The worst part about Null is that there's always time to think.
No work commute, no scrolling, no background noise pretending to be life. Just corridors, recycled air, and the awareness that there's one last thread with your name wrapped around it.
I'd meant to rest.
Instead I lay on the cot in my borrowed office-room and listened to the hum of the building. Whenever I closed my eyes I saw the same three images, looping:
my mother's hand tightening around a chipped cup
Rana's finger hovering over "send"
a crumpled ball of paper with my name inside it, lying in a bin under someone's desk
Each one ended with me leaving.
By the time the corridor lights shifted from night-dim to day-dim, I'd given up on sleep. I found Echo outside my door, sitting cross-legged on the floor, doodling on an old form with a dry pen.
"You look like you got run over by a photocopier," they said.
"I feel flatter," I said.
They stood, slipped the dead pen behind their ear, and we went to the Office.
The main hall was quieter than usual. Fewer clerks, more empty chairs. The screens still glowed, casting that pale blue light that makes everything look like a medical diagram.
Samira was at her console, sleeves rolled up, hair in a knot she'd probably tied in the dark. She didn't greet us right away. Her eyes moved over the central monitor, following lines I couldn't see.
When she finally stepped back, she had a folder in one hand and her mug in the other.
"Morning," she said. "Or whatever. Sit."
We took the same plastic table as before. Habit already.
"This is the one," she said, dropping the folder between us. "Last major residual."
I looked at it but didn't touch it. The cardboard was thin and warped at the edges, as if too many fingers had worried it.
"What's his name?" I asked.
"Ben Holloway," Samira said. "Twenty-four. Shared apartment with you for three years. Split rent, shared utilities, mutual resentment of the landlord."
I flinched at how quickly the facts came out.
"Does he know I'm dead?" I asked, immediately hating the question as it left my mouth.
"He knows there's a certificate that says you are," Samira said. "He doesn't accept it. That's the problem."
Echo leaned in, eyes scanning the page.
"What's he doing?" they asked.
Samira flipped the folder open.
Patterns again, not just words. Lines from my name to entries labeled MATERNAL, IDEOLOGICAL, PERSONAL. Two were dim, almost grey. PERSONAL burned bright.
"Since the death notice," Samira said, "Ben's filed three appeals. All denied. He's visited two offices in person. He logs into your old accounts regularly and just… sits there. He's rewritten his search history around you."
She slid a sheet toward me. At first it was a blur. Then I realized I was reading a log, abstracted but clear enough:
'administrative death case 7F-19N appeal'
'can death certificate be wrong'
'how to sue government for mistake'
'no body no proof'
"He hasn't moved your things," she added. "Keeps your chair where it was. Toothbrush still in the cup. Your mug on the shelf. Paying your half of the electricity even though the account doesn't recognize you."
A tight, hot feeling pressed behind my ribs.
"He can't afford that," I said automatically.
"That's the least of it," Samira said. "The Archive picked up one of his emails to an ombudsman. It's in a training pack now—'How to Handle Difficult Bereaved Clients.' There's already a draft brief about a potential human-interest profile."
She said it flatly, like reading a weather report.
"Working title: 'The Friend Who Wouldn't Give Up.'"
I could picture it exactly. Ben in the living room, talking into a camera, hands clenched around his knees. B-roll of the empty chair, the toothbrush, shots of city offices. My face on an old ID photo, blurred at the edges.
"This one we can't just… redirect?" I asked. "Like with Mothlight?"
Samira shook her head.
"Mothlight had never met you," she said. "All they had was projection. You were a symbol, not a person. Easy to carve the symbol out and leave the idea standing."
She tapped the folder.
"Ben lived with you. He knows your terrible late-night snack habits. He knows the way you knocked on your own door because you forgot your keys three times a week. That hole in his life is Noor-shaped. If we try to blur it the way we did upstairs, you'll leave him with nothing that makes sense."
Echo folded their arms.
"So the choice is the same as before," they said. "Blur or blade."
I swallowed.
"Blur," Samira said, "means letting time wear you down into a dull ache. He'd stop appealing eventually. Stop writing to anyone who will listen. He'd start telling himself the system did its best, because he'd have to believe that to stay functional."
"The city would love that," I said.
"Of course," she said. "It turns genuine outrage into ambient sadness. Very easy to manage."
"And the blade?" Echo asked.
"Blade means one clean cut," Samira said. "A moment of clarity so sharp it settles the question. He'll hurt like hell. He'll know you're gone. Know it in a way he can't un-know. The thread stops reaching for loopholes. So does the system."
"And me?" I asked. "What does it cost me?"
Samira looked at me over the folder.
"Any part of you that still wants a way back through that door," she said. "You cut this thread properly, there is no version of your life in which you and Ben share a kitchen again. Not as roommates, not as reconciled friends. Not in this city's logic."
Echo watched my face carefully.
"It was never really open," they said quietly. "But you've been checking it in your head. This stops that."
I stared at the folder until the lines blurred.
"Did he hate me?" I asked, before I could stop myself.
"No," Samira said, without checking the file. "He's furious on your behalf. That's the thread."
"That's worse," I said.
"Exactly," she replied.
The hum of the hall filled the silence between us. Somewhere behind me, a printer woke up and whirred, then went back to sleep.
"All right," I said. "We do it."
"Which way?" Echo asked.
"You already know," they added.
The blur option tasted like lying. To Ben, to myself. Pretending this was all a misunderstanding that would scab over if ignored.
"The blade," I said. "One cut."
Samira didn't nod, exactly, but something in her shoulders dropped minutely, like that was the answer she'd expected and dreaded in equal measure.
"Field dock is clear," she said. "Same station as before. The thread will pull harder this time. Don't fight it. And, Noor—"
She hesitated, which scared me more than anything she'd said so far.
"What?" I asked.
"Try not to… apologize," she said. "It sounds kinder. It isn't."
Echo raised an eyebrow.
"That's new," they said.
"Apology keeps people holding on," Samira said. "You say 'I'm sorry' and they hear 'maybe, in some other world…' You're not some other world. You're this one. Let the goodbye be a goodbye."
The words felt oddly heavy, like instructions for performing surgery on myself.
"Okay," I said, though it didn't feel like something I could promise.
We left the table. The screens hummed softly as we passed, pale cases flickering at the edges of my awareness. For an instant, I thought I saw my own line pulse brighter than the rest.
Echo and I walked in silence to the dock.
The platform was the same as always: fog spilling off the edge, lines of light disappearing into distances that didn't obey geometry. My card warmed against my leg before I even touched it.
"Focus on home," Echo said. "Not in the romantic sense. The actual door."
I closed my eyes and let myself remember the apartment.
The chipped paint on the door frame. The third-floor landing with the temperamental bulb. The smell of burnt toast in the stairwell that never seemed to go away. The sticky patch on the kitchen floor we never quite got rid of.
Underneath all that, Ben's voice, saying my name in the particular fed-up way he had when I was late on rent.
The card pulsed. Something caught behind my sternum and yanked.
The dock folded.
I was standing in a stairwell.
Same cracked tiles, same temperamental bulb. The burnt toast smell was still there, but sharper now, like someone had just overdone a slice. Third floor. Two doors down from the landing, ours—his—waited, crooked number on the plaque.
For a moment, I just stood there, hand hovering over a handle I couldn't actually touch.
"You okay?" Echo asked quietly behind me.
"No," I said. "Let's go in."
We passed through the door.
The apartment was almost exactly as I'd left it, with additions.
The sagging couch in the living room had acquired new stains. The coffee table was buried under envelopes, most of them official. The lamp was tilted at an angle that made me want to reach out and straighten it.
In the corner, by the window, my old chair sat exactly where it always had. No one else had sat there; I could tell by the indentation and the way the cushion was still blanketed with an old hoodie of mine.
On the tiny kitchen counter, two mugs stood side by side. One had a chipped rim. Mine. Beside the sink, in the same cup we'd used for years, two toothbrushes. One blue, one green. Mine.
Ben at the table.
He looked older, which made no sense; it hadn't been that long. Maybe it was just the slump in his shoulders or the way his hair—still a messy brown—had grown uneven, like he'd tried to cut it himself and given up halfway.
He was hunched over a laptop, bare feet hooked on the rung of the chair, knees at an angle I recognized. Same threadbare sweatpants, same hoodie we'd stolen from a friend and never given back.
Inbox open. Sent items full of subject lines I didn't need to read to know the tone.
APPEAL REGARDING ADMINISTRATIVE DEATH CASE 7F-19N
FOLLOW-UP ON CASE 7F-19N – REQUEST FOR CLARIFICATION
FORMAL COMPLAINT – ERRONEOUS DEATH CERTIFICATE
He scrolled through them, jaw clenched.
On the table beside the laptop lay my death certificate. I recognized the format from the first time I'd seen it in the Office: plain font, seal at the bottom, a calm statement that I was no longer a concern of the living.
Ben had underlined my name so many times the paper had almost torn.
"Jesus," I whispered. "You should have moved out."
"He thinks moving on means betraying you," Echo said softly. "That's the knot."
Ben clicked into a new message.
Dear Sir/Madam,
I am once again writing regarding the case of Noor—
He hesitated there, blinking hard. His fingers hovered over the keys, then curled into fists.
"Not again," he said, barely audible. "They don't even read these."
He deleted the line.
For a moment, he just stared at the blank email window. His breathing sounded too loud in the quiet apartment.
"You know what you have to attach to this thread," Echo said.
"I know," I said. "I just… didn't expect it to look this much like my life."
Echo's hand hovered near my arm, not quite touching.
"You can't make this better," they said. "You can only make it end."
Ben shoved his chair back, scraping the floor. He crossed the room to the kitchen, filled a glass with water, then didn't drink it. He stood there, staring at the sink, knuckles white around the glass.
"Where do I even start?" I muttered.
Echo nodded toward my chair.
"Start where you already are," they said. "The emptiest place in the room."
I moved to the chair and stood behind it.
A small part of me expected to see something—shimmering air, a double image—but there was nothing. Just wood, cushion, old fabric. Absence has no special effects.
"This is where he feels you most," Echo said. "Where he sees you when you're not there. That's your anchor."
"And what do I anchor?" I asked.
"A moment," they said. "Not an apology. Not an explanation he can't understand. Just the clearest, truest version of you he ever saw."
"That's not very specific," I said.
"Pick a night," Echo said. "You already know which one."
I closed my eyes and let the room tilt around me.
The air thickened, not like the dock but like water thickening into ice. For a heartbeat, the present overlapped with the past, edges misaligned, colours wrong.
The last fight came back first.
Me, standing where I was now, backpack half-zipped by the door. Ben on the couch, controller in hand, game paused.
"You're not making sense," he'd said. "You don't just erase yourself because the paperwork's stupid."
"It's not about the paperwork," I'd snapped. "It's about… everything. You know that."
"Yeah," he'd said. "I know you hate your job, and you hate your degree, and you hate waking up. That's called being twenty-three, Noor, not a conspiracy."
Back then, the words had hit like a slap. Now they just made me ache.
"I have an option," I'd said. "One real option that isn't 'keep grinding until I forget who I am.' I'm taking it."
"What option?" he'd asked, really asked, like he would have listened if I'd answered.
I hadn't. I'd thrown some bitter line about him being too comfortable to understand, grabbed my bag, and walked out.
Slamming the door had felt like a statement. Now it just felt like leaving someone in a burning building without telling them where the exits were.
I held that memory. The badness of it. The way it left him stuck, wondering if I'd come back with an apology or a clearer explanation, long after I'd stepped onto a train to somewhere he couldn't follow.
"No," Echo said quietly. "Not that."
"I thought we needed the truth," I said.
"We need a truth he can live with," they said. "Not a loop he can spin forever. Find something earlier. Before everything became an argument about everything."
Another night surfaced.
Smaller. Quieter. Easier to miss.
An evening when the power had gone out in the whole building. We'd lit candles and sat on the floor playing cards on the coffee table because there was nothing else to do.
Ben had cheated shamelessly. I'd called him on it. We'd argued about whether anyone actually liked their jobs or if everyone was just pretending not to be tired. It had ended with us laughing at the landlord's voicemail, at the way official voices always sounded like they were reading from inside a coffin.
"That one," Echo said. "Take that."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because it's you," they said. "Not your despair. Not your theories. Just you. The person he lost."
I let the fighting memory go and grabbed the softer one with both hands.
The air thickened again. This time, it smelled faintly of candle wax and cheap instant noodles. A ghost of darkness settled over the room; the lights in the kitchen flickered to that specific yellow dim I remembered from the blackout.
Ben in the past sat cross-legged on the floor, candle between us, cards in his hand. His hair was shorter, his face less hollowed. He was laughing, genuinely, at something I'd just said.
"This building is a metaphor," he'd said. "We pay rent to live inside other people's indifference."
"Wow," I'd told him. "Stealing my lines now?"
"You can't trademark being miserable," he'd replied.
We'd gone silent for a bit then, listening to the city hum outside. The blackout had made it feel like we were underwater, everything muted.
"You ever think about just… walking out of all of this?" I'd asked. "Not this apartment. All of it."
He'd considered.
"Every day," he'd said. "But then who'd notice when the landlord tries to charge three hundred for 'emergency painting'?"
I'd snorted. He'd thrown a card at me. The moment had sat there, ordinary and absolutely, stupidly alive.
"I miss this," I whispered, watching the overlay of the past sit awkwardly on the present—Ben in the chair and on the floor at once, the candle light ghosting through the current clutter.
"This is what you give him," Echo said. "One last time. Whole. No more questions after."
"How?" I asked.
Echo nodded toward the present-tense Ben, still in the kitchen, still staring at the sink like it owed him an answer.
"Push," they said simply.
I moved behind his present self.
He shivered.
Not much. Just a tiny movement under the skin, the way people do when a draft sneaks up their sleeves.
His grip on the glass tightened.
"You're not real," he told the empty room, in a croaky voice.
I put both hands on a memory that didn't have weight and shoved.
The blackout evening surged forward, through me, through the empty chair, through the stale apartment air, and hit him.
For a second, past and present sat perfectly aligned.
He was on the floor again, candle between us, cards in hand, laughing. He was in the kitchen, staring at a sink. Both. Neither.
He sucked in a breath like he'd just been thrown into cold water.
His fingers let go of the glass. It hit the counter, didn't break, but wobbled dangerously. He braced his hands on the edge of the sink as if the room had moved.
His eyes squeezed shut.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. I get it."
He didn't sound okay.
He slid down the cabinet, back against the cupboards, knees pulled up. For a moment he looked very small, the way people do when they're the only one in a room built for two.
"You're gone," he said.
It wasn't a question. It wasn't an accusation. It was a sentence being read out loud.
"You're gone," he repeated. "You're not stuck in a basement. You're not coming home to say it was all a joke. You made a choice and you walked out and… you're gone."
His mouth twisted.
"I hate you," he said. "For that."
He put his forehead on his knees.
"I hate you, and I miss you, and I can't fix it, and they're never going to admit what they did. And you're still gone."
He stayed like that for a long minute, breathing raggedly.
The thread in my chest strained. I could feel it searching, tugging toward potential loopholes—what if, maybe, some other world—but the memory we'd given him was too solid. Not noble. Not tragic. Just two idiots on a floor in the dark, very alive.
Something in him recognized that as the last time he'd truly had me.
He lifted his head.
Slowly, he crawled to the table, pulled out the chair that wasn't mine, and sat.
He opened the laptop again.
The blank email waited.
He moved to the appeals folder. Selected all three of his previous messages. Hit delete.
Then he clicked into a new message not addressed to any office, any authority.
To: self
Subject: stop
He hesitated, then wrote, in the body:
he's gone.
The cursor blinked after the period.
He saved it to drafts, shut the laptop, and pushed his chair back with a kind of finality that made my stomach turn.
In the bathroom, one toothbrush clinked into the trash.
In the living room, my chair remained where it was.
"I'm not ready," he told it. "Not yet."
But the frantic edge in his actions had gone. He wasn't reaching for handles in the walls anymore, trying to open hidden doors.
The thread tightened, then snapped.
It didn't feel neat. It felt like something tearing in both of us.
A translucent notification slid across my vision.
THREAD #3: PERSONAL – STATUS: RESOLVED.
CLIENT: NOOR – RESIDUAL LEVEL: MINIMAL.
SYSTEM NOTE: SUBJECT NOW STATISTICALLY UNLIKELY TO BE RECONSTRUCTED.
"Minimal," I said, voice hoarse.
"Means they can't easily rebuild you from what's left," Echo said. "You're mostly noise now. Congratulations. You're forgettable."
I watched Ben pick up my mug from the counter.
He turned it in his hands, once, then set it in the cupboard, not in the sink, not in the trash. A sort of compromise.
"Is this… better?" I asked.
"For him?" Echo said. "Eventually."
"And for me?"
Echo didn't answer right away.
"You won't catch your mind reaching for the old door as much," they said finally. "That's something."
The apartment wavered.
The stairwell snapped back around us, then dissolved.
We were on the dock again. Fog. Lines. The hum of Null waiting.
The pull toward the Surface was gone. I hadn't realized how constant it had been until the absence settled in. I felt… lighter wasn't the word. Less anchored, maybe. Like somebody had untied the last rope, and now whatever I was would drift whether I wanted it to or not.
Echo studied my face.
"Do you hate me?" they asked.
"For what?" I said.
"For helping you do that," they said.
I thought about it.
"I hate that it had to be done," I said. "That's enough hate to go around."
We walked back to the Office.
Samira was standing when we came in, as if she'd been pacing and stopped only when she heard us. She set her mug down without looking at it.
"Well?" she asked.
"It's done," I said.
Her gaze flicked to the central monitor. She hit a key.
My case file expanded on the big screen. The map of threads was almost empty now. MATERNAL, IDEOLOGICAL, PERSONAL: all dim, labelled RESOLVED / REDIRECTED.
Underneath:
ADMINISTRATIVE DEATH – SUBJECT: NOOR [REDACTED]
RESIDUAL SCORE: 4%
NARRATIVE ASSET VALUE: NEGLIGIBLE
For a heartbeat, I felt a dizzy kind of victory.
Then another line appeared, blinking into existence beneath the others.
OVERRIDE FLAG: ACTIVE
EXTERNAL REVIEW REQUESTED – ORIGIN: UNKNOWN
"What's that?" I asked.
Samira's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.
"That," she said, "was not there ten seconds ago."
On the screen, my negligible value pulsed once, like a heartbeat, as the new flag latched onto it.
Echo leaned closer, squinting.
"External review," they read. "Not Archive. Not internal correction. Who else has clearance to tag a dead case?"
Samira didn't answer right away.
Her fingers moved over the keyboard, pulling up something I couldn't see. A list, a log, a chain of authority.
Colour drained from her face.
"Someone upstairs is watching you," she said. "Not the Archive. Not us. Someone who can reach across both."
"Is that… bad?" I asked.
"In my experience," she said, "nothing good ever starts with 'external review' and a blank origin field."
The override flag blinked again, steady, patient.
For the first time since I'd died, I felt something I hadn't felt even on the dock:
not the pull of the living
not the ache of the threads
Something else.
Being noticed.
Act fifth end - "recycled vessel".