Dorn had worked in anomaly detection at a high-energy physics facility for twelve years, and for three of those years she had been keeping a second notebook.
The first notebook was her official log. The second was personal, unlabeled, kept in her bag. It contained records of what she had been calling the overlay events: moments when she knew, with unusual specificity, what was about to happen. Not vague familiarity. Specific knowledge: the exact word her supervisor would use, the precise reading the instrument would return, the exact interruption before it came. She had begun logging them after the sixth occurrence. There were now eighty-three entries.
Her workstation was adjacent to what her clearance documentation described as a backup array. The array's function was not described beyond that. She had not asked. She had been working adjacent to it for three years, and she had developed a theory about the overlay events. The theory was not peer-reviewed. It was not the kind of theory that could be submitted in an official report. It required accepting that the backup array was doing something she had not been authorized to know about, and that she had been experiencing the effects of it for three years, and that this was probably not an accident.
She wrote the report. She wrote it formally, with citations, with her second notebook as appendix A. She filled in every field. She got to the section marked Implications for Ongoing Operations and wrote: Recommend immediate review. She submitted it.
The familiar sensation arrived. The sense of having just done something she had already done. She sat with it. She looked at the confirmation on the screen. She had read the confirmation before. She waited.
It always took approximately fourteen seconds to pass. It passed. She went to get coffee from the machine down the hall. She knew it would be bitter, from the machine no one had adjusted in four years. It was bitter.