The second time the dock grabbed me, it felt less like falling and more like being rewritten.
A pull behind my ribs, a flicker behind my eyes, and I was standing under too-bright lights in air that smelled of toner and old coffee.
Surface.
Not the street this time. Inside.
Rows of desks stretched out around me, each with its own little ecosystem of screens, mugs, sticky notes, and plants struggling under fluorescent suns. The carpet had that uneven give of something cheap laid over concrete. A printer whined in the distance like a trapped animal.
On the wall near the entrance, a sign in municipal blue:
CIVIC INFORMATION CENTRE
MEMORY & MEDIA DIVISION – DISTRICT 3
Underneath it, more honest in small letters:
"Your stories, responsibly curated."
I snorted.
No one heard.
People moved through the room, carrying laptops, stacks of paper, plastic cups. They threaded past me without reaction. A man in a shirt with sweat marks under his arms walked through my shoulder, leaving a faint static itch behind.
The pull in my chest tugged toward the back of the room.
I followed it.
It led me past a cluster of desks where three women argued over headline phrasing ("Too dramatic." "Not dramatic enough." "What about 'City in Crisis?'"). Past a pinboard covered in photos and printed articles: missing cats, ribbon-cuttings, smiling officials.
I kept catching flashes of names I almost knew. The city was full of ghosts I'd never met.
The pull tightened near the far corner.
There, slightly apart from the buzz, a desk sat by the window. On it: two monitors, a mug that said I'M SILENTLY EDITING YOUR GRAMMAR, a stack of reports bound together with a rubber band bitten nearly through.
In the chair: a person in a dark sweater, shoulders hunched, headphones around their neck instead of on their ears. Curls of black hair. The slump of someone who had been staring at a screen long enough for the screen to start staring back.
On the right-hand monitor, my name flickered.
Not fully—just the ghost of it. The first letter, the last, a blank line of underscores between.
N__R
The headline above it read:
THE MAN THE SYSTEM FORGOT: INSIDE AN ADMINISTRATIVE DEATH
My stomach turned.
So here it was. The story.
"Got you," I muttered.
The person at the desk—name tag clipped to their sweater: RANA – FEATURES—rubbed their eyes and scrolled.
Words moved.
Young. Bright. Disillusioned. Noor N— dropped out of university last year, citing burnout and systemic failure. Friends describe him as "thoughtful" and "angry, but in a good way." Two months ago, he vanished into the city's bureaucratic black hole. His records now list him as deceased.
I could see the phrases that would stick.
Bright. Disillusioned. Vanished.
Rana chewed the end of a pen, thoughtful. They highlighted a paragraph of my old blog post and dropped it into the draft.
the city isn't a place you live in, it's a mouth that forgot how to stop chewing.
I remembered typing that at three in the morning, hands shaking from caffeine and exhaustion, convinced nobody would ever read it. Now it sat there, blue and smug, as if it had always belonged inside a neat little narrative.
"This is what you get for being quotable," I told my past self.
The pull in my chest throbbed in time with the cursor blink.
Echo's voice brushed my ear like a thought.
You see it?
"Yeah," I answered, though my mouth didn't need to move. "They've got the bones laid out. Tragic dropout swallowed by the machine. Perfect for a thinkpiece."
Good angle, Echo said dryly. Plenty of clicks.
"I don't want clicks," I said.
Exactly, she replied. That's why you're here.
Rana leaned back, letting the chair squeak. On the left-hand monitor, another window was open: a brief from some committee, city logo at the top.
POTENTIAL NARRATIVE ASSET: CASE #7F-19N
Objective: Increase public engagement with transparency reforms. Humanize administrative processes. Recommended approach: profile of individual affected by system malfunction. Emotional but hopeful tone.
Malfunction.
I hadn't malfunctioned. I'd opted out of their game by jumping to another board entirely. Endless Death was many things, but it wasn't a glitch.
"You see the problem?" I said.
Echo didn't answer. Didn't need to.
The Archive—whatever it really was—wanted me as a character in someone else's moral. The city hadn't learned anything; it just wanted content.
"So what do I do?" I asked. "Haunt the keyboard?"
You saw what worked with your mother, Echo said. You're not a ghost, you're weight. Pressure. You can lean on her.
"Her?"
Features desk, Echo said. Someone whose job is to turn people into paragraph-sized lessons. Who do you think the Archive uses as fingers?
I looked at Rana properly then.
Their face was tired, but not careless. The kind of face that had practised neutrality and only half believed in it. There were faint grooves at the corners of the mouth that said the neutrality hadn't always held.
I noticed something else: a printout pinned to the partition wall. A different article. Different name in the headline.
YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT THIS TEACHER DID FOR HER STUDENTS
By R. KADER
Someone had scribbled over the you won't believe with we didn't ask her in pen.
Guilt hung around the paper like smoke.
"Okay," I said. "Find the story they want from me, and then refuse to be it."
Start by listening, Echo said.
So I did.
—
For a while, I just watched Rana work.
They tinkered with the opening paragraph, trying different first sentences, deleting, reinstating, rearranging words like furniture. Every version of me looked slightly different.
Once I was an "ordinary young man with extraordinary criticism." Delete.
Once I was "one of many lost names in a glitching bureaucracy." Delete.
Once I was "your son, your neighbor, your future." Delete. Grimace.
They didn't want to lie too obviously. Their hands hesitated every time the draft tilted too close to propaganda. Good.
On the desk, under a crumpled snack wrapper, lay a slim, stapled dossier stamped:
OFFICE OF CORRECTIONS – INTERNAL SUMMARY
I slid closer. The letters wavered when I leaned in—the universe reminding me that physics did not recognize my curiosity—but the meaning came through anyway.
ADMINISTRATIVE DEATH – SUBJECT: NOOR [REDACTED]
STATUS: CONFIRMED.
FAMILY NOTIFIED (FORMAL).
CAUSE: PAPERWORK CASCADE, CATEGORIZATION ERROR.
I almost laughed.
Paperwork cascade. As if I'd been washed away by a flood of forms, some poor, innocent victim.
No mention of Line Infinity.
No mention of "client chose erasure."
Of course there wasn't. The system didn't like admitting that anyone could look it in the eye and say no.
Rana sighed and reached for their mug. Coffee. Cold. They drank it anyway.
Their cursor hovered over a line:
We may never know what Noor N— felt as he disappeared from the records.
"Anger," I said. "Relief. Both. And I didn't disappear. I relocated."
They shivered.
It was small. Barely there. A tiny clench of shoulders, a quick scan around the room, like someone had walked over their grave.
Okay, Echo murmured. You've got contact. Push, carefully.
"With what?" I asked.
Not your story, she said. Theirs.
That took me a second.
And then I saw it.
Around Rana—not visible, not exactly, but present in that sideways sense Null had taught me—hung faint, overlapping outlines. The shapes of things that might have been: versions of them that had written different pieces, taken different assignments, said no more often, or less.
Threads.
I didn't see details. I saw weight. One thread tugged harder than the others, humming with something like regret.
I followed it with my focus.
It led to the printout on the partition: the teacher piece. The headline someone had defaced.
"You won't believe what this teacher did for her students."
I remembered that one. It had circled social media a year ago. Some teacher who'd sold her car to buy tablets for her class. The city had applauded. The comments filled up with heart emojis and "faith in humanity restored."
I hadn't shared it. I'd written a furious paragraph about how a system that needed that kind of sacrifice was already broken.
Rana had written it.
I let that knowledge settle in my chest, then picked at it, the way I'd picked at the memory of my mother's hand in mine.
The late nights they'd spent on the article. The way the teacher's face had looked, lit by the staff room's bad fluorescent lighting, insisting "No, don't make me the hero." The way the piece had gone viral anyway. The way funders had pointed to it and said, "See, ordinary citizens can fix things if they try," and then cut the budget further.
Rana's inbox filling with messages. Some grateful. Some nasty. The teacher emailing six months later to say her students still didn't have decent chairs, but strangers kept asking for inspirational quotes.
I didn't fabricate any of it. I didn't need to. Shame has its own archive.
All I did was turn the volume up and press play.
Rana froze.
Their hand hovered above the keyboard. The cursor blinked on the line about what I "must have felt" as I died.
Their eyes unfocused, staring not at the screen but through it, at a point only they could see. The pen dropped from their fingers, bounced once, rolled under a stack of papers.
On the screen, the paragraph about me being "one of countless victims" blurred, then snapped into crisp focus again as they blinked hard.
"Not again," they whispered, so soft I almost missed it.
They deleted the sentence.
New words appeared, slower this time.
This is not a glitch and not a miracle. This is a choice the system refuses to name.
My heart jerked.
"Careful," Echo murmured. "They're slipping off the brief. The Archive doesn't like that."
As if on cue, the other monitor flickered. The committee brief window flashed red for a moment. A notification popped up:
DRAFT DEVIATION RATE: 23%
REMINDER: ASSET #7F-19N SHOULD SUPPORT REFORM TRUST INITIATIVES.
Rana swore under their breath.
Their fingers hovered over the keyboard again. They opened a new tab. Typed something into a search bar with more force than necessary.
"administrative death noor district 3 blog endless queue"
Search results blossomed.
Some were mine. Old posts archived by bots. Screenshots, quotes, threads where strangers argued in the comments. People had turned my late-night despair into fodder months ago, apparently.
One link had already been flagged with a small, grey Archive icon. The city ate fast.
Rana clicked a forum thread.
In it, people who didn't know me had built me out of guesses.
he was a hero tbh
he was just lazy, system didn't "fail" him
it's all fake, he's probably living abroad lol
A familiar wave of nausea rose.
"See that?" Echo said. "Story trying to congeal. Everyone wants a neat angle to sleep at night. The Archive drinks that stuff. Rana's just one of the cups."
I leaned closer to the screen.
Somewhere beneath the churn of strangers' takes, a different kind of comment sat, almost invisible. One line. No capitalization.
i knew him a bit. he was kind of an asshole sometimes. funny though. i don't think he wanted to be in your narratives.
I had no idea who wrote it.
But it was the first thing on this screen that felt right.
I latched onto that line like a handhold and pushed.
Not into Rana this time. Into the room.
Into the draft. Into the idea of me that was trying to gel.
No neat hero. No pure victim. A person who'd been trying clumsily to exist and had chosen a weird, brutal kind of exit rather than be domesticated as content.
For a second, the air in the office went thick.
Conversations faltered. Someone at a nearby desk frowned at their monitor, hit the side of it as if adjusting reception. A mug slipped from a hand in the distance and shattered.
Rana reached for the briefing document again.
Their thumb hovered over the phrase "humanize administrative processes."
Then they laughed, a short, bitter sound, and highlighted the whole paragraph. Delete.
The committee logo vanished from the page.
On the draft, they wrote:
This city will try to tell you this is a story about a broken system fixing itself. It isn't. There is no fix in these lines. There is only a person who wanted out.
My card in my pocket went hot, vibrating like an angry phone.
A thin notification crawled across the edge of my vision, text not on any surface but laid over the world itself.
ARCHIVE RESPONSE: RESISTANCE DETECTED. RETENTION LEVEL: REDUCED.
STATUS: ASSET USE VALUE – UNSTABLE.
"Good," I breathed. "Be unstable."
The lights overhead flickered, then steadied. On the other side of the room, someone complained about the Wi-Fi.
Rana read what they'd just written. Sat back. Swore softly, but this time there was something like relief in it.
They opened a new email. Addressed it to some superior whose name I didn't recognize.
Subject: RE: Case #7F-19N profile
The body of the email stayed empty for a long time.
Then, slowly, words appeared.
I can't write the piece they want. If we turn this guy into another "face of reform," we're lying twice—about him and about what we're capable of fixing. Recommend we move this to internal review only. No public story.
They hesitated, then added:
We keep chewing people into content. It's starting to look like the mouth is the only thing that works.
They hit send before they could rethink it.
A second later, a tiny red icon flared in the corner of their screen, then dimmed. Somewhere in a server room, the Archive sulked.
My card buzzed again.
NARRATIVE PATHWAY: INTERRUPTED.
STATUS: PENDING ALTERNATE ROUTE.
I exhaled.
"Are we done?" I asked.
For now, Echo said. You made yourself expensive. They'll look for an easier tragedy to dress up.
Rana closed the draft file without saving.
The cursor blinked in an empty document for a moment, then went still.
Slowly, as if their muscles had forgotten how, they pushed the chair back, stood, and went to refill their mug. As they passed another desk, someone asked, "How's the dead guy story?"
"Dead," they said. "We're not running it."
The someone shrugged, already scrolling their phone.
See? Echo whispered. Surface forgets fast. You pull a line out of the script, they write a different scene. The Archive will grumble. It will find another name to chew on. But not yours, not today.
A ridiculous surge of pride rose in me.
"I just ruined my own expose," I said.
Nice work, Echo said. Very on brand.
—
On my way back through the office, something else caught my eye.
A glass-walled meeting room, half empty. Inside, a big screen showed a slideshow cycling through potential "impact campaigns." One slide was paused on a stock photo: a young man on a bus, reflection in the window, city lights smudged around him.
He didn't look like me. That was the point.
At the bottom of the slide, in small font:
CASE STUDY: "NOOR" (COMPOSITE) – NARRATIVE OPTION B
"We tell them it's not you," Echo said quietly. "They say it's not you. They change your name, your face, your details. 'Inspired by true events.' Nice and vague. The Archive doesn't need you exactly. It just needs something that passes for you."
"Then what did we just do?" I asked. "What was the point?"
You kept the original from being pinned, Echo said. They can still tell a story like yours, but it won't drag your bones into every retelling. They'll feed a placeholder to the city instead of your corpse.
It was a compromise. It tasted like most compromises: better than the alternative, worse than what we deserved.
I still took it.
"I'll live with that," I said, then realized the phrasing and winced.
Echo didn't laugh. Didn't have to. The city did it for her, a distant siren wailing like a punchline.
The pull in my chest loosened.
The dock was calling me back.
As the room blurred, I took one last look at Rana, now hunched over a blank document. The title bar at the top of their screen read:
untitled.txt
They typed, deleted, typed again. For a moment, the words "Teeth of the City" appeared.
Then I was gone.
—
The Null District welcomed me back with its familiar, electric chill.
The platform unfolded around me. Echo stepped out of the fog behind, as if we'd shared a body for the trip and were only now separating.
Back in the hall, the screens over the Office counter still scrolled names. No red line flashing my half-erased one. Just the dim, ordinary white of background noise.
Samira looked up as we approached. A fresh coffee ring had appeared on her desk. Another nicotine patch on her neck.
"Well?" she asked.
"They tried to make me into a poster child for transparency," I said. "I made them nauseous instead."
A corner of her mouth twitched.
"I knew I liked you," she said. She tapped a key. One of the smaller monitors showed a summary:
ASSET #7F-19N: VALUE – LOW.
PUBLIC USE – NOT RECOMMENDED.
NOTE: SUBJECT DEEMED "COMPLICATED."
"'Complicated,'" I repeated. "That's the insult and the compliment, right?"
"In this building," Samira said, "it's the highest praise we can sneak into the system."
Echo leaned on the counter.
"Archive will try again," she said. "With someone else. Maybe with some composite Noor made of your leftovers."
"Then we'll be busy," Samira said. "Stories spill. We mop. Nobody thanks us. That's government."
Something in my chest loosened that I hadn't realized was clenched.
Thread one: cut.
Archive: stalled.
For now, I existed mostly as a gap, and that was exactly how I wanted it.
"Don't celebrate yet," Samira said, as if reading my mind. "You still have two residuals humming out there. Family, mostly. A friend. Maybe a stranger who decided you were their symbol for something. And the Archive doesn't forget the taste of a good metaphor easily."
"I noticed," I said.
She slid a folder toward me. Thin, but heavier than the paper should have allowed.
"Your file," she said. "As far as we have it. Don't read it all at once. It's ugly to see yourself in bullet points."
I didn't take it.
"Later," I said. "If it's all the same to you, I'd rather meet myself in small, regrettable doses."
"That," Echo said, "is called wisdom."
The ceiling lights buzzed overhead in lazy harmony.
For a brief, fragile moment, the Null District felt almost like a place rather than a bureaucratic accident. A weird neighborhood under the city where the things too complicated to explain went to smoke, complain, and try not to collapse the rest of the structure.
"So," I said. "What do you call someone who's dead on paper but spending their afterlife doing freelance metaphysical damage control?"
"Underemployed," Samira said.
"Field agent," Echo said.
I looked at my card, at the Endless Death symbol biting into the circle.
"Alive enough," I decided.
Behind us, one of the big screens flickered, just once.
For half a heartbeat, in the chaos of scrolling letters, I saw three characters line up in order:
N O R
Then the feed refreshed, and I was gone again.
A thrill ran through me—not fear this time, but something wilder.
Somewhere above, the city's stories moved without me. For the first time, that felt less like exile and more like space.
"Okay," I said, tucking the card away. "What's next?"
Echo glanced at Samira. Samira looked at the screens.
"No rush," Samira said. "The living generate work faster than we can process it. Get coffee. Stare at a wall. Be. You've earned at least five minutes."
The idea of having five minutes where nothing demanded I justify my existence felt like luxury.
I nodded.
As I turned away from the counter, my phone buzzed once in my pocket. No notification appeared. Just that phantom vibration, like a muscle remembering old habits.
For a second, I imagined some writer upstairs, staring at an empty document, trying to find an angle that didn't make them sick.
For a second, I imagined the Archive itself, baffled at the taste of a story that refused to resolve.
Then I went in search of coffee in a district for the dead, feeling, against all odds, more like a person than I had in years.
Act third end - "lifeless"