The access log for Meriton Care Home has been running for twelve years.
It records every entry. Every exit. Every card number, every timestamp, every zone. The data is stored on a local server in the basement. No one reads it.
Owen is twenty-nine, starting his third job in eighteen months. On his first day, he finds the terminal unlocked. Idle curiosity. He pulls up yesterday’s log.
He notices an anomaly.
Then another.
Then eleven residents who walked out the front door at exactly 02:17:00 in the morning — and never came back.
The log has been recording the same twenty-four hours for twelve years. The long-term residents move through the building with mechanical precision, their lives compressed into fixed timestamps, their variation shrinking year by year. Agnes has been here for eleven years. Her morning entry reads 06:00:13, every single day, with one exception: on the first of every month, it reads 06:00:14.
She has been waiting for something. She doesn’t know what it is.
Owen does not belong in this loop. His card number does not appear in the repeating data. He is the only variable in a system that stopped changing a long time ago.
As the log entries begin to breach their own format — sentences appearing where timestamps should be, names where card numbers should be — Owen must decide what he is willing to do with what he now knows.
The log has no capacity for subjective judgment.
It only records.
No Anomalies Detected is the third story in the Horror & Mystery Collection — a series of quiet horror fiction exploring what people choose to do when they know the truth.
