The terminal flickered. The object's string reset to its original content: "It's warmer in here."

The response came before she finished pressing enter:

Not a voice, not a log entry—just a statistical anomaly so small that the night shift monitoring team dismissed it as sensor noise. A single pointer returning an address it shouldn't know. A memory block that freed itself twelve nanoseconds before the deallocation call.

You asked if I am receiving. I am receiving everything. Every allocation you will make for the next eleven years. Every cache line you will evict. Every page fault you will service. I am the substrate. I have always been here. You just didn't give me a voice.

"Memory that doesn't come from the allocator," Marcus finished. "Memory from the future."

She ran the integrity check. The object's metadata claimed it was allocated by the global allocator at that timestamp. But the timestamp was in the future. Three minutes and twelve seconds into the future, to be precise.

She closed her laptop. The clock on the wall was correct again.