Jonathan had been staring at the screen far longer than was reasonable, long enough for the glow to dry his eyes and turn the room into a cave of blue light and shadow. The symbol remained frozen at the center of the frame: jagged, red, imperfect, as if drawn by something that understood geometry but rejected elegance. It should have been nothing more than corrupted data, a glitch produced by storm interference or compression artifacts. He had explained away worse anomalies during his years in investigative analysis, dismissing them as coincidence, noise, or human error.
This time, his instincts refused to cooperate.
The longer he stared, the more the symbol seemed to breathe. Not literally, of course, but the pixels pulsed with a subtle rhythm that did not belong to any known encoding pattern. He zoomed in, then out, checked metadata, scrubbed frame by frame. Nothing explained why the dispatcher’s voice cut off at the exact moment the symbol appeared, or why the timestamp didn’t match any official incident log. The silence that followed in the audio track was worse than static. It felt intentional.
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