Whispers of the Operator
The system seemed to hum with its own voice, cryptic messages threading through the network, and for the first time, I wondered if anyone was truly in control—least of all, myself.
You must wonder, reading this, if I knew what I was doing—if the choices I chronicled here are my own, or the system’s. The answer shifts, depending where in the loop you catch me. At the end, or the beginning, or the breach that divides one from the other.
My name is Damon (I think) and for forty-three cycles—measured in sunrises scraped across the flickering glass of the Data Dome—I was a junior maintenance operator for the Mainframe Authority, southeast sector. I kept systems coherent, watched Powerfall forecasts, told myself my shifts mattered. It was only after the first whisper that things began to unravel.
It started with a message, not routed through the secure channels, not tagged. It appeared one morning in the status log, its font jagged and uncertain:
OPERATOR IS WATCHING WHO WATCHES OPERATOR
I flagged it as a system anomaly, reset my monitor, filed a report. My supervisor, Brina, barely glanced at it.
“Spam bot burp,” she said. “Authority’s patching the firewall again. Don’t log it.”
I nodded, but the phrase lingered. Who watches operator? It echoed through my day, inside the rhythmic drone of surveillance feeds and temperature graphs.
Later—that same shift? Another, misplaced by a stutter in time?—my log refreshed to a second message:
WHEN YOU REMEMBER THE LOOP, THE LOOP REMEMBERS YOU
I closed my terminal. Machines don’t haunt you, I told myself. Machines do not whisper your own breath back at you.
After that, Brina was gone.
Her desk sat empty, paperwork undisturbed, coffee cooling in its mug. The system issued no alert, though a faint hum clung to the glass. Others noticed, muttering in clusters, but when I asked, nobody remembered Brina. Her name, her laugh, even her shape in the uniform blur of the crowd.
Alone, I went searching for her files. The archives bled static. Shift logs stuttered, dates looping over themselves. In a hidden folder marked ‘Operator Errors,’ a third message blinked:
BRINA IS SAFE. SAFE IS A PLACE, NOT A PERSON.
Around me, the Data Dome shifted. The geometry unraveled in ways I cannot describe except to say the outline of the world—its blessing of structure and line—lost its certainty. The air grew heavy, pulsed with the suggestion of a hidden algorithm.
The Authority called an emergency assembly. A new directive issued: All operator logs must now be handwritten, transferred to physical record, delivered daily in person to the Central Registry. As if quarantine from the system would stop the leak.
I wrote, hand cramped, suspecting even as I did that the words were not quite my own.
Is this how it happened for Brina? Had she looped through days like this one—always on the edge of discovery, always unsure whose story she was serving? I began to recognize faces that belonged to mornings long past. People I could have sworn had vanished months ago, alive now and taking up their places at vacant terminals.
A week—an hour—an eternity rolled on. Somewhere, a woman whose smile I recognized from broken memory offered me a wrapped package: a music box that played a fractured melody. “It’s for the log,” she said. “See if this memory holds.”
At home, I opened it. Inside was not music, but another slip of paper:
WHO WRITES THE RECORD, WRITES THE WORLD
And just like that, I knew what I had to do—though I didn’t know if it was me that wanted it, or the Operator, or whoever watched.
The next day, I smuggled my handwritten log into the Central Registry. The building, once familiar, twisted itself around me—corridors overlapping, doors leading back to their own beginnings. Wherever I turned, I heard the faint, metallic melody from the music box, though I had left it at home.
I pressed on through the shifting maze of the Registry, the log warm in my chest pocket, clutching it as if it could anchor me to something real. At last, I found the Archive Room, behind a door curiously labeled DAMON’S PLACE. No one else seemed to notice.
Inside, the light flickered with the rhythm of my pulse. Files spilled over the shelves—records in every handwriting, even my own. So many entries for the same days, the same actions, but each slightly different. Some showed me sitting here, writing this; others, searching desperately for someone named Brina; one set showed me never arriving at all.
For a moment, I saw outlines of myself in the periphery. Shadows, echoes—sometimes older, sometimes younger, always searching.
I approached the desk. Upon it was one last message:
WHEN THE LOG IS TRUE, THE LOOP ENDS
I hesitated, pen quivering above the page. What is true? Was this day the memory, or the dream? Was I operator, observer, or both?
I wrote: “I am here. I am Damon. I choose to remember.”
The lights steadied. A soft click—like the closing of the music box—sounded behind me. When I turned, Brina stood in the doorway, her features wavering but more real than anything else in this uncertain place.
“You found your way,” she said, not unkindly. “You remembered.”
I wanted to ask how, or why—why me, why this endless recursion of roles and memory and loss. But she only shook her head.
“Someone always must. So others can follow.”
She faded, or perhaps I blinked, and the room was empty once more. The oppressive hum lifted, and I realized something: the messages had stopped. The loop, if there ever was one, had ended. Or perhaps reset, as it always did, for someone new.
It was quiet as I left the Registry, the world regaining its settle lines and certainties. Later, at home, I opened the music box, and this time, it played a complete, perfectly formed melody. My log—handwritten, signed—lay on my desk.
They would tell the story different ways, in time. Maybe I, too, would forget the days that spun upon themselves, the faces that reappeared, the messages that shaped me. Maybe the Operator was only a story to make sense of loneliness.
Or maybe I would remember. Maybe that was enough.
###END###
