13. DISCUSSION
alistair
The leather of my armchair settles with a faint, structural groan as I adjust my posture, waiting for the digital clock on my desktop to synchronize with the top of the hour. Three. Two. One.
A sharp, disciplined knock sounds against the oak door of my faculty office.
“Come in,” I say, keeping my tone leveled, stripped of any welcoming excess.
The door swings open to reveal Miss Keinston. She’s precise with her timing—a trait I find marginally acceptable in a cohort otherwise dictated by chaotic schedules and unearned entitlement.
It’s been three days since our last in-person meeting.
“Professor,” she murmurs, stepping across the threshold. She doesn’t hesitate as she did during our initial consultation, but there’s a distinct calculation in the way she occupies the space opposite my desk.
Today, she has traded her performative classroom stance for a quiet, guarded focus, though her fingers clamp around the straps of her purple backpack with a tension she hasn’t quite learned to mask yet.
“Miss Keinston. I see my secretary finalized your clearance parameters without administrative delay,” I say, pulling a heavy, pale blue manila folder from the lower drawer and placing it exactly parallel to the edge of the granite desk.
“We’ve precisely ninety minutes before my afternoon seminar. So we’ll skip the introductory pleasantries."
“Of course,” she replies, and for a fleeting second, that innocent voice of hers carries that same undercurrent of gentle defiance I logged during our first lecture.
She unzips her bag, producing her tablet and a clean, bound notebook.
I open the folder, spreading several data-log sheets across the stone-grey surface.
“The department is preparing a comprehensive audit of its historical frameworks before the upcoming preliminary moderation cycle. What you are looking at is the raw code from the 2014 Archival Project—specifically, the original laboratory records concerning our recursive signal optimization models.”
She leans forward slightly, her golden-brown hair shifting over her shoulder, capturing the dull, overcast light filtering through my high office window.
I watch her eyes scan the pages. I’m not looking at her face to be polite—I’m monitoring her pupil dilation, tracking the rapid, lateral movement of her gaze as she digests the complex transfer functions.
For a long moment, the office is entirely quiet, save for the rhythmic hum of the building’s central air conditioner.
Ariella Keinston is supposed to be a minor complication—a spoiled corporate heiress playing at being a prodigy to get close to a digital phantom. Instead, she has spent the working hours turning my office into a silent battlefield.
“You’re tracking a ghost variable here,” she says.
She doesn’t look up from the unclassified 2014 archive ledger I threw at her to keep her occupied. Her French-manicured nails spin a pen with an agonizing rhythm.
“The system didn’t crash because the code was old. Someone altered the delay time on purpose to hide the fact that the machine was still listening.”
She has no idea that the “someone” she’s casually calling out is the man sitting three feet away from her. She doesn’t know she’s picking at the very threads holding my double life together.
But I don’t shift a single muscle in my chair.
“Are you suggesting you’ve found a trap that was somehow missed?” I know exactly what she’s talking about. I just want to hear what she has to say.
She finally looks up. Her hazel eyes have entirely lost the wide, terrified look they had the day I trapped her into this assistant arrangement.
“Just my assumption,” she says, her lips pulling into a small, defiant little smirk that feels like an outright dare.
For a second, a dark, clinical amusement ripples through me. She’s twenty years old, entirely human. She might be terrified of me as a man, yet utterly fearless against my intellect.
It’s a lethal combination.
“An assumption based on incomplete telemetry is merely a guess, Miss Keinston,” I say, my voice smooth, entirely devoid of the cold spike of adrenaline currently hardening my chest. I lean back into my chair while maintaining a rigid, unwavering gaze.
“And in this department, guesses are a liability. Tell me precisely which parameters led you to suspect intentional manipulation.”
She doesn’t shrink under the pressure. Instead, she taps the tip of her pen against the paper, highlighting a specific block of recursive equations.
“The delay wasn’t processing, Professor.
Look at the timestamp differentials,” she turns the paper towards me, “The latency spike occurs exactly forty milliseconds before the primary handshake terminates. If it were a natural system degradation, the decay curve would be logarithmic. This is a hard truncation. Someone deliberately coded a blind spot into the diagnostic loop.”
I look down at the papers, pretending to analyze the data she has extracted.
In reality, I’ve measured the level of intelligence she presents. She has isolated the exact backdoor I engineered a year ago.
“A compelling theory,” I murmur, keeping my tone flat to project nothing but the clinical skepticism of an academic. “Though a deliberate truncation could easily be attributed to a crude compilation error from an outdated compiler.”
“Not when it’s mirrored in the secondary auxiliary logs,” she counters softly.
A quiet, dangerous stillness settles between us. She’s dangerously close to the ledger’s true purpose.
“Then I suggest you prove it,” I say, the words falling like iron weights between us. “Document the mathematical variance between the expected decay and this... curated anomaly. If there is a ghost in this machine, Miss Keinston, I expect you to exorcise it with data, not intuition.”
Her smile falters slightly, replaced by a tight, disciplined nod as she recognizes the boundaries I’m re-establishing. “I’ll have the comparative analysis ready as soon as I can.”
She’s hiding something. No first-year student walks into Oxford and casually dissects a proprietary encryption matrix disguised as a dead academic project.
Either she’s a freak occurrence of nature—an organic anomaly—or someone sent her.
Someone who knows exactly who I am behind the professor’s suit and the polite smiles.
If not the Triarch Council, who sent her to spy on me, someone who did, they picked a terrifyingly effective weapon.
Every time she smiles that shy, earnest little student smile, I find myself wanting to let her see just a little bit more of the dark.
“Put them in a single file and email it to me,” I tell her, shutting down the sudden intimacy of the room.
“Yes, sir,” she says quietly, the fiery academic mask vanishing as she obediently packs her things, leaving for today.