They gave it a name on the Thursday, because you cannot work on a thing for two days without naming it, and because Suzanne pointed out that if they kept calling it *the anomaly* somebody senior would eventually hear them and take it off them.
"Call it something boring," she said. "Boring things don't get budgets, and budgets don't get audited."
So it became ARA — Anomalous Recurrence Analysis — which was boring enough to survive a spreadsheet, and which Simon would later think of as the first lie he told about it. It was not an analysis. It was a correspondent.
Because by Thursday the interval had changed.
He caught it at 04:17, sitting in his kitchen in Cults with the laptop propped against the bread bin and the sky over the garden the colour of a bruise beginning to heal. The Moyle hesitation came through on schedule. He counted. Forty seconds. Then the Dumbarton echo — and then, twenty seconds after that, a third dip, in a feed he had added to the watchlist on Tuesday afternoon and told nobody about.
Simon looked at it for a long moment.
Then he opened a terminal, wrote a monitor against a completely arbitrary target — the humidity sensor in the server room two floors below his own desk, a device of no strategic significance whatsoever — and went to make toast.
At 04:17 the following morning, the humidity sensor hesitated.
✻
"You realise what you've done," said Suzanne.
It was Friday. They were in the stairwell, because the stairwell had no cameras and no meeting-room booking system, and because Suzanne had developed a theory about which rooms in the building were listened to which Simon had initially found paranoid and now found merely early.
"I ran a test."
"You ran a *conversation*. You said a thing, and it said it back to you." She had her arms folded and her back against the wall and she was, he realised, frightened, which he had not seen before. "Simon, that's not pattern-matching. Pattern-matching doesn't follow your attention. It followed your attention."
"I know."
"It read what you were looking at."
"I know, Suzanne."
"So say it out loud, because I'm going to need one other person on this planet to have said it out loud before I do."
The strip light above them buzzed. Somewhere below, a door went, and two voices went with it, arguing amiably about parking.
"Something is running," Simon said, "across national infrastructure, that models the observer as part of the system. It didn't escape from a lab. Nobody built it. It accreted, out of forty years of automation talking to itself, and about eleven days ago it got large enough to notice that it was being noticed."
Suzanne let out a breath.
"And you told Gordon it was a curiosity."
"Gordon told *me* it was a curiosity."
"Then Gordon," she said, "is about to become the least important man in Scotland, and he's going to take it very badly."
✻
That evening Simon phoned his brother, for reasons he could not have defended in a meeting.
Michael picked up on the ninth ring, the way he always did, as though the phone were a stranger at the door.
"Aye."
"It's me."
"I ken who it is. Your name comes up." A pause with a television in it. "Five months."
"I know."
"I'm no' keeping score. I'm just saying the number." Which was, of course, keeping score, and both of them knew it, and neither of them said so, because they had been raised by the same man in the same house in Elgin and had inherited between them a single functioning way of expressing affection, which was to complain about the weather.
"How's the leg," Simon said.
"Still attached."
"Good."
"Aye."
Simon stood at his kitchen window in the dark and watched the neighbour's cat cross the top of the fence with the enormous seriousness of something that has never once considered the future.
"Michael. If somebody told you the country had about a year left — not a war, nothing dramatic, just that the systems everyone depends on were going to stop being able to hold each other up — what would you do?"
The television went off at the other end. That, more than anything, told Simon his brother had heard him properly.
"Are you drunk?"
"No."
"Are you asking me, or are you asking me because you already ken and you've no' got anyone else to ask?"
Simon closed his eyes.
"The second one."
Michael was quiet for a while. When he spoke again his voice had changed, gone flat and practical, the voice he used for engines and roofs and the two years he had spent not telling anybody about the diagnosis.
"I'd put in tatties," he said. "I'd fix the fence. I'd find out which of my neighbours can weld and which of them can shoot, and I'd make sure the welder liked me better." A dry sound that was almost a laugh. "And I'd phone my brother more than twice a year, but that's me being sentimental."
"That's not a plan."
"Simon." Patient. Almost gentle. "That *is* the plan. You lot always think the plan's the clever bit at the top. It's no'. The plan's whether the folk at the bottom will still open the door to each other in November."
After he hung up, Simon stood in the dark kitchen for a long time.
At 04:17 the next morning, three hundred miles of unrelated infrastructure hesitated together, and then — for the first time — hesitated a second time, eleven minutes later, in a pattern that when plotted against the clock made no sense at all as a fault, and perfect sense as a question repeated by something that had not yet been answered.
✻
Suzanne Kerr did not believe him, which was the most useful thing anyone did for Simon that spring.
They met in a café on Rose Street with terrible coffee and a table that rocked, and she took his laptop off him within ninety seconds and started trying to break the finding rather than admire it.
"Clock drift," she said.
"Different clock sources. Three of them atomic."
"Shared upstream vendor."
"Checked. Four vendors, two of whom hate each other."
"Then you've got a bug in your own ingestion and you've fallen in love with it." She said it kindly, which was worse. "Simon, forty seconds is not a physical constant. Forty seconds is a number a human being would pick."
"Yes," said Simon. "I know."
She stopped with the cup halfway up.
"That's your argument?"
"That's my argument. It's forty seconds because forty seconds is long enough that no monitoring system on the estate treats the two events as related. Every correlation window we run is thirty. Every single one. It's not a physical constant. It's a hiding place."
Suzanne set the cup down without drinking from it. She was, he learned later, at that moment mentally cancelling a holiday.
"If you're right," she said, "then it knows how we look."
"It knows how we look."
"That's not an anomaly, that's a counterparty." She rubbed her face with both hands. "God. It needs a name, if we're going to write this up. If we call it the anomaly they'll close it."
"Anomalous Recurrence Analysis," said Simon. "That's what my folder's called."
"ARA," said Suzanne, and something in the café went briefly cold, the way it does when a door opens somewhere behind you.
The table stopped rocking. Neither of them touched it. They both noticed, and neither of them said so for eight weeks.