The form wants me to list every time the city has tried to kill me.
It doesn't say it like that, of course. Oversight never does.
PRE-FIELD RISK DISCLOSURE – PERSONAL HISTORY
SECTION 4: PRIOR TRAUMA / INCIDENT EXPOSURE
"Please indicate any significant experiences involving mass-casualty events, infrastructure failure, or large-scale administrative error."
There's a neat little row of boxes under it.
□ YES – DETAILS BELOW
□ NO – NONE RELEVANT
"Relevant" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
I click YES.
The cursor blinks in the empty text field, patient and accusatory.
Somewhere else in the building, Noor is probably filling out his own version of this form, trying to decide whether "being erased once already" fits into a single text box.
I crack my knuckles, the way I always do when I'm about to write something I'll regret.
INCIDENT 1: RESIDENTIAL STRUCTURAL FAILURE / FIRE – AGE 13
I don't type the name of the street.
Partly because there isn't a field for "no longer exists on any map." Partly because even now, saying it feels like summoning something that hasn't quite forgiven me.
I just write:
"Uncontained electrical fire in subsidized housing block. 13 confirmed casualties (official figure stated 6). Personally witnessed event and subsequent 'downgrading' of impact in city records. No remaining family in district. No ongoing support provided."
The form blinks, satisfied, and gives me another blank field.
INCIDENT 2:
I close the window.
Enough honesty for one morning.
The cursor waits behind my eyelids even with the screen dark.
---
The first time the city tried to kill me, it was polite about it.
No earthquakes, no bombs. No news segment with dramatic music. Just a Thursday night on a street nobody went out of their way to find, in a building nobody would've photographed willingly.
We called it the orange house.
Not because of paint. The paint had given up long before I was born. It was the lights. Too many wires feeding into too few sockets, bulbs the wrong wattage, extensions braided like hair by whoever had the steadiest hands that day.
At dusk, when everyone got home and turned things on at once, the hallway would glow a sick, deep orange. Not warm. Not cosy. The colour of nicotine and cheap plastic melting.
I loved it.
You could tell who was awake by where the orange leaked under the doors. It made the building feel alive. Like we were all lanterns in one long ribcage.
"You'll ruin your eyes," my mother would say, finding me sitting on the stairwell, colouring homework in the hall just for the light.
"Better than breaking them on that lamp in the kitchen," I'd say.
The kitchen lamp flickered like a dying star. The hallway was more honest.
The night it went wrong, I was on the stairwell again.
It was the only place you got a cross-breeze if you opened both windows. In summer, the flats filled with fried oil and arguments and the heavy, wet smell of underwear drying on lines. On the stairs, it all mixed into something almost neutral.
I was counting.
Not people. Not yet.
Mailboxes.
They were bolted to the wall on the first floor, a grid of metal mouths, each with a number and sometimes a name scrawled underneath in marker.
I liked watching the pattern of them change.
When someone moved out, their name would get scratched off. When someone died, the box would stay, slowly becoming a neutral rectangle again as rain bled the marker away.
That week, three boxes had gone blank.
"You're supposed to be reading," my mother had said that afternoon, thrusting a dented grammar book at me. "Not counting other people's post."
"Words are just numbers with better PR," I'd muttered.
"Don't start," she'd warned, but there had been a smile in it.
She worked evenings then, cleaning offices in a different part of the city that smelled like nothing. My father wasn't in the picture anymore. I kept myself entertained.
So: fourteen years old, on the stairs, counting how many names had faded and how many new ones had appeared. Assigning myself complicated equations like, If three people leave and one baby is born, how many stories are cut off versus how many are starting, and which way does the building lean.
I didn't see the spark.
I heard it.
A pop, like someone cracking their knuckles too close to my ear. Then a hiss, sharp and eager.
The orange deepened.
It took my brain a full second to understand it wasn't just everyone turning their lights on at once.
The bulb in the hall blew in a shower of glass. The electric smell of too-hot plastic punched the back of my throat.
By the time I stumbled down two steps, coughing, there were already flames licking out of the junction box.
They moved wrong—too fast, too deliberate. A slick of light rolling along the tangle of wires, peeling itself into jagged fingers.
My first stupid thought was, Oh. That's what real orange looks like.
My second was, We're not high enough up for this to be my problem.
Then the smoke hit.
Children scream in movies when there's fire. Neighbours shout. Men bang on doors.
We didn't.
We moved.
There's a kind of discipline you learn in buildings the city has forgotten.
No fire alarms, no sprinklers. You become your own system.
There was a protocol. It wasn't written anywhere. That made it more reliable.
Older kids grabbed younger ones. Someone yanked Mr. Reznik out of his armchair and slung him over a shoulder. Auntie Malika's voice cut through the noise like a knife: "Wet the towels! Cover your mouth!"
My mother was down the stairs from the third floor in seconds, hand clamping around the back of my neck.
"What are you doing here?" she snapped, dragging me towards the door.
"Counting," I wheezed.
She almost laughed. Almost.
We got out.
Not everyone did.
The fire crew came late. The right sirens, the wrong speed. By then, the orange house was a black one with teeth of ember.
I stood across the road in someone else's jacket, hair wet from the communal bucket, mouth covered in smoke and neighbour's perfume, and tried to count.
One, two, three—who's here, who's not.
Every time I thought I had a number, another person stumbled out, coughing. Or someone realized a flatmate was missing and screamed a new name into the smoke.
The fireman who'd tried to stop me going back in called it six.
"Six," he said, like he was ordering bread. "Could have been worse."
Six is a decent statistic. Small enough to tuck into a report. Small enough not to change policy.
I knew it was wrong.
I lived in that stairwell. I knew the way footsteps sounded on those steps. I knew how many sets of keys hung on the hooks near each door.
Thirteen.
Thirteen people didn't come back out.
Thirteen names that didn't get written on the temporary shelter sign-in sheets. Thirteen voices that didn't argue in the food line.
Thirteen mailboxes that would never be opened again.
The city wrote six.
I wrote thirteen.
In chalk.
On the wall opposite the shell of the orange house, once they finally let us close enough.
I didn't write names. Not all of them. You learn early not to give certain things to strangers with clipboards.
Just marks.
Thirteen short lines in white, smeared by my too-sweaty hands.
By the next morning, someone from the housing office had washed them off.
"Morbid," I heard a man in a suit mutter. "We don't want to encourage that kind of thinking."
That kind of thinking: noticing.
I redrew them.
Smaller, this time, in a corner near the stairs.
They lasted longer. People stepped around them when they came to gawk at the burnt-out shell. Kids traced them when adults weren't looking.
Eventually, the building came down.
Eventually, we moved.
The chalk marks stayed in my head. It didn't occur to me then that I was training for a future where counting the difference between six and thirteen would be my whole job.
---
Some people find religion after an event like that.
I found data.
The city runs on it, whether it admits it or not. Budgets, inspections, emergency response times; all of it is justified with charts. "We're doing enough" is a graph. "We can't afford more" is a bar that doesn't quite reach a target someone quietly lowered two years ago.
I wanted in.
If numbers could make the fire official, then numbers were the only language the city respected.
While other kids scribbled band names on their backpacks, I copied fatality statistics and inspection schedules into notebooks. I learned how to read the little footnotes under "attributed cause."
I learned how to translate "structural failure" into "no one wanted to spend the money before the election."
At university, I studied urban policy. A phrase that makes my mother's generation snort and say, "So: learning why rich people don't fix our pipes."
They weren't wrong.
Still, it brought me closer to the machine.
My first job was in the Office of Incidents and Risk. OIR. We called it the Office of It's Raining.
We didn't respond when things went wrong. We counted how wrong they'd gone and filed it.
Every morning, I sat at a desk with a view of a better part of the river and read reports.
I got very good at turning stories into boxes.
"Gas leak" instead of "landlord ignored twelve complaints."
"Delayed response" instead of "fire crew diverted to richer district first."
"Unconfirmed casualties" instead of "we don't have capacity to keep looking."
I tried, at first, to push.
"Why is this listed as an 'isolated event'?" I'd ask, jabbing a line about a collapsed stairwell with my finger. "There were three incidents with the same contractor last quarter."
My supervisor would smile a smile you reserve for well-meaning children.
"Patterns are a political question, Caldwell," she'd say. "We just keep the numbers accurate."
They weren't accurate. Not really. They were precise. That's different.
I started keeping two sets of numbers.
The ones I was paid to maintain. And the ones I scribbled in a notebook under my desk. The ones with chalk still in them.
That worked, for a while.
Then Null arrived.
---
We didn't hear about it directly.
You don't build an administrative god and invite the people whose job it is to count human error to the launch party.
We heard about Null in the way the city hears about anything dangerous.
Rumours.
Vague references in budget meetings. "Once the new system is online, we'll see a reduction in… inefficiencies." "We're looking forward to integrating the urban resilience model." "There will be some changes to how incidents are categorized."
Resilience. Efficiency. Changes to categories.
Translation: numbers are about to get stranger.
Officially, Null was pitched as a simulation project.
A way to run scenarios in a contained environment before rolling out policies on real people. "We'll be able to test the impact of different interventions," the pitch decks said. "It's like a stress test for the city."
The first time I saw the daemon, it was on a screen in a conference room where I wasn't meant to be.
I was there to present a routine report on repeat incidents in older housing stock. My supervisor had me tagged as "the one with the fire complex," so anything with "combustible" in it automatically came to my desk.
I finished my slides. People nodded in that way that means nothing will change.
As I was packing up, a man I didn't recognize set up his laptop at the head of the table.
Silver hair. Calm eyes. The kind of posture that says, I'm used to rooms doing what I want.
"Stay if you like, Caldwell," my supervisor said. "Might be educational."
It was Gabriel's first talk to our office.
He didn't say his name at first. Just launched into it.
"Null," he said, clicking to a slide with a neat logo. "A behaviourally informed, architecture-integrated decision support system."
Everyone did that little nod staple to anything that sounded expensive and intelligent.
He talked about "urban immune systems" and "targeted intervention modelling" and "administrative burden reduction."
I watched the screen.
The city he showed us looked like a game. Stylized building blocks, cars like beads on wires, little coloured markers moving through streets.
"Each marker," he said, "is a case. A situation. A person in context."
I watched the markers change colour as they passed through certain intersections.
Green to yellow to red.
He clicked again.
The red markers dimmed, peeled away, vanished.
"Here, we've modelled an intervention," he said. "Earlier detection of structural risk. Targeted evacuation protocols. Administrative death reforms. You can see the reduction in downstream incidents."
There were fewer little explosions of light in certain zones. Fewer markers stuck in loops.
People around me murmured approval.
I couldn't stop looking at the ones that didn't disappear.
The ones that turned grey instead and sank into the background.
"What happened to those?" I asked, before I could stop myself.
Gabriel glanced at me.
"They resolved within acceptable parameters," he said.
"I didn't ask if they were acceptable," I said. "I asked what happened."
A pause.
"We don't simulate the internal experience in this model," he said, with the smoothness of someone used to having that line ready. "We simulate system load. Resource allocation. The focus is on structural outcomes."
Structural outcomes.
Six instead of thirteen.
I remember looking at the stylized city on the screen and thinking, You're going to make my chalk illegal.
After the presentation, my supervisor patted my shoulder.
"Don't overthink it," she said. "If this works, we might finally stop seeing your kind of fires."
My kind of fires. Like I'd started them.
I applied to transfer to Oversight that evening.
If something like Null was going to be let loose on the city, I wanted to be close enough to see what it did.
To count properly.
---
People imagine Oversight as some pure, ethical organ, hovering above the mess, making sure the machine behaves.
It isn't.
Oversight is just another layer of the same building. We see slightly different data, that's all. We get the memos before they're formatted into press releases. We're the first to know when a decision will hurt and the last to be able to stop it.
When Null moved from "pilot project" to "integrated system," I was already three years into my new role.
By then, the early horrors were rumours in someone else's voice.
Phase 1 subjects who didn't cope with being simulated. Pilot neighbourhoods where incident rates dropped on paper while funeral homes quietly got busier. Phrases like "unanticipated second-order consequences" being used as footnotes to real grief.
We didn't call them horrors, of course. We called them "lessons."
Oversight loves lessons.
I sat in rooms where people argued about acceptable thresholds and "narrative asset potential" and whether a particular block of the riverside could be considered "structurally forfeited."
I signed off on guidelines I didn't choose.
I read Gabriel's name at the bottom of more than one.
He left eventually. Or was moved. Or stepped sideways. With people like that, it's hard to tell.
The daemon stayed.
And the city kept burning in quieter ways.
---
When Noor's case crossed my screen, it was supposed to be routine.
Administrative death. Residual score within manageable range. Family thread, friend thread, one media thread flagged as "nuisance."
Then there were the anomalies.
The thread that refused to cut as cleanly as it should. The echo that wouldn't stay in its lane. The way his residual percentage dipped, then plateaued, like a cliff that decided partway through falling that maybe it didn't want to.
I watched his file for a week before I admitted I was watching.
His name was a marker on my screen like any other. He was, on paper, like the others we'd run through Null and tucked away.
But something about the pattern bothered me.
It felt like… when you know a room is supposed to be empty and you hear someone shifting their weight in the dark.
Gabriel once said, in a memo he probably thought no one read, that "anomalies are where the system tells on itself."
I've been listening to them ever since.
Noor's case wasn't just an anomaly.
It was the system writing a question mark in its own margins.
LEAVE IT. I WANT TO SEE WHERE IT GOES.
That sentence was, if I'm honest, me talking to the city as much as to the file.
You've taken so many people without asking, I thought. Show me what happens when you miss.
---
The funny thing about backstory is that nobody in Null asks for it until they need to blame you for something.
Now, because I signed a line saying I accept responsibility for taking our favourite anomaly into a live cluster, the system wants mine on record.
"Prior trauma."
"Incident exposure."
Reasons I might not be the calm, impartial professional the building needs me to be.
I open the form again.
INCIDENT 2:
Fine.
"Employment at Office of Incidents and Risk during major infrastructural downgrade cycle. Repeated exposure to unresolved patterns of neglect. Secondary trauma from discrepancy between official narratives and observed realities. Transfer to Oversight motivated by desire to mitigate harm via internal monitoring."
It reads like therapy notes written by a lawyer.
I delete "desire to mitigate harm" and replace it with "desire to witness."
Truth sits better in one word than four.
The cursor hops obediently to the next line.
INCIDENT 3:
I hesitate.
Does Noor count as an incident yet?
Does Pilot-03?
Does the fact that I can hear the building hum and, under it, something else—something that sounds like an old woman singing in a language no one archived—qualify as exposure to "large-scale administrative error"?
Eventually, I type:
"Current involvement in management of anomalous case 7F-19N and related legacy patterns (P-class). Ongoing ethical conflict between institutional duty and perceived obligations to affected communities. No current corrective plan beyond documentation."
The form doesn't care about ethics. It cares about whether I will freeze under pressure.
It doesn't understand that freezing is sometimes the most honest thing you can do when a system insists on moving.
I tick the box that says I am fit for field deployment.
No one is. That's not the point.
---
Later, when the building thinks I've gone home, I stay.
The city outside my windowed projection loops, tram wires glinting in artificial dusk.
I minimize the official forms and open my private folder.
Two files sit there now.
Memoir 002 – the man who counted missing people.
Untitled – the woman who signed.
I click the second.
The first two lines blink up at me.
I didn't build the daemon, but I keep signing for its work.
No one deserves to be turned into content.
Underneath, the cursor waits.
I think about the orange house. The chalk marks. The way the city decided six was cleaner than thirteen.
I think about Gabriel, staring at a monitor somewhere in the building's past, realizing the daemon was humming his neighbour's grief.
I think about Noor, making friends with a haunted mannequin in a drill hall, giving a ghost a new job title so the system wouldn't erase it.
How do you write a backstory that doesn't turn you into content?
You don't, my brain suggests. You write one that keeps the people the city tried to delete in it, even if their names are smudged.
I type:
When I was thirteen, the city burnt my street and then tried to erase the fact that it had ever existed. Oversight says I am "biased" because of that. They are correct. I am biased towards remembering.
The words sit there, raw and almost laughable.
Remembering is not a job description.
It is, however, the only reason I can bear to look Noor in the eye when I tell him we're taking him back into the city that killed him once already.
The city that killed my street.
The city that is, if Gabriel is right, starting to complain about what we've been doing to its dead.
I add one more sentence.
If I can't stop the fire, the least I can do is refuse to let anyone write "six" when I know there were thirteen.
I save the file.
The system doesn't ask me to flag it for Archive or Purge.
It doesn't know it exists.
That's the closest thing to privacy anyone in this building gets.
Outside—beyond the projection, beyond the walls, beyond the neat lines of our maps—the river curls around Riverside Margin, black and patient.
Somewhere along it, kids are sitting on stairwells in buildings with too many wires, counting the ways numbers don't match what adults say.
Somewhere else, on a street that isn't on any official plan, a girl with an orange scarf is listening to fridges hum.
Somewhere under all of it, the daemon is dreaming in static.
Oversight thinks my backstory is a risk factor.
They are not wrong.
But you can't send someone into a burning building without at least one person inside who remembers what fire feels like.
When the field brief lands in my inbox—RIVERSIDE MARGIN INITIAL CONTACT – DRAFT ROUTES—my thumb hovers over it, then taps.
I read the first line.
Primary objective: reduce uncontrolled pull.
I add a note in the margin, for my eyes only.
Secondary objective: refuse to look away.
Act Twenty-second's end – "i came, i saw, i died."