The Spy
The science museum closed at 6 p.m., but the light in Gallery 7—Materials and Matter—was still on at 6:43. No one noticed. The security guard on shift had gone to the vending machine three floors down for a bag of honey almonds. The cleaning crew hadn’t arrived yet. The only sounds were the low mechanical breath of the air handling system and the slow, repetitive tap… tap… of someone walking in soft-soled shoes.
The woman stood before the carbon nanotube display. She was wearing a coat that was slightly too warm for the season, and her left hand stayed deep in its pocket, gripping something—maybe a phone, maybe a tiny book, maybe nothing. Her face was unreadable in that specific, curated way you sometimes see on surveillance footage. She didn’t blink often. She didn’t smile. She mouthed something silently toward the panel describing tensile strength.
Behind her, the interactive screen flickered. Briefly, it showed a satellite weather map instead of its usual educational animation. Then, it returned to an image of a spider spinning silk.
In another part of the museum, a man pretending to calibrate the pendulum clock exhibit glanced at his watch, muttered “too early,” and slipped a folded page torn from a chemistry textbook into his sock. He smelled faintly of formaldehyde, like a biology lab that hadn’t been ventilated properly.
No alarms. No weapons. No dead drops.
Only misfiled brochures in the gift shop that listed the periodic table with two fabricated elements—Irion and Quantaphene. Only a child’s drawing left in a suggestion box that showed the museum’s layout with strange red dots overlaid on certain exhibits. Only a quiet laugh echoed faintly in the stairwell after hours, though no one was there.
The museum director would later swear the woman in the coat never entered. The security guard would forget about the almonds and insist the vending machine jammed before he could make a purchase. And the man by the pendulum? The records showed no such exhibit was under maintenance that day.
Still, someone left the back door ajar. Still, someone signed the logbook “E. Glass,” a name that does not exist on staff, donor, or visitor lists.
And that’s how the first signal passed hands.
***
She returned the next day at opening.
This time, she wore glasses with unusually thick frames and carried a small old digital camera with no memory card inside. She appeared to photograph exhibits that hadn’t changed in years: a plaster cast of a femur fractured in microgravity, a scale model of the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector. Her hands didn’t tremble; they were too steady.
A boy on a field trip watched her from behind the fossilized tree section. When she turned sharply, he ran. In his notebook was a sketch of her shoes, but drawn as if made of insect legs and copper wiring.
At noon, a janitor wheeled his cart into the dark hallway near the climate science wing. The light bulbs flickered in Morse. He took no notice. Beneath the bag of disposable gloves, a sliver of mirror. Beneath the mirror, a single matchstick labeled “RETRY.”
That night, someone replaced the model of Mars’ surface with a textured replica bearing untranslatable glyphs. No one noticed for three days. Then it vanished.
A message encoded in the glass refraction table still hasn’t been decoded. They say you need to read it underwater, in moonlight.
No one has tried.
The investigation began quietly, with a request from the deputy curator to a private firm known only through word-of-mouth: Fessel & Voli. No website. No obvious physical location. They sent a woman and a man, both dressed like they were trying not to be noticed but didn’t know how.
They arrived on a Wednesday. Rain soaked their coats. In the lobby, the receptionist offered them the usual brochure—this time without the fabricated elements Irion and Quantaphene. The receptionist insisted the elements never existed. They looked tired when they said it, like someone who’d woken from a dream they were not sure was theirs.
The investigators started in Gallery 7.
“She stood here,” said the security guard, pointing to the carbon nanotube display. “I didn’t see her leave.”
The man investigator bent down and examined the base of the touchscreen. “Has this panel been rewired recently?”
The curator shook his head. “It’s not even connected to the network. It just loops a video.”
But the screen flickered again. For a moment, not a spider, but two overlapping weather systems colliding off the coast of Greenland. Then, back to the spider.
They asked for the janitor. He was gone. Left no notice. His cart was found in the hallway, still containing the mirror, but the matchstick labeled “RETRY” had been replaced with one labeled “REGRET.”
The woman investigator, who had not spoken much, paused before the Mars model replica.
“This isn’t plaster,” she said, tapping it once, twice. “It’s calcite. And someone pressed a finger into it before it hardened.”
In the fingerprint’s whorls: tiny carved text. She borrowed a magnifier.
It wasn’t espionage. It was affection. I came back for the shape of your silence.
The man beside her exhaled as though he’d remembered something he wasn’t supposed to forget.
“She wasn’t looking for data,” he said. “She was leaving pieces of herself. For someone.”
They checked the guest logs. The name E. Glass appeared once more, dated from two years prior. Same handwriting. That day, a temporary exhibit opened: Light That Remembers: Photonics and Memory. It had closed quietly after only three weeks.
The child’s drawing reappeared in the curator’s mailbox, but now the red dots had begun to connect—forming not a path but a shape—a heart folded in two.
And now the air in Gallery 2 started to behave strangely.
Visitors began complaining that their reflections lagged behind them for a second or two in the exhibits on optics and perception. One woman said she looked in a curved mirror and saw herself as a child, holding a balloon she never remembered having. A volunteer tried to clean the mirror, but her cloth passed through it, briefly, as though it had turned to vapor.
The investigators remained, though their mandate expired. The woman—unnamed on her ID—now sat each morning beneath the pendulum clock, sketching spirals on museum napkins. The man stayed mostly in the stairwell, where the echo had once laughed without a source. He swore he heard it again—louder, closer. It said his name.
In the service corridor, behind the replica lunar module, a seam appeared. Not a crack. A line, too straight, too intentional. When the night guard ran his hand along it, his fingers tingled, like touching static.
Someone left a note taped to the Mars replica:
“I thought I was doing this for country. Then for justice. Then for you. But now I want out. I want air without codes. I want the silence not to mean anything.”
It was unsigned, but the handwriting matched E. Glass.
That night, the stars on the ceiling of Gallery 5 rearranged. An astronomer visiting the next day said the constellations were wrong—not just in placement, but in form. “There’s one that looks like an open cage,” she whispered. “That’s not a pattern the sky ever made.”
And in the hidden crawlspace behind the carbon nanotube display, the investigators found a coat. Too warm for the season. Inside one pocket: a camera with no memory card. Inside the other: a matchstick. This one read FORGIVENESS.
They did not turn it in.
They began dreaming of exits that did not exist on blueprints. Doors marked only with numbers that never repeated. A hallway where the displays were blank and humming softly, as if waiting to be filled.
But in the gift shop, the periodic table once again lists Irion. Its symbol now flickers—not a letter, a door.
She appeared during a school tour.
A guide was explaining the difference between quarks and leptons when a child tugged her sleeve and pointed at the second-floor mezzanine. “She’s watching the spider video,” he said.
There was no one visible. But later, on security footage, she is there. Clear as rain: the coat, the too-thick glasses, the unmoving eyes. Watching. The footage ends abruptly—just static, then resumes with a perfectly empty gallery.
The investigators—who now slept in the museum’s old IMAX projection booth, who had long since stopped pretending they’d be reimbursed—heard about it from the child. They didn’t speak, just looked at each other for a long time, as if deciding whether to tell the truth or forget it together.
That night, they met again in the stairwell, beneath the echo. They had grown used to the museum’s slow shifting: exhibits aging in reverse, the fire alarms blinking Morse that said things like DO YOU REMEMBER THE FIELD? or UNMAKE THE VOW.
She kissed him there. Not for the first time, but the first time they both admitted it was real.
Later, he found a handwritten note tucked into the fossil room’s ventilation grate. It read:
“I was E. Glass before I knew who I loved. I kept the name because I was afraid of what my real one would cost. I thought love was a kind of patriotism—coded, loyal, sharp. But love isn’t like that. It’s slow and animal and wants to be free. I want to be free. I want to dissolve through the air like radio. Like forgiveness. Like names no one has to speak aloud.”
The ink smeared as though someone had wept on it, or as if the paper had been left out in the rain.
Was she E. Glass?
The woman in the coat never said. She only placed her palm on the carbon nanotube display again and mouthed a single word. Surveillance caught the shape of it:
“Wait.”
The display flickered. This time, not a spider. A pulse of red, green, violet. A heart not beating but opening. And then she was gone again.
The woman investigator began marking the calendar with numbers that didn’t correspond to days. The man stopped answering the museum phone. Visitors still came, but they left different. Quieter. Sometimes leaving things behind: necklaces, matchsticks, letters they didn’t write.
And in the gift shop, beside the postcards and impossible maps, a single card labeled E. GLASS – $0.00.
It rings at the register when no one is there.