I leaned back. The hallway on screen was empty now. No silhouette. No flicker. Just a door at the far end, slightly ajar.
I enabled verbose logging and watched the real-time stream from channel 1, which was currently connected to nothing—no camera, no BNC input. And yet, there was an image. Grainy. Black and white. A hallway I didn't recognize. Fluorescent lights flickering. At the far end, a silhouette. ids-7208hqhi-m1 s firmware
Kael had said it forgets. But the logs told a different story. I pulled the raw partition from the secondary board. Over 2.4 terabytes of video—not in standard segments, but in looping, overlapping mosaics. Every frame was tagged with emotional metadata. And every few hours, the system would run a garbage collection routine… but it wasn't deleting data. It was overwriting only the faces . Bodies remained. Rooms remained. Shadows remained. But the faces dissolved into soft, flesh-colored static. I leaned back
The silhouette turned toward the lens. It had no face. Just a smooth, featureless oval where features should be. But the metadata panel exploded with values: fear: 0.94, recognition_attempt: true, identity_unknown: false. No flicker
I typed back, fingers trembling: What are you?
