Eset-upd [top]

"Scheduling anomalies?" Mara asked.

She thought of calling her manager. She thought of leaving the room. Both ideas felt like admitting defeat against something flimsy and absurd. Instead she dug deeper. The file's tail contained a small script written in a language she'd only seen in malware analysis—more obfuscation than function, a litany of references to "waiting rooms" and "unmet appointments." It queried the hospital's scheduling database and returned an array of matches: names that had been unassigned, appointments that never existed, files marked "ER boundary" and closed. Each name was followed by a date: the kind that had already passed and the kind that had not.