Null didn't clap when the verdict came in.
There was no little chime, no confetti, no congratulatory message reading: congratulations, you are now officially someone's experiment. Just the quiet shift of text on a screen and the sound of a printer starting up somewhere, spitting out forms for a future no one wanted.
On the main display in the Office, my file had reorganized itself overnight.
ADMINISTRATIVE DEATH – SUBJECT: NOOR [REDACTED]
RESIDUAL SCORE: 4% – LOCKED
COHORT: P3-CLASS – NARRATIVE RESISTANT
STATUS: OBSERVATION – ACTIVE
The override flag that used to look like a warning now sat there like part of my name.
"I hate that they branded you with a percentage," Echo said, standing beside me. "Like low-fat milk."
"At least I didn't get a barcode," I said.
"That's phase two," they replied.
Samira was at her console, eyes tracking lines that weren't visible to us. She had that posture again—shoulders slightly tensed, like the data might get physically aggressive.
"Anything good?" I asked.
"If you consider 'they sent us a protocol packet' good," she said. "We've been blessed with instructions."
"Let me guess," Echo said. "Step one: don't break the toy."
Samira picked up a printout and slapped it on the plastic table between us.
It was thin. That was somehow worse than thick would have been.
"Observation Cohort Guidelines," she said. "For P3-class subjects."
"You say that like it's something I should be proud of," I said.
"It's something I have to manage," she said. "That's enough."
I looked at the first page.
The language was all neutral violence.
SUBJECT WILL CONTINUE FIELD DUTIES UNDER ENHANCED MONITORING.
ALL INTERVENTIONS TO BE LOGGED FOR CROSS-DOMAIN REVIEW.
NO ATTEMPTS TO ALTER SUBJECT'S RESIDUAL SCORE ARE TO BE MADE WITHOUT OVERRIDE AUTHORIZATION.
"Cross-domain," I said. "That's Oversight code, right?"
"That's the polite way of saying 'people who can see both Null and the Archive,'" Samira said.
"People," Echo repeated. "So not just an algorithm."
Samira's mouth tightened a fraction.
"They assigned you a liaison," she added. "For the observation period."
"A what?" I said.
"A human face," Echo translated. "Someone to stand in front of whatever's watching you and smile."
Samira shot them a look.
"In theory," she said, "they're here to coordinate data flow and make sure the study adheres to protocol. In practice, it means they get to sit in the room and take notes while you work."
"So I get my own personal note-taker," I said. "Great. Always wanted to be a case study."
"You are a case study," she said. "That's what the override made you. We can either sulk about it or control what they see."
"Which would you recommend?" I asked.
"The latter," she said. "Sulking is for people without clearance."
I flipped to the second page. There was a list of permissible activities, as if I were a child and they'd just told my parents which playgrounds were safe.
FIELD ACCESS: CONDITIONAL – WITH LIAISON PRESENT OR ON REMOTE LINK.
NULL ACCESS: UNRESTRICTED WITH SUPERVISION.
CONTACT WITH OTHER CLIENTS: TO BE LOGGED.
"Remote link," Echo said. "What, are they going to put a camera on your head?"
"Don't give them ideas," Samira said.
I set the packet down.
"So," I said. "When do I meet my handler?"
"Liaison," she corrected automatically. Then sighed. "Now, apparently."
As if summoned by the word, someone cleared their throat in the doorway.
I turned.
The woman leaning against the frame looked like she'd stumbled in from some other department where people still pretended to care about appearances. Her blazer was too sharp for Null, her boots shined, her hair cut into an asymmetrical bob that would have been fashionable, once, on the Surface.
She didn't match the fluorescent hum at all. That was probably deliberate.
"Noor?" she said, eyes flicking to me. "And Echo?"
Her voice had that trained, neutral warmth you hear in helplines and guided meditations.
Echo gave a little half-bow.
"In the patched flesh," they said.
She stepped inside, held out a hand to me as if handshakes were still a thing.
"Tess Caldwell," she said. "Cross-domain Evaluation. I'll be your liaison."
Her handshake was cool and efficient. No pointless squeezing.
"Tess," I repeated. "You're… from here? Or up there?"
"Depends who's asking," she said. "On paper, I belong nowhere important. In practice, I read things I shouldn't and then fill out forms about them."
"Perfect match," Echo said. "We're things you shouldn't read."
Samira crossed her arms.
"I wasn't informed they were assigning someone in person," she said.
"You're informed now," Tess said pleasantly. "Oversight wanted direct eyes on at least the initial baseline."
"Baselines are for bloodwork," I said.
"In a way," Tess said. "They want to see how you operate as you are before they start nudging variables."
I didn't like the word "variables" attached to me.
"So what happens, exactly?" I asked. "I go about my half-life while you scribble notes in the corner?"
"Something like that," she said. "The packet gives them the clean version. I prefer messy."
She glanced at the main display, at the P3-class tag.
"You're aware of your classification?" she added.
"Hard to miss when it's stapled to my name," I said.
"Good," she said. "Then we can skip the phase where I patronize you."
Echo seemed amused in spite of themself.
"What's P3 mean when it's not pretending to be a code?" they asked.
Tess considered.
"It means you resist being turned into an easy story," she said. "Our models don't like that. They expect most people to fall into certain patterns: martyr, perpetrator, victim, reformed citizen, tragic anomaly. You keep ruining clean arcs."
"I'd apologize," I said, "but Samira told me not to."
Tess's mouth curved, almost a smile.
"Keep that defiance," she said. "Just don't aim it at the wrong wall."
"Which wall would that be?" I asked.
"That's what we're trying to find out," she said.
Samira tapped the guideline packet.
"Protocol says first step is internal audit," she said. "Null-side only. No field work until baseline is complete."
"Correct," Tess said. "We start where you're built now, not where you came from."
"So no trip to the city yet," Echo said.
"You'll get your haunting privileges back," Tess said. "For now, we're taking a walk."
"A walk where?" I asked.
Tess glanced at Samira, seeking a kind of silent permission. Samira didn't give it, exactly, but she didn't say no.
"Shelving Floor," Tess said. "Lower archive."
"I thought that was sealed," Samira said.
"It is," Tess said. "To regular traffic. Oversight extended my key for this."
The way Samira's jaw tightened made me think "Shelving Floor" was not a fun destination.
"What's down there?" I asked.
"Paper," Tess said. "And ghosts, if you like metaphors."
"I do," I said. "Unfortunately."
She gestured toward the corridor.
"Come on, Four Percent," she said. "Let's see what you look like on a shelf."
- -
The trip down felt different from every other walk I'd taken in Null.
Most corridors here look like they were copy-pasted from the same blueprint: white walls, buzzing lights, occasional doors with labels that never quite explain what's inside.
This hallway sloped gently downward, like someone had built it with the idea of a basement but forgotten to tell the rest of the building. The lights buzzed lower, as if reluctant to admit they were working.
Echo walked a step behind me, hands in their pockets.
"You smell that?" they murmured.
"Dust," I said.
"And something else," they said. "Old toner. Like burned paper."
Tess walked ahead, tapping a card against black panels at each junction. Little red dots turned green as we passed.
"No one else comes down here?" I asked.
"Not often," she said. "Most of the important files are fully digitized. Shelving Floor holds what's left of the early days. Pilot projects. Paperwork they didn't trust to the main system yet."
"Pilot days as in… Pilot-03?" Echo asked.
Tess didn't turn around.
"Who told you that term?" she asked.
"The review room leaked it," I said. "Right before wiping the screen. We saw 'Pilot-03 – status: closed.'"
"That shouldn't have come through," Tess said, more to herself than to us.
"Then your machine has holes," Echo said.
"Everything worth studying does," Tess replied.
We reached a door that looked more like a vault than an office entrance. No window, just a thick slab of reinforced grey with a slot for a card and a biometric pad beneath it.
Tess pressed her palm to the pad and tapped her card.
The door unlocked with a clunk that travelled up my spine.
"Stay close," she said. "The indexing down here is… temperamental."
"The what is what?" I asked.
"You'll see," she said.
The door opened.
The first thing that hit me was the smell. Not the dead tang of server rooms or the antiseptic scent of Null's offices, but something older: paper, dust, ink that had had time to admit regrets.
The room—or rooms; it was hard to tell where one ended and the next began—were full of shelves. Metal, tall, packed tight with files and boxes. There were no helpful signs, no comforting alphabetical labels. Instead, each shelf had a small electronic strip that flickered between codes, as if the system was still arguing with itself about what was where.
"This is where the dead go to die again," Echo whispered.
"Poetic," Tess said. "Inaccurate, but poetic."
We stepped into an aisle. The floor was concrete, lines painted on it in different colours, crossing and splitting. Some led nowhere, just stopped halfway down.
"What's with the lines?" I asked.
"Historic indexing systems," Tess said. "They tried several models when they first started storing human cases. Time-based, case-based, narrative-type-based. None of them worked perfectly, so they patched them together instead of picking one."
"Sounds familiar," I said.
"At some point," she went on, "someone realized it was easier to let the system cluster files than fight about labels. Now the lines mostly confuse anyone who comes down here without a map."
"Do you have a map?" Echo asked.
"No," Tess said. "I have this."
She held up a small device that looked like a cheap calculator had married a compass. A dim arrow jittered on a tiny screen, pointing somewhere through the shelves.
"Tracker?" I asked.
"Pattern matcher," she said. "Oversight gave me your case signature. The device pings whenever it finds something with a similar computational smell."
"I have a smell?" I said.
"Metaphorically," she said. "You're P3-class. They want to see where else that pattern appears."
She started walking, following the twitchy arrow. We threaded through aisles that all looked the same: grey shelves, brown folders, boxes with dates that meant nothing to me.
"What are we looking for?" I asked.
"Evidence," she said. "They want to know if your resistance is a one-off glitch or part of an older problem."
"Old problem meaning… Pilot-03?" Echo said.
"Old problem meaning this program might have produced versions of you before," Tess said. "And did not like the outcome."
I swallowed.
"If that's true," I said, "why am I allowed down here?"
"Because you're already contaminated," she said lightly. "Their words, not mine."
We turned a corner. The air felt heavier here, like someone had turned gravity up a notch.
The arrow on Tess's device went from jittery to insistent, pointing straight ahead.
We stopped at a shelf that looked exactly like the last ten. A small strip near the top flickered between codes.
PILOT – HUMAN SUBJEXXX
PILOT – ERROR
PILOT – CLOSED
The text never settled long enough on one word for my eyes to fix it.
Tess frowned.
"I've never seen it glitch like that," she said.
"No reassuring comment about holes in the system?" Echo asked.
"Not this time," she said.
She reached up for a file.
The strip beeped, flashed red, then cleared.
All the words vanished.
I stared.
"Did it just… forget its own label?" I asked.
"That's new," Tess murmured.
She stepped onto the lowest shelf, stretching higher until her fingers grazed a box with no writing on it at all. No code, no tag, just a grey rectangle sitting where something more properly named should have been.
"Help me," she said.
Echo and I steadied the lower shelves while she dragged the box down. It was heavier than it looked. When she set it on the floor, dust jumped like it had been holding its breath for a long time.
There was no lid.
Inside, I expected more folders, papers, maybe a broken piece of tech.
Instead, there was a wall.
Not a real wall. A metal panel, narrow, bolted into the bottom of the box. Someone had turned the container into a little vertical surface.
On it, scratched into the metal, were words.
Not typed. Not printed. Scraped in, letter by letter, with something sharp, until they bit through the paint.
NO ONE DESERVES TO BE TURNED INTO CONTENT.
The sentence punched the air out of me.
Echo read it quietly.
"That's your line," they said.
"I never said it like that," I managed. "Not out loud."
"Blog post title, maybe?" they asked.
I shook my head.
"I always danced around it," I said. "Made metaphors. Talked about structural violence and narrative commodification. I never put it that plainly. Too… dramatic."
Tess crouched by the box, fingers hovering near the words without touching.
"You're sure this isn't just déjà vu?" she asked. "A sentence that feels familiar because you agree with it?"
"Yes," I said. My voice sounded wrong in my own ears. "That's… that's mine."
"How?" Echo asked. "You've never been down here. You didn't even know this floor existed."
We were all quiet for a moment, listening to the humming of the building like it might offer commentary.
"Can you check the date?" I asked Tess. "When was this filed?"
She pulled a thin tablet from her pocket, tapped it against the metal panel. A faint light flickered in its surface, processing.
After a minute, a single line appeared.
ENTRY CREATED: DATE UNAVAILABLE – PRE-SYSTEM INTEGRATION.
"Pre-system," she said. "This panel predates most of our current architecture."
"Translation," Echo said. "It's older than you."
Tess looked up at me.
"Sometimes," she said carefully, "patterns appear in multiple places without direct contact. Human minds tend to converge on certain phrases—"
I shook my head.
"It's not just the sentence," I said. "It's the… rhythm. The way the words sit. This feels like something I wrote on a night when I thought no one would read it. Like a draft I never posted."
"You're saying your unwritten draft is carved in metal in a sealed box in a forbidden archive," Echo said. "Cool. Very normal."
The panel didn't care whether we believed it or not. It just sat there, etched and quiet, like a note left for whoever opened the box.
Under the sentence, there were more scratches, thinner, almost worn away. I squinted, trying to make them out.
P3 – 03
The rest was a mess of lines, as if someone had started writing and given up, or been stopped.
"Tess," I said. "What's P3-03?"
"Internal shorthand," she said, too quickly. "Pilot-03, P3-class. A very old case."
"You've seen this before," Echo said. It wasn't a question.
"I've seen references," she said. "Not this."
I touched the edge of the panel. My finger tingled, like I'd pressed it to a nine-volt battery as a kid.
For a second, the room shouted.
Not with sound. With images.
A desk. A cheap laptop. Fingers over a keyboard, typing the same sentence into a blank document. Then hesitation. Deletion. The words vanishing from the screen.
The feeling of your own honesty being "too much," even for you.
I jerked my hand back.
"You felt something," Echo said.
"Just a flash," I said. "Like… someone tried to write this and didn't. And the words crawled off the screen and hid down here instead."
"That's not how data works," Tess said.
"That's not how administrative death works either," I said. "And yet."
She didn't argue.
We sat there, three people in a maze of shelves, staring at a sentence that should not have known my voice.
"Is this the twist?" Echo asked softly, voice only for me. "That you're not as original as you thought?"
"Worse," I said. "That I might be very original in exactly the way they were scared of before."
Tess glanced between us.
"Oversight will want a scan of this," she said, already reaching for her tablet. "They'll want to compare carving patterns to known human samples, estimate time of inscription, run it against your pre-death writing corpus—"
"Of course they will," I said.
She paused.
"What do you want?" she asked.
No one in Null asked that very often. They usually asked "What did you do?" or "What did it cost?"
I looked at the words again.
"I want to know whether I'm repeating someone else's failure," I said. "Or someone else's attempt at getting out."
Tess nodded slowly.
"That," she said, "might be the first real research question anyone's asked about you."
Echo tilted their head.
"And what happens if they decide the answer to that question is 'yes'?" they asked.
We all looked at the panel.
The words sat there.
NO ONE DESERVES TO BE TURNED INTO CONTENT.
Somewhere above us, very far from the Shelving Floor, I could almost feel the override flag blinking, patient and bright.
Waiting to see if Four Percent was going to turn out like Pilot-03.
Act seventh end - "The you i left within the archives".