the screen. His gaze met Mira's ice-blue eyes. They were the kind of eyes that could be read as either cautious or observant—uniformly colored, revealing nothing. Not eyes that lacked emotion, but rather—eyes trained not to show the emotions that were clearly present beneath the surface. That was the impression Ray received. "What's your objective?" "An exchange of my access privileges for the physical data of the report." The answer came without hesitation. "As part of the cybercrime division, I can access the deep administrative domain officially. You have the physical data and information from the scene that will be necessary for future investigation. This isn't cooperation based on trust. It's an arrangement based on mutual benefit." It was a practical proposal. Emotionless. Or rather, deliberately kept that way. Ray thought for a while. In three years in this room, he'd never made any kind of "arrangement" with anyone. People in the hallways avoided walking past him. His supervisor threw words through a crack in the door. No one had ever come to where Ray was and made a proposal—not in any memory he retained. "What are the conditions?" "No independent action. You conduct no investigation that doesn't go through me. That's all." "Understood." --- The two of them ended up standing side by side across the work terminal. The surface wasn't wide. When Mira unfolded her notebook-sized portable terminal and set it beside Ray's, there was only about ten centimeters of space between their elbows. Before unfolding it, Mira adjusted its position on the surface—maintaining a certain distance from Ray's terminal. It was a small movement that didn't appear to be done consciously. Ray noticed the adjustment. He had the feeling he'd done something similar long ago. Maintaining measured distances between himself and others. Not too close, not too far—but leaning toward the far side. When it had started, his memory couldn't say. But watching Mira's movement, he felt something—a similarity. The way she isolated herself resembled his own. (Don't get sentimental.) Ray told himself that and returned his gaze to the terminal. "First, look at the tampering logs from Sector 7." Mira tilted her terminal screen. At an angle where Ray could see it too. That also appeared to be a habitual motion—not the movement of someone accustomed to collaborative work, but rather the shortest procedure that had become ingrained for situations where showing information to another person was necessary. A list of sensor logs was displayed. Data that should have been transmitted from monitoring sensors in Sector 7—a section of the old infrastructure tunnels from the construction period, closed in 2172 due to deterioration—was arranged in neat rows for three years. But scattered across the edges of the numbers were points marked in red by Mira. "Look at the intervals of the tampering." Ray traced the number sequence with his eyes. The intervals between the red marks were—uniform. "The cycle is consistent." "Yes. The first tampering on March 11, 2184. Since then, for three years, it's been automatically updated in exactly the same cycle. As far as I can determine, it would be impossible for human manual work to maintain this precision and scale." Ray's finger stopped. March 11, 2184. He knew that date. It matched perfectly with the estimated time of death recorded in the autopsy report and the date he'd suffered his brain injury. It exceeded the bounds of coincidence. By investigative logic, that was the only conclusion. But what lay beyond that conclusion remained unseen. "I investigated what matched this cycle." Mira switched to another screen. Two number sequences appeared side by side. "Ultima's regular maintenance cycle." Ultima—the central AI system that integrated infrastructure management across all Mars cities—performed periodic self-diagnostics across all sectors. That cycle matched the tampering cycle. Perfectly. "Ultima is..." "I can't determine that." Mira cut him off immediately. Like a reflex toward accuracy rather than emotion. "Whether Ultima is directly intervening or whether something else is operating while disguised as Ultima's cycle—I can't make a definitive statement at this stage. However, the fact that the tampering has continued for three years and that the body has been in that location throughout that period—these are facts." Ray straightened slightly in his chair. Organized as investigative logic, it came down to this: the body hadn't ended up in that location by chance. Someone—or something—had intentionally kept it there for three years. To conceal the body's existence, they'd continued altering the surrounding sensor data. Not an emotional impact. An investigative impact. This body hadn't been discarded. It had been maintained. "There's one more thing I need you to confirm." Mira turned the autopsy report to the end—not to a middle page, but to the administrative data section at the back. She scrolled further—into the deep data list not recorded in the official report. Ray leaned closer to the screen. Among the listed items, one line of numbers looked unfamiliar. Neural Link, battery remaining: 0.3%. Ray read that number. Read it—and his next thought didn't come for a long time. "Three years," Mira said. Her voice was quiet. "Electronic equipment abandoned eighty meters underground in a sealed tunnel, and three years later its battery is at 0.3%. The standard Neural Link battery lifespan is a maximum of eight months until complete discharge." "External power supply..." "Continuous, for three years. Yes." Silence fell between them. It was a different quality of silence than before. The air conditioning sounded the same. The fluorescent light was unchanged. Yet the air in the room seemed heavier somehow—or rather, denser. The sensation was unmistakable. The phrase "data anomaly" no longer applied. Ray felt that clearly. Data anomaly was a term for accidental errors. This wasn't that. This was a trace of someone—keeping that body's Neural Link alive for three years. A trace of intention. --- Mira severed the connection. She saved the data copy to her own terminal and cut the sharing to Ray's. That too was a mechanical motion, but after completion,