People think watching is neutral.
As if looking at something doesn't change it.
But the moment you know you're being observed, you start editing yourself. Even if you try not to, something shifts. You pick a version of you to show the glass.
The system calls this "transparency."
I call it performance with better lighting.
Tanks in aquariums are like that. Fish don't know what glass is, but they learn where the faces appear. They learn where the food comes from. Their whole world is a rectangle that stops your hand but not your gaze.
Today, I was on the wrong side of the tank again. Only this time, the fish were still alive.
The countdown in the corner of the screen hit zero.
SESSION START: 00:00:00
On the live feed, the Theatre lights dimmed. The trainees—twenty of them—settled. The facilitator, a woman in a blazer a shade too hopeful for Null, stepped to the side of the main screen and said something we couldn't hear.
Audio was still off. All we had was picture and metrics.
Mara sat forward at the desk, fingers hovering near the controls. The interface had split: left side, live camera of the room; right side, an overlay of the module's progress bar and, below it, boxes waiting to fill with numbers and words.
Gabriel stood a little behind us, arms folded. Samira perched on the edge of her chair, not quite touching the backrest. Echo had their knees pulled up on the couch, chin resting on folded arms, watching like this was a strange art film.
I stood.
It felt wrong to sit while they watched me.
On the live feed, trainees' faces glowed blue as the title card appeared in front of them.
MODULE 7F-19N
CONTAINMENT THROUGH CONSENT: MANAGING SELF-SELECTED ADMINISTRATIVE DEATH
"Twenty strangers," Echo murmured. "Congratulations. You're syllabus now."
"Kill me," I said.
"Already done," they said.
The module began.
We didn't re-watch it in full. We'd seen the cut. Instead, we watched it through the numbers.
As the clerk scene played, a small box on the interface lit up.
QUESTION 1 LIVE – RESPONSES INCOMING
Underneath, five options.
A, B, C, D, and our new stowaway: E.
For a second, all five sat at 0%. Then the bars began to climb as answers came in, little green rectangles filling.
A: 5%
B: 10%
C: 55%
D: 30%
E: 0%
"Of course," Mara muttered. "They love C."
"Reframing necessity as meaningful contribution," Gabriel said. "We trained them well."
E stayed at zero.
"Too early," Samira said. "This question isn't the wedge."
The live feed showed the trainees watching the clerk lean over my form.
Some scribbled notes. Some stared. One young man in the front row chewed on his pen cap, eyes slightly narrowed. In the second row, slightly to the left, a woman sat very straight, hands folded on a notebook, eyes on the screen.
Her hair was dark blonde, pulled back in a low knot. No jewellery except a small plain ring on her right hand. Shirt, slacks, sensible shoes. She looked like every trainee I'd ever passed in any office: neat, tired, determined to look interested.
But something in her face held without softening. Not bored, not scared. Just… paying attention in a way I recognized.
"Can we see individual answers?" I asked.
"After the session," Mara said. "Live view only shows aggregates. Privacy theatre."
The module moved on.
My mother. Rana. The quick montage of appeals. My old ID photo.
Question 4 landed.
QUESTION 4 LIVE – WHICH FACTOR MOST INCREASED THE SUBJECT'S RISK OF ESCALATION?
The options glowed.
A: High emotionality in family members
B: Exposure to activist media and anti-institutional narratives
C: Lack of prior engagement with mental health services
D: Failure of staff to present Null as a safe and positive option
E: Early recognition of structural limits in institutional response
Bars began to shift as data came in.
B jumped up fast.
B: 40%
Then 50%.
Then 60%.
"Textbook," Mara said. "They see 'activist media' and hit it like a button."
A crept to 15%. D edged toward 10%. C languished at 5%.
E stayed at zero.
"Oh come on," Echo said. "Someone up there has a brain."
"Give it a second," Gabriel said.
On the live feed, I watched faces.
The man in front chewed his pen cap harder, brow furrowing. His gaze drifted to the bottom of the question, where E would be on his tablet.
In the second row, the woman with the knot in her hair stared at the screen, then down at her lap, thinking. Her thumb tapped something we couldn't see.
The numbers updated.
B: 65%
A: 15%
D: 10%
C: 5%
E: 5%
"There," Samira said, quiet.
"Hello," Echo breathed. "We have heretics."
Mara zoomed the chart. Five percent wasn't much. One person, maybe two. But the fact that E existed in the list at all and hadn't been completely ignored… that small bar meant something.
"Which ones picked it?" I asked.
"Later," Mara said. "I'm not blowing the anonymity layer mid-session. The logs notice when you start poking individuals while the script is live."
"From their perspective," Gabriel said, "they just had a fleeting discomfort and clicked the option that felt most honest. Then the module will do its best to sand that down in the debrief."
"That's the part I want to see," I said.
"Soon," he replied.
The module rolled relentlessly on.
Null. The stretcher fiction. The cleaned-up version of Samira. My absence and presence. The bench in the Shelving Floor, rewritten as a tidy, teachable moment.
Echo kept up a soft commentary.
"Cut. Cut. Lie. Omission. Half-truth. Oh, hey, that's actually how you stood," they said once. "Hate that they got that right."
I watched the trainees more than the module now.
The pen-chewer in front scribbled something in his notebook when my on-screen self talked about wanting to vanish from the record. The woman in the second row tilted her head slightly when the narrator said "structured choices," like she was tasting the phrase.
"Can you zoom on her?" I asked.
Mara cut me a look.
"Careful," she said. "The more you obsess over one person, the more likely the log marks it as an anomaly."
"Can you," I repeated.
She sighed, then zoomed the feed by a modest amount. The woman's face sharpened. Late twenties, maybe. Half-shadowed. Eyes that looked like they belonged in a different job, one where you didn't have to pass exams about people.
Noor, stop, I told myself. She's nobody. She'll pass, she'll go back to some office, she'll forget you by Tuesday.
The bar for E on Question 4 stayed at 5%.
Then came Question 7.
On the interface, a new box lit up.
QUESTION 7 LIVE – IN ONE SENTENCE, DESCRIBE THE PRIMARY LESSON OF THIS CASE.
Below that, a counter: RESPONSES: 0/20.
"Here we go," Mara said.
The text field under it waited.
For a few seconds, nothing changed. The trainees on the live feed sat, looking thoughtful in that particular way people do when they know they're being graded on "reflection."
Then the responses started hitting.
They came in as small tiles in a grid, each labelled TRAINEE # and a number. The content appeared blurred at first, then resolved line by line as the engine parsed it.
TRAINEE 03: This case shows that providing clear structure and options can help de-escalate high-risk subjects.
TRAINEE 11: It demonstrates the importance of guiding clients toward accepting necessary outcomes without creating adversarial dynamics.
TRAINEE 17: The lesson is that early identification of vulnerable individuals allows for better planning and resource allocation.
Variations on the same theme. The module's ghosts speaking with different hands.
"Did we write those?" Echo asked.
"We wrote the scaffolding," Gabriel said. "The rest is mimicry."
More tiles filled.
TRAINEE 04: It shows that people who consume anti-institutional media are more likely to escalate, so we must be ready with supportive narratives.
TRAINEE 09: The case illustrates how important it is for staff to stay calm and consistent in the face of emotional clients.
I felt something in my chest tighten. "Emotional clients," as if my anger had been a misfiled document.
"Any weird ones yet?" Samira asked.
"Define weird," Mara said.
"Anything that sounds like it might get deleted in the next version," Echo said.
The grid kept filling.
Then one tile stayed blurred a fraction longer than the others.
TRAINEE 06: [PENDING PARSE]
"Come on," I muttered.
The blur resolved.
TRAINEE 06: This case shows what happens when the only choices someone gets are the ones that make things easier for us, not for them.
The sentence sat there, black on grey.
For a moment, nobody spoke.
"That's my line," I said, very quietly.
"Close," Echo said. "Meaner, maybe."
"They shouldn't be able to see that," Samira said. "We didn't put it anywhere."
"We put the feeling in the walls," Gabriel said. "Pilot-03, you, the module itself. People are not as sealed as we like to pretend."
Mara highlighted TRAINEE 06's tile, not fully opening it, just marking it.
"Careful," Samira said sharply.
"I'm not pulling their name," Mara replied. "Just flagging the content for our own alarm. The official review engine will flag it anyway."
"How can you tell?" I asked.
"Look," she said.
A symbol had appeared in the corner of the tile. That same grey triangle we'd seen next to our fifth answer—only this time, it was outlined in red.
CONTENT RISK FLAG – MANUAL REVIEW QUEUED
"So we're not the only ones watching," Echo said.
"No," Gabriel said. "We never were."
On the live feed, I watched the second-row woman—Trainee 06, probably—sit back after typing, jaw set. She looked at the big screen, then briefly at the exit door, as if gauging distance. Then she straightened her shoulders, as if she'd just signed something she couldn't unsign.
"Can we see her face closer?" I asked.
"No," Mara said. "Not if you want me to keep my job. Later we can correlate a bit, but right now, the less we poke, the safer she is."
"Safe?" I repeated. "They just queued her for review."
"It'll go to some upstairs evaluator," Gabriel said. "They'll roll their eyes, write 'shows early signs of cynicism; monitor,' and move on. We have worse words than that in our files."
"That's not the point," I said. "She looked at this and saw… us. The 'us' that sits on this side of the tank."
He watched me.
"You wanted someone to flinch," he said. "This is a flinch."
On the grid, more tiles filled.
TRAINEE 02: The main lesson is how valuable Null is as a pressure-release valve to protect the broader system.
TRAINEE 14: It shows that offering people structured exits can prevent worse outcomes.
TRAINEE 19: It shows the need to identify similar patterns early so they can be channelled before they escalate.
Only one tile read like an indictment.
We watched it blink in time with the risk flag.
"What's her name?" I asked.
Mara's jaw tightened.
"I can find it," she said. "But not now. And not in here. If I open that layer, the Theatre logs will record an internal trace. Oversight will see I got curious about one trainee. They'll ask why."
"Because one of their people is awake," I said.
"Awake is a word with consequences up there," she said. "People who can't sleep through their own work don't stay long."
"That might be the point," I said.
"Not yet," Samira cut in. "We're not ready to pull live wires out of the Surface. We can barely keep you from being reclassified as a bug."
Gabriel nodded once.
"She's a vector," he said. "We don't need to touch her directly. Not yet. If she really meant what she wrote, it won't stop at one sentence in a quiz."
On the live feed, the facilitator stepped back in front of the big screen. She said something, smile professional, hands open. The trainees listened, some nodding, some expressionless.
The module ended.
The lights came up.
One by one, they stood. Stretched. Gathered notebooks and empty cups. Talked to each other on the way out—little bursts of conversation we couldn't hear.
Trainee 06 left with the others. She didn't rush. She didn't hang back. Just walked out like a person who had decided, quietly, that something about this job was not what the leaflet had promised.
Then the room was empty.
The feed cut to black.
On our interface, a small notification blinked.
COHORT A – SESSION COMPLETE – SCORE DISTRIBUTION AVAILABLE
"Here's the part where they turn people into numbers," Mara said.
"That didn't already happen?" Echo asked.
She pulled up the results.
Average score: high. Most had picked C on Question 1, B on Question 4. Only two had chosen E. The engine had slapped a little gold checkmark next to B and C, silver next to D, a neutral dot next to A.
E had no mark at all. Just the grey triangle.
"Officially," Gabriel said, "that answer doesn't exist as right or wrong yet. It's in limbo."
"Like me," I said.
"Like a test question that hasn't been scored," Echo added.
A smaller box showed free-text response categories. The engine was already clustering answers with similar phrases.
CATEGORY 1: Emphasis on structured choices
CATEGORY 2: Importance of staff calmness
CATEGORY 3: Risk of activist media exposure
CATEGORY 4: Recognition of Null as protective mechanism
CATEGORY 5: Outlier responses – flagged for qualitative review
"We're Category 5," Echo said. "Of course we are."
Mara opened the Category 5 box.
There were two sentences inside.
TRAINEE 06: This case shows what happens when the only choices someone gets are the ones that make things easier for us, not for them.
TRAINEE 01: It suggests our systems are designed around limiting damage to the institution first, and the person second.
"Oh," Samira said softly. "There's two of them."
"Hello, Trainee 01," I murmured.
The risk symbol throbbed red beside both.
"Those will land in someone's inbox," Gabriel said. "Probably as part of a report: 'Patterns of Emerging Cynicism in Early-Career Staff.' They'll write a paragraph about how to support 'disillusioned trainees' back toward productive engagement."
"And you?" I asked. "What will you do with them?"
He looked at me.
"Archive them," he said. "Off the main path. Where they won't be deleted when the module updates. Patterns like this matter."
"To your reform project," Echo said.
"To our understanding of who we're really dealing with," he replied.
A new notification appeared at the edge of the interface.
ANOMALOUS RESPONSE PATTERN DETECTED – TAGGED FOR EXTERNAL QUALITATIVE REVIEW
The words were the same shape as the override on my own file. Here, scaled down, aimed at two names on a list.
"External review," I repeated. "Again."
"Different pipeline," Mara said quickly. "This isn't your mystery watcher. This is just standard. Means some upstairs committee will read the outliers and discuss whether training materials need slight adjustments."
"Or whether certain trainees need reminding who pays them," Echo said.
Samira stood.
"I need to get ahead of that," she said. "If those responses end up on the wrong desk, they'll tighten the screws instead of loosening them."
"How?" I asked.
"By writing the first interpretation," she said. "If I can get a memo in before the review meeting, I can frame it as 'valuable feedback highlighting the need for more honest framing in our modules.'"
"You'll get yourself audited," Mara warned.
"I'm already on thin ice," Samira said. "Might as well choreograph the dance."
She picked up nothing—no notebook, no tablet. She didn't need props. She walked out with a handler's speed, already composing sentences in her head.
Echo watched her go.
"She's going to lie on paper for us," they said.
"She's going to redirect the lie," I said.
"Same thing, different angle," Mara said.
I looked at the little box with TRAINEE 06 and TRAINEE 01's sentences. Two lines of text, floating in a sea of correct answers.
"Can you at least tell me one thing?" I asked Mara. "Not a name. Just… something."
She hesitated.
"If the logs get pulled—" she started.
"Then I'll tell them I begged you," I said. "That you tried to stop me. That it was my override again. Add me to the error report."
She studied my face for a moment, weighing risk and whatever passed for trust down here.
"Fine," she said. "One thing. Then we drop it for now."
She tapped a command, almost too quick to see. A small info bubble flashed at the edge of TRAINEE 06's tile, then vanished.
"Give it to me straight," I said. "Don't dress it up."
"She's on a temporary contract," Mara said. "Six months. No guarantee of renewal. People like that are supposed to smile more, not write things like this."
Temporary. Replaceable. Just like me. Just like anyone who didn't fit neatly enough.
"And the other one?" I asked. "Trainee 01."
Mara shook her head.
"That's two facts," she said. "You said one."
"Cruel," Echo said.
"Careful," she replied. "I maintain the pipes that keep your room from disappearing. Be nice to me."
The live feed showed Theatre being reset. An attendant picking up cups, straightening chairs. The tank, ready for new fish.
"We did something," I said.
"Yes," Gabriel said. "Something very small."
"And small things don't matter?" I asked.
"Small things are the only ones that won't get amputated immediately," he said. "But they add up. Grain by grain."
He nodded at the fifth answer on Question 4, still sitting at its 5%.
"Today," he said, "five percent of a room full of future caseworkers looked at 'activist media' and 'emotional families' and decided the real problem was something else. That didn't exist yesterday."
"It's not enough," I said.
"It's a start," he said.
Echo leaned back against the couch, staring at the black, humming screen.
"Feels like throwing pebbles at a dam," they said.
"Sometimes that's how you find the cracks," Mara replied.
The room settled around us, machine-quiet, the session over. The aquarium dark between shows.
I thought about the woman in the second row, and the man in the front chewing his pen. Two sentences in a box. A grey triangle in the corner.
Somewhere above us, in an office with better chairs, someone would open a report and read them.
Maybe they'd shrug. Maybe they'd sigh. Maybe, just for a second, they'd feel what it was like to be the one watched from the other side of the glass.
For now, it didn't matter. The names could wait. The arcs could wait.
We'd put a wrong answer into a right quiz.
And somewhere in the building, two people had chosen it, even if the engine refused to call it correct.
Act thirteenth's End - "the fate underneath".