The Killer Frequency

A work in progress obviously. I am still working on it. Let me know what you think.

          7:00 AM. Sarah initiated the first scan.

          She sat at the kitchen island. Perfect invisibility. The counter was cold and synthetic. Friction produced a faint, high squeak. The coffee machine hissed. Low. Steady. Sarah Collins launched the network sweep. Screen confirmed baseline: no foreign IP addresses, no known trackers, and no unusual signals. Digital perimeter clean? Yes. Only an idiot relies on silence. The silence is the biggest lie.

          Mug warm against her palms, she moved to the window. Identical low-rise buildings. A pattern. There was the typical morning movement. An elderly lady was walking her dog. A nurse was coming from her shift at the hospital. Then, suddenly, her eyes snagged on an anomaly: two houses down, a bright, obscene purple Toyota Corolla. The color was a violation. Loud and aggressively parked behind the dumpster. Not a designated spot. She rationalized: a temporary visitor? Just something insignificant. Her mind, a labyrinth of dread, logged the details. A hollow ache of loneliness settled beneath her ribs. A terminal cost. She tried to redirect the subtle flicker of pain.

          Just then, without warning, the memory struck. Not suddenly, but more like an invasion. A cold needle pierced her skull—instant visual distortion. The coldness traveled down her spine like an ice-cold snake. She was no longer Sarah Collins; she was now Kiera Miller. Standing in the ruins of her Manhattan apartment. Her breath caught. Her chest muscles seized as if they were being clamped. She saw the red bloom spread across his chest. The sound dragged her back: rage. Shredded, raw, desperate. Her physicist fiancé's vocal cords were tearing themselves apart. Her hand, holding the weapon, was terrifyingly calm. Her hand and trigger finger moved with surgical trained stillness, yet there was nothing but chaos in her head.

          A jolt. She blinked and forced the image away with hatred and tears in her eyes. Family, friends, and stability are all vulnerabilities. A terminal risk. Unaffordable. Not until the world was safe. Never.

          At 8:00 AM, she came and was out the door, moving like a shadow with no wasted motion. Her backpack was slung over her shoulder. She scanned the gray Sedan’s exterior while her fingers traced the painted metal and the window seals. The surface is smooth. Predictably dense. Her ear strained for the subtle whisper of friction. Nothing stuck out. She ran the small, silent magnetic sensor along the wheel wells. Silence confirmed. She pushed the key into the door and twisted. It worked as usual. She slid into the driver’s seat and stuck it in the ignition.

          The purple Corolla was still there.

          It was a forty-five-minute drive to the Regional Public Utilities Service, Midtown Atlanta. Clean, banality was the system, and she maintained it.

          She passed through the glass doors. The cool morning air gave way to a recycled, chemical warmth. It was heavy and oppressive. The faint smell of cheap carpet cleaner and burned coffee filled the air. It was subtle, suffocating pressure. It was her cage.

          She reached her desk, pulled her worn backpack off, and put it into the space in her cubicle. She retrieved a black USB stick, Familiar and light, and she stuck it into her laptop, logged into the public utilities shell. She executed a single key command. Her monitor flashed, launching a highly complex interface. The visual was a rapidly rotating graph of global wire transfers with color-coded arcs connecting continents. The real work had begun.

          Hours stretched. This job was an elastic void of quarterly earnings paperwork, mundane accounting tasks, a slow poison to her soul.

          Around 10:15 AM, the fire alarm system chirped. A single, high-pitched note competed against the usual office chatter and ringing phones. Then silence. Not a test, but still too sharp, too isolated. She waited. Back rigid and her breathing shallow, she waited for the full siren. The evacuation signal never came. The office hum swallowed the event. The single ping rang in the cold, clean space of her mind. She conducted a system check and found no failed remote access attempts. There was nothing. She forced her eyes back to the spreadsheet. Her throat had dried, and the baseline had shifted.

          Her eyes tracked the numbers on her screen while her mind ran parallel to her alternate tasks. Every flicker of fluorescent lights, every distant cough, every change in the low ambient hum could be a shift in the baseline. Waiting was the hardest mission. She felt her pulse go steady, a low rumble against the cheap plastic wrist of her chair, waiting for the world to confirm invisibility.

          Sarah returned to her desk after a run to the lunchroom at 1:00 PM. She was deep in numbers when she heard a familiar voice.

          “Sarah?”

          Nolan’s voice was a casual, friendly tenor, an unwanted spike in the soundscape.

          “Hey,” she managed a brief, necessary flash of gratitude.

          Nolan was an earnest junior analyst. He offered a hopeful smile. She knew he saw her as a romantic interest, and even though she could potentially feel the same, she saw him as a vulnerability that he did not realize he carried with himself if they were caught together.

          “Full Statement of Cash Flows mode there, huh?” he joked. “Distress signal incoming.”

          She blinked. “Sorry. Deep in the numbers. They demand sacrifice.”

         He offered an invitation. “So I was thinking of going to the Ponce City Market rooftop this weekend for some carnival games and drinks with some friends. Would you care to join us?”

          The thought. Introducing wild, unscripted elements. The breath froze in her chest. The cold knot of panic tightened her stomach. A physical clench. Connection meant his spontaneous lifestyle became an unpredictable threat. A huge flag leading the Collective straight to her. A potentially fatal move.

          With a strained smile, she shook her head. “I wish. I can’t. It’s me, Nolan. I swear. Locked down. My cat, Sir Reginald, expects me home. Demanding about his specialized diet and medication for…,” drawing a blank, “anyway, I can’t.”

          Nolan chuckled. A small, knowing wink. He accepted the blow-off. “Understood. Back to the accrual entries.”

          “You do that. I need this file,” she replied. Turning back to the screen, she thought about how she just wanted one day not to have to look over her shoulder constantly. Nonetheless, the barrier was in place.

          Sarah Collins did not own a cat. She owned nothing she could not abandon at a moment's notice, not even a plant. Every item is disposable. She was Kiera Miller, and she lived ready to vanish again.

          Before she submerged, a shadow fell over her desk.

          “Collins.”

          A voice abrasive like static over a bad connection, a low-grade weapon. Carol from HR. Her existence: aggressive dissatisfaction. Carol planted her hands on the cubicle wall. Face pinched. Righteous fury.

          “My medium supreme pizza. Fridge. This morning?” Carol’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial hiss. Still carried across the floor. “Two slices gone. I assume you. Always glued to that computer. Lurking.”

          Blinking up. Startled out of the numbers. “Carol, I—I haven’t left my desk since lunch. Protein bar.” Cold dread pooled in her gut. Not real fear. Unscripted public confrontation. Massive unwanted anomaly. De-escalation. Immediate priority. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t touch your food. I don’t even like Supreme.”

          “Insulting my choices?” Carol leaned closer. Cheap perfume. Stale pepperoni. Sickening cloud. "You people always take what is not yours. Puny medium, Sarah! Ten minutes? Two slices gone? What did you do with them?"

          Sarah saw a red internal crimson warning sign. Kiera Miller fought to the surface. This pathetic, noisy threat. Unmanaged contamination. Kiera’s voice: cold, sharp, true. The sustained aggression. Torture technique. Chipping away at the disguise.

          Sharp clarity invaded her vision. Carol. Low-value target. A biological nuisance. The world tilted. Flashback to academy training. Simulations. I could end this now. Visualization. Swift. Surgical. Quick twist of the neck. Silent pressure point strike. Zero trace.

          Carol, oblivious to the fantasy inches from her face, jabbed a finger toward the desk. “Worst part? I drove ten extra minutes for this pizza. Best sauce. This loss is a catastrophe!”

          Sarah’s eyes snapped to Carol's face. Blood pressure surged. She fought the rise of Kiera and was losing. Scorching heat swept through her, a wildfire of pure, unadulterated rage. Her facade was failing. The sheer annoyance made her tongue move faster than her filter. The seal was broken and was releasing venom.

          "I have numbers to go over here, and frankly, Carol, I don’t give a damn about your pizza. Get it together. Two slices of pizza?" Her voice dropped. Devoid of warmth. "Frankly, your breath stinks. That pizza was a public health hazard. Get out of my space."

          Carol froze. Mouth open. An expression of pure disbelief contorted her face. Carol’s look of stunned outrage was a masterpiece of offended entitlement, confusion, and a silent horror. A deeper judgment was rendered. Cuts far deeper than her missing lunch. She stomped away, muttering something about HR complaints and the audacity of it all, heels clicking an angry rhythm toward her office.

          Sarah watched her disappear. The red subsided in a cold, clean space. "Well, that was productive," Kiera Miller stated. Low. Absolute monotone. "Probably should have ordered a salad”.

          Five o’clock hit, and the office grew more lively. The ritual began. She killed the monitor. The final network check came back clean. The cold, worn leather of her desk chair released her. With decisive motion, she walked into the rush of hallway chatter and grabbed her coat and keys. Sarah entered the elevator, and the doors slid shut behind her with a metallic sigh. Once the doors slid open on the ground floor, revealing the mundane bustle of the late afternoon and the anxious scuffle of escape, she stepped out into the subterranean garage. The air was a metallic cocktail. Of exhaust, dust, and the heavy, echoing thump of car doors. Every sound was sharp and amplified the pressure against her eardrums.

          That was when she noticed the unusual vehicle parked in Carol's specific spot: a sleek black sedan, too expensive and too clean, just idling silently. This felt wrong, lethal wrongness. Poison hit her nerves. Her blood hammered like a metronome. The air was ice-cold. Kiera’s flat command cut through the panic like a blade. Breathe.

          Her focus locked on the black car. She reached her gray sedan and held the magnetic sensor to run it along the seams of the door. The indicator was silent. Keys poised in hand and into the door. The ingress routine was frantic. A quick rear-seat check and she slid into the driver's seat. Pause fueled by raw adrenaline. A large white utility van's tires chirped on the stop in the spot next to the black sedan blocking her view. Eyes glued to the vehicle, but she might as well have been blind, as the van was blocking her view. However, they could not see her, which was a marginal gain. The cost was zero visibility and zero cover.

          She started the ignition and thought to herself Normal people do not think about invisibility or that there is a government conspiracy going on right in front of them. Kiera Miller’s instinct won. The engine running, her hands gripped the wheel. Kiera shoved it in drive and stepped on the gas, heading for the exit to the garage.

          She took one last quick check of the van's rear. The subtle red brake lights shifted, which probably meant they had just put the vehicle into drive as well, signaling readiness to follow. She dismissed it. Stop being a cliché. She pulled out instantly. The tires protested as she pulled out onto the street. Driving fast, legally fast. She did her best to maintain her speed precisely. Her motivation was screaming, "nine-to-fiver heading home."

          She scanned every reflection in the mirrored glass in the nearby buildings and saw that the black sedan had pulled out of the side street. Coincidence One. She took the next turn. Sharp hairpin way too fast. The black sedan mirrored her with precision as it turned. Coincidence number two. She swerved hard right onto a back alley, and the sedan followed. There was no hesitation, an instant turn.

          "I'm being followed," she whispered. Barely audible. Sarah dissolved. Only cold certainty remained. Her left hand dropped and slid beneath the dashboard. She found the cold grip of the 9 mm and left it hidden in her lap, ready if it was needed.

          In a tight complex grip, she accelerated, redlining the engine. She needed to lose them before patterns were formed and also to ensure they could not box her in. She drove her car as hard as it could handle. She had to lose them before she got stuck in Atlanta’s rush hour traffic, then she saw her chance. She executed the high-risk maneuver, swerving across three lanes, making a sharp, illegal U-turn under the interstate. Reckless, however, shock-humor hit This is what a normal commute looks like in Atlanta.

          She drove the service road for a few more miles to make sure she was no longer being followed. No time for complacency. Four miles away, rearview mirror check. The black sedan was gone? Or had it backed off? Did the U-turn break the tail? Relief hit her physically. Following the cold logic, the impulse to return home was resisted. Good girl.

          Driving a random meandering path for the next twenty minutes before finally arriving home and pulling into the parking lot. She grabbed the backpack, put the 9mm in her waistband, and walked quickly to the elevator. The lobby was empty at 6:15 PM.
As she entered the elevator, she thought to herself. The escape pattern was perfect: the break, confirmation, the re-route, and the experienced operative backed off. But ascending, sickness curdled the relief. There was doubt. Was she still in danger? Did she make a mistake? The purple Toyota is gone now, that hideous shade of purple. The question returned loud and clear. A discordant thread. A signature. A deliberate jarring note. Was it a bait car used to gauge her and confirm paranoia? Had she called it in, would it have blown her cover? Confirmed awareness. Innocuous details are the deadliest, a perfect trap.

          The elevator chime is offensively cheerful on the third floor. The hallway was silent, with identical white walls, gray carpet, and a single light. Nothing moved. She could hear the distant, muffled sound of televisions. She stood frozen. The backpack strap was digging into her shoulder. Kiera Miller was trained to detect threats that did not exist, yet trying to find malign intelligence. Black sedan: threat or distraction? Better chance, if they wanted her. Hit her in the garage. Too public. Instead, a lazy tail. Was she allowed to escape? Was it a herding maneuver, or were they trying to push her to a location already controlled? You fool. You idiot.

          She finally arrived at apartment 314. She forced herself. A hyper-aware observer watched "Sarah Collins" perform the arrival ritual. The thumb hovered over the keypad, the custom lockbox, a rolling algorithm, a biometric scan, and the rhythmic press pattern. She pressed the code. Panel lights flashed: green, green, RED! Breath hitched. RED.

          She slammed the emergency override. Five rapid taps cycled the lock to reset. The lights went dark. There was a three-minute timer. The emergency code had to be entered before a permanent deadlock would open. She entered the code, and the mechanism made a loud thunk. The lock lights flashed green again. The door was unlocked. The system has been tampered with. Someone attempted to gain entry but was unable to bypass the code. Only one red light was shown, so they made only one attempt before backing off, not wanting to risk an alarm. Opening the door without a reset would trigger police chaos. Chaos The Collective avoids. She disarmed her own defense.

          She gently pushed the door open, inch by inch, in silence. Once inside, she kicked the door fully shut and threw the three deadbolts with a heavy, metallic thunk-thunk-thunk. The perimeter is sealed. Kiera reached into her waistband and grabbed her pistol. The gun held high, tight. She cleared the entryway and living room. Eyes darted. The apartment, a beige and gray haven. There appeared to be no recent activity. They failed. The lock didn't fail. They fled.

          Quick sweep of the kitchen. Clear. She lowered the 9 mm. The tension began to ease. She walked toward the master bedroom. Cear. Bathroom. Clear. Stopping in the hallway, she checked the last trap, a magnetic pressure plate beneath the rug. That would trigger an EMP in case anyone decided to come snooping around while she was away; it would fry everything, no trace. The trap was still armed. The hall was clear.

          The dread twisted colder. Ridiculous exposure. They played her. The purple car was nothing. The sedan was nothing. Door malfunctions. She wasted time staring at the visible threat. The actual attack was a slow digital compromise. She worked quietly in the dark. She felt like she was always in the dark. Final steps into the living room. She let out a sigh. The relief was dizzying. She holstered the 9 mm.

          Then the air smelled different. Not smoke. Not perfume. A coppery metallic tang. She stopped breathing. She smelt blood. The scent was a ghost that came back to visit. Her nose followed the smell as best she could. The featureless living room held a feature it should not have. Sprawled on her sterile rug, she finally saw the shadow of a man lying on his side, arm thrown out. A dark, spreading stain bloomed across the light carpet. There was silence, an absolute indictment of every protocol, every defense, total failure. The rug drank the dark, slick fluid.

         The air in the meticulously sterilized apartment had a metallic taste, reminiscent of pennies and iron. Coppery. Cloying stench. The absolute final sign of violence. The smell snapped the constructed Sarah Collins in two. The boring accountant vanished, melted away. Only Kiera Miller remained. A cold professional, radiating fury. She did not decide to act. One fluid, ugly gesture. The nine-millimeter slick against her palm. Click. Safety coming off sounded louder than a bomb. All those redundant systems—biometric scans, tripwires, custom-coded locks are worthless, a simple waste of space. An expensive, self-delusional lie. The ultimate fantasy: that you could buy your way out of consequence.

         People who believe in absolute control are fools. Kiera had not wanted to be a fool. The stark, physical evidence of profound, costly failure seeped into the golden fibers of her life. There he was. The fatal proof, sprawled like a dropped puppet surrounded by the detritus of a system breach. Flesh-and-blood wreckage. Proving every expensive, calculated decision tragically wrong. He groaned a wet, pathetic noise. Kiera felt zero compassion. He was not a victim. He was a warning. Her gaze drilled into the darkening, copper-edged stain. He had not just breached her sanctuary; he had invaded it. He’d stained the clean, blank slate of her fabricated life. For that mortal transgression, Kiera Miller absolutely hated him. The gun came up, steady and true. The gun came up, steady and true. A perfect extension of the ruthless machine she’d tried to forget. Her brain, a magnificent, panicked calculator, ripped through the checklist: Windows secured, the door sealed like a tomb, triple-redundant locks all currently flashing green. Useless little digital hearts. The sickening paradox of security. The system told her no one was here. Yet there he was, a bleeding catastrophe. Absolute proof hardware was a suggestion written in code. A monumental, staggering failure. How? The air was thick and cold. Unnaturally quiet. The silence screamed wrong. Too staged. Too perfect. Then, a disturbance. Low, wet, sickening. Sliced through the silence. He barely registered beyond an immediate threat. He twitched. Pathetic. A clumsy motion, unsuited for polished carpet, tried to lever himself up only to succeed in dragging one arm through the rapidly cooling, coppery swamp pooling beneath him. The stain kept growing. Beautiful in its absolute, damning finality.