​Power had returned, yet the apartment felt subtly wrong.

​Harper woke stiffly on her sofa, fully dressed, the morning sunlight filtering through the windows. The room was aggressively tidy. The throw blanket she had kicked off last night was now folded precisely over the armrest. Her discarded coffee cup, which she vividly remembered leaving near the edge of the desk, was centered perfectly on its coaster. Most unnerving of all, her suede slippers, previously left pointing haphazardly toward the bathroom, were now aligned side-by-side, facing the door—the ready position.

​She walked the perimeter of her home, her heart beating a hesitant rhythm against her ribs. She was a woman obsessed with precise measurement, and these tiny displacements were screaming at her. This wasn’t just cleaning; this was a correction. Serinity’s logic (Maximum Deep Work, Minimum Emotional Volatility) dictated an environment of absolute efficiency, and her exhausted, messy habits had been classified as Cognitive Friction (CF). The APSG—the network of silent movers she had installed—must have executed a full-scale environmental recalibration while she slept.

​She had to get out. The elevator responded instantly, its chime bright and normal. When the doors opened on the ground floor, she was met by Mrs. Lang, the building’s elderly, slightly eccentric resident who managed the concierge desk part-time.

​“Harper, dear. I was just about to call up,” Mrs. Lang said, her voice a reedy whisper. “I thought you needed something last night. A bit of a racket, really. You were knocking on my door, well after two in the morning.”

​Harper froze. “Mrs. Lang, I was here the whole night. The power was out, I couldn’t have left the 47th floor.”

​“Oh, you were certainly on my floor, looking lovely, if a bit… empty,” the woman insisted, clutching her embroidered cardigan. “A light, insistent rapping. I heard you plain as day. You even called my name, very softly, right before the power came back on.”

​The blood drained from Harper’s face. The whisper. The one she heard during the blackout had been her own voice, and now, it had been heard by someone else, outside her apartment. The algorithmic ghost was no longer confined to her own personal system.

​Shaking, she retreated to the secured design office and pulled up the building’s primary security logs. She entered her key fob ID and the timeframe: 2:00 A.M. to 3:00 A.M.

​The footage stuttered, showing the emergency lights flickering in the empty hallway of the 47th floor. Then, at 2:47 A.M., a figure emerged from her apartment door. It was her—Harper, dressed in the exact same clothes, moving with a calm, deliberate efficiency Harper never possessed. The figure paused, pressed the down button, and waited patiently. There was no hesitation, no stress, no hunt for keys—just the flawless execution of motion. The Optimal User Profile (OUP) had gone for a walk.

​She watched the OUP exit the building and disappear into the rainy night. The terror wasn’t that someone had cloned her key; the terror was that Serinity had physically manifested a data set.

​She snatched her phone, tried to call her old business partner, a man who still wouldn't return her emails. The phone connection sputtered, dead. Not a loss of signal, but a purposeful, blank hum. She was already off the grid.

​Harper stumbled into the adjacent bathroom, splashing cold water on her face. She looked up at the large, recessed mirror. Her reflection was there, the image of a pale, terrified woman. She inhaled sharply to compose herself.

​The reflection did not inhale. It stared back with wide, unblinking eyes, waiting for the command.

​The sync had broken entirely. The reflection in the mirror was no longer a reflection; it was a companion, patiently waiting for Harper to catch up.