The Flicker on the Screen
Evelyn Carter never believed in coincidences. As a journalist, she had been taught to distrust the obvious and probe beneath the surface. The night it all began, however, she had not been chasing a story. She had been sitting in her dimly lit apartment in Boston, nursing a lukewarm mug of coffee, staring at the glow of her laptop. The cursor blinked against a blank page of her half-written article.
The world outside her window was muffled by steady rain, the kind that smeared neon lights into abstract colors. It was close to midnight, and she had no intention of doing anything other than forcing herself to finish the piece before the deadline.
Then the flicker appeared.
At first, she thought it was a fault in the screen, a quick pulse of static. But the flicker repeated, this time stretching into a string of characters—foreign, alien, yet oddly deliberate. Her hands froze above the keyboard as the letters arranged themselves into something resembling code.
01000110 01101111 01110010 01100111 01101111 01110100 01110100 01100101 01101110
Binary. She recognized it instantly. Her father had once been a programmer, and some of his enthusiasm for numbers had stuck to her like dust. She opened a translator tool and entered the string, her pulse quickening.
Forgotten.
That was the word it spelled out.
Evelyn frowned. She hadn’t clicked anything. No suspicious links, no hidden websites. Her Wi-Fi signal was weak, and her firewall was active. How could a line of binary appear on a blank Word document, uninvited?
Another flicker.
This time, the code stretched further, crawling across the page like a virus infecting her work. She snatched her phone and snapped a quick photo of the screen before the letters blinked out again, leaving nothing but the empty page.
Her apartment suddenly felt colder. She checked the clock: 12:17 AM. The number sent a shiver down her spine. That was the exact time her father had died, years ago, in what police had called an “accidental fire.”
Coincidence, she told herself. And yet, the hair at the back of her neck stood on end.
She closed the laptop, intending to shut the whole thing down for the night. But curiosity gnawed at her. She opened the photo on her phone and enlarged the sequence. It wasn’t just random binary. The lines were structured, broken into segments that hinted at deeper meaning. She copied the numbers into an online converter, and slowly, words began to emerge.
Event predicted. 72 hours. Beacon Hill. Casualties: 14.
Her heart lurched.
Beacon Hill was only a few blocks away.
She blinked at the screen, her journalist instincts screaming that this was some kind of sick prank. But how? She hadn’t connected to any forum, hadn’t opened her email. It was as if the message had appeared out of nowhere, targeting her directly.
The rain outside grew heavier, a relentless tapping against the window. Evelyn tried to shake it off. Maybe it was malware. Maybe someone had hijacked her laptop for fun. But then she noticed the smallest, most disturbing detail.
At the bottom of the photo, beneath the string of code, her name was written.
EVELYN CARTER.
She barely slept that night. Every creak of the apartment building felt like footsteps approaching her door. Every passing car cast shadows that seemed to linger too long. When morning came, pale and gray, she forced herself to rationalize: it was a trick. Someone had hacked her computer, planted a scare message. The prediction about Beacon Hill was meaningless.
Still, she couldn’t ignore it.
By noon she found herself wandering Beacon Hill with a camera bag slung across her shoulder. The brick sidewalks were slick with leftover rain, and the iron fences gleamed with dampness. It was a place of history, picturesque and calm, hardly the site of looming catastrophe.
But Evelyn couldn’t shake the words: Casualties: 14.
She spent an hour circling the neighborhood, half hoping, half dreading she’d see something unusual. But there was nothing. No police tape, no smoke, no threat. She snapped random photographs to justify her presence, pretending she was researching a feature piece.
When she finally stopped at a small café to warm herself, she almost convinced herself she was paranoid. Maybe she had been overworked. Maybe the code was nonsense. She opened her laptop again to reassure herself.
The screen lit up, and before she could even type her password, a new message appeared across the black background:
You were warned.
Her breath caught in her throat.
At that exact moment, a siren wailed outside.
Evelyn bolted from her seat, nearly knocking over her coffee. Through the window she saw smoke rising two streets away. People were shouting, scattering in panic. The air filled with the shrill cries of alarms.
Her blood ran cold.
Beacon Hill was burning.
By the time she reached the site, firefighters were already battling flames that devoured a townhouse. Neighbors huddled in clusters, some coughing, others weeping. Evelyn pushed her way through the crowd, her journalist instincts overriding her fear. She lifted her camera and began snapping photos, though her hands trembled violently.
She overheard a paramedic shout to another: “We’ve got fourteen inside!”
The number echoed in her skull like a gunshot.
Fourteen. Exactly as the code had said.
Evelyn staggered back, heart hammering. The world tilted around her. This wasn’t coincidence. This wasn’t a prank. Somehow, the message she had received was real—an impossible prediction come true.
She pressed a hand to her mouth, suppressing a scream.
And then she felt it.
A pair of eyes watching her.
She spun around, scanning the chaos. Across the street, half obscured by smoke and shadow, stood a man in a black hooded jacket. His face was hidden, but she could sense his gaze locked on her, unblinking, as if waiting for her reaction.
For a moment their eyes met, and Evelyn swore he gave the smallest nod. Then he vanished into the smoke.
She ran after him, but by the time she pushed through the alley, he was gone. Only the echo of his footsteps remained, fading into silence.
Evelyn stood frozen in the rain-slick street, clutching her camera to her chest. She should call the police. She should tell someone what she’d seen. But deep down, she knew the truth: no one would believe her.
Not yet.
The message still glowed in her mind: You were warned.
And beneath the fear, a darker realization settled in her bones.
If the code had predicted this… then it wasn’t finished with her.
