CHAPTER 8
Jameson
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Present Day
For a second, I just stared at it.
The apartment was still dark, the city outside barely starting to shift. Coffee sat untouched on the counter, a thin film forming across the surface. The hardwood floor was cold under my feet, the chill enough to register but not distract.
I didn’t move.
I had almost forgotten the alert was still active. It had only triggered once since Mirrorstream went dark.
After Geneva, I had widened the net instead of shutting it down. Quiet flags on old query behavior. Broken identity seams. Records that agreed too cleanly across systems that should not have matched. Any use of the name itself.
For a few months, I checked them constantly.
Then less.
Then only when something woke them.
Nothing had.
Until now.
I crossed to the desk and woke the terminal.
It had already found where the word appeared. Public forum. High-traffic thread. Live category. The kind of place people went when they wanted an answer fast and didn’t care how much noise came with it.
Most of it was just that. Noise. Speculation, conspiracy bait, half-formed theories from people who wanted to sound informed.
Threadbare’s question sat in the middle of it all, small enough to miss if my alert hadn’t been built to catch one word.
I opened the saved page and watched it load.
The post had been live for three minutes, twenty-one seconds before the alert caught it.
Threadbare
3 min. ago
Has anyone ever heard of something called Mirrorstream?
Threadbare meant nothing to me.
Mirrorstream did.
My eyes tracked the word again, following each letter in sequence instead of the whole.
Mirrorstream.
Fuck.
My fingers moved before the rest of me caught up.
First, I cut off public access.
The page blinked once, then returned a load error.
Good.
I saved my own copy, then pulled the thread out of the archive, broke anything that linked back to it, and damaged the access log just enough to make the last few hits look like failed requests instead of readers.
Anyone trying to open it now would see nothing.
I still had everything.
But it could already be too late.
It had been live long enough for the wrong person to see it.
That wasn’t noise or recycled paranoia.
That was exposure.
No one outside the operation should know the name. Not the structure. Not the function. And definitely not Mirrorstream itself.
Unless something had gone wrong.
Or someone had talked.
I went looking for Threadbare.
There wasn’t much to find.
The account was new. No profile. No message history. No email visible from the surface account. Just a throwaway handle attached to one question in a thread moving too fast to hold shape.
The forum had done half the hiding for them.
High traffic. Shared sessions. Mobile hits. Café networks.
Threadbare hadn’t disappeared intentionally.
They’d gotten lost in a crowd.
I pulled what I could from the post timing and the connection path. It wasn’t enough for a name. It wasn’t enough for a street. Barely enough for a region.
Central Europe.
I stared at the result.
That was the problem with amateurs. They didn’t always vanish because they were careful. Sometimes they vanished because they left so little behind, there was nothing clean to grab.
No old posts. No repeated handle. No useful account trail.
Just one question, asked in the wrong place, with the wrong word inside it.
I checked the timing again.
Same broad region.
Still too wide to move on directly.
I needed a cleaner angle.
The trace still pointed to Central Europe, and Philadelphia left too much distance if it narrowed into something actionable.
London was closer. I still had the flat I’d used during the Mirrorstream years, along with a secure system I trusted and old channels that would open without questions.
I could keep working while I moved into range.
So I moved.
I grabbed my jacket and go bag and killed the lights on my way out. The apartment dropped into silence behind me.
If Threadbare was still in Central Europe, the window was already narrowing.
And if it closed before I found them, I hoped there would still be someone left to find.