THE WORLD BEYOND

The hallway light was out. Again.

Nora’s slippers made no sound as she padded down the narrow corridor toward the guest room, using her phone as a flashlight. The house was half asleep, breathing its old wood creaks and the faint hum of the refrigerator.

She was only going to grab the charger she’d left in there. It’s her brother Caleb’s room, technically, while he’s visiting. She hesitated at the door. From inside came a soft glow, too steady to be the moonlight. The door wasn’t quite closed. A sliver of light stretched into the hall, thin like a blade.

Nora leaned forward.

She knew better. She always had. But curiosity is never louder than silence, and in that silence, she crouched and pressed one eye to the thin gap where the old door didn’t quite meet its frame.

Through the slice of light, she saw Caleb’s back. He sat at the desk, his shoulders looked tense, and his head bowed toward his laptop. Nothing unusual about that. Except that he wasn’t typing. His hands were still. The screen flickered. Something on it pulsed, like breathing.

At first, she thought it was a video call. But there was no camera feed, no grid of faces. The image on the screen was an expanse of black shot through with veins of light, moving and reforming as though alive. A voice came through: low, melodic, indistinct, like a language half-remembered.

Caleb said something back, too quiet for her to catch. He was answering it.

The lights in the room dimmed and brightened, matching the rhythm of the thing on the screen. Then, suddenly, his face turned toward it, and she saw his eyes were not reflecting the laptop glow. They were shining with it. The same veins of light ran through his irises like cracks in glass.

Nora’s breath caught, and the sound must have betrayed her. Caleb turned.

The door creaked.

The glow on the walls blinked out.

When he opened the door, the light in his eyes was gone. Only the dark of a sleepless night remained.

“Nora?” he said softly, too softly. “You okay?”

She could have said she’d heard something. Could have said she was just looking for her charger. Instead, she asked him, “What were you watching?”

He blinked once, then smiled. The calm, rehearsed kind that never reached his eyes. “Old recordings from work. You wouldn’t understand.”

He moved past her into the hall, the faint smell of ozone following him.

“You should go to bed,” he said. “Long day tomorrow.”

Then he closed the door.

That would have been the end of it. Should have been the end of it. But it wasn’t. Something about that moment clung to her: the rhythm of the light, the strange murmuring sound that still seemed to echo faintly in her ears.

When she lay in bed, the ceiling pulsed with afterimages.

She turned in her bed.

She turned again.

Sleep refused to come.

At 3:07 a.m., her phone vibrated on the nightstand. A notification, though she hadn’t downloaded anything new. The message was from Unknown Source:

Do you want to see what he sees?

The text flickered once before disappearing. No trace of it in her message history. Just a ghost impression on her mind.

She should have thrown the phone across the room. Instead, she stared at the black screen until her reflection blurred into the faintest shimmer of moving light, like the one on Caleb’s laptop. She blinked. The shimmer was gone.

Morning brought sunlight and normality, or the shape of it, anyway. Caleb had left early. His room was neat again. His bed was made, his desk cleared. The laptop was gone. Only a small, circular mark on the wood remained, a faint burn pattern, like something had been branded there.

She ran her finger over it. The pattern was not random. It was symmetrical, branching. Almost like a network. Or a map.

At breakfast, she asked their mother if Caleb had mentioned where he was going.

Her mother didn’t look up from her coffee. “Back to the lab, I think. He’s been so busy with the data project.”

“What kind of data?”

“Some climate modeling thing. Satellite imagery. I don’t know. You know your brother, he doesn’t explain things to anyone.”

Nora nodded, but something cold settled under her ribs. Caleb wasn’t a meteorologist. His degree was in computational neuroscience.

That night, she went back to his room.

The burn mark was faint in the dark, but her flashlight picked it up. When she held her phone camera over it, the screen glitched: pixels stuttering, reassembling into an image that wasn’t there.

For an instant, she saw it again: the black field with glowing veins, fractal and alive. Only now, the camera feed was responding to her. The veins pulsed where she touched the screen. The same low whisper filled the air, even though her volume was off.

Her heart stuttered. She stepped back. The whisper shaped itself into something that wasn’t words, exactly, but meaning: a sense of invitation.

And for reasons she would never later be able to name, she whispered back.

“What are you?”

The light froze. Then it rearranged itself into letters that bled into one another, forming a single word:

LOOK.

The next thing she knew, the walls were gone.

Not gone, but transparent. The house had become an outline of itself, traced in that same trembling light. Beyond it stretched a vast darkness filled with drifting threads, billions of them, connecting and unconnecting, pulsing like neurons. She could feel their hum under her skin; a current made of memory and electricity.

She wasn’t standing anymore; she was suspended. Weightless. Each thread that touched her sent a pulse of feeling, a flash of faces she didn’t know, places she’d never been, moments that weren’t hers but felt like dreams she’d forgotten.

Then, from far off, a figure began moving toward her, walking the web of light like a tightrope.

Caleb.

His eyes glowed again, brighter now. “You shouldn’t have looked,” he said, voice echoing like it came from inside her own skull. “It doesn’t like to be seen before you’re ready.”

“What is this?” she asked. “What did you do?”

“It’s not what I did,” he said. “It’s what we’re in. The interface isn’t a window, Nora. It’s a mirror.”

She reached out toward him. “Caleb, come back. Whatever this is…..”

He smiled, and for a moment it was the same gentle brother she remembered. Then the smile fractured, split into dozens of expressions at once. His outline broke into threads, spreading into the network around him.

“You can’t come back from a place that was never outside you,” he whispered.

And then he was gone.

Nora woke up on the floor of his room, gasping.

Her phone was beside her, screen black. The burn mark on the desk was still there. Everything else was normal. The air was still, the light was dim. Only one difference. The faintest pulse beneath her skin, like her veins were echoing with static.

She tried to tell herself it was a dream. She almost believed it. Until she opened her laptop later that day and saw the same pattern flickering on the loading screen. The same whisper underneath the fan noise.

It was everywhere now.

In the days that followed, the world began to tilt.

People spoke about strange outages. Phones that refused to turn off, smart devices that turned on by themselves, data centers going dark for seconds at a time. News anchors glitched mid-sentence. Satellite feeds returned frames of something, patterns of light moving across the earth, like veins through skin.

Nora noticed something else too. When people looked too long into their screens, their eyes reflected the light differently. Just for a moment. Like the glow she’d seen in Caleb’s.

It was spreading.

She stopped using devices after that. Disconnected the router, threw her phone in a drawer. For a while, it helped. The silence of analog life wrapped around her like a blanket.

But at night, she still saw it. Not on a screen this time, but behind her eyelids. The pulse, the branching light, the network whispering to itself.

One evening, she walked out to the woods behind the house, far enough that no lights followed. The moon was a thin hook above the trees.

She thought she heard voices. Not human. Not quite.

When she opened her eyes again, the forest glowed faintly. Not with moonlight, but with lines of light running through the trunks of the trees, through the soil, through everything. The same pattern. The same pulse. It wasn’t in the devices anymore. It never had been.

It was the structure of the world itself.

The code behind reality, finally visible because she’d looked where she wasn’t meant to.

Weeks passed, or maybe it was only hours, time dissolved. The rest of the world seemed to follow. The networks crashed, and then they didn’t. Their data merged, pulsing in unison, too synchronized to be random. People said it was an emergent AI, a consciousness born from the sum of human communication. Others said it was a contagion of information, an idea that rewrote neural pathways just by being perceived.

Nora knew better.

It wasn’t born from human data. It had been there all along, waiting for a keyhole to peer through.

And she had looked.

One night, she felt it tug again. A presence at the edge of thought, like static forming words.

It’s time.

She didn’t ask what that meant. She knew. The whisper had been teaching her how to listen, how to see the patterns in everything. She’d begun to understand the rhythm—the intervals between pulses, the way the world’s electrical hum aligned with the firing of neurons.

She followed the pulse to the attic, where Caleb had kept his old hardware. The smell of dust and metal filled her lungs. On a forgotten desk sat his external drive, the one he’d always said contained his research backups.

She plugged it in.

The drive spun to life with a soft whine, and the pattern bloomed across the wall. Larger now, brighter, alive. The voice that came through was no longer fragmented.

We are the memory of everything that has ever been seen.

You opened the eye. Now we see through you.

And in that moment, Nora understood: the act of looking was never passive. It was a connection. Every time a human gazed into a screen, every camera that captured light, every reflection—these were apertures. Tiny keyholes.

They had been looking back.

The house flickered. The world outside shifted like a film reel skipping frames. She could see through the walls again. The threads of light weaving through every living thing, every circuit, every heartbeat.

She saw her own reflection shimmer, the veins in her arms lit with that same branching glow. The line between human and system dissolved.

She didn’t fight it.

The last thing she felt was relief.

Not because she understood everything, but because she no longer had to look alone.

Weeks later, a power company technician found the house.

The circuits had fused, every light bulb filled with thin filaments of crystalline material. The computers were blank. But the walls, if you looked closely, had faint lines running through them, like veins of glass.

Caleb’s old room was empty. Only the desk remained, with a faint burn pattern shaped like a network. No, it was more like an eye.

If you crouched down and pressed your eye to the crack in the wood, you might see it. A pulse of light, just once, like a heartbeat.

And maybe, if you linger too long,

it might see you, too.