At 15:08, while retrieving archived case files from Storage Room B-12, I encountered a woman seated on one of the low metal stools by the rolling shelves.
She appeared mid-40s.
Professional.
Wearing a maintenance badge.
Sorting through a box of old media cards.
She looked up immediately.
“You,” she said.
Her voice steady.
Surprised but unsurprised.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Do we know each other?”
She blinked.
Then blinked again, slower.
“You interviewed me,” she said.
“Two months ago.”
“I didn’t,” I said.
She turned her head slightly, scrutinizing my face as though calibrating it to a remembered version.
“You asked about the door,” she said softly.
“You were very patient about it.”
“I haven’t conducted any interviews this quarter.”
She exhaled, as if deciding something.
“You were different then,” she said.
“Not unkind. Just… earlier.”
At 15:11, she opened the box and removed a thin data card—the type used for audio transcription before the Archive went fully digital.
She handed it to me.
“Copy of my session,” she said.
“You said I could have it.”
I turned the card over in my hand.
Label, handwritten:
INTVW — DOOR 7 — FINCH (H.) — 04/12 — SESSION 2
My name.
My initial.
The date.
A session I did not conduct.
The handwriting was nearly identical to mine—
but slightly deficient in the loop of the “F,”
a flaw I corrected in training.
The version who wrote this label had not corrected it yet.
The handwriting looked like mine
from years ago.
Years I had not yet lived.
At 15:14, she asked:
“Do you remember what I told you?”
“I can’t recall an interview that never happened,” I said.
Her expression changed—
not anger, not fear.
Something like pity.
“You said this would happen.”
I felt the temperature shift in the back of my neck.
“What did I say?” I asked.
She hesitated.
“I don’t want to repeat all of it,” she said quietly.
“You seemed… worried. And I don’t want to make it worse.”
“Please,” I said.
“I need to understand.”
She looked down at her hands, folded around a stack of index cards.
“You said,” she murmured, “that someone else would come later who wouldn’t remember the conversation. And that I should treat him kindly.”
I didn’t move.
“You said not to be alarmed,” she continued. “That it wasn’t my fault. That timelines were… rethreading around you.”
“Those were your words?”
“Yes.”
“Did I seem confused?”
She shook her head.
“No. You seemed sad.”
At 15:18, I asked to hear the recording.
She nodded and removed a portable player from her bag—
an older model, but functional.
She inserted the card and pressed PLAY.
The recording was crisp.
My breathing.
My cadence.
My standard interview phrasing.
Everything.
Except the confidence in the voice.
The Finch on the recording sounded:
assured,
experienced,
already familiar with the anomalies.
He began the session:
“Let’s go over Door Seven again. Start from the moment you first heard the knocking.”
Her recorded voice responded:
“It wasn’t knocking. Not exactly. More like… someone adjusting their position.”
The recorded Finch replied:
“That matches what the others reported.”
The others.
Plural.
I have never received more than one report on Door Seven.
I closed my eyes, listening.
The recorded Finch’s questions were methodical, precise, predictive.
At one point, he said:
“When the next version asks, be honest. He’ll need the consistency.”
My stomach tightened.
The recording continued.
Midway through, the audio dipped into silence—
not clipped,
not muted,
just… absent.
A gap.
A missing block of time.
Then it resumed mid-sentence:
“…and if he seems unsure of you, that’s all right. He’s close to the split.”
The split.
The woman watched me with the uncomfortable attentiveness patients give physicians who don’t look well.
“You really don’t remember,” she said.
“I don’t,” I whispered.
At 15:24, the player emitted a soft click.
The recording had ended.
But the time index read 00:42:17.
Only twenty minutes of audio had played.
The rest had passed in silence.
The final line of the recording—unmistakably my voice—played softly:
“You’ll know him by the way he stands.”
The woman nodded toward me.
“You stood that way when you walked in.”
I hadn’t realized I was leaning slightly left—
a stance adjustment I’d made recently due to an ankle ache.
One I had not yet experienced two months ago.
Unless that Finch had.
Unless that Finch wasn’t earlier or later.
Just other.
At 15:26, we examined the data card again.
Something new appeared on the label:
Indented writing, faint and shallow.
Not part of the ink.
Pressure marks.
Three words:
“Not this one.”
The woman backed away.
“Is everything all right?” I asked.
She shook her head once.
“You weren’t supposed to see that.”
Before I could ask what she meant, she hurried out of the room, holding her bag close, as though afraid I might ask for the card back.
I stared at the pressure marks again.
They were in my handwriting.
But the hand that made them trembled.
My hand does not tremble.
Not yet.
At 15:32, I returned to my office.
My badge denied entry.
The screen flashed:
“SESSION IN PROGRESS.”
I waited.
The light shifted from red
to yellow
to blue.
Session in progress.
But I wasn’t conducting anything.
Behind the door, through the glass panel, I heard a faint sound:
Paper.
A pen.
My voice.
Asking a question I hadn’t asked yet.
[End of recovered material]