Rain shimmered like static on the wide windows of Lila Harada's 29th-floor loft, and Tokyo, restless as always, pulsed in violet and blue far below. The clock read 2:06 a.m., though time here didn't matter much. Up in this makeshift office—half apartment, half tech lab—everything existed in loops: coffee cups recycled, playlists re-spun, code endlessly rewritten. Lila sat hunched over her laptop, lit only by the soft flicker of her screen and the scattered glows of server lights lining the back wall.
She was alone. And she liked it that way.
Tonight, she wasn't debugging. Not exactly. She was watching something she didn't understand.
The interface of her app—Echoes, the algorithm she'd built from scratch—had frozen for a moment. Then a notification pinged.
Match found: Kael – Confirm?
She blinked.
Kael?
Her fingers hesitated. She scanned the panel. No profile picture. No details. No tags or interests, not even the autogenerated ID code attached to every registered user.
This person—Kael—was not in the system.
And still, somehow, matched.
The cursor blinked again, waiting. She reached for her tea, found it cold, and let her hand drop back to the keyboard. Every instinct told her to ignore it. Dismiss. Move on.
Instead, she clicked Confirm.
The screen glitched. Just once. A flicker, like an old film reel catching on fire for a split second.
Then a message appeared:
Do you remember?
Just that.
Her chest tightened. She stared at the line for a long time, heart thrumming as if the words had been addressed to something inside her, something forgotten or buried. It wasn't just eerie—it felt personal. As if this wasn't a bug in the system. As if someone—or something—had been waiting for her.
And then, the line disappeared.
No trace.
No record.
She opened the logs. Scroll, search, scan.
There it was: a single code entry, buried deep in a dormant node of the app's archive.
Author: Kael. Timestamp: November 12, 1864.
She froze.
What?
That wasn't possible. The app didn't exist before 2020. The servers were new. The cloud infrastructure didn't support fabricated timestamps older than its own creation date. And even if someone had hacked the system... why embed a name?
Her pulse ticked behind her ears as she typed the line again, this time in the console:
git log --since="1864-01-01" --author="Kael"
The screen returned nothing.
No commits. No entries. No source.
Just silence.
She sat back, running a hand through her hair, the weight of the hour pressing down. Below her, the lights of the city blinked like a thousand unanswered questions. A ramen stand's steam curled into the rain. Somewhere far off, a temple bell rang—slow, ancient, haunting.
Lila reached for her phone and tapped out a message to Priya.
> "Found a match named Kael. No user data. Logged from 1864. Can that even happen?"
A minute passed. The typing dots appeared.
> "Not unless a ghost hacked our app. You okay?"
Lila stared at the phone. She wasn't sure. She responded with a shrug emoji, then added:
> "It asked me: 'Do you remember?' Then vanished."
> "I'll check server logs. Maybe it's just a corrupted commit. Go sleep."
But Lila didn't sleep.
She re-opened the app and stared at the empty interface.
No profile. No match. No messages.
It was like it never happened.
The sun bled through the morning fog by the time she left the building, Tokyo drenched and gleaming like a memory someone else had dreamt. The rain had stopped, but puddles clung to the streets like stories unwilling to evaporate. She ducked into her favorite café in Daikanyama—a quiet place of warm wood and roasted tea leaves, safe from the city's digital sprawl.
She ordered houjicha and sat near the window.
The chair across from her remained empty, but something in her peripheral vision tugged.
A man sat three tables down. Tall. Pale coat. A navy scarf he hadn't unwrapped, despite the warmth. He stared at a screen—something in the way he tilted it made her freeze.
It was the Echoes interface.
Her Echoes.
He didn't notice her. Not at first. He tapped through screens slowly, as if unsure of what he was looking for. Then he stopped. And looked up.
Their eyes met.
Time thinned.
It was barely a second, maybe two, but Lila felt something stretch—some thread, taut and invisible, connecting her chest to his gaze. A strange, impossible weight settled inside her. She couldn't explain it, but she knew—he wasn't just a stranger in a café.
He closed his laptop gently, stood, and walked toward the door.
She opened her mouth to speak. Nothing came out.
He didn't stop. Just paused beside her table, glanced once more—not at her, but at her phone on the tabletop—and walked into the city rain.
She sat motionless for minutes. The sound of the café returned—dishes clinking, low music, distant conversation. Her tea had gone cold again. She reached for her phone. The screen lit up before she touched it.
A new message:
I'm here.
The words didn't flash.
They didn't buzz or shake or flicker.
They just... existed.
Her fingers hovered over the reply field.
Outside, thunder grumbled far off over the bay, and rain began to fall again, soft and patient, like a drumbeat that had waited centuries.
She looked back toward the door, but the man was gone.
And she suddenly realized: this wasn't a bug.
This was the beginning of something.
Something that had already started.
A loop.
A glitch.
A memory.
Or maybe… a fate that had waited for her to return.
She typed:
Who are you?
But she didn't send it.
She let it sit there, glowing on the screen, while the rain whispered against the glass.