The world was not built to remember people.
It was built to remember patterns.
You can feel it if you look at anything long enough: forms, logs, feeds. Every choice you make eventually gets shaved down until it fits somewhere in a column. "Yes / No." "Approved / Denied." "Compliant / Non-compliant." The details—the way your hand shook, the way your throat burned when you lied—don't survive the conversion.
Someone decided that was enough. That a thin outline in a database could stand in for a life.
When you die properly—body, ceremony, the whole thing—the world tries a little harder. There are photos, stories, a box of clothes that smells wrong for months. People remember you as long as they can stand to keep remembering.
Administrative death doesn't even get that. Administrative death is the system looking at you and saying: "You exist in the wrong place. We'll fix that."
You become a problem in a queue. A mistaken entry. A cost center. Once that's done, your life gets boiled down twice: once into a decision, then again into a teaching slide so nobody "makes the same error" with future cases.
I used to think death was final because it meant you stopped.
Now I think it's final because it means other people get to summarize you.
Null is supposed to be the exception. A place where they hold onto the full version of you for a while, just in case. But even here, the pressure is the same. You can hear it in the hum of the building. The urge to tidy, to compress. To store and move on.
Someone somewhere decided I was a good story. That bothers me more than the certificate ever did.
Because if I'm already a story, the only question left is: who's telling it, and what are they leaving out.
I was thinking about that when the knock came.
Not even a proper knock; just the soft, polite scrape Samira uses when she's trying not to startle someone.
"You awake?" she asked through the door.
"I'm dead," I said. "Define awake."
The handle turned anyway. She stepped in, bringing a strip of corridor light with her. She had that look she carries after too many hours at a screen—alert and exhausted at once. Short hair rumpled, badge slightly askew like it had been tugged in an argument.
Echo drifted in behind her, hands in their pockets, leaning on the frame like a punctuation mark.
"Good," Samira said. "Get up."
My fingers were already in my pocket, checking the card. White, thin, warm where my thumb pressed into it. The symbol in the corner—two overlapping circles, an arrow between them—caught the dim light.
"They approved it?" I asked.
"They didn't say no loudly enough," she said. "Which is as close to yes as we get."
Echo whistled, low.
"Congratulations," they said. "You get the director's cut of your own tragedy."
"Finally," I said. "I was worried I'd miss my one chance to hate it properly."
I sat up. The cot complained in its usual way, metal frame squeaking like it wanted hazard pay.
Samira watched my face a second longer than necessary. She'd been doing that, lately. As if trying to notice if any important pieces had fallen off.
"Just to be clear," she said. "You don't have to do this today."
"Yes, I do," I said. "They're already using me. The least I can do is see how cheap the tickets are."
Echo offered me my boots.
"Come on," they said. "Before someone upstairs remembers they're scared of you."
Echo Theatre is colder than the rest of Null.
Not physically—same air, same vents—but the space feels like a fridge even when the temperature says otherwise. It's the lighting, and the way sound gets swallowed. Training rooms are always designed to make you feel small.
The main entrance looked the way it had last time: big curved door, clean signage, the auditorium beyond. But Samira didn't steer us that way. She swiped her badge on a smaller panel to the side, marked STAFF ONLY in the kind of font that thinks it's being reasonable.
A slimmer door unlatched with a soft click.
"Private screening room," she said. "For 'sensitive material.'" She shaped the words like they tasted bad.
The corridor beyond was narrow, lined with access panels and cables. It smelled faintly of warmed plastic and coffee that had been good two hours ago. Somewhere overhead, a fan whirred in small, regular pain.
Halfway down, someone was sitting on an overturned crate, laptop balanced on their knees, surrounded by open panels and exposed wiring.
They looked up as we approached.
Tall, sinewy, in a grey jumpsuit with pockets everywhere. Short dark hair, buzzed on one side, tied back on the other in a stubby tail that refused to commit to neatness. Under the collar, a glimpse of a tattoo line disappearing onto their collarbone—something geometric, interrupted by fabric.
They snapped the laptop half-shut with their fingers still inside it, like they'd been caught in a thought.
"You're the spike," they said, looking at me.
I blinked.
"Excuse me?" I said.
"Override spike," they clarified, jabbing their thumb at the air, as if pointing at an invisible graph. "Your case lit up half our monitoring dashboards. Every time Theatre pulled your file, the architecture threw a little tantrum. You owe me three nights' sleep."
Samira's mouth thinned.
"Mara," she said. "This is Noor. Noor, Mara Quinn. Infrastructure."
"Hi," I said. "I'd apologize, but apparently that keeps people holding on."
Mara tilted their head, considering me for a beat, then snorted once.
"Fair," they said. "For what it's worth, the building likes you."
"That sounds ominous," Echo said.
"It likes anomalies," Mara replied. "They're interesting."
They slid off the crate and gestured down the corridor with a two-finger flick.
"Room's prepped," they said. "Full access on the channel Gabriel requested. You've got ninety minutes before Oversight's script bots ping me asking why the logs are noisy. Use them well."
We followed.
"Is he coming?" I asked.
"Already here," Mara said, without inflection. "In his own way."
The screening room was smaller than I expected.
No rows of seats. No big stage. Just a single curved screen taking up one wall, a low couch, two chairs, and a desk with an interface built into its surface.
The lights were low enough that everything looked like it had been drawn in pencil.
"Audio off by default," Mara said, tapping the desk. "You control it. No interrupts. That was one of your conditions, yeah?"
"One of many," I said.
They nodded.
"Good," they said. "It will be nice to watch something in here that isn't accompanied by three managers talking over it."
They looked past us, toward the dim back corner.
"Feed's live," they added, louder. "Behave."
I turned.
Gabriel was there.
He hadn't made a sound coming in. Just occupied a patch of wall like he'd been leaned against it for an hour, arms loosely folded, white hair catching the screen's dim glow.
No badge on his shirt. No clipboard. Just sleeves rolled to his forearms again, as if he'd been caught halfway through work.
"Audio off," he said softly. "As requested. I'll keep my thoughts to myself until the end."
"How novel," I said.
Something like amusement flickered over his face.
"For the record," he said, "I am aware of the irony of watching a man's life with him as a focus group."
"Noted," I said. "You can write it in your diary later."
Echo dropped onto the couch, legs folded under them. Samira took the chair nearest the screen, back very straight, mugless hands folded in her lap.
I stayed standing for a moment, card still in my pocket, feeling the room.
Screens don't just show things. They decide what counts as visible.
"Start it," I said.
Mara touched the interface.
The screen flared, then settled.
First there was the title card.
BLACKFIELD – CASE STUDY SERIES
MODULE 7F-19N
"CONTAINMENT THROUGH CONSENT: MANAGING SELF-SELECTED ADMINISTRATIVE DEATH"
The words sat there in clean sans serif, very sure of themselves.
A small line of text crawled along the bottom, the way legal cautions always do.
Based on real events. Scenes have been adapted for training clarity.
I laughed once, too sharply.
"Here we go," Echo murmured.
The module opened on the clerk.
Of course it did.
She was framed well: desk in the foreground, rows of data terminals blurred behind her like a field of glass. The focus made her look almost gentle. The overhead lights softened the shadows around her eyes.
On the desk: my form, my appeal, the certificate. Everything laid out neatly, like a surgery tray.
The dramatized version of me sat on the other side of the desk. Same haircut. Clothes suspiciously clean. Hands folded, very calm.
I remembered the real scene. My palms had been sweating so hard the pen slipped. My stomach had hurt. I'd been on the edge of shouting.
Here, "Noor" looked like a patient man explaining a complicated concept to a child.
No audio yet, just subtitles.
NOOR: I understand the risks. I understand the loss of legal status.
CLERK: And you confirm you are making this choice freely?
I turned to Samira, eyebrows raised.
"I never said it like that," I said.
She didn't look away from the screen.
"I know," she said quietly.
On-screen Noor gave a dignified nod.
NOOR: This system has failed to recognize my existence while I was alive. I prefer to work with something that admits what it's doing.
The words were close enough to things I'd thought that they made my teeth ache. Someone had transcribed my anger, neatened it, sanded off the splinters, and pasted it back on.
"They love that line," Mara said under their breath from the desk. "It tested well."
I didn't ask with whom.
The scene cut.
A montage followed: excerpts from my file, rendered as tidy bullet points drifting across the screen over footage of city offices and crowded trains.
Subject profile:
– Age 24
– History of precarious employment
– Above-average institutional literacy
– High content exposure (social platforms, para-news feeds)
– Repeated "burnout" cycles / expressions of systemic distrust
"Content exposure," Echo repeated. "Like he's a forest with too many cigarettes thrown in it."
"There's more," Mara said.
They weren't wrong.
The module tracked my route: appeals office, failed meetings, nights on my couch staring at the dark. It cut the long, boring gaps where nothing happened and I just sat there, stuck. Instead, it made it look like everything moved in clean beats: Decision → Obstacle → Insight → Null.
It turned my exhaustion into a three-act structure.
The first time my mother appeared on-screen, Samira made a small sound. Not surprise, exactly—more like someone stepping on a loose board.
The feed showed her at the café table, cup between her hands, as I remembered. But the angle was wrong. It was from exactly the height of someone watching from the next table. The focus lingered on the lines at her mouth, the way her fingers tightened around the porcelain.
The real conversation had been messy. Half-finished sentences, old arguments surfacing in the pauses. The module kept maybe twenty seconds of that, then cut to a voiceover.
You can't hear much in the silence of grief, the narrator said. That's why you have to learn to read the signs.
Words in neat text ticked past:
COMMON EXPRESSIONS OF DENIAL IN BEREAVED FAMILY MEMBERS
– Refusal to acknowledge administrative closure
– Allegations of "systemic malice"
– Rumination on alternative outcomes
– Idealization of the deceased
My mother's face became an illustration for someone else's bullet points.
My hands had curled into fists without my noticing.
"Pause it," I said.
Mara tapped the interface. The image froze: my mother's fingers around the cup, tendons standing out sharp.
Gabriel hadn't moved. He watched me, not the screen.
"This is the cleaned version," he said quietly. "The public one."
"What did you cut?" I asked.
"A scene where she threatened to throw the hot coffee at the clerk," he said. "And a line where you told her you wished the building would collapse. Oversight thought it made you both 'unsympathetic.'"
"I was unsympathetic," I said.
"Exactly," he said. "That's why it mattered."
"Then why remove it?" Echo asked.
"Because they wanted Noor to be a dilemma," he said. "Not a person. Dilemmas are easier to teach."
The phrase hung there.
"Start it," I said. "Don't stop again until it stops itself."
Mara's fingers flicked. The scene lurched back into motion.
The module moved fast.
Rana's section was shorter than I expected. They turned her into a talking head in a boxed frame, labelled JOURNALIST – LOCAL NEWS FEED. She spoke about "wider systemic failings" over b-roll of crowded government buildings. My name appeared on her screen as a case number, blurred.
They cut the part where I snapped at her for trying to make an article out of my life. In this version, I looked like I'd been quietly grateful.
Ben appeared only in still images: me and him on the balcony with takeout containers, a blurred selfie. The module didn't show his appeals, or his drafts. Just a narrator line:
Friends and roommates may become secondary victims of administrative death. Supporting them early reduces escalation risk.
"Escalation," I said. "You mean 'being a person about it.'"
No one argued.
Null came into the module later, as a solution. A long slow shot of the building, windows reflecting the washed-out sky, the logo faint on the glass.
Blackfield Centre for Post-Administrative Processing, said the caption.
The first scene inside Null was fiction.
They had me brought in on a stretcher.
In reality, I'd walked through the front doors myself, card in hand, just tired and angry. Here, two attendants with blank faces and soft, firm hands rolled me down a corridor like I was a sedated patient. The camera lingered on the fluorescents, the hum of the vents, the clean floor.
This is one option for high-risk administrative cases, the narrator said. Null offers a structured environment for residual support and systemic learning.
"Learning," Echo repeated. "They make it sound like summer school."
Samira watched herself appear on the screen.
Her module-version wore her hair longer, neatly tied. Her badge was straighter, her expressions smaller.
She appeared in a doorway, tablet in hand, speaking into it like a recorder. Her lines were crisp, jargon-laced.
Subject calm but resentful. Demonstrates high comprehension of process, elevated distrust in institutional rhetoric. Recommended cohort: Observation, with emphasis on narrative restructuring.
"'Narrative restructuring,'" I said. "Nice phrase."
"I didn't say that," she muttered. "Ever."
"You flagged something similar," Gabriel said quietly. "In a note. They turned it into a training term. It… got away from us."
On-screen Samira smiled the way people are trained to smile during onboarding sessions. It was unnerving, watching her face do something it never had.
The module walked through my early days in Null: the first conversation with Samira, the corridor where Echo had popped up, the cafeteria with its too-bright lights.
Echo wasn't in it.
Every scene where I remembered them at my shoulder had been replaced with an extra chair, or a conveniently timed phone call. Jokes that had been theirs were now mine, making me sound sharper, more performative. The empty spaces where their presence had steadied me were filled with neat silence.
"They cut you," I said.
Echo shrugged one shoulder, not quite hiding how it hit.
"I'm not on any payroll," they said. "Easy to pretend I don't exist."
"Unofficial staff complicate the hierarchy," Gabriel said. "Oversight doesn't like variables it didn't authorize."
"You authorized me just fine when I saved your glitchy module last winter," Echo said.
"I remember," he said. "The module does not."
There was a small satisfaction in the way they stared at the screen, an entire self edited out.
Then the threads.
Mother. Rana. Ben.
Each got a scene.
The module turned my choice of "blade" into an object lesson.
We watched the dramatized version of me standing in the Shelving Floor, speaking to a blurred figure labelled SUBJECT'S MOTHER, while a calm voice explained recommended phrasing. The more jagged parts of my grief were smoothed. The camera cut away from the moment I wanted to scream and showed, instead, a gentle fade as her file dimmed in the Archive.
Text popped up in a neat box:
KEY TECHNIQUES:
– Affirm finality without assigning blame
– Avoid language that suggests alternate outcomes ("if only," "what if")
– Do not apologize for systemic limitations
– Offer concrete, limited acts of remembrance
The real memory of the conversation didn't match the rhythm of the scene. Watching the module felt like watching someone lip-sync badly over my life.
With Rana, they erased the part where I'd nearly let my own spite throw her into the same pit. In the module, I looked… wise. Detached. I delivered the line about people like us being turned into content like I'd had a week to rehearse it.
"Congratulations," Samira said dryly. "You have a catchphrase."
"Kill me again," I said.
"With pleasure," Echo murmured.
Ben's section was the worst.
They didn't show his messages, or the drafts. They showed an actor in a small kitchen, looking at a printed certificate on the table. The actor's face had the generic softness favoured by human-interest segments.
The narrator framed it neatly:
In such cases, prolonged denial can actually increase long-term suffering. A clean cognitive break, facilitated by Null staff, allows both parties to move forward.
Then they showed the moment by the sink. Or something like it. The actor slid down the cabinet, knees drawn up, exactly as I'd seen Ben do. The shot composition matched my memory too well for comfort.
There were no subtitles. No "I hate you and I miss you." Just music, low and carefully chosen.
Finally, my "intervention" with him was reduced to a vague presence: a wind that made the kitchen curtain stir, a tilt of frame, a softening of focus when he wrote in the draft email:
he's gone.
The words glowed briefly, then minimized.
Text box:
OUTCOME:
– Subject's friend disengaged from appeals
– Litigation risk reduced
– Residual pull stabilized at low levels
RECOMMENDED BEST PRACTICE TAGS:
#boundarysetting #finality #compassionwithoutpromise
"Compassion without promise," Echo said. "I'm going to tattoo that on a knife."
I sat very still.
The module made it look like this had all been clean. Efficient. Kind-ish, in a way that didn't cost anyone upstairs anything.
At the end, they summarized me.
The screen displayed my file, simplified.
NOOR [REDACTED]
– Administrative death case 7F-19N
– High literacy, high content exposure
– Voluntary Null enrollment
– Successfully reduced residual network from 81% to 4%
– Demonstrates effective self-selection into non-disruptive narratives
My image—one of my old ID photos—faded behind the text. I looked slightly to the left of camera, as if I'd been trying to see who was taking the shot.
The narrator got the last word.
Some subjects will choose disappearance over confrontation, the voice said. When guided carefully, this choice can protect both the system and the subject from greater harm.
The module faded to black.
On the bottom of the screen, a simple prompt appeared.
END OF CASE.
PROCEED TO QUIZ?
The screen froze there, waiting.
No one moved.
The room hummed. The air vents whispered. Somewhere in the wall, a cable clicked as it cooled.
"Is that it?" Echo asked. "No post-credits scene where you turn into a dragon?"
"Version 2.3," Mara said. "Standard runtime. There are optional annexes for specialized trainings. But that's the core."
I realized my jaw hurt. I'd been clenching it.
"You turned me into a safety warning," I said.
Gabriel unfolded his arms.
"We turned you into what we thought you were," he said. "An argument for giving people like you a place to go, instead of letting you fall apart where cameras can see."
"You made it look like I chose this to help you," I said.
"You partly did," he said. "You hate the spectacle. You hate being used as an example to move money. Null minimizes that. We shaped the story around that truth."
"That's not a truth," I said. "That's a justification."
Samira finally spoke.
"Why am I like that?" she asked. Her voice was flat, controlled. "On the screen."
Gabriel looked at her.
"Because Oversight wanted a 'reassuring presence' in the module," he said. "Someone who believes in the procedure. Grounded, calm, just strict enough. The real you is… messier."
"Good," she said.
There was more in that one word than I could unpack.
"And Echo?" they asked. "Why don't I exist?"
"Because they don't know what to do with you," he said. "You don't fit the org chart. You complicate the causality. So they edited you out."
"Feels familiar," Echo said. "Good to know it's official."
Mara leaned back in their chair, watching all of us with a mechanic's eye, the way you look at a machine that's making a new noise.
"For what it's worth," they said, "it's not the worst module I've seen. Last year they did one where a guy's entire burnout got reduced to 'remind staff to hydrate.'"
"High aspirations," I said.
The prompt still blinked on the screen.
PROCEED TO QUIZ?
"In real sessions," Mara said, "this is where the trainees get questions. Multiple choice. 'At what point did the handler effectively de-escalate?' 'Which phrase best encourages the subject to self-select into Null?' You'd be amazed how many of them pick 'We all have to play our part.'"
I stared at the black screen.
"That's the story upstairs sees," Gabriel said. "That's the Noor they think they're learning from."
"And what do you see?" I asked.
He took a moment before answering.
"A man whose hatred of being turned into content is strong enough to steer his choices," he said. "And whose choices, despite himself, have already been turned into content."
"So I've already failed," I said.
"No," he said. "You've already been noticed."
He nodded at the screen.
"That module took months of approvals," he said. "Committees. Edits. Risk assessments. They don't spend that kind of time on cases they consider noise. You're in a category with maybe a dozen others in the last decade. Pilot-03 was one. You're another."
"You make that sound like an honour," I said.
"It's a responsibility," he said.
I laughed, because the alternative was hitting something.
"Responsibility," I repeated. "That's what you call turning a man into a warning sign."
Gabriel unfolded from the wall and stepped closer to the screen. The reflected light made the pale lines under his skin faintly visible again—circuit scars from Room 0.
"This is the version that exists without you," he said. "This is what they're already using in induction sessions, policy proposals, budget pitches. The question now is simple."
He turned back to me.
"Do you want to leave it like this," he asked, "or do you want to break it?"
Mara raised an eyebrow.
"Careful," they said. "If anyone else hears you, that sentence costs you a promotion."
"Then it's fortunate we're in a room that doesn't officially exist," he said.
No one spoke for a moment.
I thought about the way my mother's hands had looked on the cup. The way Rana's cursor had blinked over a title she'd never get to finish. The way Ben's back had curved in the kitchen. The way Echo had been neatly erased, as if their presence in my life was a typo.
I thought about the train in my dream, the doors with percentages over them. How the 0.9% had refused to settle.
Pilot-03's scratched sentence surfaced in my head, sharp as ever.
No one deserves to be turned into content.
Too late, the module said.
But the module was just one version.
"If I break it," I said slowly, "what happens to the trainees who watch?"
Gabriel's mouth curled, just a little.
"That," he said, "is the interesting part."
He gestured at the prompt.
"In every session," he said, "they get four answer choices. We can add a fifth. Something… new. Something that doesn't fit their rubric. A little hairline fracture. We see what they do when the right answer isn't on the list."
"You want to use me to experiment on them," I said.
"I want to use you to see if anyone upstairs still recognizes a human when they see one," he said. "And if they don't, we'll have that data too."
"And if they do?" Echo asked.
"Then," he said, "we have allies we didn't know about."
Samira stood up.
"Give us a minute," she told him.
He inclined his head, stepped back again, folding his arms. Mara turned their chair half-away, pretending to adjust a panel but listening.
Samira moved closer to me, lowering her voice.
"You don't have to decide this now," she said.
"I do," I said. "They're already running this thing."
"Not every module," she said. "Not everywhere. It's still in phased rollout. We could try to yank it, file an ethics complaint, argue misrepresentation—"
"And they'll replace it with something worse," I said. "Without us in the room."
She pressed her lips together.
"Maybe," she said.
"I don't think I can stop being a story," I said. "That ship has sunk. But if I can at least aim the wreckage…"
Echo watched me, head tilted.
"You sure?" they asked. "Because this is the part where you slide from 'reluctant subject' to 'co-author.' Once you start rewriting yourself with them, it's going to stick. They'll call you whatever makes the report look clean—'advisor,' 'consultant,' 'collaborator.'"
"I know," I said.
"And you hate that," they added.
"I do," I said. "Very much."
"So why do it?" Samira asked.
I looked at the frozen prompt on the screen.
PROCEED TO QUIZ?
Because if I walked away now, the module would keep running. Trainees would keep picking between Sanitized Option A and Sanitized Option B. One day, someone like me would sit in an office and get the same treatment, and the clerk would genuinely believe they were being kind.
"I want to see one of them flinch," I said. "I want one person upstairs to watch this and realize the quiz is wrong. Even if they never say it out loud. Even if all they do is hesitate a second longer in front of the next form they stamp."
"That's not much," Samira said.
"It's more than nothing," I said. "And nothing is what I get if I stay in this room pretending the module doesn't exist."
I turned back to Gabriel.
"All right," I said. "You get your fifth answer choice. And you show me every version of this thing they're running. Every annex. Every use case. No more surprises."
He nodded.
"Agreed," he said.
"And," I added, "we don't do it alone. Samira's in on every change. Mara sees the technical side. Echo…" I looked at them. "Echo keeps count of every time we're lying to ourselves."
"Finally," Echo said. "Promotion."
Mara shook their head, making a small, disbelieving noise.
"I'm just here to stop the architecture from catching fire," they said. "But sure. I'll watch."
Gabriel's gaze flicked over each of us.
"This is how contagions start," he said softly. "One room, too many people willing to think."
"Good," I said. "Let's be contagious."
The screen blinked, waiting.
In the corner of my eye, for just a heartbeat, the black surface shimmered. A faint line of text ghosted across it, too fast to read. I caught only fragments.
…NOOR…
…DON'T LET THEM WRITE THE END…
Then it was gone. Maybe a glitch. Maybe 0.9% of someone else.
PROCEED TO QUIZ?
"Let's see what happens," I said.
Mara's fingers moved, unlocking controls that weren't supposed to exist.
In a training hall somewhere above us, a projector would brighten. A group of trainees would take their seats, coffee cups in hand, notebooks open. They'd watch the same title card. The same clerk. The same mother, same kitchen, same building.
And then, if we did this right, they'd reach a question that didn't fit any of their manuals.
As beginnings go, it was small. Just an extra option on a screen.
But every structure starts cracking from a hairline.
We had ninety minutes.
We had the full cut.
And for the first time since they killed me on paper, I had my hands—however lightly—on the story that was being told in my name.
Act eleventh - "the you in the mirror"