Tess was the first one to move.
She took a slow breath, like she was resetting some internal line between "observer" and "person," then lifted her tablet again and aimed its camera at the scratched sentence.
"Hold it steady," she said.
"I'm not touching it," I said.
"I was talking to myself," she said.
The tiny lens blinked as she captured the words, the half-erased P3-03 scrawl, the way the panel's paint had flaked around the cuts like skin around an old wound.
"Congratulations," Echo murmured. "Your most honest thought is now a high-resolution asset."
"It's not mine," I said. "That's the problem."
Tess finished, lowered the tablet, and finally looked at me properly.
"You're sure you never wrote this," she said. "Anywhere the system could have scraped."
"Yes," I said. "And if I'd carved a manifesto into metal, I'd remember the part where someone gave me a screwdriver."
"Always possible it's convergent phrasing," she said. "People in similar circumstances arrive at similar lines. 'No one deserves to be turned into content' isn't so complex it needed you to invent it."
"It feels like I did," I said. "That's what's bothering me."
Echo ran a fingertip near the bottom of the panel, not quite touching.
"Maybe you were a reboot," they said. "Version 2.0 of someone who was very sure about the same thing."
"Pilot-03," I said. "The case we're not supposed to know about."
Tess tucked the tablet away, folded her arms.
"Do you want the safe answer," she said, "or the one I'll regret giving you?"
"I'm already dead," I said. "Regret away."
She sighed.
"Early pilots were selected because they fit certain patterns," she said. "Disaffected, articulate, aware of narrative manipulation. People who hated being turned into examples. The theory was: if you can build an afterlife out of admin, it should start with those least likely to accept it."
"How did that go?" Echo asked.
She gestured to the panel.
"Depends who you ask," she said. "Pilot-03 pushed back. Hard. Too hard, according to some reports. Turned the tools meant to process them back on the system. Left a mess down here and upstairs."
"And they're not over it," I said. "Hence the sealed files and the P3 label on my case."
"You're not Pilot-03," she said quickly. "You died later, in a different context, under a system that had already learned from its mistakes."
"Great," I said. "So I'm the improved model."
"That's not what I—"
Echo cut in.
"Is Noor here because he happened to fit the pattern," they asked, "or because someone up there was waiting for another one?"
Tess's jaw worked.
"I don't get to see recruitment algorithms," she said. "By the time they reach Null, clients are already tagged for our branch. You were flagged as suitable for Endless Death, Noor, long before Samira saw your file."
"Because of my blog," I said. "My appeals. My choice on Line ∞."
"And because you're very good at not letting other people narrate you," she said. "They wanted to see what would happen if someone like that played along just enough."
"Played along?" I repeated. "You saw the audit. I'm trying to vanish, not co-author a new policy."
She looked at the carved words again.
"Intent doesn't erase pattern," she said softly.
The panel was starting to get under my skin. The sentence sat there with the kind of certainty I'd never had. My own pre-death writing had been tangled, hedged, dripping with qualifiers. Whoever scraped this into metal hadn't stopped to wonder whether it sounded theatrical.
I'd always been jealous of that kind of directness.
"Do we put it back?" Echo asked. "Close the box, pretend we never saw it, leave the ghost manifesto where it lives?"
Tess shook her head.
"Chain of custody," she said. "I catalog it, send a scan up, log that you were exposed. If Oversight finds out I 'forgot' to report it, I lose my clearance."
"Is that bad?" Echo asked.
"For you?" she said. "Extremely."
I ran my thumb along the box's cardboard edge. The corrugation bit faintly into my skin, grounding.
"Take your scan," I said. "Fine. But leave it here."
Tess studied me.
"You don't want it moved?" she said.
"Where would you put it?" I asked. "On someone's slide deck? Next to a chart about trust indices?"
"They might decide to isolate physical artifacts linked to P-class cases," she said. "Lock them somewhere deeper."
"And deprive this shelf of its only personality?" Echo said.
Tess almost smiled, then sobered.
"I can note client preference," she said. "But I can't guarantee anything. Once it's in their hands…"
"It already was," I said. "Someone put this down here for a reason. Maybe Pilot-03 wanted someone like me to find it."
"Or maybe they just didn't have anywhere else to put it," she said. "Not every symbol is a prophecy."
She stepped back, carefully, and we reloaded the box onto the lower shelf. It looked smaller now that I knew it was heavier than it seemed.
The little electronic strip above us blinked again.
For a second, just for one frame, the text settled.
PILOT – 03
Then it glitched back to blank.
"Can I ask something?" I said.
"You've been doing that all morning," Tess replied.
"How many P-cases were there?" I asked. "Before me."
She hesitated.
"We had Pilot-01," she said. "Pilot-02. Pilot-03. They don't talk about 04." She shrugged. "If there was a 04."
"And now a P3-class cohort," Echo said. "A whole category built off three broken experiments."
Tess's gaze drifted down the aisle, toward unmarked shelves.
"There are worse foundations," she said. "Empires have been built on less."
"That's exactly the kind of sentence that would have set Mothlight off," I said.
Echo nudged my shoulder.
"Mothlight doesn't remember you anymore," they said. "Only 'nobodies.'"
"Lucky them," I said.
We left the box on its shelf. On the walk out, I kept expecting the words to call me back, like I'd left something behind. They didn't. They just sat there, etched into metal, doing their job without complaint.
Maybe that was dignity. Or maybe it was just inertia.
*
Back in the corridor, the air felt thinner.
Tess locked the vault door, held the card to the reader until the light stayed red.
"Does this change my status?" I asked.
"You were already classified as narrative resistant," she said. "Finding an old echo of your thoughts doesn't alter that. It might explain it. A little."
"And Oversight?" Echo asked. "Do they get excited when they see their lab rat shares slogans with a previous lab rat?"
"They're not all rats," Tess said. "Some of them think they're gods."
"That's worse," Echo said.
She tucked the tablet into her blazer, which had somehow stayed clean through the dust.
"You should talk to Samira," she said. "Before she sees my report and throws a mug at the wall."
"She throws mugs?" I asked.
"Not often," Tess said. "She prefers to file complaints. Much more damaging."
There was a flicker of dry affection in her tone. It made Samira feel less like a function and more like a person with a favourite form.
"What about you?" I asked. "Where do you go after this?"
"Back upstairs," she said. "The screens there don't hum like yours. They hiss."
She started down the corridor, heels muffled on the scuffed tiles.
Echo watched her for a moment.
"You trust her?" they asked me, quietly.
"I trust that she'll write her report," I said. "Beyond that, I don't even trust myself."
"That's new," they said.
"What is?" I asked.
"You admitting it," they said.
They weren't wrong. Before the review room, my certainty had felt like the only thing I owned. Today it had been cut with something else: the possibility that my defiance came pre-printed from someone else's ruined attempt.
Maybe I was less an original and more a photocopy with slightly different noise.
*
Samira didn't throw a mug.
She was, however, holding one in a way that made me rethink Tess's comment.
When we stepped into the Office, she was at her console, watching the main screen cycle through cases. My little corner of it stood out: the override flag a bright stain, the P3-class tag a fresh scar.
Her eyes went straight to us, then to Tess. Her grip tightened on the mug handle.
"That was fast," she said. "Either the Shelving Floor has improved, or you skipped it."
"We found something we weren't supposed to," Tess said. "So: option three."
Samira set the mug down with careful precision. No shattering. Probably for the best. Null only had so many cups.
"Let me guess," she said. "Pilot-03."
"The case likes to get mentioned for one we're not supposed to talk about," Echo said.
Samira rubbed a hand over her face.
"They sent you down there on your first day of observation?" she said to me. "Subtle."
"I tried to get lost," I said. "The indexing beat me."
She huffed, which might have been a laugh in some kinder world.
"What did you see?" she asked.
I told her. Not every detail, but enough: the panel, the sentence, the P3-03 mark. The small electric sting when I touched it. The sense, however irrational, that my own unwritten thought had been waiting for me in a box older than my death.
She listened without interrupting, then turned to Tess.
"And you," she said. "How did your evaluation frame it?"
"Artifact linked to early pilot case," Tess said. "Content: statement of principle, aligned with current subject's expressed ideology. Inscription method: manual, unsanctioned. Risk level: moderate."
"Moderate," Samira repeated. "Because nothing says 'moderate' like an idea you couldn't bury the first time."
"I didn't choose the categories," Tess said. "I just tick the boxes."
"You could tick them slower," Samira said.
We fell quiet.
The main screen cycled through more statistics: cases with names I'd never see, graphs tracing how belief rose and fell like market trends.
"What does it mean," I asked finally, "for someone like me to be compared to someone like that?"
"It means Oversight has been waiting to see if a certain pattern would reappear," Samira said. "And now that it has, they're measuring you against it."
"If Pilot-03 broke the system," Echo said, "what did they do wrong?"
"Depends who you ask," Samira said. "Some say they refused to cooperate at all. Others say they cooperated too cleverly. Turned their own erasure into a kind of performance. Started a cult in the footnotes."
"How do you start a cult in footnotes?" I asked.
"You become the story everyone's trying not to tell," she said.
I thought of the panel again. The bluntness of that scratched line. No metaphors, no caveats. Just a prohibition carved where only a handful of people would ever read it.
"Do you think I'm like them?" I asked.
Samira studied me for a long moment.
"I think you are stubborn in adjacent ways," she said. "You keep trying to find a third option. That always makes systems nervous."
"Between what and what?" I asked.
"Between being used and being gone," she said simply.
She pointed at the screen.
"Most people resolve that tension by letting themselves be used a little bit. You'd rather cut everything than be turned into material. It's not a common instinct."
"I've been called a lot worse," I said.
"It's not a compliment," she said. "It's just why you're on their wall now."
"I was trying not to be on anyone's wall," I said.
"Try less," Echo murmured.
Samira ignored them.
"Tess'll file her report," she said. "Oversight will run their comparisons. In the meantime, I have to pretend this is fine and keep you working like a normal client, so they have something to watch."
"'Pretend this is fine' is one of your less reassuring phrases," I said.
"You want reassuring," she said, "you should have joined a different afterlife."
Tess glanced at the screen.
"They also want baseline social interactions," she said. "See how you function in Null when you're not on assignment."
"What does that mean?" I asked. "Mandatory team-building exercises? Trust falls?"
"I would pay good money to see you and Echo do a trust fall," Samira said.
"We'd both let the other drop," Echo said. "For science."
"Relax," Tess said. "It just means we'll log where you go, who you talk to. No new cases yet. Observation period first."
"No new cases," I repeated. "So I'm grounded."
"Think of it as administrative house arrest," Echo said.
Something in my chest clenched.
"No threads left on the Surface," I said. "No missions, for now. Just being watched. What am I supposed to do with that?"
Samira tilted her head.
"What did you do with time before all this?" she asked. "On the Surface."
"Avoided myself," I said.
"Try again," she said.
I looked at the Office.
The plastic tables. The humming monitors. The rows of empty chairs where other clients probably sat once, now resolved to zero residual and moved off the map.
"I don't know," I said. "Start by finding a chair that doesn't remind me of Ben's?"
Echo bumped my shoulder lightly.
"I'll show you the good ones," they said. "There's a corner where the lights don't flicker as much."
"Romantic," I said.
"It's Null," they said. "We do our best with what we're not supposed to have."
Tess checked her watch, which probably told a different kind of time.
"I'll come back once the scan's processed," she said. "In the meantime, try not to do anything too interesting without me."
"Maybe I'll take up knitting," I said.
"Log it," she said. "Oversight loves unexpected hobbies."
She left, the door closing behind her with a soft hiss.
Samira watched it for a second, then looked back at me.
"Do you regret it?" she asked.
"Regret what?" I said.
"Taking Line ∞," she said. "Joining Endless Death. Cutting the threads."
The question felt heavier than anything in the Shelving Floor.
I thought of my mother at the café, finally letting the fact of my death sit in her hands instead of in some office inbox. Of Rana's unsent article. Of Mothlight's revised title. Of Ben's email to himself: stop.
I thought of my own file, now flagged and watched, my attempt at absence turned into a research subject.
"Yes," I said. Then: "No. Then: I don't know."
"Pick one," she said.
"I regret needing it," I said. "That there wasn't another way to stop them from turning me into a story. I don't regret the part where my mother doesn't wake up hoping for appeals every morning. Or the part where Ben stops bleeding himself dry for my sake."
"That's two out of three threads," Echo said quietly.
"Rana?" Samira asked.
"She'll write about something else," I said. "Someone else. That's… workable."
Samira nodded, once.
"Hold on to that," she said. "You're going to need some kind of anchor when the observation starts playing with your edges."
"What do they even expect me to do?" I asked. "Perform? Prove I'm not Pilot-03?"
"They don't expect anything," she said. "They prefer not to. Expectations cloud data."
"People built this," I said. "People always expect."
She didn't argue.
On the screen, my override flag blinked, steady. For a moment, in the reflection, I thought I saw a second file next to mine. Same layout, same fields. Another name blurred out. Another residual score, redacted.
When I blinked, it was gone.
"Did you see that?" I asked.
"See what?" Samira said.
"Nothing," I said. "Probably the lights."
Echo watched me.
"Maybe you should try something radical," they said. "While you're grounded."
"Like what?" I asked.
"Sleep," they said.
*
My room in Null looked the same as it always did. Cot against the wall, small desk, one chair, no windows. The air had the stale neutrality of spaces built to fit anyone and no one.
I sat at the desk and opened the drawer.
They'd given me a notebook when I arrived. A real one, paper and spiral binding, "for adjustment notes." I'd never touched it. Writing by hand had felt too exposed. Too easy to lose, too easy to have found.
Now I pulled it out, flipped to the first blank page, and stared at the lines.
After a minute, I wrote:
I don't want to be turned into content.
The sentence looked wrong. Flatter than the carved metal version. Less certain than the one in my head. I crossed out "want" and wrote "deserve" over it.
I don't deserve to be turned into content.
That was better, but it still wasn't the other thing.
No one deserves to be turned into content.
I added "No one" above, squeezed it in. The line now sat there, cramped, my handwriting small and slanted, like it was apologizing for existing.
I closed the notebook.
For some reason, I didn't throw it back in the drawer.
I slid it under the cot instead, where it would collect dust and whatever else drifted down here. Maybe one day someone would pull the bed away and find it there, read the sentence and think they'd discovered something important.
Or maybe they'd just shrug and mark it down as clutter.
I lay back.
Null hummed around me.
For the first time since Ben's kitchen, sleep felt like more than just a way to skip time. It felt like a test. If I dreamed of the panel, of the carved words, of a desk that wasn't mine, would that mean Pilot-03 was pushing through? Or just that my brain, like the system, liked patterns too much to let them go?
I closed my eyes.
Somewhere above, in rooms I'd never see, my scan was travelling along channels, landing on screens watched by people who thought in graphs. Somewhere below, on a shelf in the dark, a sentence sat etched into metal, too deep to erase easily.
In between, at Four Percent, I waited.
Not for a revelation. Not for a voice from the ceiling.
Just for whatever came next.
Act eighth end - "Thus i remain".