The coffee in Null always tasted the same: burnt, metallic, and somehow like printer ink.
I sat at one of the plastic tables pushed up against the Office cafeteria wall, watching the light flicker in the vending machines. Echo sat across from me, legs stretched out, chair tipped onto its back two legs in a way that would have gotten both of us yelled at anywhere else.
"You're doing the staring thing," they said.
"I have a lot to stare at," I said. "My own death, for example. The ethical implications of cutting emotional threads. The philosophical—"
"You're thinking about your mother," Echo cut in. "And the article."
I took a sip. The coffee scalded my tongue and left no real flavor behind.
"Both," I admitted.
On some deep screen somewhere, my case file had changed status. No longer promising narrative asset. Now: "complicated." The Archive had moved on to the next tragedy.
That should have felt like a victory. Mostly, it felt like static—like the buzz on an untuned radio station where my name should have been.
The cafeteria door squeaked open. Samira stepped in, carrying a stack of thin folders under one arm and a mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST EMPLOYEE in the other.
She took one look at me, crossed the room, and dropped the folders on the table.
"You're not hiding if you're in my cafeteria, Noor," she said.
"Didn't realize I was hiding," I said.
"You finished a parental residual and picked a fight with the Archive in under forty-eight hours," she said. "You're either hiding or showing off. Either way, we have work."
Echo let the chair drop to all four legs with a thud.
"How many threads left?" they asked.
Samira opened the top folder. Little graphs and lines glowed faintly on the paper, the ink reacting to whatever strange light Null ran on.
"Two major ones," she said. "One personal, one ideological."
"Personal," I repeated. "As in…?"
"As in someone who knew you as a person," Samira said. "We'll get there."
She tapped another page.
"The ideological one is simpler. Someone upstairs flagged a cluster around your old blog posts. A small group's been using your name as shorthand in their discussions. The system doesn't like it."
"A small group," I said. "Like… a book club?"
Echo grinned.
"Like conspiracy forum," they said.
Samira shrugged.
"Activists. Malcontents. People with too much internet," she said. "Point is, your name is pinned in a little digital shrine. They're starting to connect you to other cases. The more they say 'Noor' when they mean 'everything wrong with the city,' the more the Archive thinks you'd make a great symbol."
I imagined my name typed over and over in threads full of grainy screenshots.
"So what, I go up there and tell them to take the posters down?" I asked. "I don't know them. I never met them."
"Doesn't matter," Samira said. "The thread is there. It pulls on you. It pulls on the system. If you leave it, you risk ending up as a martyr in a manifesto. Or worse, in a policy document."
"Feels wrong to start my afterlife by disappointing people who actually hate the city," I muttered.
"Then don't disappoint them," Echo said. "Just make sure they stop using you as a mascot."
Samira closed the folder and pushed it toward me.
"You don't have to handle this one first," she said. "We can start with the personal attachment if you prefer."
The idea of facing someone who used to know me, really know me, made something twist in my gut.
"I'll take the ideological one," I said. "Warm-up."
Samira's eyes softened, just a little.
"Field dock is open," she said. "Same rules. Don't touch anything humming in a language you don't understand. Try not to start a revolution without filling the right forms."
"Is there a form for 'please stop turning me into an icon'?" I asked.
"If there were, we wouldn't need you," she said.
Echo was already on their feet.
"Come on," they said. "Before you think yourself into a hole."
We left the cafeteria. Behind us, Samira muttered something to the coffee machine. It sounded suspiciously like a prayer.
The dock felt almost familiar now.
Fog. Tile. The abstract glow of lines stretching into nowhere. The metal card in my pocket warmed the moment I stepped onto the painted edge.
"You remember how this works," Echo said, standing at my shoulder. "Focus on the pull."
"What if I don't feel pulled?" I asked.
"You will," they said. "Ideologues are loud."
They weren't wrong.
As soon as I let my thoughts drift toward the idea of being quoted, shared, distorted, something tugged in my chest. Not like the slow ache of my mother, but a sharper, restless hook.
I closed my eyes.
The card pulsed once, twice.
The dock folded.
I opened my eyes to a room that smelled like dust and old electronics.
It was night on the Surface. The only light came from three monitors, their glow painting the walls in pale rectangles. Wires snaked across the floor. Books and printouts formed unstable towers on a small desk, a windowsill, the back of a chair.
On the wall opposite the desk, someone had taped up a collage: news clippings, photos, hand-written notes. Everything connected by red string would have been too theatrical. They'd used cheap tape and highlighters instead.
In the center of the mess, circled in blue ink, was my name.
NOOR
Underneath: "Administrative Death Case 7F-19N – proof of structural intent?"
"Okay," I said. "Points for enthusiasm."
A person sat at the desk, hunched over the keyboard. They were maybe my age, maybe older—it was hard to tell in the screen glow. Shaved head, oversized hoodie, bare feet hooked around the chair legs.
Their cursor blinked in the middle of a long post.
I drifted closer. Echo followed, hands buried in their coat pockets.
The post was titled:
HOW MANY NOORS DOES IT TAKE TO WAKE UP A CITY?
I skimmed.
It was all there: my blog quotes, the official summary of my "paperwork cascade," rumors from forums, a screenshot of a partial internal memo someone had leaked. In between, the writer—username: Mothlight—had woven anger, sarcasm, and a theory.
Not "the system made a mistake."
"The system eats people who see too much."
They'd drawn a pattern. Me. A social worker who'd "burned out" and disappeared. An inspector who'd filed one too many critical reports, then "relocated" and never logged in again. Small, weird cases, gathered and connected with sentences like:
this is not noise, this is a design choice
Echo whistled low.
"They've been busy," they said.
The person—Mothlight—paused, rubbing their eyes.
"For the record," I said quietly, "I did burn out. And I did disappear. But I walked into that train on purpose."
Echo shrugged.
"Intent doesn't matter to the pattern," they said. "You're still gone in a way that looks useful to them."
On the screen, Mothlight scrolled back up and reread a paragraph.
"It's not enough," they muttered. "It's not enough to say 'the system is bad.' They won't listen unless there's a face…"
They highlighted my name. My words. My picture in a grainy capture from some protest I'd halfheartedly attended years ago.
My stomach clenched.
"See the problem?" Echo asked.
"They're not wrong," I said. "But I don't want to be right like this."
We watched in silence for a minute.
Mothlight paced the room, barefoot on cold floorboards, the cord of their headphones brushing their shoulder. They stopped at the wall of clippings, staring at my circled name.
"You're the cleanest example," they said, to the paper. "No criminal record. No scandal. Just… disappeared into a form."
They touched the paper with two fingers, like a strange, one-sided blessing.
The pull in my chest tightened.
"This thread is not about who you were," Echo said. "It's about what you're good for. That's exactly what we're trying to avoid."
"So what do I do?" I asked. "With my mother, I had a memory to press on. With the journalist, I leaned on guilt. This one doesn't even know me. They've married an idea of me."
Echo nodded slowly.
"Then don't try to give them a true memory," they said. "Give them the lack of one."
I frowned.
"What?"
"You don't share history," Echo said. "That's the point. They've built you from distance and screenshots. So show them the distance. Make it loud."
"How?" I asked.
"You felt it reading their post," Echo said. "That disconnect between their Noor and you. Hold onto that. Push it outward."
"That's not very technical," I said.
"We're not technical support," Echo said. "We're ghosts with opinions. Try it."
Mothlight sat back down, cracking their knuckles. Their cursor hovered over the "publish" button.
I stepped closer until I was almost breathing down their neck. The urge to physically grab their hands, yank them away, was strong. Useless, though.
Instead I focused on everything they didn't know about me.
Not the dramatic stuff. The petty things.
They didn't know my voice. They didn't know the way I used to rearrange books by color when the boss wasn't looking. They didn't know the stupid songs I made up in my head to remember bus times. They didn't know how many times I'd thought of quitting everything and hadn't.
They didn't know I could be cruel. They didn't know how selfish my choice to ride Line ∞ really was.
They'd turned me into diagnosis, symptom, evidence.
I held that mismatch in my chest until it hurt, then opened it, aiming it at their thoughts the way I'd aimed a memory at my mother.
The air in the room thickened.
On the desk, one of the empty mugs rattled.
Mothlight's finger hovered above the mouse. Their pupils dilated. For a heartbeat their breathing hitched.
They blinked hard and leaned closer to the screen, as if the letters might rearrange themselves if they stared hard enough.
"Who are you, really?" they whispered.
Their gaze slid over the blog quotes, the official text, the leaked lines.
"Who are you?" they repeated, but this time it wasn't rhetorical.
Their cursor moved away from "publish."
Slowly, like it weighed more than plastic should, it drifted up into the body of the text.
Sentences disappeared. Paragraphs that presented me as "clear case of systemic predation" shrank. The title line lost my name first.
HOW MANY NOORS DOES IT TAKE TO WAKE UP A CITY?
The cursor flickered next to it.
Backspace.
Backspace.
Backspace.
The title settled into:
HOW MANY NOBODIES DOES IT TAKE TO WAKE UP A CITY?
I exhaled without meaning to.
Mothlight sat back, rubbing their face with both hands, messing up the line where their hoodie met their neck.
"What am I doing…" they muttered. "I didn't know him. I'm doing it again. Making someone into a symbol so people will read past the first paragraph."
They scrolled through their own post, eyes narrowed.
"I don't need his name," they said, more firmly. "I don't. The pattern is bigger. They'll say it's anecdotal anyway."
On the wall, the paper with my name on it had started to peel at the corners. The tape couldn't quite hold.
Mothlight crossed the room, fingers digging into the paper. For a second I thought they'd smooth it down, draw another circle.
Instead, they ripped it off.
The paper came away with a soft tearing sound. A strip of paint came with it.
They looked at my name in their hand for a long moment.
"Sorry," they said quietly. "Whoever you were."
They crumpled the paper and dropped it into a small bin already half-full of failed diagrams.
Back at the desk, the post was changing again. Places where my name had been appeared now as "X" or "one person." The point remained, but the face was gone.
Mothlight added a line near the top:
this is not about one Noor or one case. the danger is precisely that we never really know them, we just get the aftermath
They hovered over "publish" one more time.
This time, they clicked.
The post went up into whatever network of angry, tired people read this sort of thing. Noor was not in the headline. Noor was not tagged.
The thread in my chest loosened, then snapped, like overstretched elastic.
The room flickered.
A small notification slid across the corner of my sight, the same translucent font as before:
THREAD #2: IDEOLOGICAL – STATUS: REDIRECTED.
SYSTEM NOTE: ANONYMITY LEVEL INCREASED.
"Redirected," I said. "Is that new?"
"Not every cut has to leave a scar," Echo said. "Sometimes you turn the knife sideways."
On the floor, the crumpled paper shifted as the heater kicked in. Mothlight picked up another pen and started circling new cases—a teacher, a cleaner, a clerk.
This time, they didn't write any names.
I looked at the bin. At the small ball of paper that had my name inside it like a seed.
"What happens to that?" I asked.
"Nothing the system can track," Echo said. "That's the point."
For a second, I wished I could uncurl the paper, smooth it, and write something of my own on it.
I didn't.
"Ready to go back?" Echo asked.
I nodded.
The monitors blurred. The wall of clippings stretched and fell away like wet paint.
The dock unfolded around us again, fog curling at the edges of the platform.
Null's cold hit my skin the way humidity hits when you step out of an air-conditioned shop: all at once.
"Back so soon?" Samira's voice came from the hall.
We stepped through the door.
She was at her station, eyes on the screens, one hand wrapped around her mug. Without looking away, she gestured toward a side monitor.
My case summary was up again.
RESIDUAL THREADS:
– MATERNAL – RESOLVED
– IDEOLOGICAL – REDIRECTED
– PERSONAL – ACTIVE
Underneath, in the same small font as before:
NARRATIVE ASSET VALUE: LOW
RECOMMENDATION: INTERNAL ONLY
Samira finally turned her head.
"You look less haunted," she said.
"Someone just tore my name off their wall," I said. "It was therapeutic."
Echo flopped into the nearest plastic chair.
"He managed to keep the anger but lose the martyr," they said. "It was almost elegant."
Samira's mouth twitched.
"You're learning," she said. "Most clients go for full erasure first chance they get. You redirected instead."
"It was easier," I said. "He never knew me. I didn't have to take anything real from him. Just the part where he pretended to."
Samira nodded slowly.
"Good," she said. "You'll need that restraint for the last one."
I already knew which word she meant. It blinked on the screen, stubborn as a pulse.
PERSONAL
"Who is it?" I asked.
Samira took a breath. For the first time since I'd met her, she looked almost reluctant to say something.
"Old roommate," she said. "Shared lease, shared late-night kitchen conversations, shared electric bill debt. They've kept your toothbrush in a cup for three months after the official death notice. They still don't sit in your chair."
A picture I didn't want rose immediately: a cramped living room, a threadbare couch, mismatched mugs.
My throat tightened.
"What's the system reading?" I asked, to keep my voice from cracking completely.
"Elevated queries around your name," Samira said. "Repeated logins to your old accounts, searches for 'administrative error appeals,' 'can a death certificate be wrong,' that sort of thing. Enough patterns that the Archive sniffed around and decided they might make a good 'case of the friend who wouldn't give up.'"
"Let me guess," I said. "You'd rather they give up."
"I'd rather they live a life that isn't shaped around a ghost," Samira said. "And I'd rather you not end up as a heartwarming story about loyalty."
Echo watched me carefully.
"You don't have to decide right now," they said. "We're not throwing you straight back onto the dock."
"We could," Samira added, "but then you'd probably vomit on my floor, and I like these tiles."
A laugh escaped me, sharp and brief. It helped.
"I'll do it," I said.
"Not tonight," Samira said. "You're two cuts in. Go lie down, pretend to sleep, stare at the ceiling, whatever you people do. Tomorrow we'll talk about what cutting a personal thread actually costs."
"Is that on a form?" I asked.
"Unfortunately, no," she said. "That one's still handwritten."
She closed my file with a soft key tap. The screen shifted to a list of other cases, other half-erased names. The world didn't stop because I'd saved myself from becoming a headline.
I stepped away from the counter, card heavy in my pocket.
Echo fell into step beside me.
"How do you feel?" they asked.
"Like a word erased in pencil," I said. "You can still see the trace if you tilt the page."
Echo nodded as if that made perfect sense.
As we walked toward the dorm corridor—if you could call a row of converted offices "dorms"—I glanced back once.
On the far wall, one of the lesser screens flickered. For a moment, my case number glowed a little dimmer than the rest.
ADMINISTRATIVE DEATH – SUBJECT: NOOR [REDACTED]
STATUS: IN PROGRESS
I turned away.
Two threads down. One left, tangled around someone who'd once known me well enough to knock on my door without texting first.
The thought lodged in my chest like a splinter.
Tomorrow, I told myself.
Tonight, I was allowed to be nothing but tired.
Act fourth end - "nameless companian".