The Delta Threshold

Mira spent her days drowning in data—rivers of it, oceans of it, more numbers than there were stars in the sky. She worked for someone, somewhere, doing something with patterns. That’s all anyone needed to know. She liked to think of herself as a miner, not a hoarder—digging through the endless streams for the one glint of gold that made sense of the chaos. The trick was knowing what to ask. Ask the wrong question, and you’d choke on noise. Ask the right one, and the data sang.


Her latest project was trails. Old trails, mostly—dirt paths etched into the earth by feet long gone. She’d built a system to read them: wear patterns, erosion slopes, the faint lean of a footprint fossilized in mud. The computers could tell you if someone carried a load one way, or if a path favored a single direction. Modern roads flattened that out, asphalt hiding secrets under its smooth skin, but out in the wild, the earth still whispered. She called the difference between one direction and the other “the delta.” A little imbalance was normal—people went to market and back, hunters chased prey and returned. But a big delta? That was a story.


She’d set her threshold high: 50 to 1. Fifty steps one way for every one the other. Anything less was just life’s messy ebb and flow. Anything more, and the computers flagged it. She figured she’d never see an alert. Who moves that much, that deliberately, in one direction? The world didn’t work that way anymore.


Until it did.


Two alerts pinged her system on a Tuesday morning, 500 miles apart but close enough to make her stomach twist. Both hit the maximum certainty—100% one-way travel. No backtracking, no stragglers, no hesitation. The first was a trail into a valley in the northern range, a jagged scar of rock and pine. The data said people walked in, and then… nothing. The trail stopped at a sheer cliff face, like they’d vanished into the stone. The second was a cave exit in the same mountains, 300 miles south. Here, the delta was triple the entry traffic. For every one person who went in, three came out. Mira stared at the numbers. The computers didn’t lie, but they didn’t explain either.


She dug deeper. Satellite maps showed nothing—no villages, no roads, just wilderness. She tweaked the algorithms, cross-referenced weather data, soil density, anything that might skew the readings. The alerts held. She even pulled up X posts and web scraps, chasing rumors of the range. Most were hikers raving about views or conspiracy nuts babbling about UFOs. But then she found it: a scanned page from a 19th-century ethnographer’s journal, buried in an academic archive. A tribal elder, speaking of a disaster—a flood, a fire, something that drove his people underground. They’d survived, he said, because the Ant-Eyed People took them in. Mira frowned. Ant-Eyed People? It sounded like myth, a story to scare kids. But the elder’s descendants still lived near the valley, and their oral histories matched.


Mira didn’t tell her boss. She didn’t tell anyone. Instead, she packed a bag, rented a truck, and drove out to the range herself. The valley trail was faint, overgrown with brambles, but the data was right—every scuff, every bent root pointed inward. She followed it for hours, her boots crunching on gravel, until she reached the cliff. Up close, it wasn’t solid. A narrow fissure split the rock, barely wide enough for a person. She squeezed through, her flashlight beam bouncing off damp walls, and stepped into a cavern.


The air was thick, heavy with the smell of earth and something sharper—like metal or sweat. Her light caught shapes: tunnels branching off, walls smoothed by hands or tools. And then, carvings. Figures with elongated heads, eyes bulging like insects. Ant-Eyed People. Her pulse quickened. The trail ended here, but the story didn’t. She thought of the cave exit, the tripled traffic. Something had happened down here—something that multiplied.


She drove south next, to the cave mouth. It was wider, gaping like a wound in the mountain. The ground outside was churned, trampled by countless feet heading out. She walked in, tracing the entry path. It sloped down, then leveled out into a chamber. Her flashlight flickered over bones—small ones, scattered like dice. Not human, she thought, but what? The air buzzed faintly, a vibration she felt in her teeth. She pressed deeper, and that’s when she saw them.


Footprints. Fresh ones. Three sets for every one going in. Tiny, clawed, overlapping in a rush toward the exit. Her beam swept up, and she froze. A cluster of eyes glinted back—black, unblinking, set in pale faces. Not human, not animal. They scuttled, fast and silent, vanishing into the dark. Mira stumbled back, heart hammering. The data hadn’t lied. The Ant-Eyed People were real—and they weren’t alone anymore.


Back at her desk, Mira deleted the alerts. She rewrote the code, raised the delta threshold to 100 to 1. Let someone else find it. She’d mined her gold, but some truths were better left buried.