The first thing I noticed when I woke up was that Null had gotten louder.
Not in any obvious way. No alarms, no announcements. Just the hum in the walls—higher, like someone had turned the building's thoughts up a notch.
I sat up on the cot and listened.
The air recycler in the corner wheezed on the inhale, clicked on the exhale. Somewhere beyond my door, footsteps passed, too many for this early not-morning. A cart rattled. Paper slid. Someone swore under their breath and tried to pretend they hadn't.
Observation week, I thought. Maybe they'd installed extra microphones in the ducts.
I reached under the bed and checked the notebook.
Still there. Still closed.
I didn't open it. I already knew what was inside: three versions of the same sentence, like a bad joke I'd told myself and then found carved in metal in a room I wasn't supposed to know existed.
No one deserves to be turned into content.
The Shelving Floor had felt like a place outside time. Today, Null felt like the opposite: too much time stacked on top of itself, trying to occupy the same second.
I washed my face in the tiny sink, stared at the mirror they'd bolted to the wall as if the worst thing a dead client might do is try to smash their own reflection.
My face looked tired.
Good, I thought. At least something matches.
When I opened the door, Echo was already in the corridor, leaning against the wall with their hands in their pockets.
"Morning, Four Percent," they said.
"You've started using it like a nickname," I said. "That's unhealthy."
"Everything here is unhealthy," they said. "Might as well be consistent."
We fell into step.
On the way to the Office, we passed other doors I'd only ever seen shut before. One was ajar. Inside, a man sat on his bed, staring at the wall where his case summary faintly glowed. Lines of his own life scrolled past in neutral font. He didn't move.
"New client?" I asked.
"Old," Echo said. "They finally cut his last thread last week. Some people need extra time to understand what 'negligible' feels like."
"What does it feel like?" I asked.
Echo looked at me.
"Tell me when you find out," they said.
The Office was busier.
Clerks moved between desks, carrying slim stacks of forms. The screens were brighter, or maybe my eyes were more sensitive. My blue square still hung in the corner of the main display, the override flag a steady pulse. Next to it, the space that used to be empty had a faint outline, as if another file wanted to live there but hadn't decided what to call itself.
Samira stood by the central console with her mug. Today she wasn't pretending not to watch the door; she was watching it when we walked in, like someone had told her the interesting part of her day would come through there.
She lifted her chin at us.
"Breakfast of champions," she said, nodding to the table.
On it sat three cups of coffee, if you could call Null's brew that without being sued for defamation.
"Where's Tess?" I asked.
"Upstairs," Samira said. "Sending love letters to Oversight. She'll be down any minute."
Echo sniffed one of the cups.
"Is this special observation coffee?" they asked. "It smells like extra surveillance."
"It's the same sludge as always," she said. "They don't waste good beans on the dead."
We sat.
"What's with the crowd?" I nodded toward the extra clerks.
"They're reindexing a batch of surface cases," she said. "Archive's pushing a new classification model. Means we get to watch a lot of people's lives get retagged as 'domestic,' 'economic,' or 'dramatic' depending on which column makes the graph look nicer."
"That's horrifying," I said.
"That's Tuesday," she said.
Before I could answer, Tess walked in.
She was less sharp today—blazer creased, hair a little out of place, dark half-moons under her eyes. She looked like someone who'd been arguing with screens for hours.
"Good, you're both here," she said. "Saves me chasing you through the ducts."
"Nice to see you too," Echo said.
Tess dropped a thin folder on the table.
"Shelving Floor report went through," she said. "Oversight is delighted."
"Delighted how?" I asked. "Like 'what an interesting anomaly,' or 'let's delete the whole department'?"
"The first one," she said. "For now."
She opened the folder.
On the top page was a still photo of the scratched panel, the sentence carved into metal. Underneath: a block of analysis in small print. I didn't read it.
"Graphology," Tess said. "Carving depth, pressure patterns, stroke order. They ran it against all known handwriting and manual samples from early pilots."
"And?" Samira asked.
"And it's consistent with Pilot-03," Tess said. "Whoever carved that sentence is the same person who filled out their intake forms and threatened to burn down the Appeals Office on day four."
Echo let out a low whistle.
"So our mystery slogan belongs to your favourite ghost," they said.
"It was never that mysterious," Tess said. "We just couldn't prove it until now."
My stomach did something unpleasant.
"And their conclusion about me?" I asked, bracing.
Tess flipped to the next page.
"Linguistic comparison shows overlap in lexical field and rhetorical structures between Pilot-03's documented statements and your pre-death writing," she read. "Phrases recur. Tone aligns."
"I don't like being told I share a tone with someone whose file is sealed under 'We Don't Talk About This,'" I said.
"It doesn't mean you're the same," she said. "Just… adjacent."
"Was this what they wanted all along?" I asked. "Find another P3, see if it goes better this time?"
"If that were the case," Samira said, "they'd be handling you upstairs. Not down here in my charming office."
"Why am I not reassured by that?" I said.
"Because you know us," she said.
Tess closed the folder.
"Anyway," she said, "they have a new request."
"Of course they do," Echo said.
Tess slid a small plastic card across the table toward me. It wasn't my field pass. It was thicker, edged in red.
"What's this?" I asked.
"Access badge," she said. "Echo Theatre."
"The what?" I said.
Samira went still.
"No," she said.
"Yes," Tess said.
"What's Echo Theatre?" I asked.
"It's a training suite," Tess said. "They use it to run scenario simulations for caseworkers, clerks, null operators. Replays of difficult cases. 'What would you do here' modules."
"They want to run me through training?" I asked.
"They want to run you through you," Tess said. "You've been a case study for months, Noor. They built a module around your administrative death long before Null got you."
The room tilted a little.
"Explain," I said.
Samira's expression had hardened into that particular cold she used when she was trying not to break anything.
"High-profile anomalies get turned into teaching tools," she said. "Your death—young, procedural mess, public-facing potential—was perfect. Somewhere upstairs, there's a slide deck titled something like 'When the Paperwork Kills the Citizen.' They walk new staff through it. 'Here's what went wrong, here's how to avoid it, here's how to talk to the family.'"
"I didn't know that," I said.
"You weren't supposed to," she said. "By the time you came to us, the module was already in circulation. That's probably where part of your residual echo lives. All those trainees running through a Noor-scenario in their heads."
The unknown 0.9%.
"Wait," I said. "So pieces of me are stuck in a glorified customer-service exercise?"
"Compressed, anonymized, dramatized," Tess said. "In theory, clients are always changed enough that they're no longer personally identifiable."
"In theory," Echo repeated.
"In practice," Tess said, "they've asked us to bring you into the Theatre, load up your module, and watch how you react. 'For comparison.'"
"Like showing a bug its own error log," I said.
"Like seeing whether you recognize the shape of the cage they built out of you," Samira said.
There was a tightness to her voice that made me think she'd argued about this, and lost.
"Can you say no?" I asked her.
She shook her head once.
"Oversight request," she said. "Cross-domain. I can't block it. I can go with you and file forms afterwards describing how stupid it was."
"That's something," Echo said.
I stared at the red-edged badge.
"Echo Theatre," I said. "Why is it called that?"
"Because it plays back what's already happened," Tess said. "Louder."
*
The Theatre was on a floor I hadn't seen before.
Not down, like Shelving, but sideways. A wing off the main Null structure, entered through a door with a cheerful, meaningless icon etched on it—two overlapping circles with a little arrow between them. Translation: "learning".
Inside, the air was colder. Not like a server room, more like an empty cinema that's been set to comfortable for non-existent viewers.
Rows of seats faced a curved wall of screen. No stage, no podium. Just a blank, pale surface waiting for images.
I'd imagined something more clinical. This looked like the sort of place you'd bring middle managers to watch a video about diversity.
"Sit where you want," Tess said. "There's no front row."
I took the middle. Echo sat to my left, Samira to my right. Tess stayed near the back, by a console built into the wall.
"Does this thing ever show good endings?" Echo asked.
"Occasionally," Tess said. "When they need to prove the system works."
"And today?" I asked.
"Today they want to show you what they think your life means," she said.
She tapped a command.
The lights dimmed. The screen flickered from blank to grey.
At first, it was just text. Neutral font, white on charcoal.
CASE MODULE 7F-19N
SUBJECT: [REDACTED]
SCENARIO: DISPUTED ADMINISTRATIVE DEATH – ESCALATION AND AFTERMATH
My stomach clenched around the words. It was like reading my own autopsy, written by a focus group.
The text faded.
The image that replaced it looked almost like a film.
A government office—one of the mid-tier ones, not quite shabby enough to be honest about itself. Lines of chairs. A ticket machine. A counter behind glass.
I knew that space. I'd stood in it.
A younger version of me sat in one of the plastic chairs, clutching a folder. The image was eerie: close enough to be me, off enough to be someone else. The hair was shorter, the shoulders a little more slumped. The badge on the folder said something like STUDENT RESIDENCY REVIEW.
"That's you?" Echo asked.
"Ish," I said.
A voiceover began. Calm, training-video calm.
"In this scenario, you are assisting a citizen whose records have been incorrectly flagged as deceased," it said. "Watch the interaction closely and consider how you would respond at each decision point."
On screen, the Noor-approximation stood, approached the counter. The clerk behind the glass smiled the way people do when they've been told to be friendly or be replaced.
"Yes?" she asked.
"There's a mistake," Screen-Me said. "I got a notice saying my death was processed. I'm not dead."
Polite laugh track, almost audible.
"In this moment," the voiceover said, "what is the most appropriate first response?"
Three options appeared at the bottom of the screen.
A: Express sympathy and reassure the citizen.
B: Explain procedure and request documentation.
C: Suggest that the citizen is mistaken and redirect them to the online portal.
A faint cursor glowed, hovering.
"This is disgusting," Samira muttered.
"You've seen this?" I asked her.
"Not this cut," she said. "We get summaries. They never show the face."
"So this has been playing upstairs," I said, "over and over, with my maybe-face, while trainees choose answers."
"That's how you get the 0.9%," Tess said from the back. "Tiny fragments. Rehearsed versions of you."
The cursor clicked on B. The clerk on the screen launched into a speech.
"I'm very sorry for the inconvenience," she said. "If you could provide your national ID and any notices you've received, we'll look into the discrepancy and see what happened."
Screen-Me handed over papers. There were cuts in the footage—jumping forward in time as the clerk typed, frowned, called a supervisor.
"In training," Tess said quietly, "they pause here and ask 'What would you escalate? When would you override?' They talk about thresholds."
"And what do they choose?" I asked.
"Depends who's teaching," she said.
The scenario fast-forwarded: meetings, emails, growing piles of documents. My double's face hollowed out with each jump.
"In this module," the voiceover said, "the citizen's case is mishandled. An internal miscommunication leads to the finalization of their administrative death despite multiple appeals."
On screen, the clerk held out a sheet of paper.
"I'm so sorry," she said. "There's nothing more we can do at this office."
Screen-Me stared at the document.
"Are you saying the system believes I'm dead?" he asked.
"Yes," she said. "But you can lodge a complaint through the appropriate channels."
The moment froze. Text underlined it.
DECISION POINT: HOW DO YOU COMMUNICATE IRREVERSIBLE OUTCOMES?
The training voice went on about tone, empathy, referrals to counselling services. None of it mattered. I was watching my own worst day turned into a multiple-choice question.
Echo shifted in their seat.
"You okay?" they murmured.
"No," I said. "Keep it rolling."
The scenario jumped ahead.
My mother at the kitchen table, notice in hand. Ben on the couch, staring at his phone. Rana reading an internal memo. Each moment came with a menu of options for the imaginary staff.
In this scenario, the family member is distressed.
In this scenario, the roommate is angry at the institution.
In this scenario, a journalist requests comment.
The trainees were supposed to learn how to de-escalate, how to sound caring without admitting fault. The voiceover congratulated or corrected imaginary choices.
"This is worse than I imagined," I said.
"You weren't supposed to imagine it," Samira said. "You were supposed to be out of sight while they learned how not to do this again. That's the story they tell themselves."
"And you?" I asked.
"I drink my coffee and pretend my work isn't built on the same bones," she said.
The footage shifted.
Now the scene was the café with my mother. Except it wasn't: the angles were wrong, the lighting too warm. An actor-version of her sat with her hands wrapped around a cup, looking heartbreakingly dignified in arranged grief.
"In this extended module," the voiceover said, "we examine the long-term impact of procedural failure on a citizen's support network."
"They made my mother a supporting character in their training," I said.
Tess's voice had lost its professional smoothness.
"I told you," she said. "You were an asset long before you became a client."
Something cold coiled under my ribs.
On screen, the actor-version of my mother looked up, as if she'd heard something. The camera held on her face a fraction too long. For a moment, I thought—
No.
She wasn't looking at me.
The footage cut again.
Rana sat at a newsroom desk, scrolling. The voiceover talked about media engagement strategies.
Mothlight's room appeared, walls covered in printouts. In this version, my name on the collage was blurred, just "SUBJECT X". The article draft on their screen read HOW MANY NOBODIES DOES IT TAKE TO WAKE UP A CITY?
"They updated it," I said.
"Modules change with the data," Tess said. "When your ideological thread shifted, so did the scenario."
"So they're watching your work too," Echo said.
"Them watching is the only reason we get budget," Samira said.
The screen rippled.
For a second, everything went grey, like the film had run out. Then a new prompt appeared in big, clean letters.
IN THIS SCENARIO, THE SUBJECT ACCEPTS ADMINISTRATIVE DEATH AND ENTERS NULL.
Echo stiffened.
"They've integrated us," they said.
"Of course they have," Samira murmured.
The image resolved into the Line ∞ carriage.
I watched a version of myself sit on the train, staring out at the dark, hand on the strap that would open the door. The camera floated just above his shoulder, intimate and intrusive.
"In this moment," the voiceover said, "the subject believes they are escaping narrative exploitation. In fact, they are entering a controlled environment designed to study and mitigate such anomalies."
The train doors opened.
Screen-Me stepped into Null. The view shifted to show the corridor, the office door, the first time I met Samira—
Except it wasn't. The woman at the desk was generically kind, generically firm. No Echo. No cracks, no tired jokes. The Null in the module looked like a brochure: clean, purposeful, morally neutral.
"Welcome," the scripted Samira said. "We're here to help you transition."
The scene froze.
TEXT: DISCUSSION – HOW CAN AFTERLIFE PROCESSES RESTORE TRUST IN ADMINISTRATIVE INSTITUTIONS?
I laughed. It came out wrong.
"They turned you into therapy," Echo said.
Samira's hand clenched around the armrest.
"This is propaganda," she said. "Not training."
Tess didn't argue.
"Oversight uses modules like this to justify Null's existence," she said. "'We provide dignified closure.' 'We turn mistakes into learning.' They show this at budget hearings."
"So what do they want from me?" I asked. "Applause?"
"As far as their request goes," Tess said, "they want to see where your memory diverges from the module. How you react to their version. Whether it destabilizes you."
"Why would it destabilize me?" I said.
The screen changed again.
No announcement. No prompt. Just a sudden cut to something that made my breath stop.
A room.
Small, windowless. A cot against the wall. A desk. A chair. A notebook half under the bed.
My room.
"This feed isn't part of the module," Samira snapped.
The view zoomed in. The notebook slid out from under the cot, as if pulled by an invisible hand. Its cover flipped open. A page filled the screen.
My handwriting.
No one deserves to be turned into content.
The voiceover was gone. The theatre was silent. Only the hum of Null made any noise.
"I didn't authorize internal surveillance for this demo," Samira said, standing.
"Tess," she barked. "Shut it down."
"I didn't load that," Tess called, fingers already flying over the console. "It's not on my script list."
On the screen, the words trembled slightly, like something was breathing under the paper.
Then, slowly, a second line appeared beneath my sentence, as if an invisible pen were writing over it.
YOU ALREADY WERE.
The letters didn't match my handwriting or the carved panel. They were neat, deliberate, like someone signing a contract.
"Is this part of Pilot-03's file?" Echo asked, voice low.
"No," Tess said. "No. This isn't… I don't know what this is."
Samira moved toward the screen, as if proximity might help.
"Kill the power," she said.
Tess hit a key.
Nothing happened.
The theatre's lights flickered, but the screen stayed bright. The image zoomed back, out of my room, out through the ceiling, past levels of Null I'd never seen. For a moment I saw lines—rivers of data—flowing between floors, between servers, between whatever counted as heaven and hell in this place.
Then the view snapped to the main Office.
Our Office.
On the screen, we watched ourselves sitting in the Theatre.
It was like looking into a mirror from the wrong side.
"Okay," Echo said. "That's—"
The image froze.
A new window opened beside it: my case file. Threads dimmed, residual score: 4%. Override flag: active. Next to it, another file ghosted into view. Same layout, same fields. Name: [REDACTED]. Residual score: 0%. Status: CLOSED.
Underneath, in small text:
REFERENCE CASE – PILOT-03.
The two files slid closer together, overlapping until where one ended and the other began blurred.
Samira swore.
"Tess—"
"I'm trying," Tess said through her teeth. "Control's not responding. Whatever's doing this isn't using our interface."
"Then who is?" I asked.
The overlapping files pulsed.
A small percentage value appeared under mine.
EXTERNAL ECHO: 0.9% – SOURCE: LINKED CASE – PILOT-03.
"That's your missing fraction," Echo whispered.
"Linked how?" I said. "I never met them. They died before the program stabilized."
"Patterns," Tess said. "Shared phrasing. Parallel actions. The system thinks you're statistically adjacent. Close enough for bleed."
On the screen, the merged files twitched, then began to separate again.
But now, something clung between them. A thin, glowing thread hung in the space, connecting my residual to the zero where Pilot-03's memory should have been.
A voice filled the Theatre.
Not from speakers. From everywhere.
It didn't sound like me. It didn't sound like anyone I knew. It sounded like a person who'd stood against a wall and refused to move until the wall gave way.
"You don't get to close a case like me," it said. "Not while you're still using it."
Echo's hand found my arm without quite touching.
"You hear that?" they murmured. "Or is it just me?"
"I hear it," I said. "I really wish I didn't."
The thin thread on the screen brightened.
NEW STATUS: PILOT-03 – RESIDUAL SCORE: 1%.
"That's impossible," Tess said.
"Apparently not," Samira said.
The Theatre shook, just once, like the building had coughed.
On the screen, the view of the Office dissolved. The merged files collapsed into a single block of text, the letters too small to read. The only thing still legible was my override flag, pulsing faster.
The voice spoke again, closer now.
"Four Percent," it said. "They won't let you go. They never let any of us go."
I swallowed.
"Who are you?" I asked, before I could think better of it.
For a heartbeat, nothing answered.
Then the Theatre screen went black.
In the dark, a final line wrote itself in clean, unfussy letters.
COME FIND ME.
Under it:
LOCATION: NULL – LEVEL -3 – ROOM 0.
The lights snapped back on.
The screen was blank.
Tess stared at her console like it had bitten her.
Samira turned to me.
"Do not move," she said.
Then, softer, not as my handler, but as someone who'd just seen a ghost climb out of a locked cabinet:
"They shouldn't be able to do that," she said. "Nothing closed should be able to ask you for anything."
Echo leaned toward me, eyes bright with something between fear and a terrible curiosity.
"Did you see the room number?" they whispered.
"Yeah," I said.
"Do you know what's on Level minus three?" they asked.
"No," I said.
"Me neither," they said. "Isn't that interesting?"
The override flag in my head pulsed in time with my heartbeat.
Level -3. Room 0.
Pilot-03, at one percent.
As cliffhangers go, I'd have preferred something quieter.
Act ninth's End - "the room within me".