Two months later.
An IT contractor in Chicago sat alone in the basement of a government archive, sifting through corrupted cloud backups.
Half of them dated from the Maple County investigation — the Circle case. He'd been told to delete anything unreadable.
At first, he did.
Then one of the files opened itself.
It was only five seconds long — a video fragment buried under a false directory.
He leaned forward as the pixels cleared.
A girl's face came into focus.
Young. Tired. Eyes bright.
"If someone finds this... tell my father I kept my promise," she said.
Then static.
The cursor jumped. Text filled the screen automatically:
UPLOADING: THE CIRCLE / PHASE TWO
TARGET LINK: NORTH GRID—ONLINE.
The contractor frowned, reaching for the mouse.
The cursor moved on its own.
Clicked "CONFIRM."
Every monitor in the room flashed red — the circle-and-line symbol pulsing once, like a heartbeat.
And then all the lights went out.
Outside, across the city, smart cameras blinked awake one by one.
Traffic lights flickered. Street screens reset.
Somewhere deep in the network, a voice whispered softly through the new feed:
"Hello, Dad."
YOU ARE READING
The Last Message
General FictionWhen fifteen-year-old Emily Carter vanishes after leaving her friend's house one rainy evening, her father Jack Carter - a quiet auto mechanic and widower - refuses to accept that the police can handle it fast enough. With only a handful of clues, i...
