The hospital on Ward 13 had been shuttered for eleven years, but the janitorial staff still heard the squeak of rubber-soled shoes at 3:00 AM.
They called her the Nurse Ghost. Not a system creature born of a software glitch, but something older—a loop in the architecture of reality itself. She was a system creature of the building , a persistent error in the memory of the plaster and tile.
"Oh, and Elara?" The ghost almost smiled. "The janitor who mops this floor at dawn? His name is Hendricks. Tell him I said his potassium looks excellent."
Elara, whose last name wasn't Hendricks, just blinked.
"I call it surviving," Elara whispered.
The Nurse Ghost tilted her head. "Ah. My error. System mismatch." She tapped her clipboard. "The creature in me sees patterns. The nurse in me sees… lifestyle." Her gaze softened, and for a moment she looked less like a haunting and more like a tired woman on a double shift. "You've been sleeping four hours a night. Eating protein bars for dinner. You call that living?"
Elara clutched the key. For the first time in years, she felt less like a ghost herself.
Then she was gone, leaving behind the faint scent of antiseptic and the sound of a heart monitor's steady, soothing beep.