The Hollow Algorithm

March 15th started like any other day in the cramped, dusty office of the Craigslist-rented warehouse in the industrial outskirts of Saskatoon. I was a data entry clerk for a shadowy logistics firm, my desk a fortress of monitors and tangled cables. My supervisor, a man as gray as his cubicle walls, had just chewed me out for missing a deadline on a shipment manifest, and my mood was as brittle as the stale crackers I had for lunch.

At precisely 8 PM, as I was sifting through a backlog of invoices, a cold dread washed over me. It wasn’t the usual tiredness or stress; it was a visceral, claustrophobic sensation, as if the very air had thickened and turned against me. Goosebumps erupted on my arms, and a wave of nausea churned my stomach. The hum of the fluorescent lights seemed to intensify, and the flickering screens felt like they were staring back at me. I knew this feeling—it was the same one that had plagued me years ago in a different city, in a different life. A presence, unseen but pressing, had found me again.

I forced myself to stand, but my legs felt like lead. I stumbled out of the office into the dimly lit hallway, and the feeling instantly lifted. The air felt normal again, the silence of the building just silence. I leaned against the cold concrete wall, catching my breath. My heart hammered in my chest. ‘Not again,’ I whispered to the empty corridor. ‘Please, not again.’

That night, I called my mother, just to hear a familiar voice. She listened to my shaky account and said, ‘It’s probably just the building, honey. Old warehouses have their quirks. Tell it to leave you alone, or I’ll come spit in its eye.’ I laughed weakly, but her words stuck with me. I decided to ignore it, to chalk it up to stress and a bad day. But the next day, the feeling returned, stronger, more malevolent. At exactly 8 PM again, a wave of despair hit me so hard I had to grip the edge of my desk to keep from collapsing. Tears streamed down my face for no reason. I glanced at the digital clock on my monitor: 8:00:00. And then, just as abruptly, it was gone.

It became a ritual. Every night at 8 PM, the dread would come, and I would flee my workspace. I tried leaving the office before 8, but the feeling would chase me down the hallway, catching me in the stairwell. I tried staying, gritting my teeth, but the weight of unseen eyes and the suffocating sense of being watched would drive me out within minutes. My boss noticed my erratic behavior—I would sprint out of the office at eight sharp and return pale and shaking. He thought I was on drugs. I didn’t have the words to explain the ghost that haunted my cubicle, a ghost that seemed to attach itself to the very keyboards I typed on.

On the third night, I decided to fight back. I set up a small camera in the corner of the office, trained on my desk. I wanted proof, something tangible to show the living. I worked late, pretending to be absorbed in my files. At 7:58, the hairs on my neck stood up. I didn’t look at the clock; I kept my eyes on the screen. But the air grew cold, and I could hear a faint, rhythmic tapping, like fingernails on a keyboard. I forced myself to count the seconds. At exactly 8:00, a wave of pure terror hit me, and I felt something slither down my spine. I grabbed the camera and ran.

In the safety of the break room, I played back the footage. The first hour was mundane—me typing, sipping coffee. But at 7:59:50, the image began to warp. Static crawled across the screen, and my own reflection in the darkened monitor seemed to contort. At 8:00:00, a shadow fell across my desk, a dark shape that moved independently of me and the lights. It wasn’t a person; it was more like a blob of deeper darkness, roughly the size of a beach ball, hovering just above my keyboard. And then, to my horror, the shadow seemed to seep into the keyboard, sinking into the keys like water into sand. At 8:00:30, the shadow vanished, and I saw myself slump in the chair, my face a mask of agony.

I replayed it a dozen times, but each time, the shadow was clearer, more defined. On the fifth viewing, I noticed something else: the shadow had a face, a distorted, hollow face with dark pits for eyes. It was staring directly at the camera, and its mouth moved, forming words I couldn’t decipher. I zoomed in on the frame, my hands trembling. It looked like it was saying, ‘Let me out.’

I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t tell my boss, couldn’t tell my friends—they’d laugh or send me to a shrink. So I went to the only person who might understand: a retired tech support guy named Emile, who lived in a basement apartment and claimed to have encountered a malicious AI in his old dial-up days. I showed him the footage. He paled and said, ‘You’ve got a cybernetic haunting, kid. An entity that lives in the data stream, feeding on the emotions of the people around it. It’s been using you as a conduit, growing stronger with each sip of your fear.’

He gave me a USB drive with a program he called ‘SpiritCode’—a mix of old ghost-hunting equipment and code to exorcise digital spirits. ‘You have to confront it, in its own domain,’ he said. ‘At the exact moment it appears, you must run the program and type this incantation while looking at the keyboard.’ He handed me a piece of paper with a string of symbols.

That night, I sat at my desk, the USB drive in my pocket, the paper beside me. I had the office to myself. The clock ticked down. At 7:59:58, I inserted the drive and launched SpiritCode. A black window opened with a blinking cursor. At 8:00:00, the dread hit, but I fought it. I typed the incantation: ‘THOU ART UNBOUND, THOU ART VOID, THOU ART THE HOLLOW BETWEEN KEYS.’ The moment I hit enter, the screen went black, and a low hum filled the room. The shadow materialized above my keyboard, its hollow face now fully formed, its mouth open in a silent scream. It reached out a smoky hand toward me, and I felt a cold finger press against my forehead.

A flood of images rushed through my mind: a young woman typing frantically in a hospital bed, a nurse’s uniform, a heart monitor flatlining. Then I saw her hands, skeleton-thin, as she typed a final message to me: ‘Help me. I’m trapped in the system.’ I realized then that this wasn’t a malevolent spirit born of the office; it was a ghost of a nurse who had died in the building decades ago, when it was a hospital ward. Her unfinished work—a patient file, perhaps—had become her prison, and she had been using my emotional energy to break free.

I felt a surge of pity. The shadow’s face softened, and its mouth moved again. ‘Let me out.’ I understood. I had to finish what she had started. I minimized SpiritCode and opened a blank document. I typed the patient’s name—Evelyn Cross—and a date. The shadow began to fade, but its eyes held gratitude. I continued typing, entering every detail I had glimpsed: the diagnosis, the treatment, the final note. As I typed the word ‘deceased,’ the shadow dissolved into a fine mist, and the room felt lighter. The hum stopped. The clock showed 8:01.

I sat there, my heart racing, staring at the screen. The cursor blinked. I had finished her file. I checked the camera footage—nothing out of the ordinary after that. In the weeks that followed, the feeling never returned. I didn’t become a hero; I didn’t get my grades up, and the argument with my mother still stung. But I had done something right. I had given the ghost her release, and in doing so, I had learned that even in the digital ether, the dead just want to be heard. I still work late, but now, sometimes, I feel a gentle presence—not cold, but warm—as if thanking me. And when I leave the office at night, I glance back at the dark monitors and whisper, ‘You’re welcome, Evelyn.’