Sean had six photographs spread across the table.
Three phones.
One tablet.
A receipt.
A booking confirmation.
And a guest list with six names.
ELJARA:
“You’ve made a shrine.”
SEAN:
“I’ve made a comparison.”
“You’ve made a shrine to poor filing.”
Sean ignores her.
He points to the first photo.
SEAN:
“19:42.”
Seven people.
Second photo.
“20:11.”
Still seven.
Third.
“20:37.”
Still seven.
Eljara picks up the guest list.
ELJARA:
“Six names.”
SEAN:
“Yes.”
“The seventh is the unknown man.”
“Peter.”
“Martin.”
“Depending on whom you ask.”
That is the problem.
Everyone remembers him.
Nobody remembers the same person.
One witness says middle-aged man.
Another says young woman.
One remembers German.
Another English.
One says Bavarian accent.
Another something Scandinavian.
Somebody remembers shaking his hand.
Someone else remembers him refusing beer.
Another remembers him drinking schnapps.
The details change.
One thing does not.
He belonged there.
SEAN:
“So what do we call that?”
ELJARA:
“Confabulation. Possibly.”
“Alcohol?”
“Possibly.”
“Social contamination of memory?”
“Possibly.”
“Unnatural interference?”
Eljara looks at him.
“Possibly.”
SEAN:
“There she is.”
Then they find the taxi driver.
He remembers the unknown guest standing beside his car after the party.
Too close to the passenger door.
The driver waited for him to move.
He did not.
So the taxi pulled forward.
The man was still beside the door.
SEAN:
“How?”
The driver shrugs.
“I don’t know. Maybe I remember it wrong.”
They check the dashcam.
No man.
But three seconds of footage are missing.
No file break.
No corruption warning.
Just three seconds that are not there.
SEAN:
“That’s rude.”
Then the waitress.
She remembers seven guests too.
Only her seventh guest was a woman.
Blonde.
Around thirty.
SEAN:
“Did she order anything?”
“No.”
“Drink?”
“No.”
“Eat?”
“No.”
“Then why do you remember serving her?”
The waitress stops.
“I don’t know.”
Now the pattern widens.
Man.
Woman.
Old.
Young.
Brown hair.
Blonde.
Local.
Foreign.
Different faces.
Different voices.
Different stories.
But everyone points to the same place at the table.
Then they check the security footage.
At 19:13:22:
six people.
At 19:13:23:
seven.
No one enters.
No cut.
No blur.
No one moves aside.
The seventh guest is simply there.
And there is still no seventh chair.
Sean stares at the screen.
SEAN:
“Now?”
Eljara says nothing.
“Now can I call it Unnatural?”
ELJARA:
“Not yet.”
“Why?”
“Because we still don’t know what happened.”
“But something happened.”
“Yes.”
They play the audio.
Six voices.
The seventh guest moves his mouth.
No seventh voice.
Yet one of the others answers him.
SEAN:
“What did she hear?”
ELJARA:
“That is a better question.”
Then they find another video.
Sean is playing guitar.
The seventh guest stands behind him.
On the recording, Sean suddenly stops playing and looks over his shoulder.
ELJARA:
“You noticed something.”
SEAN:
“I don’t remember that.”
“What did you see?”
Sean watches himself.
Then his expression changes.
SEAN:
“I remember a smell.”
“What kind?”
“Sea water.”
“In Munich.”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“Rotten wood.”
He pauses.
“And something sweet.”
Now Sean is no longer joking.
Then comes the strangest witness.
A child.
Six years old.
She watches the video for five seconds.
Then looks away.
SEAN:
“What do you see?”
CHILD:
“That thing.”
“What thing?”
“The one pretending to be people.”
Eljara goes still.
SEAN:
“What does it look like?”
The child shrugs.
“I don’t know.”
“You just saw it.”
“No.”
She points at the screen.
“It keeps choosing.”
Sean and Eljara try the witnesses again.
They show the same frame.
One sees a man.
One sees a woman.
One sees someone old.
One sees someone young.
But when asked to point at the seventh guest—
every finger lands on the same pixels.
Sean stops smiling.
Back at the table, he counts the evidence.
SEAN:
“Photographs.”
ELJARA:
“Yes.”
“Video.”
“Yes.”
“Independent witnesses.”
“Yes.”
“Different human descriptions.”
“Yes.”
“Same spatial position.”
“Yes.”
“No recorded voice.”
“Yes.”
“No recorded arrival.”
“Yes.”
“People answering speech that isn’t there.”
“Yes.”
Sean leans back.
“Now?”
Eljara looks at the files.
Then at the screen.
Then at him.
ELJARA:
“Yes.”
Sean waits.
ELJARA:
“Unnatural.”
No triumph.
No relief.
Because the word does not explain anything.
It only removes one comforting possibility.
Sean looks again at the witness statements.
SEAN:
“Do you think it fooled them?”
ELJARA:
“No.”
“Then what?”
She taps the statements.
“I think they helped.”
“Who?”
“The witnesses.”
Whatever they saw, their minds gave it a person.
A face.
A voice.
A name.
A reason to belong.
Peter.
Martin.
Friend.
Colleague.
Cousin.
Someone else’s guest.
SEAN:
“So it didn’t choose the disguise.”
ELJARA:
“Maybe not.”
“Then what did?”
Eljara looks at the statements.
ELJARA:
“They did.”
Sean looks back at the screen.
The seventh guest looks perfectly ordinary.
Only now Sean sees something else.
Not a man in a brown jacket.
A place where six people had agreed there should be a seventh.
And something had occupied that agreement.
SEAN:
“All evening.”
ELJARA:
“Yes.”
“It was there all evening.”
“Yes.”
“And nobody noticed.”
Eljara looks at him.
“That’s not quite true.”
Sean waits.
ELJARA:
“Mara noticed.”
He smiles faintly.
“Because she counted.”
“Yes.”
Six chairs.
Seven people.
One contradiction small enough for everyone else to smooth away.
A child simply refused to.
AND WHAT DO YOU THINK?
If something had no human face of its own, but everyone who looked at it automatically gave it one, where would the illusion really come from?
From the thing?
From memory?
From expectation?
Or from the human need to make the world coherent?
And how many contradictions would you accept before you finally said the words Delta Green agents already know can be true:
There is something here.
Different views are welcome. Disagreement is welcome.
Spam, trolling and disrespect are not.
Enter a Delta Green world where the impossible can sit beside you all evening: