The Wrong Note

In Yamen's world, faces were nothing but scattered puzzles; expanses of flat skin, strange noses, and eyes that left no trace in his memory. For him, human beings were merely a fabric of sounds, rhythms of walking, and scents of perfume that preceded their owners. For this reason, he adored architecture; walls did not change, right angles remained faithful to their logic, and concrete had no face to betray you with its silence.

It was past two o'clock after midnight, and Burj al-Qimma rose behind the glass of his office on the Fortieth Floor like a steel giant gazing at the lights of the bustling city. This tower was not merely a building; it was the son he had never fathered, the masterpiece he had designed to be the safest in the face of the most violent earthquakes.

Before Yamen on the huge screen, the final blueprints for the tuned mass damper were spread out like a complex treasure map. His hand trembled slightly as he moved the mouse over the structural joints. He felt something was out of place. It was not an obvious engineering error, but a "wrong note" in the symphony of numbers he knew by heart.

Yamen murmured in a low voice: "This sensor... I didn't put it here."

He brought his face close to the screen until he almost touched the glass. In Sector 7-B, where the main columns of the tower met, he found a modification in the frequency code. According to this modification, the counterweight mass at the top of the tower would not act to absorb vibrations, but would amplify them if the building were exposed to a certain acoustic frequency.

His heart stopped for seconds. This was not a human error, it was precise surgical work. Someone, with access authorization to the main server, had changed the mathematical equation just forty-eight hours before the grand opening ceremony.

"Who could do this?" he asked himself, while his mind tried to recall the "voices" of his colleagues at the company; for it was impossible for him to remember their "faces." He remembered the hoarse voice of Samer, the gentle laugh of Layla, and the measured steps of the project manager. Which of them had the motive to turn this tower into a glass graveyard?

Suddenly, a cold shiver washed over him. He was not alone.

The senses sharpened by his face blindness (Prosopagnosia) made him aware of the slightest changes in his environment. The air in the office had changed in density. There was a faint smell, a mixture of rain clinging to clothes and old leather. A smell that did not belong to anyone from his usual team.

Yamen froze in place, his eyes still fixed on the screen. He heard a faint "click"; the sound of a shoe sole pressing on the luxurious carpet behind him very slowly. It was not a familiar rhythm. The steps were confident, heavy, and terrifyingly regular.

"Are you still here, Yamen?"

The voice came calm, deep, and carrying an artificially friendly tone. Yamen avoided turning around quickly; he knew that even if he looked at the speaker, he would not be able to recognize him by his face alone. He would need to hear more, or see the movement of his body.

Yamen said as he tried to keep his voice steady: "I was reviewing the final touches for the elevators... Who is speaking?"

"Oh, my apologies... I forgot that you rely on your ears more than your eyes."

The shadow drew closer until it was right beside Yamen's desk. From the corner of his eye, Yamen saw a hand wearing a black leather glove placed gently on the edge of the table. He could not see the face clearly because of the strong light of the screen, but he felt gazes piercing through him.

The stranger continued: "The modifications in Sector 7-B are ingenious, aren't they? They make the tower breathe with the city... dance with it."

Yamen felt the blood freeze in his veins. This person knew exactly what he had been looking at. Yamen said sharply: "These modifications will lead to a catastrophe if strong winds blow or if music at a certain frequency is played in the grand hall. I will cancel them now."

The leather-gloved hand moved with lightning speed to close the computer screen. Darkness fell over the office, and nothing remained except the pale moonlight seeping in through the windows.

"I don't think you will do that, Yamen," the stranger said, drawing closer until his whisper was in the engineer's ear. "This is not just an equation, it is the destiny of this building. And if you try to tamper with it, remember that I know where you live, and I know that you cannot even distinguish the face of the person who might stand in front of your house door to kill you."

The stranger pushed Yamen hard toward the chair, and Yamen heard the sound of his footsteps retreating toward the door quickly. Yamen shouted as he tried to get up: "Stop!"

But the office had become completely empty. Yamen ran toward the corridor, but he found no one. The silence of the empty offices buzzed in his ears. He returned to his desk to restart the computer, but he found a worse surprise waiting for him.

The original blueprints had been completely erased, and in their place was a single file bearing a strange name: "Symphony No. 0".

With trembling hands, Yamen opened the file, and a short message in red appeared to him: "The first test begins tomorrow at dawn. Do not try to escape, for the eyes you do not possess.. are watching you now."

Yamen felt an immense pressure in his chest. He looked toward Burj al-Qimma outside, and for a moment it seemed to him that the building was swaying, not from the wind, but from that hidden tone that had begun to creep into its foundations.

As he was about to leave the company, he tripped over a white envelope lying under his desk. He opened it to find a photograph of himself asleep in his bed, taken from an impossible angle inside his locked room. And in the background of the photograph, there was the face of someone standing behind him in the darkness, but the face was indistinct in the photograph, as if the photographer had wanted to mock his illness.

Yamen went out into the street feeling dizzy. Every person who passed by him represented a potential threat; every face he saw was merely an anonymous "mask." And while he was standing waiting for a taxi, he felt a sudden cold on his neck, and heard a very familiar voice whisper directly behind him:

"You forgot your bag in the office, Yamen.. or have you forgotten me as well?"

Yamen turned in panic, to find before him a man smiling with indistinct features that seemed to him like all the other features in the world, but the rhythm of his breathing was the very same rhythm as the person who had been in the office minutes before.