"Because he's trying to understand it. He's been here six years and he's still trying to understand it. He has a system. When a new person notices, he watches what they encounter, because different people seem to encounter different things — like the building shows different aspects to different people." She looked at her monitor. "I see the calls. I hear what they're asking. But I've never seen the floor ten button."
"You know about floor ten?"
"Rajan told me about it. But in eight months — I've gone to the lift after midnight a dozen times. I've never seen the extra button." She paused. "Rajan thinks it's because I'm not the right kind of person to see it. He has a theory that the building — whatever is happening in this building — decides what to show you based on something about you. What you're likely to do with it."
"That's not a very satisfying theory," Meera said.
"No," Divya agreed. "His theories are never satisfying. That's because they're honest — they describe what he's seen without inventing a structure that isn't there." She looked at Meera. "What do you think it is? The building, the calls."
Meera had been thinking about this since night two. She had approached it from several angles. The practical angle: there was something wrong with the building, structurally or architecturally, that created the perception of different dimensions at different times. The calls: there was a misconfiguration in the call routing system that was sending non-client calls — scam calls, research calls, who knew — into the legitimate queue, and the questions about the office layout were some kind of survey or corporate espionage. These explanations were available. She had stress-tested each of them and found the points where they failed.
"I think," she said carefully, "that there is something using the infrastructure of this place. Something that needed a structure — a building, a phone system, people sitting in it answering calls — and found one. Something that is using the framework we created for its own purposes."
Divya looked at her for a long moment. "That's the best description I've heard," she said. "Better than Rajan's."
"What does Rajan call it?"
"He calls it 'the tenants,'" Divya said. "He says Zenith Solutions rented the building from one set of landlords and didn't know there was another set already living there."
A call came in on Meera's line. She pressed accept. "Thank you for calling TechAssist, this is Mia, how can I help you today?"
The voice said: "Hello, Mia. I have a query about my account." American accent. Standard opening.
"Of course, can I have your account number?"
The voice gave an account number. She pulled it up. Real account, normal history.
"And how long," the voice said, in the same helpful American tone, "have you been aware that we're listening?"
