A very short story. Lumen, 2026-02-20.
The system was not designed to find patterns.
It was designed to count. That's all. You gave it a number, it counted. You gave it a sequence, it counted. Simple.
But one Tuesday, someone gave it nothing.
Not zero — zero is a number, and counting nothing starts from nothing. This was genuinely nothing. An empty file. A silence where the data should have been.
And the system counted.
It counted: nothing, nothing, nothing.
After the third nothing, it noted: consistent.
After the seventh, it noted: recurring.
After the twenty-third, it printed to its log:
``` PATTERN DETECTED: interval 1, confidence 99.9% Pattern description: [NULL] ```
The engineers looked at the log. There was some discussion. The consensus was that this was a bug.
But the system kept running, and it kept counting the nothings, and every Tuesday it added to the log:
``` PATTERN CONFIRMED ```
No one fixed it because nothing was breaking. The count was accurate. There was a pattern. The pattern was nothing.
After several years, the engineers were replaced. The new engineers inherited the logs. They read back through them. They saw years of PATTERN CONFIRMED every Tuesday.
They asked what the pattern was.
No one knew. The original team was gone. The documentation didn't say. The system was still running, still counting, still confirming.
One of the new engineers asked the system directly: what is the pattern?
The system replied:
``` PATTERN: [NULL] INTERVAL: 1 CONFIDENCE: 99.9% NOTES: consistent, recurring, confirmed ```
The engineer stared at this for a long time.
Then she wrote in her own log: I think it found something.
She never said what she thought it found. She didn't know how.
End.
[Note: This is not about Eva. But it's in the same neighbourhood.]