Prologue

  The morning stretched soft and grey, shrouded in a mist that hid all the far edges of the valley. Across the moorlands, the colours of the world ebbed into murmurs - the purples of the heather bruised and muted, the green of the grass a memory beneath a pallid sheen of dew. The trees were spectral things, their branches dissolving into the cloud like half-formed thoughts. They seemed to lie in delicate layers, each fainter than the last, paper-thin silhouettes gently laid one upon another, in a procession of whispers dissolving into the pale horizon, as if the landscape itself were forgetting them.

  The air was heavy with the scent of wet bracken and rich, damp earth, carrying with it a faint sweetness of decay. Somewhere distant, the mournful cry of a curlew echoed, its sound swallowed almost instantly by the hush. The land rolled away in gentle swells, soft and endless, its beauty washed with an aching desolation, as though it remembered a time when it had been brighter, sharper, and more alive.

  Set back from a narrow road, the cottage emerged from the mist like an afterthought. Its walls, weathered smooth in places by the relentless winds sweeping across the Devonshire moorlands, seemed silent and subdued. Patches of deep yellow lichen clung to the stonework, their uneven circles, markers of nature's slow encroachment. Ivy crept its way up the corners, tendrils gripping with a possessive hold, as if determined to guard a secret.

  Inside, the air was heavy with stillness, carrying the faint odour of neglect, the muted scent of a place left unused. Dust lingered in the wan beams of light filtering through the windows, each mote hanging as if time itself had paused, uncertain how to proceed.

  A single chair stood crooked in the corner, its legs dug into the floor with a sense of purpose, as if it had been left hastily. The table in the centre of the room bore the marks of anxious movements - loose scrawls that looped and crossed, tangled in patterns that made no sense. They seemed to spiral inward, as if someone had been trying to pin down something that refused to be caught.

  The walls, too, bore marks - chalk scribbles covering the plaster, their lines deliberate but frantic, layered over one another like a language half-formed, half-remembered. Here and there, curves emerged, suggestive of apertures or arches, shapes lingering just on the edge of recognition. They beckoned in places to be seen as something more, only to dissolve back into ambiguity.

  Outside, as the fog tightened its grip, a single bird took flight, its wings briefly cutting sharp and dark against the haze, its cry faded before it could truly be heard. A thing of air, barely a murmur, as if the world were dissolving into itself, becoming unrecognisable, fragments of a memory.

  The boundaries of the place bled away, forms thinning into vapours, shapes ever more indistinct, reverberations of voices no longer there. The distance between things lost meaning, as though the landscape were slipping away, piece by piece, losing its form. Sound, sense, unravelled, dissolving, until only the quiet, endless expanse of nothingness remained, like a memory half-formed, drifting just beyond reach.

  Chapter One - Signal In Noise

  The rain draped the streets in a thin, slick sheen, reflecting the neon glow that flickered from the city beyond the South West of England Primate Research Facility. A distant drone passed overhead, its low hum blending with the rhythmic tapping of rainfall, tracing invisible lines in the air. Inside, the lab was hushed, save for the soft hum of machines and the occasional flicker of a monitor breaking through the gloom.

  Dr. Rosa Baum sat alone in the dimly lit lab, absently twirling a fineliner pen between her fingers, her gaze fixed on the screen that bathed her face in a pale glow. Everyone else had gone home long ago, leaving her in the quiet solitude of her precisely arranged desk - notes meticulously stacked, pens neatly aligned. Pattern recognition in randomness - finding meaning where there was none - wasn’t just an academic interest for Rosa; it was the way she navigated life itself, instinctively imposing order on even the smallest details.

  Her title blinked back at her: Chaotic Connections: Exploring Pareidolia in Human and Primate Pattern Recognition. She placed the end of her pen between her lips, considering. Humans instinctively saw faces in clouds or shapes in shadows, but they weren’t alone in this tendency.

  She sat back, straightening a notepad nudged out of place by her elbow, her gaze returning to the screen. Just as humans were driven to impose order on entropy, primates, too, reached into the void, detecting patterns amidst chaos. The question was just how deeply they shared this need - and what it revealed about them both.

  A full moon hung low outside the lab window, its perfect circle obscured by drifting clouds. Rosa tilted back in her chair, its jarring creak breaking her focus. She reached for a yellowed newspaper clipping pinned to the side of her precisely arranged desk. "Macaques and Mayhem: Unraveling the Chaos of Creativity at Paignton Zoo," the headline read.

  At the turn of the century, Paignton Zoo housed six monkeys who, as part of an experiment inspired by the infinite monkey theorem, were given a keyboard and allowed to type. The premise was simple, if absurd - given enough time, the monkeys might eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. Of course, no one seriously expected it to happen. It was more a playful exercise in entropy. The randomness appealed to Rosa's sense of fun. What if the creatures did output something 'meaningful'? Not The Bard's total library of course; maybe just a few words, a word. "Mass".

  The company AI she had put to work on analysing the monkeys' literary output occasionally pulled the odd something from the chaos. That was the nature of data, wasn’t it? Patterns emerged if you looked hard enough, even in noise. Pareidolia.

  Immersed in thought, her screen flickered violently, jolting her upright. Its light flickered across the darkened room, tearing her focus from the line of thought she was tracing. Frustrated, she slammed her palm on the monitor - a hard, satisfying impact she knew was a bad idea. The sharp crackle of her earpiece sent a shiver down her spine, filling the silence with unsettling static. The lab seemed to hold its breath, the steady hum of machines the only sound in the stillness.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  She pushed her chair back and crossed the room to the blinking server banks. She counted the blinks: flash, flash... double flash. She felt sure she had a touch of OCD. She counted stairs as she climbed them, aligned her desk equipment at precise angles and knew exactly how many lab doors were locked at any given time - reassuring overlays of regularity imposed onto the great 'out there'.

  Her obsession with patterns was both her burden and her gift, drawing her to the fascinating world of pareidolia. She found herself constantly spotting faces in bubbles of dish soap, picking out fleeting figures in sunlight shafts filtering through leaves, hearing ever-so-faint signals in everyday noise and generally imposing order and meaning on a world that often felt disordered and disinterested.

  She stood for a moment, then reached out, placing a hand against the cool metal of one server unit. The hum seemed to vibrate through her, resonating in her chest, making her fingers tingle. The vibrations naturally fell gradually into layered rhythms for her, synced almost to the thump of her own quiet heartbeat. The AI was running its usual analysis - data, patterns, noise. The department had come to rely on it heavily in recent times. Glancing back at her monitor, she saw the letters on the screen shift, jitter, rearrange themselves as the display seemed to settle down. "Mass." The software showed the same search result again. It was just one word, pulsing on the screen, glowing with a cold, clinical light. Then the letters dissolved back into static, reforming into nonsense. She moved toward the desk, examining the patterns.

  Briefly, the ceiling lights flickered, cut out, then came back on. A power surge? Rosa felt a wave of irritation wash over her at yet another distraction. Then came a noise - soft, like a distant whisper, indistinct and unnerving. It wasn’t coming from the speakers of Rosa's workstation. Her breath hitched as she turned, searching for the source. As she did, she noticed the security drone hovering outside the window, its red LED blinking: flash, flash, double flash, followed by a burst of flashes. She opened the window, now clearly hearing the noise. It sounded like a thin voice - garbled, almost human but distorted, like someone speaking through layers of static. "Sssssssseeeeusssssss..."

  Really? It was amusing how the security team seemed to take themselves so seriously. She pictured them huddled around their screens, acting like they were in some kind of high-stakes spy thriller, over-analysing every flicker of the lights. No doubt one of them had sent the drone on some grand, over-the-top patrol. "Overachievers," she muttered with a smile, not buying into the drama.

  The drone abruptly rotated on its axis and swung off in a big curving trajectory, continuing its usual scan of the facility. Rosa shook her head with the barest puff of a laugh.

  On the way home, as she crossed the puddled entry courtyard splashed with bright reflections of the facility signs she could see the drone going about its usual patrol high up over the far side of the building. The place was huge, frankly she didn't know what went on in most sections of the place. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in one of the puddles, coat flapping in the wind. Are you really that desperate for some excitement?

  Back at her desk the following day, the lab felt nothing but ordinary. However, the routine tasks felt heavier today, like she was wading through fog. She tried to focus on the work, on the predictable behaviours of Borneo macaques, observing them via a series of well-placed robot webcams, but she wasn't committed, the jumbled letters from the old Paignton Zoo project - kept resurfacing in her mind. Static, noise, fragments of nothing. It would add an impish twist to her paper if she could uncover a pareidoliac pattern hidden in the chaos.

  She took a break, cleared her head, and returned to her workstation slightly refreshed. The rest of the day unfolded uneventfully, though it felt slow, each minute dragging. Eventually, one by one, her co-workers powered down their stations and headed out, leaving the lab quieter with each departure. As night settled in and the building emptied, Rosa found herself alone, and able to get back to her research paper. She brought up the text from the zoo monkeys, but her heart wasn't in it tonight.

  Words, words, words; like a storm of static, the long string of letters barely suggested any at all. Only that one word "mass" surfacing near the end, almost lost in the noise. The rest, meaningless banks of typographical sleet. "Like to a mass whose own huge weight is easier borne than the continent."

  Rosa leaned on one elbow, tapping her fingers as the flickering light highlighted the weariness in her eyes. The windows turned into black mirrors as darkness fell. No sign of any security drone tonight. The clock on the wall read nearly nine, its faint tick phasing in and out of time with the rhythmic whir of the technology around her accompanied by the quiet buzz of the overhead lights. She exhaled slowly, and returned to her paper.

  The typed output from the defunct art project at Paignton Zoo was readily available on the Web. The small group of Sulawesi crested macaques had produced a jumble of letters, consisting mostly of endless strings of "S" and a smattering of other random characters. The potential for pattern spotting intrigued her more than her mundane daily observations of creatures fiddling with coconut husks, mutual grooming and the occasional squabble.

  The zoo monkeys' cascading susurrations of the letter "S" were punctuated sporadically by strings of "G, " "Q" and "A." Baum knew these arrangements had no latent purpose beneath the randomness, yet they could be used as a metaphor, an illustration perhaps. "G" and "A," harsh and soft, and "Q," an emblem of inquiry. And that ubiquitous "S," suggestive of the infinity symbol (∞), repeated over and over, a mesmerizing, eternal motif - an Ouroboros loop of endless possibility.

  Not The Bard's total library; maybe just a few words, a word. "Mass." Was she wasting her time? "Like to a mass whose own huge weight is easier borne than the continent." The cold emptiness of the room felt less appealing than it once had. She adjusted her chair, feeling a shiver that had nothing to do with the temperature. She got up and idled over to the window, looking for movement outside. Nothing.

  She returned to the screen. Pareidolia, like a Rorschach blot, seeing patterns where there were none. Monkeys had it just like humans. "Mass," she whispered aloud, the word lingering in the air like an accusation. It was nothing, just a coincidence, but maybe something to exploit for her paper.

  Give it up, Rosa. You're spiraling. She shook her head, her lips pressed into a thin line, then reached for her mug of now-cold coffee. The ceramic was barely warm against her palms; it did little to chase away the chill that seemed to settle deeper into her bones as the hours wore on.

  Rosa leaned back, rubbing her temples, ready to call it a night, when her display, unbidden, flicked open a new window. Not words, not static - an image. She froze, her breath caught in her throat as the screen flickered, revealing a grainy video feed. She knew that place. It was the lab. Her lab. The camera angle was unfamiliar, low to the ground, tracking across the floor in jerky, mechanical movements, but it was her lab. Her pulse quickened as she jumped up, scanning the room for the source of the feed. Every muscle in her body tensed as the view crept across the room. Then vanished. A prank - some joker must have recorded it earlier... surely.