Page 48 of A.I.AM.

“Like the paper grooves,” he said.

Hiro fetched the photograph of the graphite sheet and held it beside the pegboard. The line spacing matched groups of holes. Pigsty looked from one to the other.

“The wall is the playback machine.”

“Not playback,” Code said. “Indexing.” He used chalk to mark each vacant hook, then drew the shortest connections among them. A warped grid appeared. AJ saw it first.

“Letters.”

“No,” Tanner said. “Rooms.”

The pattern resembled the ground floor of the house, but the proportions were wrong. The basement door aligned with a gap that should have been solid foundation. The kitchen counter sat over a narrow rectangle extending beyond the known wall.

Hayes took the cloth tape through the house. When he returned, his expression had changed.

“Exterior width is thirty-one feet, two inches. Interior accounts for twenty-nine, eight.”

“Eighteen inches,” Carl said.

“Wall thickness.” Hayes said it as a statement, not question. Challenging the logic.

“Not on the north side. Twenty inches are missing after subtracting framing.” They returned to the kitchen. The missing space ran behind the cabinets and continued beside the basement stair. Pigsty reached for a pry bar. Bron stopped him.

“Find the intended access.”

They removed drawers one at a time. Behind the narrow drawer beside the sink, AJ found a strip of unfinished wood worn smoothly by fingers. He pressed it. Nothing happened.

“Try from seated height,” Ace said. AJ knelt and pressed upward. A spring released inside the wall. The cabinet back opened three inches.

Behind it was not a room but a vertical cavity lined with cork. The dead copper pipe passed through its center. A narrow wooden shelf held a ceramic cup, a pencil sharpened at both ends, and a second metal cylinder. This cylinder was empty. Code examined the interior.

“Residue.” He frowned, bringing his fingers to his nose to sniff.

“Paper?” Bron asked.

“Wax. Graphite. Same as the first.”

“Someone removed the message,” Carl said. Tanner looked at the cup. A hairline crack ran from rim to base, repaired with a thin seam of dark resin.

“Or Elias moved it.” Ace lifted the pencil. Both points were equally worn. “Why sharpen both ends?”

“So, orientation carries no information,” Hiro said. “There is no front or back. No first choice.” AJ rotated the cup. Scratched into its underside were three words.

ASK ME LATER.

Pigsty stared at it.

“That is Elias talking to ARGUS.”

“Or to himself,” Tanner said.

“Or to whoever opened this,” Carl said. The house lights came on.

Every bulb burned at half strength, revealing dust in the air and the team’s reflections in the dark kitchen windows. The refrigerator, empty and disconnected, began to hum. On its black display appeared a sentence.

THE QUESTION HAS AGED.

Tanner faced it.