The hydropower station sat in a gorge at the end of an access road posted with three separate sets of warning signs. By the time I reached the gate, the air already smelled of wet concrete and iron.
The Archive request referenced “visual duplications” reported by maintenance crews during emergency light tests. The phrase employees briefly observed themselves at a distance appeared twice in the internal incident summaries, once underlined.
I arrived at 19:02, after sunset, at the shift supervisor’s insistence.
“Daytime doesn’t do it,” he’d said on the phone. “You won’t see anything with the overheads on.”
The station interior was a stack of spaces: control rooms and walkways and, at the bottom, the turbine hall itself—a long concrete cavern lined with cylindrical housings, each the size of a small house, their tops domed in dull green paint. Overhead cranes straddled the span. A narrow safety walkway ran along the length of the hall.
When the full lighting was on, it looked like any other large industrial space. Fluorescent banks humming. Painted safety stripes. The slow rhythm of heavy machinery.
The anomalies, I was told, only appeared during flicker tests—brief intervals where the main lights cut out, leaving the emergency strobes to pulse in timed bursts.
Intervals where the human eye struggled to interpolate motion.
Intervals where, according to two separate workers, they had seen “someone wearing my face from the wrong angle.”
At 19:23, we stood on the overhead gallery.
Below us, turbines turned silently beneath their housings. The roar of water lived behind the walls—muted, ever-present.
The supervisor, Alvarez, checked his watch.
“We can do three cycles,” he said. “After that the system gets touchy.”
Two floor techs waited at the far end of the hall, near the access door, both wearing high-visibility vests. I could see them as small moving points of orange and yellow, heads turned up toward us.
I set my recorder and stabilized it on the gallery rail.
“Turbine hall, initial observation,” I said. “Full illumination. No visual duplication. No reflected surfaces other than standard gauge faces.”
I’d read the statements. Eight separate accounts. Employees describing, in different languages and levels of technical literacy, the same experience:
During the strobe intervals, they would see a figure:
roughly their height
wearing their PPE
standing farther down the hall than they physically were
In at least two reports, the figure was described as “ahead of me by one flicker”—moving a split second sooner.
Not a reflection.
Not a shadow.
Something like a preview.
The first test began at 19:26.
The main overhead fluorescents clicked off with a soft, descending whine.
For a moment, the hall was black.
Then the emergency system engaged—slow, regular pulses of light cycling along the length of the hall, bright white strobes mounted at floor level for evacuation events.
The turbines appeared in frozen slices:
light
dark
light
dark
The two techs at the far end of the hall walked toward the central exit door, as instructed. Their movement, viewed through the strobe, broke into discrete poses. An animation missing frames.
I watched for duplications.
On the third pulse, I saw nothing.
On the sixth, something changed.
For a single strobe, there were three vests moving instead of two.
Not beside the men, but ahead of them—nearer to the central turbines—one half-step farther than either tech had reached yet.
On the next flash, the extra vest was gone.
The men continued forward, unaware.
I noted the timing, the strobe interval, the positions.
On the recording, my voice stayed even.
My grip on the rail had gone tight.
The second test began at 19:33.
Same sequence. Darkness. Then pulses of white.
This time the techs started at the door and walked back toward the far end of the hall, retracing their path in reverse.
On the fourth strobe, I saw it again.
A third figure. Vest. Helmet. Same walk cycle. Same stride length as the men.
But its timing was wrong.
On each flash, it appeared a fraction ahead of where the men would be in the next pulse. A lead ghost.
Like watching a video feed with the preview on top of the live image—and the preview arriving first.
When both techs stopped on cue at the hall midpoint, the extra figure did not.
It kept walking.
On the next strobe, it stood alone at the far end of the hall, shoulders angled slightly toward the gallery where I stood.
On the one after that, it was gone.
Alvarez shifted beside me.
“You saw it?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
I did not add: It was already looking back.
The third test started at 19:40.
The techs remained at the midpoint, per my request.
“I want as few moving variables as possible,” I said.
They stood side by side, backs to the nearest turbine, hands on the safety rail.
Main lights off.
Strobes on.
In the first pulse, only the two of them.
In the second, three figures.
The third stood closer to our position now, halfway between us and the techs, as if it had started the test already in motion.
It faced away from us, toward the end of the hall. Its posture was too straight. Its helmet sat slightly crooked on its head, as if placed there by someone unfamiliar with gravity.
On the next flash, it was gone.
On the next, it was closer.
Ten meters nearer.
Still facing away.
The timing of the strobes didn’t change.
Its position did.
At 19:43, the pattern broke completely.
For several pulses, the extra figure advanced up the hall in increments, always present one flash, gone the next, skipping forward in a path that had nothing to do with the techs’ positions.
Then, on one strobe, it appeared directly beneath the gallery where we stood.
Too close now for the strobes to hide its details.
It was wearing my jacket.
Not the high-visibility vest, not station-issue PPE.
My dark field coat.
My shoulder seams.
My posture from a distance.
Its head was tilted up at an angle that would have let it see the gallery.
But its face was wrong.
Not blurry. Not blank.
Stretched.
As though the skin had been pulled too tightly across the bone, distorting the proportions—eyes too far apart, mouth too wide at the corners, the overall arrangement correct but the distances alien.
On the next pulse, it was gone.
I can say, clinically, that my heart rate spiked to one-fifty in that interval.
On the recording, my breath jumps once, audibly.
“Shut it down,” I said.
Alvarez hesitated. “We’re still inside tolerance—”
“Shut it down.”
He killed the sequence.
The main lights came back slow, building in layers—first the low-level work lamps, then the high ceiling fixtures.
The hall returned to continuous time.
The two techs remained at the midpoint, hands on the rail, slightly hunched, as if braced against a wind that hadn’t touched us yet.
Directly beneath the gallery, the space where the thing had stood a moment earlier was empty concrete.
No third vest.
No field coat.
Still, for a second, my body insisted something was there.
A negative space in the shape of myself.
At 19:51, I reviewed the live feed on the portable monitor.
The station’s cameras had captured the strobe sequences, but the artifact—the third figure—was not clean.
The footage showed altered exposures, ghost limbs, duplicate frames. Enough to acknowledge that something had been present, but not enough to submit to analysis without it being dismissed as interference.
There was one exception.
On camera three, mounted midway down the hall, the third figure appeared for a single frame at 19:43:12.
Standing directly under the gallery.
Facing up.
The jacket it wore matched mine exactly.
The face—
The face, in that frame, was mine.
Not stretched. Not distorted.
Neutral.
Staring straight at the camera.
The timestamp overlay jittered on that frame, briefly displaying a different time:
19:21:50.
Ten minutes earlier than the test had begun.
I requested the raw sequence exported and archived.
On my way out, in the access corridor, the overhead lights flickered once—just once—unrelated to any test.
For a fraction of a second, the world reduced itself to still frames.
In that interval, I saw myself standing at the far end of the corridor, facing me.
Not a mirror. Not an afterimage.
Just a man in my coat, in my posture, in my boots.
Mouth open slightly, as if mid-sentence, saying something I had not yet heard.
When the light steadied, the corridor was empty.
My own voice, on the recorder at my belt, unspooled a moment later, a half-whisper I did not recall speaking:
“You’re late.”
[End of recovered material]