The first thing they taught Riya about Endless Death was how to say it without saying it.
"You will rarely use the internal term," the trainer said, pacing the front of the auditorium. "Line ∞ is for technical documentation only. Public-facing language is *administrative exit*, *deep archive*, or *complete correction*."
The slide behind him showed a picture of a corridor: long, white, impossible. The floor gleamed. The walls curved in a way that made Riya's stomach tighten. At the far end, instead of a door, there was a symbol.
∞
No label. No timetable. Just the sign you put on something that never comes back.
Riya sat at the edge of the third row, Null lanyard warm against her neck. Trainee 06 on the roster. R. FARIS in the system. In Riverside, nobody called her that. At home she was Lina, habibti, girl-who-reads-too-much. Here she was Riya, trainee, unit in a cohort.
"Endless Death," the trainer said once, carefully, like touching a hot surface. "Is our flagship deep-correction service. It allows qualifying clients to remove themselves fully from active narrative registers—legal, financial, social—while maintaining structural integrity for those they leave behind."
The slide changed.
Now it was a diagram: circles and arrows, life reduced to lines. At the top: ACTIVE SUBJECT. At the bottom: COMPLETE ARCHIVE – ZERO RESIDUAL.
Between them: four smaller circles.
Debt. Criminal Record. Medical Burden. Narrative Noise.
Each had a little wrench icon next to it, like something you could fix if you had the right tools.
Endless Death was a tool.
"Question," someone three rows back said. "What's 'narrative noise'?"
The trainer smiled the way people smiled when they'd practised in a mirror.
"Overlap," he said. "Redundancy. Patterns that create stress without structural contribution. Think of three siblings living in the same two-room apartment, each trapped in a repeating conflict cycle around care duties. Or a person whose legal and cultural identities are in constant contradiction, causing repeated intervention. Our systems flag these as high-noise threads."
He clicked again.
Another diagram: a dense, tangled ball labelled HIGH NOISE. Next to it, a smooth, single loop: OPTIMIZED.
"Endless Death," he went on, "offers a voluntary exit path that resolves these threads at the root. It is not punishment. It is not execution. It is narrative hygiene."
Riya felt the words like grit between her teeth.
Narrative hygiene.
In Riverside they called it something else.
Human cleansing.
The first time she'd heard the term she'd been fifteen, sitting on the stairwell with her neighbour Amal while the rain made the courtyard smell like rust. Amal's uncle had "gone on the Line" the week before.
"They say it's his choice," Amal had said, shredding a bus ticket into smaller and smaller pieces. "Choice my ass. They took his license, his job, and then offered him a one-way ticket to nowhere. That's not choice, that's… washing. Like when you rinse blood off the pavement. Human cleansing."
At the time, Riya hadn't corrected her.
Now she wasn't sure she could.
The slide changed again.
This time it was a map of the metro system. Colored lines, loops and branches, the familiar river cutting the city in two. Every line had a number or a letter.
Except one.
A faint, almost transparent line that left Saint Gabriel Station, dipped under the river, and vanished into the margin of the slide, marked only by the symbol.
∞
"This route is restricted," the trainer said. "Only clients with completed contracts and approved residual scores may access Line ∞. Staff may not enter the corridor without Level-Three clearance and explicit Oversight authorization. Attempting to do so is grounds for immediate termination of contract and potential legal action."
Someone near the front put up a hand.
"Has anyone ever… come back?" they asked, trying to sound light. "From the Line, I mean."
The room shifted, bodies leaning in just enough to betray interest.
The trainer's smile thinned.
"Endless Death is a complete correction," he said. "Return is a contradiction in terms. Any… stories to the contrary are urban myth and should be discouraged among clients."
He let that hang there a moment.
Riya's mind flicked, uninvited, to a training module from last month.
Case 7F-19N.
The man who had walked into Null's Office of Corrections to vanish and somehow, instead of vanishing, had become a problem. The module had presented him as a scenario. The questions had presented him as an obstacle. His voice, careful and precise, had not fit either role.
When the quiz had asked what the "primary obstacle" was, she hadn't chosen denial, family, media, or environment.
She had typed in E:
*The design of the paths.*
Now they were teaching her about the path that sat underneath all the others.
Line ∞.
On the slide, small grey numbers indicated usage rates by district. Null wrote them as percentages. Riya's eyes translated automatically.
12% – old industrial belt.
18% – shrinking coastal zone.
29% – Riverside margin cluster 3H-Delta.
Her home.
The trainer moved on.
"From an operational standpoint," he said, "Endless Death is a cornerstone of the Project. Without robust uptake among high-noise populations, our entire correction architecture becomes unsustainable. This is not about ideology. It is math."
Project.
Riya had heard the word before, half-whispered in training halls.
The Project. As if there were only one.
Sometimes they dressed it up as "The Null Initiative" or "the Citywide Correction Framework," but underneath it all, there was a simple fact: the system only worked if enough people agreed to be cleaned away.
On the slide, a graph appeared.
Population density vs. "narrative burden."
Budget vs. "correction efficiency."
A neat curve showing how Endless Death kept all the lines at manageable levels.
Human lives as load-bearing equations.
"Your roles," the trainer said, "are not to sell Endless Death. We do not recruit. We do not coerce. We provide informed options, neutral information, and respectful support."
Riya almost laughed.
She thought of the pamphlets that had appeared in Riverside clinics two years ago, with soft blue circles and phrases like WHEN LOVE MEANS LETTING GO and YOUR FAMILY DESERVES PEACE.
Neutral information.
She raised her hand.
"Trainee… Faris?" the trainer said, squinting at the roster.
"Yes," she said. "You said we don't recruit. But the usage rates are… uneven." She nodded toward the district numbers. "Why does Line ∞ run under our side of the river three times as often as under theirs?"
A tiny silence opened, the kind people fill with shuffling and throat-clearing.
At the back of the room, a woman Riya hadn't noticed before shifted. Dark blazer, Oversight badge. Tesse, she realized, from the induction video. The one who'd talked about "ethical thresholds" with a voice like she was tired of hearing herself say the phrase.
The trainer glanced toward her, then back at Riya.
"Some districts experience higher structural strain," he said carefully. "Legacy neglect. Environmental risk. Underemployment. These factors create more 'noise' cases and fewer traditional exit paths. Endless Death responds where the need is greatest."
Riya held his gaze.
"Funny how the need is always greatest where the buildings are oldest," she said. "Where land is cheap. Where people are… removable."
A couple of trainees shot her looks—admiring, warning, both.
Tesse cleared her throat.
"Our job," she said from the back, voice calm, "is to ensure any use of deep correction meets consent standards and doesn't cross into coercion. That's why we need people like you in the system. People who see the skew."
Riya turned slightly, meeting her eyes.
"And if we see it," she said, "and can't fix it?"
"Then you document," Tesse said. "Loudly."
The trainer smiled again, a little too quickly.
"We can take more questions in the breakout," he said. "For now, let's move to the operational overview."
Slides flipped.
Residual percentages. Consent scripts. "Exit readiness" indicators. The language turned softer around the sharpest edges, as if words could pad what was actually happening.
How to take someone to the end of their own story and make it sound like good housekeeping.
---
On break, the Training cafeteria smelled like coffee and panic.
Riya sat with her tray—tea, something approximating bread, a piece of fruit that had seen better days—and listened to her cohort talk.
"So my cousin in North Pier says they got an entire building cleared last year," one trainee was saying. "Noise reduction exercise. They called it 'Deep Relief Week.' Everyone over a certain residual threshold got a 'pre-approval' letter for Endless Death."
"Did they all take it?" someone asked.
"Nah. Some did. Mostly older people. Some men with… history. One kid, actually. Twenty-three. On and off pills, in and out of court. He told his mother it was 'the grown-up thing to do'."
"That's messed up," a third trainee muttered.
The first shrugged.
"He was tired," they said. "Tired counts, right?"
Riya stirred her tea.
Human cleansing, she thought. But make it sound like a spa package.
Her mentor for this rotation, a senior handler named Malik, dropped into the seat across from her.
"You asked the good question," he said, unwrapping a sandwich.
"Which one?" she said. "The one that made the trainer sweat or the one that made Oversight twitch?"
"Both," he said. "Word of advice? Keep asking them. Just pick your rooms."
She eyed him.
"You don't buy the hygiene line either," she said.
He took a bite, chewed, swallowed.
"I buy the numbers," he said. "I buy that the city is a machine built on limited power and if we don't manage load, it burns out. I don't buy that the people under the river should pay more than the people above it."
"So why are you here?" she asked.
He smiled without humor.
"Same as you," he said. "Better to have someone in the room who knows what the walls look like from the wrong side."
She thought of the missing posters again. How the tape left grey scars on the concrete even after the rain took the paper.
"Do you ever tell clients no?" she asked. "When they ask for Endless Death."
"Sometimes," he said. "If it's obvious someone else has talked them into it. Or they're in acute distress. Or their residual reads more like someone else's story than their own."
"And if management doesn't like that?" she said.
He shrugged.
"Then I get moved to training," he said. "Or field liaison. Or they make me sit in a room and watch modules and tell them why their questions are bad. Point is, I stay. I annoy them. It's my contribution to noise."
He stood, picking up his tray.
"Come on," he said. "We're supposed to watch a corridor video next. Maybe you'll get a glimpse of the holy Line."
She followed him.
As they walked, she passed a notice board.
ENDLESS DEATH – WE'RE LISTENING
Staff anonymous feedback on deep correction practices.
Submit your thoughts to: ED_FEEDBACK@NULL
Underneath, someone had pencilled in tiny letters:
DO YOU, THO?
Someone else had underlined it twice.
---
The corridor video was worse than the slide.
Small room. Lights off. Screen bright.
"Orientation aid only," the trainer said. "This footage is not to be shared outside of certification spaces."
The recording began with a regular station: Saint Gabriel, late night. Riya recognized the tiles, the chipped column, the vending machine that always ate coins. The platform was almost empty.
Then the camera pivoted.
At the far end of the platform, where the service stairs used to go down to the equipment rooms, a new gate had been installed. Brushed steel. No handle. Above it, the symbol.
∞
The gate slid open without sound.
Beyond it, the corridor from the slides.
White. Curved. Ceiling lit with that clean, sourceless light that made Riya's eyes ache. No visible cameras. No signs. Just distance.
A person walked into frame, guided by a handler. Back to the camera. Shoulders set like someone about to sit an exam.
Riya didn't see their face. She saw their bag.
Plastic. Transparent.
Inside: a folded shirt. A dog-eared book. A photograph.
The two figures passed through the gate. For a second, the frame warped, as if the camera itself flinched.
Then the recording ended.
"That's all you need to see," the trainer said.
"Did the handler come back?" someone asked, voice too tight.
"Handlers have separate protocols," he said. "Next slide, please."
Riya's stomach rolled.
She couldn't decide what felt worse: the idea of walking into that corridor, or the idea of building her job around it.
Behind her, she sensed movement.
When she glanced back, she saw Tesse in the doorway.
The Oversight woman's face was unreadable in the projector light, but her hand rested on the frame like she needed the contact to stay standing.
---
On her way home, Riya took the tram that crossed over Saint Gabriel instead of under.
She told herself it was to avoid the rush, but the truth sat under that: she wasn't ready to look the gate in the eye.
From up here, Endless Death wasn't a corridor. It was a light under concrete. A thin, forbidden glow bleeding through the cracks of a system that pretended to be whole.
In Riverside, kids told stories.
If you pressed your ear against the tunnel wall at the right time of night, you could hear the train that didn't exist. If you looked between the pillars of the bridge, you might see faces in the water—reflections of people the city was trying to forget. If you said the wrong name three times near Saint Gabriel, you'd wake a daemon that lived in the wiring and it would offer you a ticket you couldn't refuse.
"Urban legends," Null called them.
Riya called them… side channels.
People finding ways to describe a service designed to erase description.
She got off two stops earlier than usual and walked the last part along the river.
The sky was the color of metal. The water was a darker smear, moving sluggishly between concrete banks. On the Riverside side, buildings leaned over the embankment like tired relatives at a hospital bed.
She passed the wall where the missing posters went.
They were back down to two this week.
One curled at the corners, tape peeling. One new, the edges still sharp.
She read the names. Ages. Last seen.
Someone had scribbled across the bottom of the newer one in angry red marker:
DON'T YOU DARE CALL THIS A CORRECTION.
Further along, a sticker had been slapped over a no-littering sign.
ENDLESS DEATH = ENDLESS PROFIT
HUMAN CLEANSING IS NOT CARE
The logo in the corner was a moth with its wings on fire.
Mothlight again. The activist group Null pretended didn't exist, except when it needed a scapegoat.
Riya felt the familiar split in her chest.
She agreed with the sticker.
She also worked for the building it was accusing.
At home, her grandmother was waiting with a letter in hand.
"They gave this to Mrs. Haddad downstairs," she said, waving the envelope like something that smelled bad. "She can't read English well, so she asked me to help. I told her to wait for you."
Riya took it.
NULL – OFFICE OF CORRECTIONS, said the letterhead. The logo was neat, tasteful, merciless.
Dear Ms Haddad,
Our records indicate that you may be eligible for Early Administrative Relief through our Deep Archive Program…
Her throat tightened.
"So this is how it starts," her grandmother said. "They send a polite letter. They tell a tired woman she can stop being a burden. They call it relief. I call it cleaning."
"She doesn't have to take it," Riya said automatically.
Her grandmother gave her a look that had survived three demolitions and two regimes.
"And if you don't have money for rent, medicine, and food?" she said. "If your back hurts all the time and you are alone and the building creaks in storms? Maybe you start to think they are right. That disappearing is a kind of kindness."
Riya folded the letter carefully, pressing the crease like it might change the words.
"I can talk to her," she said.
"And say what?" her grandmother asked. "That they're lying? Or that the choice they offer is poisoned but sometimes poison is the only thing that stops the pain? You work for them now, habibti. Your words wear their badge."
It was unfair.
It was also, uncomfortably, true.
"I can at least explain the parts they won't," Riya said. "Like residual. Like what 'irreversible' means in their mouths."
Her grandmother sighed.
"Do it," she said. "But don't let them use your kindness to soften their knife."
Later, when the building had quieted and the river's sound came through the thin windows, Riya lay in the dark and stared at the crack in the ceiling.
She thought of the corridor.
Of the transparent bag with its folded shirt and dog-eared book.
Of the invisible train.
Of Noor, case 7F-19N, standing in a module projection and refusing to accept the way the paths were drawn.
Her tablet buzzed on the bedside table.
NEW ASSIGNMENT – PRELIMINARY
SUBJECT: CLUSTER CASE 3H-DELTA – RIVERSIDE MARGIN
ROLE: COMMUNITY INTERFACE (AUXILIARY)
NOTES: FOCUS ON ENDLESS DEATH UPTAKE PATTERNS; INTERVIEW SELECTED HOUSEHOLDS REGARDING "RELIEF" PROGRAMS.
Underneath, a smaller system note blinked.
FLAG: AUXILIARY PATTERN – EMERGENT REFUSAL
STATUS: MONITOR – POTENTIAL INSIGHT SOURCE
She snorted softly.
"Glad you like my attitude," she told the crack. "Hope you survive it."
Sleep didn't come.
At two in the morning, she gave up, pulled on a coat, and slipped out of the apartment.
The tram at that hour was almost empty. A drunk couple sleeping on each other's shoulders. A cleaner with a cart. A Null security officer half-dozing, hand resting near their badge.
Riya rode it back toward the center, past her usual stop, all the way down into the tunnels.
Saint Gabriel Station at night was a different animal.
The daytime crowds were gone. The tiles sweated. Lights buzzed. Down the far end, where the old equipment stairs had once been, the new gate sat like a closed eye.
∞
A chain barrier now blocked the passageway leading toward it. A plastic sign hung from the chain.
NO PUBLIC ACCESS – MAINTENANCE ONLY
The maintenance arch looked ordinary.
The air beyond it did not.
Riya stepped as close as she could without touching the barrier.
For a second, the hairs on her arms rose, like someone had opened a freezer door on the other side of the wall.
You're not supposed to be here, a sensible voice in her said.
Another voice, less sensible and more hers, answered:
Neither is whatever you built behind that gate.
She listened.
At first, all she heard was station noise: ventilation, distant drip of water, the hum of electricity in the rails.
Then, layered under that, something else.
Not sound. A… rhythm.
As if a train were approaching on a line that didn't exist on any visible map. As if air were making space for something that refused to be recorded.
Her hand went to the Saint Gabriel medallion at her throat, the one her grandmother insisted she wear "to confuse the devils." The metal was warm.
In the corner of her eye, something moved.
She turned.
No train. No figures.
Just her own reflection in the darkened window of an out-of-service carriage.
For a heartbeat, though, the reflection wasn't quite right.
Behind her, in the glass, the platform extended further than it should. A second gate, faint, half-there. A blur of people—or not-people—standing just inside it. Not clear enough to see faces. Just shapes.
One of the blurs lifted a hand, as if in greeting or warning.
Riya blinked.
The image snapped back.
Just the real platform. Just the one gate. Just the chain.
The security officer on duty cleared their throat.
"Miss," they called, not unkindly. "You're not supposed to be down here."
"Going," Riya said.
On the ride back, she sat with her hands clenched between her knees, heart still kicking at her ribs.
The city had built a train to nowhere and called it mercy.
Null had wrapped it in consent scripts and hygiene graphs and called it math.
People like Mrs. Haddad would get letters and consider stepping through a gate because they loved their families and were tired.
People like Noor would walk the corridor believing it was the only way not to be turned into someone else's story.
People like Riya—
She wasn't sure yet.
She only knew one thing clearly:
If Endless Death was a kind of river, she was standing on its banks with a clipboard, asked to help stepping stones look attractive.
And somewhere underneath the official flow, other currents ran: activist stickers, grandmothers' curses, haunted mannequins on drill floors trying to finish a sentence the system kept cutting.
No one deserves to be turned into—
She finished it silently, in the dark tram window.
Content.
The word tasted like metal and sleep deprivation.
"Human cleansing," Amal had said, on that stairwell years ago. "They're rinsing us out of their statistics."
Maybe that was true.
Maybe the only thing she could do, at least right now, was remember every face that even brushed against the gate. Refuse to let the river carry them entirely away. Keep a private, disobedient archive in a world obsessed with deletion.
She pressed her forehead against the cool glass.
"Fine," she told the invisible line under the tracks. "If you're Endless Death, I'll be Endless Memory. Let's see which of us gets tired first."
The tram rattled on.
Underneath, somewhere, a corridor glowed, patient and hungry.
Above, the city slept uneasily, dreaming of clean ledgers and quiet streets.
And in between, a trainee flagged as "emergent refusal pattern" rode back to a district that had always known what it meant to live next to a machine built to make people disappear.
Act Twenty-Sixth's End - "death follows".