An audit isn't really about what happened.
It's about deciding which version of what happened gets to live on paper.
Confessions work the same way. People say, "Tell us everything," but what they really mean is, "Give us enough detail to keep the story we already like."
Null just does it with better stationery.
Samira woke me by knocking like a normal person, which was how I knew something was wrong.
"Up," she said, sticking her head into the room. "Put on something presentable."
I glanced down at the same grey clothes I always wore. "This is literally all I own."
"Then try to stand like you didn't sleep in it," she said. "We've been called."
"Called where?" I asked.
"Internal audit," she said. "Regarding your case and the module."
Echo, already awake on my floor with a pile of stolen forms as a pillow, rolled over and squinted up at us.
"Is this the 'we're fired' kind of audit or the 'we pretend we're cooperating' kind?" they asked.
"Depends how Noor behaves," Samira said.
"So we're doomed," Echo said.
The audit room was on a floor I'd never been to.
The lift recognized Samira's card and took us down, then sideways, then down again in a way that made no physical sense. The doors opened onto a corridor that felt… unused. Carpet unscuffed, walls too clean, the air smelling faintly of something citrus and fake.
Signs on the doors read things like COMPLIANCE REVIEW and POLICY ALIGNMENT.
Our room: INTERNAL QUALITY PANEL – 3B.
A paper sign taped underneath in smaller letters: meeting rescheduled from 2C.
Samira looked at the tape and muttered, "Of course it has."
Inside, the panel room was smaller than I'd imagined. No long table, no rows of serious people. Just a circular table with four chairs. One wall was mirrored glass. The opposite wall was a screen showing a calm, abstract pattern that might have been waves or a heartbeat.
One person sat at the table.
They were in their thirties, maybe. Short dark hair, collar buttoned, sleeves rolled precisely to the same length. A badge with their photo and the word AUDIT hung from a lanyard, the cord twisting slightly when they moved.
They didn't look like a villain. They looked like someone who had learned how to sit still in long meetings.
"Mr… Noor, is it?" they said, half-glancing at a tablet in front of them.
"That's the word they used," I said, sliding into a chair.
Samira took the seat beside me. Echo leaned against the wall, technically present, technically not at the table. No one had asked them to leave. Maybe the system didn't know what category they fit.
There was an empty chair across from me. Nameplate in front of it: OBSERVER. No one sat there.
The auditor noticed me looking at it.
"They're remote," they said. "Listening in."
"Of course they are," Echo murmured.
"Names?" I asked.
The auditor smiled in a practiced, neutral way.
"For the purposes of this conversation, you can refer to me as Clarke," they said. "Role: internal quality assurance. The observer is… external to Null."
"So this is about me," I said, "and also not about me at all."
"Everything in here is about you," Clarke said. "And nothing in here is about you. I'm required to say both."
Echo snorted softly. Samira shot them a look that said please don't get us all killed.
A small line of text glowed at the bottom of the wall screen behind Clarke.
INTERNAL AUDIT – CASE: 7F-19N/NOOR – DURATION: 00:30
The timer started counting up instead of down.
Clarke tapped their tablet.
"We'll start simple," they said. "Module 7F-19N. Are you aware that a training material based on your case is in active use?"
"Yes," I said.
"And that this module was recently altered?" Clarke continued. "A fifth answer added to a multiple-choice question, language modified in certain key frames, additional framing inserted in Question Seven."
"I'm aware," I said.
"Did you authorize those changes?" they asked.
"No," I said. "I inspired them."
Clarke's eyebrow moved half a millimetre.
"Inspired," they repeated. "Describe how, please."
I glanced at Samira. Her jaw was tight. Gabriel wasn't here. Mara wasn't here. Just three of us and a ghost in a mirror.
"I exist," I said. "The module tries to explain me. It fails. People touched it. It shifted. Like a bad photocopy of a drawing you don't understand."
"That's not a process description," Clarke said.
"It's the honest one," I said.
Echo said, "You should write that into the manual."
Clarke ignored them.
"The fifth answer," they said, tapping. "Option E. 'Early recognition of structural limits in institutional response.' Was that phrase yours?"
"No," I said. "Mine would have had fewer syllables."
"Whose was it?" Clarke asked.
Samira spoke for the first time.
"Collective effort," she said. "Architecture liaison, Theatre, case subject, handler. We drafted it together."
Clarke looked at her.
"Noted," they said. "You're aware you bypassed standard approval channels?"
"Yes," she said.
"Why?" Clarke asked.
"Because the standard channels don't have a box for, 'The old answer is lying,'" she said.
The room went a degree colder.
Clarke's lanyard twisted once, slowly, then settled. They took a breath I recognized—the kind people take when they file a statement under "concerning but expected."
"The system's current position," Clarke said, "is that the previous wording was not a lie, but an incomplete framing for early-stage staff."
"That's one way to say it," Samira said.
"I'm interested," Clarke said, "in whether your alteration increased or decreased risk."
"What kind of risk?" I asked.
"Escalation," they said. "Resistance. Non-compliance. Contagion of sentiment."
"You mean will telling the truth make people harder to manage," I said.
"If you want to paraphrase it that way," Clarke said.
"I do," I said.
They regarded me for a moment.
"You've watched the pilot session results," they said. "Trainees' answers to the new option. How would you characterize the impact?"
"Small," I said. "Two people wrote sentences that looked like mine. The rest behaved exactly how you trained them."
"Two is not zero," Clarke said.
"That's the point," I said.
The timer ticked up on the wall.
00:06:13
Clarke swiped sidewise on their tablet.
"There is also a concern," they said, "regarding… cross-contamination between your case and a prior legacy incident. Pilot-03."
The room shifted.
Echo stopped fidgeting.
Samira's hand, resting on the table, curled into a fist.
Clarke read from the screen.
"Signal analysis indicates recurring phrases and semantic patterns common to both cases," they said. "Specifically around the concept of 'content,' and resistance to being described as such."
"Maybe that's because we're both right," I said.
"This isn't about right or wrong," Clarke said. "It's about stability."
"You mean obedience," I said.
"Stability," they repeated.
There was a faint crackle from the mirror wall behind them. I couldn't see anything in its dark surface, but for a second I had the strong sense of someone on the other side leaning in.
Internal use only, I thought. But someone external is holding the pen.
"Pilot-03's case," Clarke said, "ended in system-wide disruption. Temporary suspension of Theatre activity. Emergency patching in architecture. Their language is now quarantined in filters. It has made certain phrases… expensive."
"Like 'No one deserves to be turned into content,'" I said.
Clarke's eyes flicked up, sharp.
"You've seen that phrase?" they asked.
"I've seen it try to write itself and get cut off," I said. "In Theatre. In Shelving. In the walls."
Clarke was silent for a heartbeat too long.
"Ghost data," they said finally. "Residual patterning. That's not supposed to be visible to you."
"It is," I said. "You turned someone into a warning label and now they're bleeding through."
Echo murmured, "Tell us how you really feel."
Clarke's gaze slid to Echo. "You are… Echo, correct?"
"That's one of the things I am," Echo said.
"Role?"
"Being inconvenient," they answered. "Professionally."
Clarke's mouth threatened a smile, then thought better of it.
"The external observer," they said, nodding slightly toward the mirror, "has flagged a concern that your case, Noor, is following a similar trajectory to Pilot-03. Initial compliance, followed by narrative deviation, following by attempts to alter system language."
"They're worried I'll become a bug," I said.
"They're worried the fifth answer is not the last," Clarke said.
"It isn't," I said.
Samira made a soft, pained noise beside me.
"You're not helping," she muttered.
"I'm not here to help," I said. "I'm here to exist. For as long as they let me."
Clarke tapped the tablet again.
"Let's be practical," they said. "Option E. What do you imagine it does, humanly, to a trainee who chooses it?"
"I think it makes them feel less crazy," I said. "Like the itch in the back of their head has a name."
"And then?" Clarke pressed.
"And then," I said, "maybe they hesitate the next time they're told their job is to make someone agree to disappear. Maybe they remember that early recognition of structural limits is not a pathology. Maybe they start to see the limits."
"And if they see too much," Clarke said, "they leave. Or they become Pilot-03. Or you."
"Good," I said.
The word surprised even me. It landed on the table with a little shock.
Clarke tilted their head.
"You want more of you?" they asked.
"No," I said. "I want fewer people who can do what you do without feeling it."
The screen on the wall glitched.
For half a second, the abstract pattern flickered into text.
NO ONE DESERVES—
Then back to waves.
Clarke's jaw tightened.
"Stop that," they said.
"I'm not doing it," I said.
The mirror behind them shimmered faintly, like heat on asphalt. Whoever was on the other side didn't like that line.
Clarke folded their hands.
"Here is the choice I have," they said. "I can recommend that your case be downgraded—moved to Deep Legacy, module retired, your override rescinded. That would likely calm architecture and satisfy the external reviewer. You'd become a story we used to tell staff, then stopped."
"And the alternative?" I asked.
"I classify you as a supervised anomaly," Clarke said. "Which means we acknowledge you as a problem we're still studying, not one we've solved. Your module stays live. Your handlers keep their jobs, for now. The fifth answer remains… with the understanding that any further deviations will trigger automatic suspension."
Automatic suspension sounded like a polite phrase for something much worse.
"What does being a supervised anomaly feel like?" I asked.
Clarke considered.
"You'll keep hearing the walls," they said. "And more of the walls will hear you back. But there will be more eyes on everything you touch. Logs, flags, quiet edits in places you don't expect."
"So, exactly like my life so far," I said.
"Intensified," they said.
"And Pilot-03?" I asked. "What were they classified as?"
There was a small pause.
"They were never classified," Clarke said. "They were a mistake. We rewrote them out of our categories."
"Did it work?" I asked.
The glitch in the wall pattern answered for them.
NO ONE DESERVE—
Static.
Clarke pinched the bridge of their nose, as if the light itself gave them a headache.
"What would you recommend?" they asked abruptly.
It took me a second to realise they were speaking to me.
"You're asking the subject?" I said. "That a new policy?"
"I'm asking the anomaly," they said.
"Same person," I said.
"Not to the system," Clarke said.
They watched me, expression steady.
"If you want this to go away," they said, "tell me. Say the fifth answer was a mistake. Say it confused trainees. Say you regret altering the module. That will make certain things very easy."
For them. For the building.
For a bizarre second, I pictured it—the relief in their posture, the little green check on some dashboard: SUBJECT RECANTS. ANOMALY RESOLVED.
I could almost feel the silence that would follow. No more trainees writing sentences that sounded like mine. No more ghosts in the wall getting halfway through one line and being cut off.
Just the old script, untroubled.
"I don't regret it," I said.
Clarke nodded, like they had expected that.
"Then we're here," they said. "Between erasure and supervision."
They turned slightly, looking toward the mirror.
"This will go into the record," they said. "Recommendation: classify Case 7F-19N as Anomaly Type-Five—Reflexive Narrative Disturbance. Status: supervised. External review deferred pending internal observation."
The vague wave-pattern behind them showed, for a moment, a different line.
EXTERNAL COMMENT: ____________________
The blank stayed blank.
Whoever listened chose not to speak aloud.
Clarke waited. Listened to whatever only they could hear. Then nodded.
"Noted," they said. "Observer concurs. For now."
The timer on the wall ticked.
00:27:49
"Anything else?" Samira asked, her voice sharper than it had been all meeting. "Any other threats, conditions, unspoken implications you'd like to make explicit while we're here?"
Clarke looked down at their tablet, then back up.
"You altered sanctioned material," they said. "You encouraged an anomaly. There will be consequences. But there is also… interest. From above. They want to see what happens if we don't put this fire out immediately."
"Interest," Echo repeated. "We're an experiment with legs."
"In Null," Clarke said, "that's better than being a closed ticket."
They gathered up their tablet, flicked the session off. The screen behind them went from waves to a simple message:
SESSION SAVED – INTERNAL USE ONLY
They stood.
"For what it's worth," they said, almost as an afterthought, "Pilot-03 would have liked you."
I swallowed.
"You knew them?" I asked.
Clarke hesitated, just a fraction.
"I audited the aftermath," they said. "Different room. Same mirror."
They walked to the door, paused, turned back.
"You're not the first crack," they said. "You're just the one we're deliberately not plastering over yet."
"How reassuring," I said.
"It shouldn't be," they said. "But you wanted honesty."
They left.
The door hissed shut.
We sat there a moment, in the leftover hum of the room.
Echo exhaled dramatically.
"Well," they said. "We live to be problematic another day."
Samira leaned back, staring at the dark mirror.
"You could have lied," she said quietly. "About regretting it."
"I know," I said.
"Why didn't you?" she asked.
"Because then the only true version of me would be in someone else's filter," I said. "At least this way, some of it's still in my mouth."
She closed her eyes for a second, then opened them again.
"I'll need to rewrite my reports," she said. "Carefully. Clarke wasn't wrong. More eyes on everything now."
"Do you trust them?" I asked.
"Clarke?" she said. "No. But I think they trust their own curiosity. That's close enough, for now."
Echo hopped to their feet.
"So," they said. "Supervised anomaly Type-Five. How does it feel?"
"Like being a bug someone decided to keep as a pet," I said.
"Just don't start biting the hand that feeds you," Echo said.
"That's the only reason they keep pets," I said. "So they don't have to bite each other."
We stepped out of the audit room.
The corridor outside looked exactly the same as before. Citrus smell. Clean carpet. Closed doors.
Only now, in the quiet, I could hear a faint whisper in the walls, like water moving behind plaster.
Not words. Not yet.
Just a sense of attention.
The system had looked at me and chosen not to get rid of me. Not yet.
That wasn't mercy. It was curiosity. Curiosity is kinder than indifference, but only by a little.
Still, as we walked back toward the lift, Option E sat in my head like a small, sharp stone.
Early recognition of structural limits in institutional response.
Somewhere above, a trainee was probably looking at that phrase on a tablet, feeling something snag behind their ribs.
Somewhere deeper, Pilot-03's censored sentence kept trying to finish itself in the dark.
No one deserves—
The doors closed.
The lift began to move.
Act fifteenth's End - "the high within the memory".