Chapter 2 – "Trace Protocol
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The email came just as the second espresso finished steeping.
He didn't rush to open it. It had the usual tone—over-polite, polished English subject line about upcoming investor preparation. Something about founder bios for the Barcelona series. He clicked anyway.
A document loaded. Company-approved dossier. Branding copy. He skimmed.
His name at the top in all caps:
RAFIQ AMEEN – EXTERNAL SAFE PROFILE
He scrolled. The page laid out the sanitized version of his life—CEO of Sable Dynamics, lead architect of the RXN empathy layer, Tokyo-based since 2015. All clean. All clinical.
But then, at the bottom of the page, something blinked.
A small yellow bubble hovered off to the side. A comment, probably from someone young, someone new, someone who didn't know better.
No early education listed here. No birthplace either. Should we confirm with the founder or just leave it blank?
Rafi didn't move.
The cursor blinked in rhythm with the comment. Nothing else on the screen did.
Eventually he closed the file without typing a word. Not minimized. Closed.
He leaned back in his chair, one hand resting against his jaw, and opened a terminal window from memory. A quiet black screen. Plain code. He ran a system-wide sweep—his own script, buried three levels beneath anything the security team could touch. It crawled the net like a whisper.
No references. No stored thumbnails. No photo metadata floating around. No cached backups from old blogs or school sites. The perimeter was still clean.
Still, something about the comment itched. He opened the original document again, found the bubble, and deleted it. This time, the blinking stopped.
He typed three plain words beneath the background field.
Profile confirmed. Accurate.
He hit send. Closed the tab.
Then sat still.
It wasn't that the question bothered him. It was that the question had taken this long to appear. Ten years, and no one had asked.
Now someone had. Just once. Then erased.
And that felt closer than he liked.
The apartment lights dimmed automatically at eleven. Rafi didn't notice.
He was still seated at the kitchen island, one hand wrapped around a now-cold ceramic mug, the other idly tracing the edge of his touchpad. The espresso had long been finished. The silence had only grown.
Outside, Tokyo moved like it always did—quiet and precise, full of ordered noise. The occasional train hummed faintly in the distance, carried on rails and rhythm. But up here, on the fortieth floor, all of it felt like it belonged to someone else.
He pushed the mug away. Stood. Crossed to the wall panel near his desk. There was a black drive tucked behind a sliding door, one he hadn't touched in months. No AI, no syncing, no cloud.
Manual only.
He keyed in the boot code and watched the drive light blink. The interface came up—flat, utilitarian, colorless. He typed out the path from memory. No menu. Just directories spelled in lowercase, fragmented like old thoughts.
One folder sat alone at the bottom.
/before/
He opened it.
Inside: a dozen image files, some with corrupt names, others just strings of numbers. He didn't click any. He just watched the list populate, the timestamps ticking backward like a forgotten metronome.
One file still had a preview.
cam_auto042.jpg
Taken from a low-end Samsung. April 9th, 2015. The metadata still thought it was worth remembering.
He hovered the cursor over it. The thumbnail was too small to see clearly. Just blurred figures, a chalkboard, the washed-out green of a school uniform. No context. No faces.
He didn't open it.
He selected it, paused, and pressed delete. A single confirmation prompt appeared.
Are you sure?
He clicked yes.
The image disappeared.
No drama. No sound. Just one less ghost taking up digital space.
He leaned back from the screen, closed the terminal, powered down the drive. It clicked softly as it shut off—mechanical, final.
Crossing the room, he didn't turn on the sleep lights. He lay down in the dark. No music. No AI voice. No biometric scan.
His eyes stayed open long after he closed them.
---
By 2:30 a.m., the walls felt too close.
Rafi slipped on his shoes without turning the lights back on. No announcement to the system. No destination typed into his calendar. He stepped into the corridor and let the door seal itself behind him.
The elevator ride down was empty. Forty floors in silence. He didn't look at his reflection in the brushed steel walls. When the doors opened to the lobby, the lights dimmed in acknowledgment of the hour. The night concierge looked up from behind the counter but didn't say anything.
Rafi didn't wear anything to mark who he was. No logo, no device, no name tag. Just dark fabric, silent steps, and a face that asked nothing.
The streets outside breathed a different rhythm. The day's rigidity had melted, replaced by the faint looseness of a city between shifts. Delivery scooters glided past shuttered restaurants. A drunk salaryman muttered into his phone across the street, pacing in tight circles. Vending machines cast blue halos onto the sidewalk.
Rafi walked with no purpose. No map.
Just… forward.
The night air was thick with the trace of rain that never arrived. It clung to the concrete, lifted slightly when a breeze caught between buildings. He didn't check the time. Didn't count blocks. He passed storefronts, apartment balconies, an old pachinko parlor that still buzzed despite the hour.
And then it came—quiet at first. A flicker of sound from a narrow alley.
He slowed.
A ramen shop. Old, small, just five stools along a counter and a paper lantern outside. A radio sat on the shelf above the cash drawer, slightly tilted. The voice coming through it was scratchy, fading in and out.
Not Japanese.
Bengali.
A folk song.
Old, older than memory. A woman's voice, untrained but soft, singing about a boy who kept missing the boat because he never ran fast enough to catch it. No background instruments. Just her, and maybe the rustle of wind caught on the mic.
Rafi stopped walking.
He didn't step inside. Didn't even look directly at the shop. But his feet had stopped. That was enough.
The voice on the radio rose in pitch, then fell into a hum. The language was sharp in his ear, strangely intact. His mind knew every word, but it had nowhere to put them. The grammar sat on his tongue like something foreign.
He tried to remember what his father's voice sounded like. The exact tone of it. Not the words—those he remembered. But the pitch, the shape.
He couldn't.
Just a silence.
And the phrase that had ended it all.
You'll regret this.
He blinked. Took a breath. Kept walking.
Didn't look back.
Rafi returned home just before dawn.
The apartment lights stayed off. He didn't need them. He moved through the space by pattern, not vision—stepping over the same tile edge, turning left after five silent paces, pressing the side of the water filter once, waiting exactly three seconds for the first drip.
He drank standing up.
No music. No screen. Just the soft hum of the city resetting itself beyond the glass.
He was still in the same clothes. Still hadn't slept.
By 7:15 a.m., he was at the office.
Koji was already there, legs crossed on the couch like he'd never left, a steaming can of black coffee in one hand and a foldout tablet balanced on his knee.
"You look like someone scrubbed you with command-line syntax," Koji said without looking up.
Rafi dropped his bag on the desk. "Flight details."
Koji handed over the tablet without commentary. The screen displayed their itinerary—outbound to Barcelona in 48 hours. Private terminal. Closed-entry robotics panel, followed by private negotiation windows with FerroTech and several mid-tier AI consortiums. Nothing unexpected.
Koji finally looked at him. His expression didn't change, but the pause was deliberate.
"You're packing like you're not coming back."
Rafi scrolled past the hotels. "I'm not packing at all."
Koji shrugged. "You know what I mean."
There was a long silence.
Outside the office window, a line of schoolchildren passed by the crosswalk. Backpacks too big for their spines. Laughing. Noisy. Nothing they said reached high enough to matter, but their presence lingered like static.
Rafi set the tablet down.
"I just want this clean. Quiet. In and out."
Koji nodded, then leaned back and crossed his arms.
"They're not going to care where you're from," he said. "They only want the patents."
"I know."
Koji hesitated. Then said, more softly, "That doesn't mean they won't look anyway."
Rafi didn't respond.
He picked up the tablet again and opened the visa form. Scanned for gaps. There were none. There never were.
---
The sky outside had turned from steel to blue by the time Rafi returned home.
The windows of his apartment tinted automatically against the glare, softening the morning into a quiet wash of silver. He dropped his key card on the console. Kicked off his shoes. Didn't even bother to straighten them.
He walked past the kitchen. Past the sleep module. Straight to the desk where the personal terminal sat, dormant.
No lights.
No blinking cursor.
He sat.
The system booted without sound. No AI assistance. No startup chime. Just black and gray interface, coded years ago to do exactly what he needed and nothing more.
He opened a private client — one not tied to Sable, not connected to any cloud.
One contact saved.
No name. Just an address: [email protected]
He stared at it.
Then started typing.
"You don't have to reply. I just wanted to know if—"
He stopped. Backspaced.
Typed again.
" I will travel to Barcelona ..if you want to….."
Delete.
He let his fingers hover over the keys.
Then dropped his hand to the side of the desk.
He didn't erase the message. He didn't send it either.
He just closed the window.
Shut down the terminal.
Locked it.
Set his alarm for 4:00 a.m.
Then stood there a while longer, not moving, not planning, not breathing quite right.
Outside, the city kept living.
Inside, he hadn't decided yet.
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