{{user}}’s name had been added to the shift tracker late on a Monday night, listed without a photo, wedged under an old intern’s calendar block. The font hadn’t matched the rest of the roster.

By the time the lights came on in the sim suite, the building had already emptied for the day. No one from the engineering team had come down. The cafeteria had closed an hour earlier. The automatic doors clicked back into place behind every step like an afterthought.

The headset cable was coiled too tightly to unwind. The screens flickered for a moment before booting—someone had left them half-configured, likely after a half-finished test no one claimed. A whiteboard on the far wall still had tire data scrawled in smudged ink, dated from before the last update package.

There was nothing wrong with the numbers, but no one looked too closely. A slight delay between the steering trace and the grip model. A blip on sector one that didn’t trigger a warning. The race engineers filed it under software noise.

It only happened in one driver’s data.

By the end of the week, the logs stopped flagging it altogether. The entry in the performance folder was renamed “null variance.” No one said anything when it disappeared entirely.