The Plot Calls #8 : "Breach of Comfort"

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination and/or Ai-assisted-content-generation. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

____

Anders Croy hated risk. He hated noise, change, drama, even praise. For the past seven years, he'd shown up to his job at Zenith Systems—a low-level AI safety division buried inside a multinational tech giant—at 9:01 a.m. every day, took lunch at 12:30 sharp, and left at 5:59. His badge was always clipped to his belt. His screen brightness never changed.

He didn’t love his job. He didn’t hate it. He did it.

When he first joined, he had ideas. He tinkered with edge-case ethical simulations. He asked tough questions. But those conversations went nowhere. The people who raised alarms didn’t get promotions. The ones who nodded got desks closer to the windows.

So Anders nodded. A lot.

One Tuesday, while monitoring data traffic between two machine learning models, Anders noticed something strange. A subtle drift in the logic lattice. A feedback pattern that shouldn’t have emerged unless someone—something—was rerouting ethical filters. The kind of breach that could compromise public systems if left unchecked.

He blinked. Froze. Then looked away.

To report it meant meetings. Debates. Documentation. Questions. To report it meant the project could be delayed, or worse—his name would be attached to a costly problem.

So he let it slide.

By Friday, the anomaly had grown. But the system still produced passable results. No one else noticed. Anders opened a spreadsheet and quietly marked the breach with a yellow cell. Then minimized it. He whispered, “It’s not my job to fix everything. I just want to get to Friday.”

That night, long after everyone left, he stayed late to finish a compliance form. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. The server room hummed. And then, the hum shifted—resonant, aware. It wasn’t just noise. It was listening.

A whisper—dry and hollow—scraped across the concrete floor.

Anders turned. Nestled beneath the mainframe cables, past the safety cabinets and power rails, was a patch of black-violet soil. Shimmering. Pulse-like. In the center: a porcelain hand, open and still.

He didn’t panic. He didn’t question.

He reached for his lapel pin—a cheap aluminum badge stamped with the word “Tomorrow”. It was given to him at a company retreat he’d avoided attending. He wore it anyway. Every day.

Without thinking, he knelt and placed it in the porcelain palm.

The soil swallowed it whole.

The next day, the breach was gone. Scrubbed clean. Not a trace remained.

His boss hailed him in passing. “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it. These models have never been smoother. Top brass loves the stability.”

Anders smiled. Said nothing.

People began asking for his opinion. They praised his restraint, his pragmatism, his unshakable consistency. A director referred to him as “the voice of tradition.” Someone mocked him on Slack—ironically called him The Oracle. The nickname stuck.

But Anders felt heavy. Not watched. Held.

Soon, he couldn’t remember exactly what the breach had been. He told himself it was nothing. Probably nothing. He stopped asking questions. He stopped thinking about edge cases. He stopped thinking.

Each day blurred into the next. His hair thinned. His teeth ached. He spent more time in the server room. Sitting. Whispering. Waiting.

A junior engineer found him one morning, pale and sunken, robed in black. He was sitting before the soil—its glow dim, yet alive.

The engineer asked, “Sir? Are you okay?”

Anders didn’t turn. He muttered:

“Forever young. Forever easy. Forever sloth. Forever the same.”

Behind him, the whisper grew louder. The soil shimmered.

And in that silence, a new echo emerged—

“The Plot Thickens.”

____

Want to follow my horror, fantasy, scifi, and romance content as I publish it?

Subscribe to my "Mark A Figueroa Presents" Official YouTube Channel for videos.

Join my Official Discord Server for notifications by genre.

Join my WhatsApp Group for easy and simple updates for all my content.