Names On The Night Walls

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1:10You never really know a place until you've seen it in the unfinished ires. When everything familiar takes on a harder edge and there's nobody left but eaterico the odd noise is down empty holes. That's what I told myself my first night as the new janitor for Saint-Hansom moral hospital. I arrived at 10-58 two minutes before my shift, my sneaker squeaking nervously on the linoleum outside the service entrance. The double-glass doors hiss when I push them, exhaling the sterile, recycled air of long days and long nights lived in the same rooms. I barely had time to get my bearings before someone pressed a ring heavy hand into my narrowing of keys jingling, not a handshake. That was my handover from the dish of Supervisor Marsher. She'd been almost apologetic for her little introduction she was giving. It's the night you get used to it, she muttered while handing off a battered clipboard. Her eyes never quite met mine, instead darting up and down the main corridor toward the distance squeak of an elevator. The buckets and supplies are in the closet by nurse admin, mop the waiting areas, then work your way through those wings as she said, gesturing vaguely at the maze of corridors behind her. He'd keep her to be blocked after midnight, her alarm won't shut off otherwise, don't bother with level 3, we never do it night,

2:12any questions. I wanted to ask a dozen things, why stay out of be block, why the rush, why did everyone look so exhausted even at the start of a shift? Instead, I just shook my head. He'll do fine, nobody wants the shift, but it's steady. With that, she was gone. Her squared shoulders vanished into an elevator. When the door was slid shut, the building fell silent in a way that was immediately oppressive. I stood under the buzz of the main lights for a moment, but even that shallow hum couldn't quite run out the sense of being eyed from just around the next corner. I blinked, adjusted my backpack and forced myself forward into this muffled hive of corridors and half lit rooms wholly mine for the night. The first thing I noticed was how close the ceilings felt. The hospital looked normal in the day wide atrium, spizzy with fluorescent light, but after I was the whole shrank. The overhead bulbs flickered, each casting an aerosircle that didn't quite meet the next. The air stailed quickly and even just a few yards away the nurse's station blurred into shadow. Marsha had pointed out my territory, but I needed to see it for myself. I started with a slow, secured as walk through. Trash bins lined the snake of narrow holes,

3:15most overflowing with the debris of the day. I picked them up, set them on my fat-but-cut, tried to make mental maps of the turns and supply closets. Anxiety sharpened my senses every distant knock or elevator beat felt too crisp, too loud. My mop buckets quaked whenever I moved. In more than one place, a solo corner's harbour not only dust but evidence of age if you wanted to claim. It still no longer used, a paint pealed in long walnut curls. I wouldn't have noticed anything odd except at one spot right behind a fire hose cabinet the chipplaster gave way to a strange bowl of faded marker and cheap spray paint. I moved closer, phone light in my hand. Underneath the topmost flake, scrawled in nearly invisible black, was a list of letters and numbers. In K14 slash 10 slash 13, I'll beat you slash 6 slash 20. DT4 slash 11 slash 22. The most recent was just last week a C17 slash 4 slash 23. The edges of the oldest letters were smudged, water warped. But that last one sharp, dark, with only half the initials visible. It was as if someone had tried to scrub the names and failed. A tug at my gut said it was

4:19probably nothing old stuff with a weird sense of humour, maybe tally marks for late night days. But the longer I looked, the more my mind nod at the strange coincidence, it looked deliberate at out of place and far too recent for a forgotten corner. Either way, the graffiti was quickly eclipsed by the volume of mundane tasks to follow. The mess of my first night left scant room for idle reflection, vaulting stub and trash liners kicked with a need and fruit, mopping sticky waiting room floors while the late night news drone from a TV with a greenish, warped display, trying not to make eye contact with the few blue patients who wandered in and out of the ER. Still, that sense of being absorbed slipped through behind the ordinary, especially when I cut through the back holes. Time stretched in a way it never had during my old job at the high school. An iOS swept by and left behind only a surface sheen on tile and the echo of my own footsteps. Each time I passed that stairwell, I glanced at the initials, telling myself I'd look up the last one I see when I got a minute. I didn't know who to ask, or even if I wanted to know. I pressed on through the small iOS, telling myself that every building had a spirit at night and it just took getting used to. The next several nights did little to ease the knowing sense that I was part of some

5:22intricate half-hidden mechanism one that worked best where no one looked too closely. Normal routine built up like sediment caulking in at 10.55, nodding to the guard who never left the security glass collecting my cop from storage and cycling through the endless mop and bucket rituals. The holes were almost clear of staff by 1 a.m. On the floors, the only recurring regulars were an orderly name jibral, who always looked like he was half with her in app and a nurse called Dorian, who had the droop of someone who'd given up on him of getting a proper night's sleep. Conversations, when they happened, were perfunctory. How's the new shift? Dorian would say, barely pausing as she wiped her hands on a surgical green apron. Same as the old one, I might joke even though this was nothing like my life before. She wouldn't laugh, only nod faintly and drift off trailing the tarts' male of hand sanitizer. Jibral sometimes gave me a brief rundown of which wards devoid. Don't go past pediatrics and hide fuse box wet again. Or don't leave the bin in the whole way, they'll skin you. Always quick, always a little nervous, as if lingering too long and conversation might attract the wrong kind of attention. Nobody ever taught much about

6:22their own shifts while the pass of the hospital that felt somehow off limits even tonight's staff. After a week, I almost stopped thinking anything about it loneliness will do that, making you simplify except what you're told, go numb so that I was dutiful and tolerably long. Once in a while, though, there was a look past between two noses as a gurney rolled by, or a hasty memory when a certain door would stick and need it a badge to open. At first, I chalked it up to gossip with a compressed secret of hospital life. But it felt thicker than that as if everyone was worried about the wrong eyes being present, the wrong ears overhearing the wrong words. The days blurred together. My body acclimated to the elastic eyes of midnight routine. I became the background to everyone else's fatigue. Until my fifth night alone, when something finally pierced the surface calm and the night shifted, irrevocably beneath my feet. It started in the corridor that snakes down past the more gargier by the loniest part of any hospital at night. The full-rescent tubes, they were always the first to flicker in the last to be replaced. Shadows bunched behind the antique earners and shuttered with each cold draft that snuck in from under rusted emergency doors. I was halfway through mopping a sticky corner one that always took extra effort to feel clean,

7:26though it never quite did when the light started. It wasn't just a flicker, they dipped and pulsed in time with the compressive size from the nearby ventilator room. I kept moving, focused on the swirling grave dirty water until something tickled at my ears. A whisper, then, neither male nor female, almost a hiss. The words melted into each other, impossible to grab hold of. I paused listening. Nothing but my own breath and the echo of water slapping linoleum. I told myself it was a vent or static from the calm system. Still, I found myself moving faster, almost abandoning protocol to make it out of that corridor and into brighter, bizarre wings. Later, as I restocked to supply closet, something crackled from beneath a loose mob handle. A torn piece of paper, half slid under a floor buffer blade, caught my eye. I almost let it be God knows the place was full of discarded notes and random forms but the words ghosted across the page in dark, frantic strokes. Don't trust them. They know when you see. I ran my thumb along the edge, hesitated, then folded the paper into my pocket. Rational explanations warmed, disgruntled patient, bored orderly, even some good playing a prank on apparent shift with

8:28access. Yet, the warning begged me to look at the hospital itself at who or what that they could be. It was easier to slip the page in with my sandwich wrappers at the end of my shift and tell anyone about it. Now it's following that incident stretched hot with suspicion. I started noticing more than I wanted to. Profiti, a first invisible or ignored, revealed itself when I lingered in the empty wings or put my mop behind rolling equipment. Chop initials behind the baseboard in an abandoned patient room. Names carved sloppy, fearful on the inside belly of a linen cot. Even in a closet where I'd found the note inside the low door patch, they'll 212 slash 18 bd1 slash 4. My skin crawled. They wouldn't random delays or just kids jokes. There was a pattern. I started making a list on my phone, matching the initials and dates where I found them. I noticed too an odd correlation. The dates kept lining up not with silly staff rituals but with recent patient deaths, or with the last days a certain worker's name was still in the duty board in the break room. I tried bringing it up with Dorian during her break, almost as a joke to hide my nerves.

9:30Hey, you have noticed all the weird taggings around the place at night. Names and dates, I asked. She froze, fingers tightly grouping a coffee cup. Just bored kids from the day shift, she said too quickly. She placed her hand of a mine for a moment, blocking the name I'd written on a napkin. Don't worry about that, Alex, it's nothing you need to bother with. Her nails dug in, even through glove and tissue. Similarly, when I asked you to be careful, just a little too casual, he gave me a sudlong glare. Just ignore it. Yeah, old stuff, place got painted a dozen times. Don't start digging. Then he visit himself with a cascade of files, conversation over. The tension grew heavier every night. Routine maintenance started to unravel. My panda's bent in my grip. Once a bucket of water I'd left at the top of a stairwell had turned up empty, boned dry, just 10 minutes later, though no one had passed me in the way. Whenever I went to mop a particular corridor that should have been locked until morning, I'd find a door wide open, the crass bar hanging loose. Equipment squealed, rolled by its own weight into corners you couldn't quite see unless you looked over your shoulder. Puddles appeared that couldn't be traced, leading to places like the sealed elevator bank near Cardiac,

10:32under the door to the old surgical theatre's ruins no one used or spoke about. Paranoia seeped him with every shift. I started keeping mental talus. How many times did the supply closet slam after I entered? Had a shout across the nurses' pattern glass even though the staff were all accounted for upstairs. Once I thought I saw a reflection not mine, not anyone smiling from behind a closed fire door. I refused to look back. To convince myself I wasn't inventing things, I went to the security desk. I made up of reason, admin called, said the bin order was often dewing, could you run footage for yesterday. The night guard, a gruff man with a belly the size of his desk, crunted him, pulled up the night logs out of boredom. For about two hours after midnight the screen went black. No images loaded. The time stamp vanished, only static shimmed and faded. That's weird, he muttered. Our system isn't down, just sometimes the hard drive skips technical thing probably. He shrugged but didn't look me in the eye. I left with bio-rising in my throat and a cold certainty that what I experienced was a technical glitch, but in absence something else owned those eyes, I no one wanted to admit it.

11:36Sometimes I'd look at Marsha the day supervisor as she came back for morning handoff. She looked older every week. Her hands trembled when counting keys and she always asked the same questions as expecting a different answer as if wanting me to admit something strange before I left for the day. But she never said it. None of them did. One morning a trail to her into the admin's supply room under pretense of returning badge keys. The moment the door shut she stiffened. Don't ask about things you aren't paid to know, she said. Her words clipped as if she practiced. If anything happens after midnight, just keep working. Don't wander. That's how people end up in their own places. I almost demanded more, but she left me with silence in the echo of her warning. Everything tightened until the only thing that could puncture it was a human voice willing to break the unwritten pact. President Barack Obama. Virginia, we are counting on you. Republicans want to steal enough seats in Congress to raid the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years, but you can stop them by voting yes by April 21st. Help put our elections back on a level

12:40playing field and let voters decide not politicians. Vote yes by April 21st. And even live dice with craps and bubble craps. The games never stop so you don't have to. And right now, new users get $30 coin packs for just 10 bucks. Play now at spinquest.com. Spinquest is a free-to-play social casino. Boydware prohibited. Visit Spinquest.com for more details. That force found me a week later, long before my shift started. I had arrived early, nursing a vending machine coffee at the back door. I ran the day janitor let herself in her eyes sunburned, her coveralls too neat for genuine comfort. She was usually friendly and passing, but not the kind to linger. This time, she stopped her hand locking around my wrist.

13:40They don't go below level two at night, she whispered, checking over her shoulder. And never, especially if you hear them whispered or anything, people who listen, who follow, they disappear, not by accident. My pulse started. What do you mean? I started trying to sound incredulous or amused, but she shook her head violently. I'm not joking, Alex. Every year, someone who takes the shift, most of us do the day, or switch fast, some never come back, some go mad, you look for patterns to forget them. Just show up, do your job, leave, don't try to figure it out. This place changes people. Her grip loosened. Before I could push further, she turned and vanished down the hole. Her footsteps were treating fast and occurring in the Bay concrete. The warning stuck with me. When I entered the hospital that night, it felt not like a place of work, but trapped slowly adjusting its jaws. By then, the list of initials and dates on my phone had grown. Others matched recently posted in a morium notices on the staff, but it in a quiet passing slip between lunch menus and shift swaps. I started to cross for a fence online, local obituries from the last ten years, news of missing staff, harsh us resignations, unexplained accidents. A pattern emerged areas like the basement archive,

14:45or the sild of surgical wing, had more initials, more dates, and more gaps on shift for rusters immediately after. Some initials belonged to oddly's on nurses I'd never met, but whose files popped up from time to time and lost to found drawers or old clipboards. One night, sheepish and shaking, I braved the basement records not quite going below level two, not at first. Half the lights were out, but my phone's beam was enough. I sifted through a pile of decades old personnel files in a water-warp filing cabinet. Hibber stuck to paper, the ink bled into tree rings of meldy. That's where I found it, a staff badge, photo barely there, name and data, studentic black marker over the plastic DT4 slash 11 slash 22. The same as the name I'd found carved into the underside of the fourth four-bray current table. No one had mentioned DT on any current list staff, if pressed, were turned stoneians where they'd never heard of him. No one would say where he'd gone. I pocketed the badge, my hand's slick with cold sweat. I could hear every pulse in my wrist, every take a far off equipment. Fear I noticed something else from the back of my mind and memory, on your ding, that I did not want to test the boundaries of what I encode a line.

15:47It was the next night that everything balled over. My rationalisations crumbled, and whatever lived in the darkness of that hospital decided I'd paid enough attention. I'd stayed late, hunting over patient logs in the office supply rooms, quinting at faint handscrolled notes left on torn rustles. My shift was nearly over, some rise not far off, but cushions chewed at me. I walked the whole slow than usual, keys dangling kellously, as though daring something to notice me. When I turned the corner to the fin stairwell, I saw the door was unlocked. The hinges creaked, not with age, but use. To my left, the old elevator banks copper doors hung slightly a jaw lawn out of service I'd been told. Yet, a dim orange light flickered inside like a beacon. I remembered Irene's warning, but it was adrenaline, or stubbornness, or the compulsion that comes with knowing a mystery is too close to turn away from. Step by slow step, I descended into the underbelly. The air changed the hospital's order of disinfectant give way to something damper, metallic, like work coins or old blood. My fast light beams scattered against glass, flickered back off warp signage they'd afford not in use. The lower lettle was nothing like the rest of the hospital.

16:49The floor towers cuddled at the corners, walls patched which eats a plywood and strips of peeling paper. Each step echoed too loud. I heard myself breathing and beyond it, the low, steady whisper not a voice, but hunters, layered, overlapping in a coal-wine. At first, I convinced myself it was air movement through supplied ducts or the slow drip of a bust of pipe, but as I turned the last corner in the corridor, the ambient sound resolved into something else, desperate pleading words. Don't leave, please help. She'd blood from the shadows tall in substantial almost human but stretch undefined. I could feel them crowding my periphery as I moved. The farther I went, the louder the hush became, growing into a near-screen that pressed itself behind my eyes. Then, as I reached the centre of the old surgical foyer, the temperature dropped to freezing. My fast light beam caught on something pale at the far wall of face, mouth open in a silent cry, rippling as a thunderwater. I felt a heavy grip clamp onto my arm, the sensation of freezing, spectral fingers sticking into my flesh. I staggered backward, vision blurring at the edges. I screamed, but my voice vanished under the upper earth thunderous

17:50and possible flood of voices peeling through my skull. Shadows broke and swam around me. Desperate, I yank free and ran, stumbling upstairs that's seen to fold in on themselves, through doors that locked and unlocked behind me. The last thing I felt was the grasp of coldness at my back in the whisper, you know now, you've seen. Then, darkness. When next day opened my eyes, I was somewhere else entirely and nothing felt safe anymore. I woke on a hard final couch with a drow stiff patch beneath my cheek and the two bright lights of the staff lounge, starving straight through my eyelids. For a minute I just lay still, the emergence of blanket prickling hot on my chest despite the chill in the air, and let the confusion swarm me, I didn't remember walking here. The last I could recall was the echoing stairwell, the clutching hand, and the course of voices then a hole in memory was abrupt and perfect as a power outage. Somebody was standing by the vending machine, half concealed by the cheap plastic rack of outdated magazines. Doreen. Her back was turned, but she glanced at me in the reflection of the window, tight-leaped, eyes rode for more than lack of sleep. That was some episode, she muttered, voice flat. You lucky you didn't break your head on anything down there. I set up too fast,

18:53disnice pitching me sideways. My arm ached when I rolled up the sleeve, the skin was bruised in five precise ovals, like someone with a hand the size of a shovel had tried to leave fingerprints. I rubbed at them trying not to shake. Did it did someone carry me? I forced the words past a fractured dry mouth. My voice didn't sound like it belonged here higher and thinner than I remembered. Doreen shrugged. He were out cold in the admin corridor, jibble spotted you, said he heard a scream. She glanced down at her hands, fidgeted with the waiting ring she never wore at work. She didn't look up. You look like you've seen a ghost. Someone else passed behind a frosted panel of the land door, whispering urgently to a second shadow. There was a crackle static from the wall into calm, then silence. I tried to stand, swaying as the room doubled before resolving. I needed to get to the bathroom, but couldn't force myself to leave the light. Doreen's attention was fixed in the bruises that painted my arm. You said the stairs, right? She whispered, words barely from her ears. Don't go looking, don't ask anymore. My tongue wanted to ask what, why, how, but the air in the break room was getting thick.

19:56I pushed past her into the corridor and caught the eyes of Jibble. He was waiting there, apparently on some invented errand, studying me with careful suspicion. He want me to grab anyone from admin. Shibble asked, fiddling with his ID Laniard, nervous. No, I just I think I fainted. I heard how hollow it sounded even as the light humbled her. He didn't argue. Behind him, a pair of orderlies held up a small gurney with a plastic wrap bundled suit with crimson at one corner. Someone's bad night. I watched them avoid the stairwell as if it's dank as if the dark crawl out and wrap around their ankles. My president Barack Obama. Virginia, we are counting on you. Republicans want to steal enough seats in Congress to raid the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years, but you can stop them by voting yes by April 21st. Help put our elections back on a level playing field and let voters decide not politicians. Vote yes by April 21st. Paid for five Virginians for fair elections.

20:59You know what? It sucks to be bored, but when I get on my phone and play real casino games on spinquest.com, the time flies by that two hour wait at the DMV seems like 10 minutes. Play your favorite spots. Live black check live preps with a live dealer. New players $30 coin packs are on sale for 10 bucks. Play spinquest.com and you'll never be bored again. Spinquest is a free to play social casino. Boydware prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details. Stomach twisted. And now Spio through the glass said something clipped to Doreen and the two of them stepped away to conference and low voices. I used dropped what I could again three this year. We need to request it before the hum of conversation slid to a stop as I approached. No one blamed me for collapsing, not out loud, but the looks lingered and then spoken rule was reinforced if you saw something past midnight you kept it to yourself. Anything else was asking for trouble. I stumbled to the locker room have to collect myself, have to run from the scrutiny. Spushing icy water on my face did little to clear the memories, but the bruises pulsing on my arm brought it all back anyway.

22:03I tried to prop my phone against a locker to snap a photo of the marks, but my hands were unsteady, the image blurry and wrong. I told myself it would fade, that I'd check the photos later, but even then I already sensed I'd find the image corrupted or missing altogether. By afternoon, I managed to grab a few eyes and easy sleep full of dreams I couldn't quite shake. I wandered hospital corridors in pitch dark, my steps echoing, anonymous voices chanting names and dates. Sometimes, in a dream, the faces were close enough to touch, skinwaxy, miles moving soundlessly. One whispered my name in a voice that was some wasmine. I worked shivering so violently my teeth ached. The cycle went on, night after night. I returned because routine is its own kind of armor, an absence would only mean facing whichever nightmare would chase me outside the hospital's walls. Sleep became a trickle ration carefully. I stopped trying to engage the others. Each night shift was lonelyer, assignment shifted, sticking me with trush runs out in the tacked on palliative wing where no one else was ever sent or endless mobot by the generator room where only the old boilers made any sound. People gave me space like a carried a disease.

23:06Emails for management started arriving current and formal, please restrict roaming outside of assigned wings, report all maintenance issues to supervisor, no exceptions, and after three nights of final warning spreading rumors as cause for termination. Rumors had never started, but the implication was clear. I tried, once to catch the whisper's on my phone. I left the recorder running tucked in a scrub pocket, hit record when the corridor went quiet, when the light in the fast air will puddle sickly orange on the floor. Later, when I played the file back, all I caught was the thunder of my own heart and a staticky distortion someone we'd be in have forced worked beyond recognition. Other recordings came out worse, corrupted by jagged electronic shrieks, the sound of a wind that never blew inside the buildings at eight windows. More than once, I wondered if I was losing my mind. But then, in empty cafeteria, another note turned up folded inside an overturned chair, it reed, it's real, they're hungry. The handwriting was careful, blocky. Below it, an old initials and a scroll, beaty one slash four. That one matched to missing nerves whose locker still bore a hot shit sticker, faded and intended. I began to keep all the notes, each one growing a heavy

24:09await in the pockets of my coveralls. If it was a jerk or shed madness, its persistence ground down whatever hope I had of ignoring it. Desperate to understand, I forced myself into the nearly forgotten archive room on three and old section, which between admin offices, always locked air-thick with dust and slowed decay. I cried to door open one afternoon after a long shith, using a key that Marsha habitually forgot to reclaim in her morning haste. Inside, box files and ledges towered and tilted stacks. The walls bled with ghost outlines where frame degrees or certificates had once hung, now long remove. There were a list of patient names, coded diagnoses, staff rosters from decade to past. I found a stick, leather band volume and a milk crate at the back. The paper was warped and sticky at the edges. Incidents in 1982-2002. I thumbed through it to slow at first, then faster, hands trembling. The answers were methodical, clinical, but the content showed me, nervous I'll be, missing after overnight shift, last seen in theatre corridor, nurturase, or doly dt, found disoriented in sub-basement, committed suicide four days later dozens of entries, each early matter of fact, every name 119's gold somewhere in graffiti.

25:14Wedge inside the back cover, almost invisible against the binding, was a memo on faded hospital let ahead. All night staff never work alone and be block or lower theatres after midnight management is aware, report incidents only to admin. No date, no signature. My heart hammered. The next folder I rifle through held staff evaluations, termination paperwork typed with the same phrases over and over, failure to adjust, unable to respect boundaries disruptive to team Arrell. Always dated within days of the incidents. Below it all, tuck flat between fired the vitars, lay an envelope marked personal return to Irene. It wasn't sealed. I hastated, then slid out a battered polaroid, young Irene, 20 years younger at least, in her blue coveralls, Siriuson, and smiling next to a man whose name I didn't know except for the scribbled initials on his badge, MK14 slash 10 slash 13. One of the oldest names from the wall. Foot-sips guff behind me and I nearly dropped a lot. Irene herself stepped into the thin band of hallway light, stopping at the door we're in looking for the first time truly haunted. She shut the door with a careful thud. You weren't supposed to see those, she said. But she didn't sound angry, more like she was

26:18treading a razor-thin hope. I handed her the polaroid. Why are the same names on everything? What happened to them? Irene's hand shook as she tucked the photo back into her breast pocket. It's not just accidents, you know that now. I waited. She gripped the edge of the battered desk, knuckled blanched ghost white. This place eats people, not everyone, just the ones who start to notice. When I first took the night shift, I thought it was just old stores the way you print the new hires, but they're true. This building wasn't always a hospital. It was built in the stone of an old per house, then turned into a TB sanatorium. Too many amard graves, too many who died alone. The walls remember. They keep a hunger. Her lips twisted, searching for a word that wouldn't come. I almost didn't make it. She said finally, vortaroid. I saw more than I showed up. I only got away because she tapped the polaroid because someone else took my place. I say it's random luck, but it's not. Every time someone is taken, place leaps for a while. As long as no one else starts digging. What can I do? I asked helpless, anger and fear vying inside me. Warned people, leave? She shook her head grimly. Nobody listens until it's too late.

27:20By then it's inside you. She stepped close, her face inches from mine. Forget what you saw, leave tonight. Before it knows your name, some people get out if they run. Most don't. I go now if I were you. For a moment, I considered it. Every animal instinct screamed to flee, but my blood thudded with a heavier obligation. I couldn't forget the voices the desperate ones in the darkness, not the ones that wanted to consume but those begging to be remembered. Every note, every carving hidden by hands that I tried to at last to dark. I re-enterned to go, pausing at the doorway. Don't go back down there. The next person at once might be you, please. Then she was gone, a clop of her step-swallowed by the archival dust. I stood in the sudden silence, mind-raising. I could quit, walk out into the predominant blue and promise myself nothing followed. Or I could try to do something anything for the invisible, pleading randoms in the walls and deep under the tile. Instead of leaving, I gallowed everything, the file of personnel records, the notes I'd hoarded, copied my own list of initials and dates. I photographed the graffiti wherever I could find it, compiling a private catalog.

28:21Then I spent three hours in a fever of panic, emilling everything to an encrypted backup, rotting it through burner accounts. If I didn't make it out, someone would have proof. I have believed nothing would transmit, that the files would vanish into static the way my recordings had about the centfold of stayed, blinking green. President Barack Obama. Virginia, we are counting on you. Republicans want to steal enough seats in Congress to raid the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years. But you can stop them. By voting yes, by April 21st. Help put our elections back on a level playing field and let voters decide not politicians. Vote yes, by April 21st. Paid for by Virginians for fair elections. Most people would rather assemble a 300-piece cabinet than search for insurance. That's why the zebra searches for you, comparing over 100 insurance companies to find savings no one else can, compared today at the zebra.com.

29:22That night, when I walked in for my final shift, the hospital felt different. Thica, the lights already dull, my badge stuttering when I swiped through the main door. The other staff were shadows, their faces turned away. Marsha avoided my eyes as she handed over the keys. During D.V.A. tonight, she said, but her voice broke at the end as if she feared the words might be the last she ever said to me. I started my routine with mechanical precision, cleaning toilets, emptying bins, swelving finger prints from glass doors. But I kept my eyes open for the hidden cameras in my pocket to file zipped in my bag. I texted the last V.O.D. to the local union rep, using the break rooms half dead desk top. When midnight ticked over and the halls fell silent, I made my decision. Whatever Irene had warned, I couldn't stop. Not when the names and the walls burned in my memory, not when the dark places under the tile-hound with forces. I locked up my cleaning cart in the wrong closet so it would not be found by morning, pocketed my spare badge, and headed for the forbidden stairwell for the last time. The elevator bank was colder than usual. Night air pulled around my shoes, the cold slick and oily leaking from the stairwell like a thing alive. I pressed my palm to the chipped wall,

30:25felt it vibrating not with machinery, but with something deeper, like a heartbeat under stone. Lights overhead blinked once twice, then stared it into a sickly, but so white. Nobody else in the wing. With effort, I forced my feet down the steps. Ever tread grown with my weight. As I passed the third landing, the egg grew thick, my own breath fogged out in front of my face, the chill biting straight to bone. The bottom corridor was black as a crypt. My flashlight guttered, flickered, then failed, leaving only the twitching glow of the knot in your sign, illuminating nothing but the knoll doorway to theatre four. That's when the whispering started up with new purpose different this time. Not random nose names, particular and hungry, Alex, Alex, Alex. I ran a trembling hand against my chest, feeling the maltetu of my heart. I wanted to turn to race back up to pretend nothing had happened. Instead, driven by compulsion or doom across the threshold into the condemned theatre. Inside, the world warped. The room's vast old dome pressed down, darker for being almost familiar. Ghostly shapes surface at the edge of the circle, orderlies with washed out faces, nurses with badge photos for eyes, patients in old hospital gowns still clutching their

31:28chests, hands pressed to winds that never healed. The numbers grew, crowding closer until the air thickened with electricity and sorrow. The voices resolved to some pleading, others bitter, some shrieking out broken bargains, help us free us one more, just one more and we'll be allowed to go. I crumpled, knees slamming the sticky tile, one hand out to fend off the darkness. Then a pressure, physical as any hand, sees my shoulder. You see us, something hiss, cold breath pouring through my ear and into my skull. You must stay, it's the way you know now. Ghostly hands poured out my skin, pulling insistent. I'm out filled with eyes. Behind me, footsteps real, solid, rapid to figure bursts and with a wild edge to her voice, get away from him. It was Irene. I could see the edge of her blue coveralls in the sickly light, see the flush of something fierce in her eyes. She reached down, rubbed my arm. No, take me, I've seen enough, leave him alone. A dozen voices wail at the core shattering with rage. The cold tightened, then broke, Irene shoved me backward, sending me sprawling to the door as a silent lightning lit up the room.

32:29The last I saw before the dark rose again was Irene's mouth set, brave or terrified or both, as the shape surged over her, swallowing her in grey light. Hand shoved me hard and a tumble through the doors, the world tilting, the corridor swallowing me whole. My last impression was of her, standing defiant, then gone, and the repeated, echoing message pounding inside my skull, remember us remember. I woke sprawled on the asphalt outside the hospital under a sky caught on the edge of dawn, every muscle shaking, bruised in my core. Police lights flickered red blue in the smoky glass. Someone talked into a radio face action. I staggered a bright, reeling, as Medics tried to shepherd me toward an ambulance. My bag of files was half open at my feet, print out spilling out under the headlights. The hospital loomed, all its windows back. As the bundle me away, a soulman in hard hat setting up barriers, official looking people are giving with news crews, evidence bags filled with battered folders. The world, at last, had come to take a hard look at St. Anne's some memorial. I glanced back once to the spot where I'd first entered, where the night air still shimmer, and caught a glimpse of a pale face framed by blue coveralls between the blinds.

33:31It smiled, sad and proud and resigned. I was alive, outside, but I'd left something vital behind in the zenless, hungry Halzen would have followed me out, I couldn't shake the ghost of Irene's sacrifice, or the whispered names that would echo through every silence the rest of my days. Like pressed against my alas like a cruel interrogator, sharp and hot in the soft flush beneath my brows. The scent of antiseptic and melted asphalt filled my nose first strange then familiar, then revolting. Somewhere forces argued in a strained tone that seemed to buzz out the edges of my hearing, and the word of a generator spooled out an endless, jittering drone. There was no sense of peace in waking, no comfort that the previous Ios had been a dream. Something painful had been torn out of me and tossed into the morning air. I sat up slowly, tentatively, in the world, world, and pale streaks of blue and orange, the smeared colours of police light bouncing off the battered side of the reach, St. Anne's a memorial visitors welcome. One of the permatics, a young man with shell-shocked eyes and a blanket thrown half-hazardly over his shoulders, glanced over, startled to see me moving. You should lie back, sir, he said, his voice attired monotone of someone who forgotten how to care exactly, but still clung to the scripts. We're doing our intake, medics will check you in a sack.

34:36I shook my head, feeling me again my joints and the weight of everything I hadn't done. No, I have to. I didn't know what I had to do. One, scream, flee into the sunrise and hope nothing followed. Some responses never fully formed. I only managed to ask, did it, did you find anyone else? He gave me a look as if he thought I might bolt into traffic, then shook his head wearily. Just you, place was empty, like nobody's worked the graveyard in years, but never reported seeing you come out, stumbling like you'd been shot, said you collapse here on the curb, that true. I tried to hold my voice steady, though as someone else a woman, iron, she. I saw her again in memory, standing in the grip of those shadows brave and doomed. She worked here with me. The nitics frampold his face into a deeper mask of concern. He jotted a note. If she's in there, they'll find her. Another responder in a yellow, wet-a-proof jacket was shining a flashlight into the empty lobby through the thick glass. The entrance looked the same as always, a sickly green glow, a pot of tree dying in silence, the robber mat curling by the door but behind it. I could sense the air,

35:39seat awareness of those who had not yet learned to shield themselves from what waited in the dark. Police moved nervously around a perimeter. One detective, more rumpled than the rest, not next to my bag and began methodically removing its battered contents, my keys, my phone, cheaves of notes, the envelope of photos, even the half-melted sandwich I'd carried all night. He pulled on evidence gloves and leaf through them one at a time. He was at least ten years my senior, hollow-eyed and wary, but with the air of someone determined to ring sense from the senseless. He met my gaze. Your Alex, right? I nodded or tried to, the muscles in my next basind. It looks like you've been through hell. We'll need you to come inside for a statement, when you feel steady, but he held up his hand before I could interrupt. A first thing's first, were you involved in whatever happened in there, Austin, burglary, anything that could explain in what we're dealing with. The question surprised me. Part of me wanted to laugh what would they do if I told them the truth that St. Anson Memorial Hospital was a predator, that it chose his prey and hunted when the corridors emptied and no one remembered the names on the walls. Locked me up to date me, maybe. I looked at my hands, noticing for the first time that my fingers

36:41were bruised, and that there was blood under my nails not mine, but someone's dark and sticky. I tucked my hands under the blanket. I just worked here. They tried to get help. The detective tilted his head, quietly studying me, and for a moment I saw the ghost of skepticism in his face give way to weary resignation. He did not pursue the accusation. Look, you're obviously shaken. We got the tip about strange things in this building. Anonymous email with Files attached, staff deaths, missing persons, or a shift log, even a photo of that badge DT know anything about him. I swallowed hard. He worked nights a long time ago. He he vanished, and I ran. I nodded again. It was all I could manage. He picked up the staff badge I'd found scrutinizing the warn writing. We'll run a search. If anything in your files pans out, we'll want to talk again. More officers trickled in. Middix loaded me onto a stretcher before I could object further insisting I let them check my injuries. The ordeal of answering questions stretched for iris, name, job, how long I'd been a say down some, whether I'd taken drugs, whether I'd seen anyone else, did I know what happened to the missing staff, why had I emailed we were

37:45complained to weeks before? I answered as honestly as I dared, still staring around the edges of the unspeakable. Eventually, they let me go no hospital bed on a felt any safer. I wrote down everything in block capital letters as soon as I was able, the names, the messages, Irene sacrifice. I tried to describe the theatre the way the darkness pulse, but on paper it all read like feverish invention rather than memory. They closed the hospital the same day, rolling out battered fencing and plastic barriers, mocking it closed for renovations. Newsvans came, then left. My witness statement was taken but not televised. The files that sent to the media turned up and if you sketch your blog post before being scripted. Two days later an actor left me a voicemail, we won't run this, there's nothing verifiable, no evidence of any crimes. No one contacted me about Irene. The files didn't list her as staff, not in any official capacity for the past 10 years. As far as payroll was concerned, she designed long ago. Every attempt I made to get follow up from local papers, the union, even the city's cold case squad hit the same wall plausible deniability,

38:45insincere regret, or just empty silence. The memory of what I'd lived who pressed at the boundaries of my mind, eroding what little resolve I have left. I moved into a cramped basement rental on the far edge of town. Each night I double and triple locked the doors, unplugged my phone, and lay awake long after midnight, staring at the swirling plaster and the ceiling and crying for dream asleep. The dreams, when they came, were vile and recursive. Hospital corridors everyone the same length, looping endlessly back to their own beginnings. Door sagged open each one whispering my name, hinting at ships moving just out of sight. Irene was always there at the end, caught in the spill of orange light from a single working bulb. Sometimes she wept, sometimes she glared at me as if I'd betrayed her. Always her voice ended in a chorus, not her own, remember us. I tried to hold down a new job factory custodial, supermarket stockroom but each time the pattern of night shift returned I found myself flinching at the sun of soft voices on empty floors. The smell of mildew, the sharp town of cleaner, even the home of ancient fluorescent tubes, all of it could send me careening into a panic I could not shake. I told myself it would pass

39:47in time, it never did. On the fear, I whispered by the fear on me. Several weeks after my release from St. Hansom, a letter arrived at the drop-box I'd rented when paranoia was at its worst. It was brown with age, stamped with a postmark for a town I'd never heard of. Inside, a single slip of blue paper creased at the corners. It was my old staff badge, the one I'd lost the night iron vanished. My name beneath the mortuary polished plastic glimmered and failed some light from the basement window. Beneath it was a noting careful, looping handwriting I recognized immediately, remember us. I sat there for a long time, trace a reservoir chill creeping up my arms. I flipped the badge in my hand. On the reverse was a set of initials I hadn't noticed before on K, DT, LB, and, written last and lost, I R2-slush-5. My hands began to shake. I jammed the badge into the back of a kitchen drawer and the actor shut so hard that silver were jangled against the wood. The note fluttered to the floor, landing near my bare toes. For a moment, I considered burning both purging any connection to that place. The thought festered, never breaking the surface.

40:49I was afraid, not of the building, now boarded and empty, but of the invitation it still whispered in the dark. An unfinished bargain. The ladder haunted me, the badge felt radioactive. Every day I opened the drawer to grab a fork, a half-it-picked to see the initials had multiplied. I didn't let myself look too closely or too low. I tried to move on to make routine my cage to live in the bland patterns of quiet work, after shift homelots and old sitcom runs but the chill of St. Anson's followed me, then as a shadow. Twice, I found myself sleepwalking, shoe scoffer or from crossing the crackside walk in front of the old hospital gates. Neighbors stared as I stumbled, eyes blank, toward the keep-out signs, pausing always at the threshold where electric light never quite held the dark at bay. Both times, I woke with my winded arm throbbing and the sense that voice, quiet and cold, was urging me on. Those days blurred with the kind of exhausted horror. I stopped answering my phone. Friends messages dried up. The union never called back. Even my mother's voicemails her gentle ticking in, her distant concern began to sound hollow like a transmission from another world.

41:49I wanted to run, to start fresh in a new city, even as I knew something would only follow. It wasn't the hospital's location that mattered to it was memory, or warning, or a kind of curse I'd inherited by knowing too much. What truly undid me was the sense that my part in it could never really be over. That I hadn't escaped so much has been spared for now a witness and a vessel. Sometimes, in the dull crackle of bad wiring, I hear them again. Soft and distinct voices swelling out of static as the minute hand creeps past 1 a.m. Sometimes I answer. Sometimes I hide. President Barack Obama. Virginia, we are counting on you. Republicans want to steal enough seats in Congress to raid the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years. But you can stop them by voting yes by April 21st. Help put our elections back on a level playing field and let voters decide not politicians. Vote yes by April 21st. Paid for by Virginians for fair elections.

42:51Forget everything you had planned for this weekend because you are sitting on your couch and winning from the comfort of your own home. I'm here with SpinQuest where you could play hundreds of slot games, all of the table games you love, and you could even win real cash prizes. New users, $30 coin packs are on sale for 10 at SpinQuest.com. SpinQuest is a free to play social casino. Boyd, we're prohibited. Visit SpinQuest.com for more details. But one night, a month or so after the badger arrived, I couldn't sleep. I got up pacing my tiny kitchen hands restless. There was an old plastic radio in a corner, one of those handcrack models that barely picked up anything but static and the evangelical A& Channel. On impulse, I twisted the knob. The antenna cracked, the radio buzzed to life and there in between the hiss and pop. I heard it a voice, not quite male, not quite female, whispering a string of names. First softly then louder. M.K. I'll be. D.T. S.C. Then my own name. Alex. On the edge of the

43:53transmission, beneath the click of the FM dial, one more word help. The radio went dead. My flat chilled by at least 10 degrees, as if an old freezer door had flung open, flooding everything with the past. I reeled, searching for meaning, but already knew what it would be. Not the hospital. Nay. The bargain had shifted. I was part of the chain now. Dispressed wet the last of the numbness aside and left me frantic with resolve. I rifled through the drawer for my badge, gripped it until the corner was bit deep into my flesh. I pulled out Irene's note. I unfolded the hospital directory, battered and faded that I'd never managed to throw away. And I wrote. I wrote copies of every name, every date, every warning, everything I'd seen. A email journalist, union contacts, old supervisors, even distant relatives who'd never worked a single night shift in their lives. I printed pages and left them in public libraries, wander mats, supermarkets. I slept fliers under doors and into bus station benches cryptic, desperate, everywhere, saying down some memorial or remember US, don't go alone.

44:54Sometimes I included the initials. Sometimes just blank spaces that anyone could fill. People called me crazy. People threatened me. A man in a suit from some regulatory board threatened to sue if I didn't stop spreading libel. My landlord asked how long I planned to stay. Police warned me to mine my business. But every time I heard or read some new name in a scattered news reporter missing, nursing on another state, a janitor vanished from a shelter, a patient on a forgotten ward, initials carved into the wood of an abandoned building I felt less alone, though not less afraid. The chain was nationwide, maybe older, maybe endless. I lived like that for six months, not quite awake, not asleep, haunted by cold and by inevitability. Nothing supernatural seemed to happen in those months not in the surface. No more bruises, no more missing time. But sometimes, on still nights scraps of hospitals smell pressed into my nose, harsh and metallic, and my skin would cause if someone's hand hovered just above my arm. The weight of old debts then, one final time, something came. It was deep winter moonless, air brittle. I lay in bed,

45:54roused to consciousness not by sound but by a darkness that felt too thick, hovering lower by my sheets. I reached for the lamp, the bulb exploded with the pop of ancient glass. In total blackness, I listened to my own racket breathing until and mistakenly I heard footsteps in the kitchen and saw the faintest blue glow-sifting under the door. Hot hammering, I stumbled upright. The radio crackled, burst to life. I'm the counter-sat my badge. Next to it, the familiar, battered stuff older from the hospital, one I was sure I'd left behind or destroyed. And, rising to meet me, the soft, unmistakable outline of iron blew a cigarette smoke shimmering only with the kitchen light would never reach. She didn't smile but her eyes deep and old and full of sore held mine. I heard, not with my ears, but in the deep coil of my mind, her words, it's not finished. The names. Don't forget. Don't let it feed. She pressed the badge into my palm, ice-reading through my veins. I ran to the kitchen window steamed with the mist of a hundred winter nights gone raw. For just an instant, I tasted copper on my tongue, the acrid metallic town of hospital blood and ancient fear. Then, without drama,

46:58without lighting or thunder, she faded. The radio fell silent. My apartment returned to still an ordinary cold, but the badge in my hand was different. The names on its back shimmered. Below my own initials, another had appeared overnight, I, R. My mouth worked, but no words came. There was only a pulse through my fingers and a deep sense of certainty. My task was not to end the chain, but to hold a close for a while to fend off the forgetting, upright hunger. The next morning, I packed a bag. I traveled to the address in the anonymous envelope, a Crematorium turned off half outside the city-border. I left the badge and Irene's note with an envelope full of every photocopied record I'd salvaged. Marked with two words, remember US. Then I walked away, letting the light creep over my shoulders, swallowing the fatigue, a horror jagged gap we're belonging used to be. St. Ansel Memorial would reopen. They always did a new staff, new shift logs, new laughter echoing in the bright morning halls. But some things changed to a plaque with a row of initials hidden in a quiet corner to set of stuff instructions, explicit and strange do not work alone. Do not listen to the whispers. And somewhere at the back of every

48:02new badge, I found trace barely visible except in the half-light of the old names still galloping forward, waiting, pleading, remember us. In the end, I could never be free of what I'd seen. But so long as the chain was not broken, as long as one person any person had kept the names alive and the store is circulating, some part of the hunger could be held at bay. I keep the last foot covered no clip to my nights and now, a warning and a burden, both. Never trust the silence between midnight and dawn. Never ignore old names. Never let the hospital forget. Even now, when the wind rises in the light flicker, I press my hand flat to the trembling cluster and whisper back every name I know. Because the night belongs to the ones who remember, and the walls are always listening. I kept the promise etched in my marrow, though there were nights it felt like the adult hospital shadow followed me through the waking world, growing taller as the sun edged in the city's lights below beyond my window. Life did not return to normal because the notion itself had become strange to me, but I learned the contours of my new world, fragmented sleep, a taste of cold metal lingering down every cup of instant coffee, vigilance that never quite relaxed. When to loosen its grip on my neighborhood, healing to a queer, muddy thaw.

49:05I developed a ritual climbing the stairs to the roof just before dawn, badge in my palm, whispering the same names, letting my breath haze out in the pale chill. Some mornings I imagine that I saw Irene silhouette in the pattern of fog on the next building never quite close enough to convince me of anything, but always there at the edge, tetted by memory. I climbed to order where I could. Every week, I sent ladders. Sometimes I addressed them to old janitors unions, to city offices, to health inspectors. Sometimes I didn't address them, I'd all just drop them in a blue postbox mocked only with initials and dates, and the plea to remember. I filled out online forums, submitted hits to local ghosts to her guys, posted warnings and forgotten forum threads. An old custodian from a hospital upset even wrote me back once, is not only said, I've seen things to stay shop. It didn't help, but it didn't hurt either. For a while, it seemed this was to be my life, guardian of names, student of sleeplessness, half crazy town in a rental with a door rattling full of cursed artifacts. But every chain, however carefully tended, must be tested. It started smaller rerun of the same old red, simmering gently. A car to scrap of news online, sent on some memorial to reopen wings

50:10for modernisation, promises fresh start. Though as a photo of smiling executives cutting a ribbon, not a one of them local old enough to remember the dozens who had vanished. The building in the back around looked both unchanged and wrong, the windows too bright, the new sign glinting with the unnatural polish of denial. I deleted the tab, but couldn't and see it. I doubled my efforts, sent new warnings with more urgency, but there was only so much an anonymous sender could achieve. I stocked message boards, reading every rumor. The lack mold in the basement lights flickering on and condemned wings, security contractors quitting after-night shift without giving notice. Patents, yes, but dismissed as cheaper than legend by anyone with authority. Sometimes an ex nurse would post, asking about the initials, therefore it would vanish by morning, swallowed up by silence or admin edits. One morning, the Branstans buzzers startled me out of a half-dream in which the hospitals tiled holes and felled beneath my feet. I let it bust twice three times. I stood at the window, watching a delivery truck idle by the coat, its hazardous blinking. Probably nothing a package for wrong address. But I stayed frozen,

51:10fighting a jitter that felt like a trap closing. Another buzz insistent. I forced myself downstairs. The man at the door was in plain clothes, but everything about him's tank of official I.D. Badge on a line-out, clipboard in one hand, boards suspicion in the lines of the corners of his eyes. He gave my name, my real one, and a tone that broke nerdy-nile. Alex, need a minute of your time, city-health is here to follow up on some complaints about saint and some memorial. We've had aud reports missing persons, weird files, do your names come up. My mouth was dry. You hear task about the past for the present. Athens mile. Both in a little about the future. He shifted his clipboard. You send in some pretty well documentation. Staff deaths, notes, claims about patterns in the building, anonymous tips to media too. Then there's the recent incident. His eyebrows dipped. You want to elaborate? Did I? I didn't know. They urged a fold to spill everything to beg for some official hand to close the wound rushed through me. But the deeper urged the one that wore my nerve for always to protect. Protect the names,

52:12the dead, even the living who'd returned to those halls with wide eyes. I sent those and because I was afraid no one else would listen. I said finally, my voice low, steady out of nowhere. The place is wrong. It doesn't forget, and it doesn't forgive me then. Every name I gave you each when I saw evidence tied to incidents. Disappearances and explained injuries. You can brush me off as crazy, but you'll see the pattern if you check records hard enough. Someone always pays for looking. He flicked through his notes. That's a lot of accusation for an old building. It's not the building. It's the will behind it. Something wants company. If you dig there, do it with someone else in the room. Never alone. Never below two after midnight. And do not answer if it calls. Something in my tone must have unsettled him. The lines at his jaw tightened. We'll take it under advisement, Mr. Green. Just one more question. That badge he gestured vaguely at the outline in my jacket. Any chance we can take a look? With reluctance, I pulled it out, flashing my thumb over the initials on the back. He studied it. His eyes narrow. Odd place for those markings. Usually, only the HR code on the reverse and your handwriting I, R, on the bottom, was that one of your supervisors. A cold spot opened. Not exactly,

53:15no one you'd find in payroll records. She stayed after she shouldn't have. She shouldn't have asked around if the staff will talk. They won't, but ask anyway. He nodded at the brisk, unseen nod of officials everywhere. Thank you for your cooperation. He left, shuffling away in the grey drizzle. I tucked the badge away, feeling the faintest static jolt as it slipped into my pocket. Upstairs, I closed the blinds and waited, listening for the aftershock I knew would come. Outside, the world did not change. Across the street, a grocery truck unloaded crates. Two kids argued over a scooter. Normalcy reasserted itself, loud and indifferent. But inside, in the hollow between my heartbeats, I caught the rasp of breath in an empty stairwell. That night's leap was a lost country. I sat on the couch. Radio soft static blanketing the silence, half expecting Irene's presence flooring blue beside me. But nothing appeared to just the endless thin hunn. When the hospital officially reopened the new snuck in on a late segment, reporter was gusting about community resources and the fine job done on a restoration I took the train across him. Couldn't help myself.

54:16I watched from the low concrete wall beside the parking lot as nurses milled in their new uniforms, as shiny ambulances before the illusion that a line had been drawn between old and new. I did not enter a thought craved of the way an attic crazed pausing. I simply watched, counting President Barack Obama. Virginia, we are counting on you. Republicans want to steal enough seats in Congress to raid the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years. But you can stop them by voting yes by April 21st. Help put our elections back on a level playing field and let voters decide not politicians. Vote yes by April 21st. Paid for by Virginians for fair elections. Hi, this is Alex Cantrowicz. I'm the host of Big Technology podcast, a longtime reporter and an on air contributor to CNBC. And if you're like me, you're trying to figure out how artificial intelligence is changing the business world and our lives. So each week on Big Technology, I bring on key actors from companies building AI tech and outsiders trying to influence it.

55:19Asking where this is all going, they come from places like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon and plenty more. So if you want to be smart with your wallet, your career choices, in meetings with your colleagues and at dinner parties, listen to Big Technology podcast or ever you get your podcasts. How many people went in groups and who was sent alone to fetch supplies from the lower levels? Those are janitor young, uncalust hands, the same cheap jacket I'd worn just months before pushing a mop cut for a ground floor doorway. A security guard called something after her, the words were muffled by the wind, but I heard a joke or maybe a warning. She smiled the fragile first week smile and vanished around the corner into the old bee block. I read it. Time crawled. She returned pale but intact. I watched every instinct in myself fries go, worn her, tell her to run, task about graffiti to pay attention to the silence. But I stayed on my wall, a ghost unable to intervene, waited by my own unfinished business. Maybe I thought the chain would break of its son accord. Maybe the warnings, if enough of us kept muttering them would hold back the worst. But I knew better. Memory, if left intended,

56:22always wroughts from the outside in. Strange things started to happen in the neighborhood as spring crept into the city. Two blocks from my apartment are powered out at struck one night plunging the street in an opaque, inky dark. People hauled and banged on doors convinced a wind carried voices beyond the howling of the downtown trains. The next day don't show up and pale, the news reporting a missing person, a building superintendent come without a trace, last seen below in the godforsaken tangle of city pipes. At night, I found a slip of paper which under my own entryway, a date two initials, ridden in ballpoint as fierce as a knife. Not from me. Not from anyone I knew. I scoured the records, made calls, pressed myself into the old grooves of compulsion. The initials matched the missing man the date was today. I felt the world waiver was this how crap forward, hopping from nest to nest in the city's underbelly, finding people too used to being unseen, unremarked. I broke my own rule and went back to St. Hanson, this time not as a visitor or witness, but as someone willing to trust specific meant clarity. There were new staff at the front desk to security men who smelled of coffee and bored expectation. I signed in with a fake name, using an excuse about lost property

57:25and old paperwork from the previous era. They handed me a visitor badge and waved me on without a glance. Wondering the familiar halls, I felt their shape alive under my feet the scuffed lines on the floor tile, the battered fire doors, the echo in the walls like breath. Everything looked brighter, shields raised against the dark. Postes for staff wellness programs cleaned with fresh plastic. But behind every update, the old bones remained. I made my way through the service tunnels, retracing overlaps. Whenever I passed the stretch of wool or corner I had known well, a scan for graffiti initials, fresh or faded, peaking from behind-safety posters and undernually lacquer trim. It was all there of some newlywashed, some covered by layers of institutional beige, but always leaking through like old blood. I added one of my own, a tip of a pancarven to desperate IR in the seam of a doorframe. A nurse spotted me in the arc of corridor. She paused and certain. You lost, as she asked. I forced a smile. Just looking for Irene used to be on days, heard she might be back. Her face furrows then melted into professional skepticism. Don't know

58:27that name, sorry, but something at the edge of her voice told me it rang a bell or maybe cland an alarm. She heard off her footsteps that going after. The lower levels were still technically sealed, new padlocks and steel doors fresh out of used tape stretch tight. I hovered, waited for a gap in the cameras, then slept my hand for a loose hinge, feeling for the cold of familiarity. The dome was just as I remembered a bread-than-weight barely contained by the walls above. The air-tasted rom, not just stay-albut-age, as if every exhale in this place had been drawn in a hundred times before. Something watched from the far side of the darkness. I did not see it, but I felt the old urgency building in the static behind my ears. I crept forward into the chill. On the blackboard of the old operating room, a ghostly scroll materialized as if conjured by my gaze, asterisk-sterisk-remember-us-asterisk-sterisk. Hand-writing like mine, but not the tale in the orcewept in the style that belonged to another era. I might feat a new patch of initials, months fresh, the paint only just dry. A cold certainty shivered through me. It wasn't just St. Anson that kept the chain alive, it was every place hungry

59:28for forgetting, every shadowed institution when names were erased by custom and need. I wrote in the wall myself in the open, each name I remembered, stacking them like bricks against the tide. When I finished, I left my badge tucked into a crevice in the wall, letting it join the relics that took in for whoever came next. I said the names allowed, voice-breaking but unashamed. MK, Helbee, Tee-Tee, SC, BD, IR, AL, all of you. The room scene to hold its breath. For a fraction of a second, the pressure-abbed there grew lighter. But my time was up, the tap of footsteps in the service dare will snap the moment. I slipped back into the day let-halls, visited a badge-turned backward, my skin humming as if electrified. I passed through the lobby, giving a last glance at the front desk. Behind the glass, I caught the reflection not of myself, but a blur of blue, a fragment of an old uniform a face-watching with weary sorrow. Irene. Her eyes, solemn and proud, met mine in the security mirror just for a heartbeat. I walked away, not daring to look back. The remainder of the day, and week, and month-bled together, countless names flickering across news tickers another

1:00:29missing patient, a janitor gone, a note posted online about strange forces in a subway tunnel. My warning to proliferate were copied, erased, marked, but sometimes this duck. I compiled a master list of constantly abated, desperate ledger on old envelopes, napkins browser bookwacks, a memorial for those who were gone and those who were come. Sometimes, a stranger would reach out, a nurse from halfway across the country, a custodian from a retirement home in Florida. I felt it too, their emails read. Thank you, what do I do? My advice was all I could offer, asterisk asterisk, don't go alone. Write the names. Tell someone. Don't forget. Asterisk asterisk occasionally, someone sent back news that the cycle had claimed another. Sometimes, it was just thanks for the confession of an innumable relief that someone else believed. It was never enough, not when the nights were at their thickest in silence press barbs into my dreams. Even now, I wake sometimes to find the initial stress and fog on my window. My own name added now the chain nodding tighter. The city moves on, times cycle stubbornly toward new losses,

1:01:29new amnesia. For each time I feel the cold begin to creep each time the radio flickers to static and begins the old litany awake fully, I walk to the nightstand, and I whisper the truth aloud, line by line, name by name. I do it not for myself, but for Irene. For those she saved, for every soul who carved a warning where only the desperate would see. For the possibility that, someday, the names will outnumber the hush, and a dark hunger will go wanting. But until then, I keep the watch. I remember, because that's all the living can do in a world built on forgetting, keep the names alive, breathe meaning back into the silence, and hope against all laws, and all endings that the chain will not end with us, but be carried, still bright, but it was brave enough to listen to the whispers in the night. Some nights the chain felled and breakable, as if every warning and whispered named it nothing but by time for the next shadow to step forward and be swallowed. On those nights, I'd paste the apartment, badge pressed into my sweating palm, collecting breath a slight boar of charm. It would always begin with a draft cold as a hospital stairwells that forced its way beneath the door, rattled the glass in its frame, send shivers racing out my arms. My mouth would dry out. My nerves would drag me to the window, where the city

1:02:34glimmered in different and endless, the streets taught with the tension of secrets kept too long. But there was a shift coming, heavier than before. I could feel it on impatience in the silence that old rituals didn't soften, an urgency behind every creek of the floorboards. The final test had not yet come, that much was clear. Three nights after my last visit to St. Enselm, just as the clock's red digits blinked past 1.30am, a new sound shot of the routine, a knock slow and purposeful at my front door. It was not the wild pounding of a break in, but neither was it the casual type of a neighbor come to borrow sugar. It was measured one, two, three beats. Pause. Then three more. I stood motionless in the kitchen, pulse stuttering. The radio pop was static, a nice e-metallic tang slithered into the air. I glanced toward the night-send, the badge glowed faint as a cap to star. The knock came again. I crept to the people careful, silent heart in my throat. Through its goss, I saw nothing but shadow, the cheap hole was gumpses outside my door flickering-like defective heartbeat monitors. And then, as I reached double-locked the bolt, a voice, horse, and doubled, whispered from the other

1:03:35side. Alexed opened up. It was my mother's voice, and yet not. Flat hollowed as a channel through a mouthful of dirt. My insides twisted. I'd spoken to her a week ago her number letting up my phone, miles away, certainty alive in her tone. She wouldn't be here. She couldn't be here. Alex, I forgot the names, let me in. Terra flared, urging me to recoil to retreat to the kitchen and dial for help. But something heavier kept me rooted, the call of the chain, or maybe the part of me that was tired of running, of letting others pay the price. I can't, I said, voice trembling, but clear. You're a nodder, you can't come in, not tonight. A pause. Then a voice turned, walked by hatred and ye, you remember but you all forget, you keep the chain alive, but you never break it, let me in and name them for me, Alex, let me in and be forgotten with them all. Behind a door, the shadow shifted, press flat, and tall against the threshold. The chill in the apartment ballooned until my breath turned visible, curling white in the air. My teeth shattered. I gripped my badge and tell my knuckles

1:04:36burned. Not this time, I whispered, and felt some old piece of self-fusion to steal. I remember, I will always remember. For a moment, the world hung suspended one thin wall between me and a Bolivian. Then, with a sudden, shattering bang, the front window exploded inward. Shards pep of the floor with a crystal enroer, frostbiting at my bare feet. The shadow poured through the rupture, a cold fog racing toward me, voices carried on its current hundreds of mouths. Names blurring together, Irene Danumarsia will be a sea help us at Eflat to the centre of the room, badge raised like a ward, eyes stinging with tears and dust. The fog circled me, the voices pulling in opposite directions, some pleading, some threatening, all desperate to be acknowledged. Something ancient and hungry loomed in the centre of the howling its outline vast and void like as if the hospital itself had broken through the skin of the city and now bent over me, insistent to drag me in. In a rush of panic, I did the only thing left, I shouted the names aloud, louder and harsh than ever before. Every syllable ran with memory, pain, hope. Each name was a blow against the cold, against the silence, against the ancient will detour to erase. N.K.D.D. the Seethalbeat, I.R. Marsha Doreen, Irene Daniel, jibble, everyone

1:05:41for remember us I remember you'd I remember. The shadow roared, the temperature plummeted further, and I dropped to my knees, batch burning in my grip as a electrified. Light streamed up from my hands blaze over, piercing the gloom with each name, another pulse, like bells tolling through fog. And then, in the centre of the cold, a figure resolved, Irene, spectral and resolute standing between me and the darkness, arms wide. Her voice at once everywhere I know her, cut through the uproar, no more, not him, not tonight, he keeps the names, he bears the chain. The shadow shuddered, recoiled, its edges unraveling as if at the touch of sun. For an instant, a glimps face is in the depths snoling with loss, weaving with relief, calling out name after name after name before the fulc shrank contracted and was suck ladly through the hole in the window, trailing a storm of whispers.

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