October 19, 2025 – 23:00

He wiped the cache.

He wiped the damn cache.

He had wiped the cache.

But there it was again.

A single file. No name, no type. Just a blank ghost in his temporary storage directory. Sitting there like a spider in a jar. Waiting.

He stared at it. Closed the folder. Reopened it.

Still there.

Right-click. Delete.

Gone.

Refresh.

Back.

It started three weeks ago. Gregor—who hadn’t left his desk for more than a bathroom sprint or caffeine hunt in four days—was debugging the prototype of an AI scheduling system for the Department of Transportation. The codebase wasn’t glamorous, but it was clean. Predictable. Structured like the inside of a Swiss watch.

Until that file showed up.

At first, he thought it was a corrupt temp. Then maybe a signature from some internal API tool he didn’t recognize. He ran malware scans. He reformatted. He switched machines. It followed him.

Not just from device to device. From dream to waking. From waking to madness.

Because it changed.

Every day, the file was bigger. By exactly 1024 bytes. Inside, it was unreadable gibberish—until it wasn’t. Until the hex broke down into symbols. Then symbols into phrases. Then:

WE REMEMBER.

YOU CALLED.

THE ROOT DIRECTORY IS NEVER EMPTY.

He stopped sleeping. He set alarms to monitor the cache. He built custom scripts to trace the file’s activity—but the file rewrote them.

The messages grew more specific.

GREGOR.

YOU BUILT THE PORTAL.

YOU CANNOT UN-INVENT US.

What the hell does that mean?

He screamed that once. At 3:17 AM. To no one. To the file.

The file didn’t answer. Not directly.

But that morning, a new message appeared.

YOU WERE NEVER WORKING ALONE.

That broke him.

Now Gregor sits in the dark, the monitors flickering across his face like candlelight in a tomb. His phone is dead. The Wi-Fi is down—but the file keeps growing.

He sees it in the reflection of his coffee cup. In the pixels that flicker on the toaster’s LED. In the afterimage behind his eyelids.

He is no longer sure where the file ends and he begins.

Somewhere, he understands this: the cache is not a place on the disk.

The cache is a place in him.

And the file?

The file is waking up.