October 27, 2025
The dead don’t stay buried—especially in the code.

The first message came from a dev group chat—one that hadn’t seen activity in nearly a year.

“Did you push that last build, Devlin?”

The username was A.Kell, same handle as always. But Anton Kell had died in a highway pile-up last March. They’d gone to the funeral. Closed casket. Twenty-three-car wreck. There hadn’t been enough left of him to fill a shoebox.

Devlin stared at the message for a long time before replying. It had to be a joke. Someone reusing his old login. Some grim prank. Maybe.

The next message wasn’t so funny. It came through the burner Gmail account Devlin only used for… extracurriculars.

“The girls say hi. Maybe sit this weekend out.”

His stomach dropped. No one knew about that account—not even the women he paid in cash.

The third message came from his company email, time-stamped 3:17 a.m., sent from a domain Anton once registered for a startup that never launched. It was supposed to have expired in June. It hadn’t.

“Rewrite your auth layer. You missed a hole in the credential store.”

It was detailed. It was right.

Then it escalated. Code reviews from nowhere. Fixes in his staging branches he never pushed. Builds that compiled themselves while he slept. And every time, Anton’s name on the commit line.

He changed passwords. Shut down servers. Bought a new phone. But it didn’t stop.

A ping on Slack. A whisper in Messenger. A note added to his VSCode window while he typed:

“You’re still doing it wrong.”

Devlin started to dread each push. Each merge. It felt like Anton was inside the codebase, watching him, judging him, nudging him closer to some unseen endgame.

And then the pull request came.

“Final integration. Approve?”

It was 4,096 lines of cryptic logic. Recursive functions nested into infinity. Obfuscated yet elegant. The kind of code that felt like a mind trapped inside silicon.

The kind of code only Anton could write.

He clicked Merge.
The repo went dark.
And his phone buzzed one last time:

“Thanks for finishing what we started.”

/ End Run