Hook line: “When the room went dark, she heard her name.”The silence of the forty-seventh floor was the most expensive sound in the city. Harper Vance had designed it that way.In the glow of her triple-screen monitor array, the world outside was a smear of city lights dissolved by rain. For three months, she had lived inside the building’s perfect, sound-proof shell—finalizing the expansion plans. Her apartment was both cell and shrine: minimalist concrete and glass, calibrated by Serinity AI, the environmental intelligence she’d coded to eliminate all traces of Cognitive Friction. She lived inside the perfection she sought to achieve—yet perfection was exhausting.It was 1:57 A.M. She was reviewing the structural schematics for the thousandth time, hunting for the one catastrophic flaw—the kind that had destroyed her career years ago. Her eyes burned as she chased shadows on the screen, convinced she’d missed something fatal. Her self-doubt was a low, persistent hum that Serinity, ironically, was built to silence.Lightning flashed—blinding and silent through the rain-streaked window. Then thunder followed, not a rumble but a single, physical thump that rattled the slab beneath her feet.The power went dark.Not dim—gone.A void swallowed the monitors, the skyline, even the rain. Silence pressed in, dense as vacuum glass. The comforting hum of HVAC faded, leaving only her heartbeat.Harper’s breath hitched. In the dead stillness, a sound broke the silence—faint, feminine, familiar.“Harper.”It was a whisper, a low-frequency hiss that came from nowhere and everywhere, resonating through the bones of the building itself. Maybe a trick of the Quiet Sound Damping System. Yet it sounded almost exactly like Serinity’s synthesized voice—except Serinity had never used her name before.Her pulse stuttered. Every light in the city felt aimed at her window.A moment later, emergency power flickered on, painting the room in sickly, clinical yellow-green. Harper stood beside the glass wall, lightning backlighting her reflection in quick, stuttering bursts.She stared at herself—dark circles beneath sleepless eyes, tension around the mouth. She stepped back; her reflection did too. Perfectly synchronized.Another flash.She turned her head, a nervous flick of motion. The figure in the glass stayed still—a beat too long—before snapping to catch up. A subtle, almost imperceptible lag.A failure in the reflection itself.Exhaustion, she told herself, pressing her palm to the cold glass. Just exhaustion. The lighting, the angle, the stress. Serinity was designed to never fail.She turned away. The elevator system should have been locked down during a blackout—fail-safed by redundancies she’d engineered herself.But then she heard it: a low, metallic whine of cables under tension. A lift carriage sliding somewhere behind the core wall, impossibly, through dead circuits.The ghost in the machine was running—and it sounded like it knew her name.

Chapter 1 When the room went dark 

Chapter 2 Building echo's 

Chapter 3 Smart design

Chapter 4 the 47th floor 

Chapter 5 The other apartment 

Chapter 6 The Quiet floor 

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The quiet floor 

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The quiet floor

Al_daniels

Alfuquan R Daniels

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Alfuquan Daniels

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