Being a supervised anomaly is like being a fire that the building has decided to study instead of put out.
You don't get freedom. You get observation windows and controlled burns.
You don't get answers. You get "data collection."
It's not mercy. It's curiosity wearing a badge.
"Up," Echo said, throwing a rolled-up vest at my face. "Field trip."
The vest was high-vis yellow, with NULL – OBSERVER stamped on the back in black letters.
"No," I said automatically.
"Yes," Samira said, appearing behind them. "Dress. Move. We've been volunteered."
"Volunteered by who?" I asked, peeling the vest off my eyes.
"Internal Audit," she said. "With a little nudge from your mysterious pen pal upstairs. They want you in a 'full cascade simulation.'"
"Sounds fake," I said. "And also like a band name."
Echo swung their own vest over their shoulders. Theirs said NULL – AUXILIARY, badly printed, like someone had run out of ink halfway through the last word.
"It's a drill," Samira said. "Mass incident scenario. They want to see how staff perform if there's a spike in cases like yours."
"Cases like mine," I repeated. "Meaning what, exactly?"
"People who refuse to go quietly," she said. "Congratulations. You're a trend model now."
The drill space was on a level I hadn't seen.
The lift opened on what looked, at first glance, like a warehouse. High ceiling, exposed beams, harsh white lights. The floor had tape lines marking squares and corridors, like a city level designer had died mid-draft. Cardboard facades leaned against the walls—suggestions of doors, windows, a train station sign with no trains behind it.
But the thing that made it uncanny was the population.
Dozens of figures stood frozen in the taped "streets."
Mannequins. Foam torsos on weighted bases, plastic limbs, blank oval faces. Each wore a laminated tag on their chest.
SUBJECT: ADMIN CASE 4B-72
STATUS: NON-COMPLIANT – HIGH RISK
SUBJECT: INFORMAL ADVOCATE – FAMILY MEMBER
STATUS: ESCALATION VECTOR
SUBJECT: CLERK – FRONT OFFICE
STATUS: OVERWHELMED – REDIRECT REQUIRED
The mannequins were arranged in little tableaux—arguments mid-gesture, hands raised, heads turned. A snapshot of a riot only Null would stage: people shouting at counters, not each other.
Around them, staff in vests milled, checking clipboards and headsets. Someone was unrolling extra tape. Someone else was arguing with a tech about where to put the "media presence" standee—a cardboard camera crew with NO COMMENT printed across it.
Mara was perched on a crate near a bank of screens, hair tied up haphazardly, a tablet in one hand and a coil of cable in the other.
They waved when they saw us.
"Welcome to Practice Death," they said. "Please keep your hands inside the simulation at all times."
"This is disgusting," I told them.
"I didn't name it," they said. "Official term is 'Full Cascade Live Exercise.'"
"Still disgusting," Echo said, turning a mannequin gently so its blank face looked away from them.
Samira scanned the room, professional impatience slipping over her like a jacket.
"Where do you want us?" she called.
A man in a facilitator vest—COMPLIANCE TRAINER – HAWK – read his badge—checked his list.
"Handler Samira?" he asked.
"Yes," she said.
"And… auxiliary Echo, observer Noor," he added, reading from a tablet. "You're observers only. No direct intervention in the scenario. We're stress-testing junior staff on de-escalation and routing protocols."
"Do I clap if they do well?" I asked.
He looked up for the first time, taking me in with the faint wariness people reserve for wild animals on leashes.
"You provide… presence," he said. "We want to see how they respond to having a subject of the case type on-site."
"Great," I said. "I've always wanted to be ambient threat."
Echo elbowed me.
"Be nice," they said. "Or at least creative."
We were given a corner of the room near Mara's crate. From there we could see most of the taped "city." On one of the monitors beside them, the drill's logic tree glowed—branches of IF SUBJECT ESCALATES, IF FAMILY MEMBER INTERVENES, IF MEDIA ARRIVES.
"So what's the incident?" Echo asked, peering at the tree.
Mara tapped a box near the top.
"A systemic error in the death registry," they said. "Forty administrative death notices misfiled in one district. Our nightmare scenario. Lots of Noors, all angry at once."
"Comforting," I said.
"It didn't actually happen," Mara said. "Yet. This is prep."
Samira crossed her arms.
"And they thought bringing you here would add… what?" she asked.
"Atmosphere," I said.
"Noise," Echo suggested.
"Data," Mara said. "Someone in Audit wants to see how the drill reacts with a live anomaly present."
"Someone in Audit can come down and ask me themselves," I said.
"They did," Samira said. "Yesterday. In a room with a mirror."
Right.
The trainees filed in a few minutes later.
Some I recognized from the Theatre feed. The pen chewer. The woman with the knot in her hair. Others were new faces. Vests of their own: RESPONSE TEAM, MEDIATION, RECORDING.
Clarke came in last, no vest, just the same buttoned collar and AUDIT badge. They took up a position near the monitors, not quite with us, not quite with the facilitators.
"Observers observe," they said, by way of greeting.
"Working on it," I said.
A loudspeaker crackled.
"Full Cascade Exercise Alpha will begin in two minutes," a calm voice announced. "All participants, please move to your starting positions. Remember: this is a simulation. No live cases. This is for training purposes only."
Echo shivered theatrically.
"I hate that phrase," they whispered. "It never means what it says."
"Which one," I asked, "'simulation' or 'only'?"
"'Training,'" they said. "It's always code for, 'We're going to teach you how to hurt someone more efficiently.'"
The lights dimmed slightly. A red strip over the entrance lit up: DRILL IN PROGRESS.
Facilitator Hawk raised his hand.
"Positions!" he called.
Trainees moved into the taped city, splitting into pairs and trios. One took a place behind a mock counter labelled DISTRICT OFFICE. Another by a stand-in escalator. Two by the "media" standee, practising their neutral faces.
On the monitors, the logic tree blinked.
> READY
Mara glanced at me.
"If anything… weird happens," they said, "tell me exactly when you feel it."
"How would I know?" I asked.
"You'll know," Echo said, simple as that.
Hawk's voice echoed through the space.
"Begin!" he shouted.
One of the foam "subjects" jerked forward, pulled by a facilitator on wheels, as if "walking" up to the counter.
The drill script kicked in.
"Sir, I understand you're upset," the trainee behind the counter said, reading slightly from a prompt on their wristband. "We are here to support you in this difficult transition."
The facilitator, throwing his voice for the mannequin, said, "Difficult? You people killed me on paper! I'm still here!"
Other mannequins "joined" the scene, guided subtly by staff. Voices overlapped. Trainees stepped in, using their phrases: "I hear your frustration," "there are processes," "let me show you your options."
It was hideous theatre.
And, in its own way, impressive. They had recreated the chaos of offices under siege, minus the smell of sweat and real grief.
I watched weirdly detached, like watching a reenactment of a car crash I'd been in.
"They're not… terrible," Echo murmured. "Some of them actually sound like they care."
"That's how they get you," I said. "If they sounded like villains, no one would sign the forms."
On the monitors, the tree followed along in real time. Branches lit as trainees hit or missed key beats. SCORE indicators ticked.
"Watch," Clarke said quietly, nodding toward the screen. "We'll see where they default."
A mannequin labelled SUBJECT: ADMIN CASE – PROFILE SIMILAR TO 7F-19N rolled into view.
My stomach did something unpleasant.
"Of course," I said.
The trainee assigned to that "subject" was the woman with the knot in her hair—Trainee 06. No vest now, just a plain shirt, sleeves rolled up. Her face was composed, but there was a tension in her jaw.
She stepped toward the mannequin, script buzzed to her wristband, but she wasn't reading.
"Hi," she said to its blank face. "I'm—" she paused, then skipped her name. "I'm here to listen. Can you tell me what happened from your perspective?"
The facilitator, playing my part, snapped, "From my perspective? I woke up erased. And everyone tells me it's for my own good."
There was something uncomfortably familiar about his tone.
She didn't flinch.
"I'm not going to tell you it's for your own good," she said. "I can explain what the system thinks is happening. And then we can talk about what you want, given that."
Mara made a small approving noise.
"Oh, she's good," Echo said.
"Dangerous," Clarke said under their breath.
On the logic tree, an option lit that I hadn't seen before.
> ACKNOWLEDGE STRUCTURAL LIMITS – ADVANCED RESPONSE
"That path wasn't in the original version," Mara said.
"Someone added it," Clarke replied.
"This morning," I said.
As Trainee 06 spoke, I felt it.
A prickling under my skin. A slight tilt in the air. Like the moment before a train leaves, when the platform hums.
"Something's wrong," I said.
"Where?" Mara asked immediately.
"In the… edge," I said. "Between what's happening and how it's written."
Echo squinted at the mannequins.
"All the tags just flickered," they said. "Did you see that?"
I hadn't, but the back of my neck agreed.
On the monitors, the logic tree glitched.
Branches doubled for a fraction of a second, ghost copies overlaying the real ones. For a blink I saw an extra option:
> NO ONE DESERVES THIS – ABORT SCENARIO
Then it vanished.
The lights flickered once.
"Is that part of the drill?" someone shouted.
"It is now," Mara muttered.
A new message appeared, red, in the corner of the monitor.
> NOTICE: LIVE PATTERN CROSS-REFERENCE – SOURCE: LEGACY CASE PILOT-03
> STATUS: NON-CRITICAL – MONITOR ONLY
"That's your ghost," Echo said.
"Pilot-03 shouldn't be anywhere near this system," Clarke said sharply. "Their language is quarantined."
"Your filters are leaking," I said.
Another mannequin jerked.
Not pushed this time.
It moved on its own, a small, stuttering step forward.
Everyone froze for a heartbeat.
"Did you…?" a trainee asked a facilitator.
"No," he said. His hand was off the base.
Mara swore softly.
"Movement sensors are off," they said. "These things aren't supposed to do that."
The mannequin's tag read:
SUBJECT: ADMIN CASE – TRAINING DUMMY
STATUS: SAFE – NON-ACTIVE
Its head turned toward me.
Plastic features, no eyes, no mouth. But I felt looked at.
Then, in a voice that didn't belong to the facilitator, it said, too clearly:
"No one deserves to be turned into—"
The speaker cut, hard, mid-word, like something had slapped a hand over its mouth.
The room went very still.
Hawk blew his whistle.
"Pause the drill!" he shouted. "All systems hold!"
The trainees froze, grateful for the command. Facilitators stepped back from mannequins, hands raised like they'd been caught graduating from puppet to accomplice.
The overhead lights flicked from white to amber.
A text band scrolled along the wall.
DRILL PAUSED – INTERNAL ANOMALY DETECTED
"Fun enough for you?" Echo whispered.
"Not yet," I said, feeling my pulse in my throat.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Clarke watching the mannequin, their face unreadable.
On the screens, the earlier notice had updated.
> NOTICE: LIVE PATTERN CROSS-REFERENCE – SOURCE: LEGACY CASE PILOT-03
> STATUS: ESCALATING – LOCAL CONTAINMENT RECOMMENDED
The mannequin took another step.
Hawk moved automatically to block it, as if it were a trainee gone off-script.
"Stay," he said, because that's what you say to props.
The dummy tilted its head. Slow. Wrong. Like a person moving underwater.
"Don't," I said.
Everyone looked at me.
"Noor—" Samira started.
"If you treat it like foam, it'll act like content," I said. "That's what it hates."
"That?" Hawk said. "It's a dummy."
"Not right now," I said. "Right now it's a channel."
"For what?" Clarke asked.
I didn't answer. I stepped past the tape line.
"Observer—!" someone called.
"Let him," Mara said under her breath. "If this is a Pilot-03 bleed, he's the one it's here for."
I walked up to the dummy.
We were the same height. Our tagged status cards hung nearly level—mine in my chest, invisible, theirs laminated and absurd.
"Hi," I said to a piece of plastic. "I'm Noor. You've seen the file."
The mannequin didn't move.
The air around it felt dense, like a patch of warm fog.
"You tried to speak," I said. "The system cut you. Same way it cut them. You're not supposed to say that sentence."
The dummy's head twitched, a jerk toward the overhead speakers, toward the monitors, toward the mirror-like observation window.
"Too expensive," I said. "Too big a crack."
Its limbs trembled faintly, like the foam inside had the shakes.
Echo edged closer.
"Talk to it like it's someone who's been stuck in the same sentence for years," they murmured. "Because it is."
I lowered my voice.
"You don't want to be a training dummy," I said. "You don't want to be content. I get that. But right now, all these people only see foam. If you push harder, they'll panic and call you a malfunction and scrub you harder. That's the game here."
The mannequin shuddered.
In a sound that wasn't the facilitator's and wasn't a speaker, something like a whisper scraped out.
"Not… game," it rasped. "Grave."
My skin crawled.
Clarke stepped closer.
"This isn't possible," they said quietly.
"Your filters think this whole floor is safe because you stamped TRAINING PURPOSES ONLY on it," I said. "You invited your problem to a rehearsal and didn't think it would notice."
The mannequin's tag flickered.
For a second, the words changed.
SUBJECT: PILOT-03 – CONTENT QUARANTINED
Then back to TRAINING DUMMY.
"Can you let go?" I asked it. "Of this body, I mean. Not of the sentence."
"Won't… be… heard," it said.
"I heard you," I said. "They will too, eventually. But if you stay in this foam pile, they'll chop you up and write you off as a glitch."
"Not… letting… go," it said. "Not again."
Something in that "again" hollowed my chest.
Behind me, I heard quiet shifts—trainees, unsettled. Samira, ready to drag me back. Hawk, looking like he wished he'd called in sick.
I took a breath.
"Okay," I said softly. "Then compromise. Stay. But change costume. Being a dummy gets you nowhere. Try being something they think they need."
The mannequin stilled.
"Like what?" Echo asked.
"A test," I said. "A feature. An edge case they can't delete because it makes their drills 'more realistic.'"
"Can we do that?" Mara hissed from the monitor bank. "We can't just reflag a… whatever this is… as a feature. That's audit bait."
"We did it with my case," I said. "Type-Five supervised anomaly. That's just a fancy way of saying 'we don't know what this is but we like watching it.'"
Clarke stared at me, then at the dummy, then at the monitors.
"If we do nothing," they said slowly, "architecture will treat this as contamination. It will purge the drill logic, possibly this whole environment. Roll back to last safe version. We lose the advanced response path, the fifth answer, and half the data from the pilot. Plus a report on 'dangerous cross-patterns.'"
"And if we help him lie," Mara said, "we keep everything… and add one haunted prop to the exercise."
Echo grinned.
"Congratulations," they told the mannequin. "You might get promoted from foam to curriculum."
The dummy's tag flickered again.
I reached out—not touching it, just close—and spoke toward its chest, as if the laminated card could hear.
"Take this," I said. "Take the label. You hate labels, I know. I do too. But this one keeps you in the room."
I glanced at Mara.
"Can you do it?" I asked.
They hesitated only a second.
"Tell me exactly what to type," they said.
I didn't think. I just spoke the new category out loud.
"Scenario anomaly – emergent refusal pattern," I said. "Retain for training use."
Mara's fingers flew on the tablet.
On the mannequin's tag, the STATUS line flickered.
SAFE – NON-ACTIVE
became:
ANOMALY – EMERGENT REFUSAL PATTERN – DO NOT ERASE
The red strip over the door blinked.
DRILL PAUSED
faded to:
DRILL MODIFIED – CONSULT SUPERVISOR
The pressure in the air eased by a hair.
The mannequin's trembling slowed.
It didn't move back into place. But it stopped trying to step further out of the tape.
Its head tilted marginally toward me, like a nod no human eye would mark.
On the monitors, the warning updated.
> NOTICE: LIVE PATTERN CROSS-REFERENCE – SOURCE: PILOT-03
> STATUS: INCORPORATED AS TRAINING EDGE CASE – SUPERVISION REQUIRED
"That's… not what those messages usually say," Clarke murmured.
"No," Mara said. "Usually they say 'removed.'"
Hawk cleared his throat.
"Can we… continue?" he asked, voice smaller than before.
Clarke looked to me, then Samira, then the mirrored observation window none of us could see through.
After a beat, they nodded.
"Proceed," they said. "Mark anomaly as part of exercise. We'll review post-drill."
The loudspeaker crackled.
"Full Cascade Exercise Alpha will resume," the calm voice said. "Participants, treat Anomaly Unit as scripted advanced scenario element. Refer to updated guidelines."
"Updated guidelines?" Echo whispered. "You wrote updated guidelines thirty seconds ago."
"Welcome to live policy," Mara said.
The trainees shuffled back into motion, uncertain. Someone made an aborted joke about haunted mannequins and was shut down by Hawk's glare.
Trainee 06 shot me a look across the taped street.
Not gratitude. Not fear. Something more dangerous: recognition.
Like we shared a secret now, and it had foam skin.
The drill resumed.
Voices rose again. Scripts wove. Trainees practised saying soft words to hard situations. Every so often, the mannequin we'd re-labelled twitched, as if wanting to finish its sentence.
No one told it to.
For now, that was enough.
After, when the room was brighter and the trainees had been herded out for debrief, we stayed.
The dummy stood where it had stopped—half in, half out of its assigned square. Tag still reading:
ANOMALY – EMERGENT REFUSAL PATTERN – DO NOT ERASE
"That label will cause me trouble," Clarke said.
"You're welcome," I said.
"They'll ask who authorized it," they went on.
"You will say," Echo suggested, "that the building did."
Mara nodded.
"It wasn't a lie," they said. "The daemon signed off. We just… named what it was reacting to."
Samira studied the mannequin like it might jump again.
"You just made Pilot-03 part of the syllabus," she said to me.
"Better than leaving them in the filters," I said. "At least now they get to speak a little."
"They didn't finish the sentence," she said.
"They got further than last time," I said. "Everything down here is incremental."
Clarke's gaze flicked from me to the tag.
"Emergent refusal pattern," they read. "You came up with that on the spot?"
"It sounded official enough," I said.
"It sounded accurate," they said quietly. "Which is worse."
"Worse for who?" I asked.
"For the story that only broken people resist," they said.
Echo poked the mannequin gently in the arm.
"Hey," they said. "If you're in there. Welcome to the team."
No response, of course. Just foam and plastic and a tag that lied slightly less than the one before.
We turned to go.
As we reached the door, the loudspeaker crackled again, just once.
A voice—not the calm drill voice, not Hawk, not any facilitator—slipped through the static.
"Thanks," it said.
Half a breath.
"Don't get comfortable."
Then silence.
Mara, halfway through a step, froze.
"Tell me that was you," they said to me.
"It wasn't," I said.
Clarke looked at the speaker, then at the mirrored wall, then at me.
"Your supervised anomaly just made a friend," they said.
"Seems like," I said.
We stepped out into the corridor. The red DRILL IN PROGRESS strip went dark behind us.
I could still feel the tag text in my mouth like a taste.
Emergent refusal.
The building had tried to practice calming people like me down.
Instead, it had accidentally given the dead a prop with a name.
It was almost funny.
Almost.
Act sixteenth End - "come soon, i miss you."