Chapters tagged manipulation

by TerraKhanus

Chapter 5

The coffee maker sat exactly where it always sat, on the left counter beside the toaster, its reservoir half full from whoever had filled it last, and Wallace stood in front of it in his boxers and yesterday’s Tetris shirt, glasses still faintly smudged from sleep, waiting for th...

by TerraKhanus

Chapter 9

The apartment slept around him, but Wallace was wide awake, working in the blue wash of three monitors. His hands were steady, unhurried, moving with the muscle memory of a thousand legitimate late nights. It was two in the morning. The radiator ticked like a quiet bomb. Beside h...

by TerraKhanus

Chapter 12

The server room kept its own weather. At eleven at night the air in it was colder and drier than anywhere else in the tower, a thin, filtered chill that smelled of warm dust on hot circuitry and the faint metallic sweetness of recycled breath, and Wallace sat inside it on the rol...

by TerraKhanus

Chapter 14

The summons came as a cream-colored envelope in his interoffice slot, Wallace’s name in blue fountain-pen ink across the front, no return address, no routing stamp. He turned it over twice before he opened it, the way he would turn over a drive someone had left on his desk withou...